CHAPTER 3
Willa
◆
I did not sleep.
Three-fourteen was the hour my father had died fourteen months ago, and a woman who has not decided whether she will weep does well to count from a fixed point.
The dawn began to be a gray suggestion at the south window, and Old Brigham crowed in his new yard like a circuit preacher with three points to make.
I sat up. The bone pin had loosened in my braid; I caught it before it fell.
Six inches of polished elk-bone, the small edelweiss carved by my mother's mother in a Bohemian kitchen forty years ago.
Mein Liebling. My father's voice. I pressed my thumb to the cleft between my eyebrows and waited until the pressure had done its work, and then I got out of Mr. Carrow's bed.
I dressed in the green-and-cream travel dress, the only dress I had not packed in the bottom of the trunk, and pinned my hair at the nape with the bone pin set crosswise, the way my mother had set hers. I went out into the kitchen.
A man was at the table.
He had a King James open at the Psalms and a tin plate of bread cut in three slabs and a cup of coffee gone half-cold.
The kettle on the warming shelf was cast-iron seasoned black.
The cabin smelled of pine-smoke and Arbuckle's coffee and, behind both, something herbal and bitter I would put a name to in a minute.
He looked up when I came in, and then he did not look at my face directly; he turned his head a quarter-inch to the left and let his eyes settle past my shoulder.
Near-black hair worn slightly long. A streak of silver at the left temple. Gray-blue eyes that went, on the second look, full gray.
"Mrs. Greer. " He stood. His voice was low and mountain-quiet, and he gave me the Mrs. a day before any paper required him to. "Coffee."
He had it in front of me before I had crossed the room.
He poured slow. He put bread on a second plate and set it across from his own.
I noticed two things as he sat. A streak of pink along the inside of his right forearm, a mottled scald from inside-of-elbow to wrist. A stillness in him I have seen in three other men in my life, all of them widowers.
"Mr. Halloran," I said.
"Tate. " He did not look up. "If you can bear it."
"In a day or two, Mr. Halloran."
He inclined his head. He did not take it amiss.
I ate the bread.
The herb-smell put a name to itself while I drank the coffee.
Bee-balm and tincture-bitter, the cabin shelf at my shoulder, a low pine ledge above the dry-sink with three Mason jars on it and a bundle of wormwood hung head-down by a twist of brown string.
The smell was medicinal and lemony at once and sat at the back of my throat like a question I had not asked.
The kitchen door opened. Mr. Carrow came in with his hat in his hand, standing a half-step closer to the table than the table required, scratching the scarred palm of his left hand with the thumbnail of his right.
"Miss Greer. " He hung the hat. "You slept."
"I did not. " I poured him coffee. "I counted."
He took the cup. He did not press the counted. He sat.
The corral door went next. Mr. Thorn came in wiping his hands on a rag, copper-red hair tied at his nape with a strip of saddle-leather, green pine resin still on his knuckles from yesterday's kindling. "Good morning, ma'am. Beck. Tate."
"Mr. Thorn."
"Levi," he said, sea-blue eyes lifting half a second and dropping. "If you don't mind."
"In a day or two, Mr. Thorn."
He laughed once, surprised, and sat. He did not put his elbows on the table.
The four of us sat in a quiet so polite it made me want to scream. Three men who had been alone in a basin for two years and did not yet know what to do with a woman already up before any of them had laid the table. They had done their work, and now they were waiting on me.
I set my cup down.
"I would like to know the practical reason," I said.
Mr. Carrow set down his coffee. He did not affect surprise. He looked at me with hazel-green eyes that the dawn had turned the color of pond-stone.
"There is a statute," he said.
He spoke slow at the speed his thinking required.
The Territorial Session Laws of eighteen seventy-seven, chapter forty-one.
The homestead-and-mineral patent, a federal deed combining surface and mineral estate.
Three eligibilities. Twenty-four months of continuous occupancy.
A productive improvement beyond the workings.
A marriage of record at the county level.
He scratched the scarred palm.
"We have the first and the third. Not the second. The filing window closes the thirty-first of August. If we miss it, any man with paper from the East can lay a piece of paper down at the clerk's window and put us into a six-month proceeding we cannot pay a lawyer to fight."
"And the advertisement," I said.
"Named me only. " He did not look away. "I am principal claimant by office. Mr. Halloran wrote the wording. Mr. Thorn and I read it and signed off. We did not lie to you, Miss Greer. We only let an advertisement be narrower than the truth."
My father had taught me to hold an invoice up to the lamp and read the watermark before the figures.
Watermark first, Willa. I held Mr. Carrow's plain sentences up to the lamp of the kitchen and looked.
He had not lied. He had let an advertisement be narrower than the truth, and had said so plainly three minutes after I asked.
"Thank you," I said. He inclined his head a quarter-inch.
Mr. Thorn cleared his throat. "I would like to add a part, ma'am, if I may. We are going to be courteous to you, and I am, for myself, not for the patent, going to be more than courteous, in time, if you let me."
His hand had gone to his sternum at the end of it, two fingers, a small cleft scar my eye had measured through the linen of his shirt without my having decided to.
"Mr. Thorn. I thank you."
He laughed once, short, and let his hand fall.
Mr. Halloran had not spoken. He had turned a second page of the King James and not read it.
When I looked at him he closed his eyes for one beat longer than he should and opened them and let them settle past my shoulder again.
"Ma'am. I will speak when I have a sentence worth my voice. I have not had one this morning."
It was the most honest line a man had said to me in a year. I did not press him.
*
I went out alone after the men had scattered to their work.
I worked the iron pump in the dooryard. The squeak came in two notes, a rising and a falling, and the falling note was the question. Three strokes and the water came, so cold from the upper spring the metal stung my palm.
The pump is asking a question I have not yet answered.
I sat on the porch step with the bucket between my boots and inventoried my purse.
One dollar and sixty-five cents. The fare to St. Louis on the Kansas Pacific was nine dollars even.
The boarding house was full of cousins of men who had come west and not gone back.
My mother was in the upper rooms of a kinswoman's house on Soulard Street with a gas lamp and a stack of mending. She was forty-nine.
I pressed my thumb to the cleft between my eyebrows. Once. Twice.
I did not weep.
I decided.
*
On the second morning Mr. Carrow took me around the basin. He went a half-step ahead on the path, the foreman's habit of standing a half-step closer to whatever he was protecting.
The south ridge was the work. A slate-and-quartz band along the toe of the slope for three hundred yards, dark slate with a milky vein of quartz at the middle.
That is what we crack. The gold lives in the slate.
Not much. Enough. He showed me the stamp-mill by the creek-pool and the assay-shed at the toe of the slope.
The north ridge was the food. Twenty-two head of meat-cattle. Six broke saddle horses higher up. Levi has a seventh he has not caught yet.
He lifted the lid of the springbox and the cold of the spring came up at my face like a small breath off river ice. Paper will last in here.
The chicken yard. Eleven hens. Old Brigham strutting along the wire.
He claimed this yard in two days when we built it.
He is the basin's clock. The rooster crowed at me midway through Mr. Carrow's next sentence, and Mr. Carrow paused until Old Brigham had finished his three points and then went on.
I laughed once. Short. The first laugh in the basin. The corner of his mouth lifted.
He took me last along the south-east lip of the bowl. The lodgepole opened on a single tall pine standing alone, and at the base of it a small white-painted board cross. Eliza Halloran. Eighteen fifty-one to eighteen seventy-seven. And daughter.
Mr. Carrow took off his hat. "Mr. Halloran's wife. Two years past this February. The infant did not live the night. We do not bring it up at the table, Miss Greer. He brings it up when he can."
I let my thumb find the cleft of my eyebrows and held it there until the skin pinked.
I had buried my father in April of seventy-eight and had not wept at the graveside because I had been reading the Psalms aloud at the bedside, and a person who has just finished a Psalm does not need to weep at a grave. "I am sorry, Mr. Carrow."
"It is his sorrow. We carry it because he carries it."
He tipped his hat at the dooryard and went to the assay-shed.
*
I cooked. The cast-iron kettle, scrubbed that morning with sand because it had been too long unscrubbed, took salt-pork and navy beans soaked overnight, a turnip from the pantry, and a pinch of bee-balm from the shelf for the sweetening.
The cabin shelf was at my elbow as I worked, bee-balm and tincture-bitter, the smell on my hands and going through the kitchen and out the door.