CHAPTER 3 #2
The men came in at six. They had the unused-to-women quiet of men alone in a basin for two years.
Mr. Halloran ate slow and thanked me at the start and again at the middle.
Mr. Carrow laid the spoon down between bites.
Mr. Thorn ate fast, then slower when he saw Mr. Carrow's spoon between bites, and then he tried a joke.
"Ma'am. If I die of this stew, you must promise to tell the Reverend it was my own fault."
He meant it kindly. Mr. Carrow looked up and did not say a word; he only looked at Mr. Thorn for the length of a breath, and Mr. Thorn caught the look the way a horse catches a rein and laughed once and put both palms up.
"I take it back with the same grin I made it with. Ma'am, the stew is the best thing this kitchen has produced in three summers."
"Mr. Thorn. " I let my voice go dry. "I will not poison you the second day. The third or fourth, perhaps."
He laughed out loud. The first full laugh in the cabin. Mr. Halloran did not laugh, but his mouth softened, and the silver at his temple caught the lamp.
If I am to stay I will need to be more than a stew.
*
On the third evening I wrote a letter to Mrs. Doss on cheap county paper from the front-room writing-table.
I take you at your word that the boarding-house linens want a steady hand.
I am that hand. If you will send the work up by the freight-wagon, I will mend at one and a half dollars a month, payment to my own keeping, the linens turned within nine days of receipt and returned by the same wagon. With my respect, Willa Greer.
I folded the letter into thirds and laid it in the small wooden box on the loft pallet with the bone pin and the Greer Bible. The decision was in the letter. The letter was the chalk-line. The seam would come the next night.
*
On the fourth night, the thirteenth of June, I stood up at the head of the scrubbed plank table after supper.
I laid out my terms.
"I will not be a wife in body to any of you unless I choose to be," I said.
"The choosing is mine alone, and is not made by my coming into this cabin nor by my signing of any paper.
I will give my word twice for any act, the first to the man and the second to myself alone, and either word can be withdrawn at any moment.
I will sleep in the loft above the front room on the pallet, with the small wooden box at my pillow, until I choose otherwise. "
I paused. Mr. Carrow's left palm was open on the table. He scratched it once with the right thumbnail. He did not interrupt.
"I will earn my keep. I will do the cooking and the laundry and the chickens and the kitchen-garden and the household paper.
I will take the boarding-house mending from Mrs. Doss for my own income, paid in cash to my own hand.
I have written her the letter and will send it down with Mr. Halloran when he goes.
I will keep your books cleaner than Mr. Carrow has kept them.
I have seen his ledger. He uses a soft pencil.
I will use ink. I will set them right by the end of the month. "
I drew breath. The room was so quiet I could hear Old Brigham settling in the yard.
"I will sign as Mrs. Carrow on the patent application and on the marriage certificate of record because the law names Mr. Carrow as principal claimant.
I do not regard this as a slight to Mr. Halloran or to Mr. Thorn.
I will say so at the table if any visitor mistakes the paper's naming for the marriage's naming. "
I sat down and waited.
Mr. Carrow set down his cup and looked at me for a count of three. I counted by the pulse at the inside of my own wrist where my fingers had found the vein under the table.
"Mrs. Greer. Those are fair terms. We accept."
Mr. Thorn laughed once, low, surprised and a little relieved. "Bloody hell, lass. That is the cleanest piece of speech I have heard in three years."
"Mr. Thorn," I said.
Mr. Halloran looked up.
He had not looked at my face directly since the first morning.
He looked at me now in full daylight, in the late-supper kitchen light, the brass kerosene lamp half-low and the cracked chimney throwing a thin ray across the plaster of the east wall.
His gray-blue eyes were full gray. He held my eyes for two beats and inclined his head a quarter-inch.
"Aye."
That was all. Aye. I felt the word at the inside of my wrist.
Mr. Halloran fetched the steel-nibbed pen and the pewter inkstand and wrote out the terms on a fresh sheet of cheap county paper in his copperplate hand. He handed me the pen first.
I had expected the foreman to sign first by office. Mr. Halloran shook his head once. "You spoke first, Mrs. Greer. You sign first."
I signed Willa Greer at the bottom of the page. The pen rasped on the cheap county paper, the chapter's small audible weight. I handed it to Mr. Carrow. He signed Beckett L. Carrow. He handed it to Mr. Halloran. Tate O. Halloran. Mr. Thorn took the pen in his right hand and signed Levi Thorn.
Mr. Carrow folded the page in three, took the small tin lockbox down from the top of his trunk, laid the folded paper inside, and turned the brass key. He came back to the table and sat.
"It is a paper, Mrs. Greer," Mr. Halloran said. "We are honor-bound by it."
"Aye," I said. I had not meant to use the word; it was his, not mine, but it came out of my mouth in his cadence.
Mr. Halloran heard it and closed his eyes for one beat longer than he should, and Mr. Thorn caught my eye and looked away smiling, and Mr. Carrow put his thumbnail to his scarred palm and held it there a long moment.
I stood up and cleared the supper dishes. The cooking and the clearing were on the paper now as my standing orders.
*
I scrubbed the cups in the dry-sink and dried each on the hand-towel folded twice. The kettle was on the warming shelf, the cast-iron polished black, the bottom catching the kerosene light from the table.
The cabin had no mirror. A woman who is about to walk out at dawn on the first morning of a marriage she has signed for in her own hand likes to know where her hair sits.
I bent to the kettle on the stove.
The polished cast-iron gave me back the dim curved outline of my own face.
My gray eyes met me. The bone pin was crosswise at the nape; the dim image showed the dark coil at the back of my head and a paler line across my forehead where the lamp caught.
I reset the pin a quarter-turn, the way my mother had taught me, against the curve of the skull and not against the hair.
Mein Liebling. I let my father's voice and my mother's voice sit at my shoulder for one breath, and then I went on.
Beck Carrow at the table. Tate Halloran.
Levi Thorn. I had used their formal names all evening and would go on using them at the table tomorrow, but in my own head the formal address fell away the way a basting-thread falls when the seam beneath it is set.
Beck. Tate. Levi. I had given them their first names in the privacy of my own thinking.
I picked up the basin and went out to the dooryard.
I had said at dawn in my own head and would honor it as they would honor theirs. I worked the iron pump once, slow. The squeak came; the rising note, then the falling.
I did not yet have an answer. I had a chalk-line drawn this evening in my own hand on cheap county paper, folded in three and laid in a tin lockbox on top of a Pennsylvanian's trunk. The chalk-line was the promise to the seam.
The bee-balm was still on my hands from the cabin shelf. The basin was cool around me, the high country dropping toward forty by sunup, and I held the empty bucket and looked east where the dawn would, in two hours, begin to be a gray suggestion.
I did not pray.
I lifted my chin to the basin.