CHAPTER 4
Levi
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The lean-to is cold at first light even in June, and I lie a minute on the cot with the saddle-blanket pulled to my chin and listen to the cabin breathing through the door-flap.
Beck has not started his fire. Old Brigham has not yet crowed.
The smell of green pine resin on my knuckles, fresh-cut, is still on my hand from yesterday's splitting at the corral's south side — lemon-sharp, warm at the back of my throat, the smell of the chapter of my life I have apparently begun without consulting myself.
I sit up. The bone-and-rawhide charm on the peg above the cot turns once on its string with the small air I made standing.
The bead at the center is the molar of a sorrel mare named Tiller I loved at eleven; she walked into a frozen sluice and I went back in the spring for the bone and braided it with a strip of her tail-hair, and I have carried it on a peg or in a pocket since.
I touch it with two fingers. Good morning, love. The lady from St. Louis is in the cabin. We are about to do a deal of work neither of us has done before.
I tie my hair at the nape with the rawhide strip I keep on my wrist for the purpose, and I rub the cleft scar at my sternum with two fingers, just once, the way a man does when he is afraid in private and does not want to admit to it.
The basin is the color of new-poured pewter at this hour, the south ridge a black line, the dooryard ground gray with cold.
The iron pump squeaks its morning question. I do not have an answer for it.
I heard them the night before last — half of it, the half that carries through a lean-to door-flap if a man is not asleep and is pretending to be — a careful woman laying down five careful terms in a careful pen-rasp.
I laughed once at the cleanness of it, into my own collar, and then I stopped because the third term was that she would sleep in the loft alone and would not be a wife in body to any of us unless she chose to be.
I have laughed first all my life, because the laugh is the door of the joke, and if a man stands in the door he stands ahead of the hurt. Last night I stood in the door and the hurt got through it anyway.
I have not lived with a woman in this house since I was fourteen.
Not since the gate-house outside Chesterfield, not since my mother in the freckled kitchen with her copper-red hair pinned at the nape with a brass comb and her hands red from the wash-tub.
She died in the Plains horse-station fire in November of '64 with my father and my brother Owen, who went back in for her and did not come out.
The dead become weather, I have decided in lieu of religion. My mother is the dawn wind that goes through the basin in June. I am not, I have decided, the kind of man whose people stay.
So I go to the corral, because four feet from a horse is the safest I have ever been.
He is in the round-pen, the chestnut: sixteen hands at the wither and eight years old and twice the size of every saddle horse on the place, with a single white star between the eyes and no other white anywhere on him.
I bought him in May at Granite Forks from a man with a beard the color of wet straw who told me in plain English that the horse could not be broken, and I took him for twenty-eight dollars and a saddle because the man had used his hands on him in a way that did not need translation.
I have worked him gentle for three weeks.
He has let me put a halter on him. He has let me run a soft brush down his shoulder.
He has not let me put a saddle-blanket on his back, and the blanket is the question of this morning.
I go in slow, the blanket folded over my left forearm — a worn navy-wool with a faded yellow stripe, the lightest weight I own. I keep my eyes on his shoulder and not his eye. I keep the talking soft.
"Easy, love. Easy, easy, there now. You and I, we are going to put a thing on your back today that is the weight of a folded shirt, and you are going to tell me whether you can bear it, and I am going to listen. There is no surprise here."
He lets me come to his shoulder. He lets me lay my left hand flat on the wither.
I can feel the heat of him through the hand, the long steady going of his breath.
I lift the blanket, ease it onto the curve of his neck, slide it back, and for the count of three the world is a quiet thing, and on the fourth count he goes sidelong like a thing fired out of a cannon, and I am into the rail.
The rail takes me across the left wrist because the left is the wrist I lead with. The pop is small and clean and I hear it in my own ear-bones before the pain comes. I go down on one knee in the dust.
"Christ's teeth, you bastard."
I say it low because he is twenty feet across the pen and watching me with the calm interested eye of a creature that has just established a thing, and I do not want to argue with the establishment.
The blanket is at the post, blameless. I sit a long second in the dirt and look at the dust on the back of my own left hand, where the resin is still on the knuckles and is now mixed with the dust into a kind of pale paste, and I laugh once because the laugh is the door, and then I say the only thing I have ever been able to say to a horse that has just put me down.
"All right. You win today."
He blows once through his nostrils, a single sharp sound like a stove damper opening, and steps two steps farther off. He does not turn his head from me.
I get up off the knee, gather the blanket, lay it folded across the top rail, and let myself out the gate. I sit on the corral fence with my back to the round-pen and feel the wrist begin to fatten in my sleeve.
She comes down off the porch step before I have decided to call up to the cabin.
She does not run. She does not call out.
She comes down the path in her gray work-dress with her hair pinned at the nape with the bone pin and a small tin in her right hand and a strip of clean linen folded twice in her left, and her gray eyes are at me from twenty paces off in that direct seamstress's measure I had thought I had been prepared for and which I had not.
She sits beside me on the bottom rail. She holds out her right hand for my left and waits.
I give her the wrist. The hand comes off my own thigh and into hers as if it were a thing she has had on her workbench all morning and had asked back.
Her hands are cool. They are precise. There is no flutter at her fingertips at the swelling.
She has done this before. A tailor's daughter knows a sprain; she has seen one before.
She opens the small tin. The smell is sharp and herbal, paler and cleaner than the bee-balm on the pantry shelf — arnica, I decide, from her own seamstress's pouch out of St. Louis.
She rubs a thin film into the meat of my wrist with the pad of her thumb.
The pad of her thumb is cool. She wraps the linen around my wrist with two clean turns and a flat knot at the inside, where the pressure does not foul the move.
It is the seamstress's knot, over-under-twice-across, the knot she would tie at the inside of a man's coat-cuff and that he would not feel against his shirt-sleeve all day. She tightens it once with her thumb-nail.
She does not flinch at the swearing. She does not flinch at the smell of me — horse-sweat and pine-resin and dust and a thin sour line of fear-sweat I am not in a position to apologize for.
She finishes the knot. She rests my wrist back on my own thigh, as a man would set down a tool that has been borrowed.
"Christ's teeth, lass. You don't move slow."
"I was apprenticed to a tailor. We work fast. " She does not look up. She closes the tin. "You will not lift more than a tin cup for three days. You will keep the linen dry. Tomorrow I will look at it."
I laugh once. It comes out of me without my consent and goes off into the dooryard small and surprised, and the chestnut behind me hears it and blows once.
She glances up at the round-pen at the blow and then back at her own hands in her own lap, as if she has heard the answer of a question she did not ask.
"Mrs. Greer," I say, and I keep it quiet, because Beck is up at the corral fence twenty paces off pretending he is not watching, and Tate is up at the lower gate pretending he is not watching, and the basin has ears in June whether a man wishes it or not. "I am obliged."
She nods at the formal word. She walks back up to the porch without speaking.
---
That afternoon Beck and Tate are at the north ridge looking at a fence-line.
I am sitting on the porch step about four feet shy of the corral fence, because four feet is as far as I sit from a horse if a horse is to be had, and Willa is at the porch with a small basket of mending in her lap.
The chestnut is at the round-pen rail watching me as if I am a piece of furniture he has not yet decided about.
The resin on my knuckles, fresh-cut, is still there at my own nose when I lift the hand to my own jaw, the same resin from yesterday's splitting that one washing and one bandage have not taken off.
She mends a tear in Tate's work-shirt with a needle so small it is invisible from four feet off. Her hand goes in and out of the cloth without lift. She does not look at the cloth; she looks past me at the chestnut, in the same flat measure she gave me at the rail this morning.
I take the bone-and-rawhide charm out of my trouser-pocket and lay it on my knee. I do not say what it is. She sees it. She does not laugh. She asks what I expected her not to ask.
"What was her name."