CHAPTER 2 #2
She lifted the cracked-chimney lamp off the table when she had dried her hands and turned it a quarter-turn so the cracked side faced the wall.
Levi cracked the chimney with a horse-bridle in April.
I have not put the spare chimney in. She turned the cracked side away so the light would not throw the crack on her own face when she sat down. She did not say a word about it.
I learned three things from her in those two minutes. She was observant. She was gracious. She would not say what she did not need to say.
I learned a fourth thing standing at the wash-counter with my back to her: I had been ready for a wife who would tolerate us, and I had been given a wife who would not need to tolerate anything if I built the house right.
That was a heavier piece of news than the lower west seam at Mountjoy in '70 had been.
I scratched the scarred palm.
*
The loft pallet was not laid — I had not been sure she would come up the road. Tate's loft was Tate's. Levi was not putting a woman in his lean-to on her first night, and neither was I.
I had a bed. The bed was mine. The bed was hers tonight.
I said, low, Mrs. Greer.
She turned at the wash-counter.
I said, You'll take the bedroom. The lock works. I'll be in the rocker.
She opened her mouth.
I said, Mrs. Greer. It is my bed, and it is yours tonight.
She closed her mouth. She looked at me a half-second longer than I expected. She nodded.
I carried her tin trunk through the threshold of the southwest room and set it at the foot of the bed and I did not look at the bed.
I lifted the cracked-chimney lamp from the kitchen table and set it on the dresser for her — across the room from the bed, because a woman should not have to reach across a strange bed to find a wick in the dark.
I said, There is bee-balm on the kitchen shelf if the night gets cold. I went out and shut the door behind me.
I stood in the front room with the rocker behind me and the cold stove in front of me and my scarred left palm in my right hand. I closed the right hand on the left and held it there. I did not scratch this time. I held.
*
Tate went out to the freight stable. He never says goodnight; he closes his eyes for one beat longer than he should at the porch step and goes.
Levi went to his lean-to through the side-door I cut for him in '77 and pulled the leather flap across the door.
I heard him lay his hat on the peg. I heard the cot rope settle. I did not hear him lie down.
I sat in the rocker and took the King James off the shelf and put it across my knee.
I have read this book slow for thirty years.
My mother taught me letters at the chapel-school out of this exact book in 1854, and the King James was the slower book and is still the slower book.
I read where the strap-cracked spine fell open. It fell open at the Book of Ruth.
Whither thou goest, I will go.
I sat with it.
I almost laughed out loud in the dark cabin alone. I did not. I will not laugh where there is a woman two doors away who has not yet slept in the country.
I thought, with the King James across my knee: I have got a wife three months ahead of August thirty-first. She is a slip of a thing who counts her own pulse and does not flinch at a drop. The Lord help us all.
I closed the book and put it back on the shelf.
*
I took the watch out of my vest.
I take the watch out twice a year. I took it out the morning after my father's letter came up the road in '75. I take it out on the third of October most years, which is the day my mother would have called my birthday if she had lived past five of mine. I took it out tonight because I had to.
It is a brass-cased English movement, the crystal hairlined where the case bumped the kitchen mantel-clock at Pottsville in '65, the hands stopped at four-eleven a.m. My father came in from the night shift on the fourth of December that year and laid the watch down on the kitchen table at four-eleven and he never wound it again.
The hands have been at four-eleven for fourteen years.
I snapped the case-lid open. I laid my thumb on the small ivory portrait of my mother — Catherine Carrow nee Beckett, of Anglesey, by way of Pottsville — for the length of two breaths. I closed the case.
I thought, in the half-formed Welsh-Methodist prayer I have not said aloud since the chapel-school: Duw, gwarchod hi.
I did not know which woman the prayer was for. My mother, fourteen years cold, who had asked for nothing in this hour. The woman in my bed two doors away, who had asked me for nothing tonight either.
I scratched the scarred palm.
I thought of Pottsville. I thought of my mother at the kitchen mantel at four-eleven a.m. I thought of the lower west seam at Mountjoy in August of '70 — the eleven men I had broken bread with, six of them boys.
I thought of Hugh under the cable, who had gone home that night to a wife who never knew how close she had come to losing a husband.
He lived because I grabbed a steel hoist-cable bare-handed and held it till the cable burned the heel of my left hand clear across to the cleft of my thumb. The cable had whistled when it went. I have not got the sound of it out of my ear.
I put the watch back in my vest. The hands at four-eleven held the time the way they always hold the time.
*
I went out to the dooryard one more time.
The cabin was dark behind me, all but the bedroom window. I had set a clean glass of water on the dresser beside the lamp earlier, and there was no need to go to the pump again. I went anyway. The iron pump was the only object in the basin tonight that did not have a woman attached to it.
I pumped two strokes for myself. The squeak came twice. Once rising. Once falling.
I drank from the carved birch dipper Tate's father had carved and Tate had left at the rim of the trough. The water was cold off the spring. I set the dipper back.
The bedroom window held the lamp behind it. I did not know what she did in that quarter-hour. I know what I did. I stood. I did not move my boots from the place I had set them, a yard from the iron pump. I did not turn my head.
The lamp in the bedroom window went out.
It went out the way a flame holds for one breath and then drops down into the bowl and is gone. The window went black. The bedroom held its own dark.
I stood in the dooryard with the squeak gone off the air and I scratched the scarred palm of my left hand with the right thumbnail.
I thought, what have we done.
I thought, what has she.
*
I went back into the cabin. I did not light the lamp. I went into the front room and I sat in the rocker and I put my hands flat on my knees with the scarred palm down and the watch in my vest at four-eleven and the King James back on the shelf and the bedroom door at my left shut.
I did not sleep.