CHAPTER 4 #2
"Tiller. " I scratch at the cleft scar at my sternum without meaning to, and then I lower the fingers.
"A chestnut mare with a star like the one in the corral and a long stride at the gallop and a soft mouth that could carry the lightest bit.
I was eleven. Wyoming remount station, the winter of '62.
A sluice along the back fence froze over and looked like ground.
She walked across it and the ice gave. I had her out by the third hour.
She laid down in a stall and did not get up.
I sat with her two nights. I went back in the spring and took the bone. "
I have not told this story to Beck. I have not told it to Tate.
I have not told it to a person since 1869.
I have just told it to a woman whose name I have known a week, and the telling came up out of me as smooth and unconsented as a yawn.
I almost weep. I do not. I laugh, the way a man laughs when the door of the joke has just shut on his fingers.
"Bloody hell. I am not sure I have ever said her name aloud."
"You have now," Willa says. The needle is going in and out of the seam. "That is a kindness she will not mind."
The chestnut blows once at the wind. She mends. The afternoon goes on as if nothing in particular has happened, which is one of her gifts to a household that has not had a woman in it in nineteen months: she does not make a fuss of a kindness.
---
Supper is the four of us at the scrubbed plank table.
Beck has made the cornbread. Tate has carried the salt-pork in from the smokehouse.
Willa has set the dough-trough on the east end and the brass kerosene lamp lit at the table edge with the cracked chimney throwing its small thin ray across the east wall.
She passes the bread first to Beck at her right; Beck takes a slice and does not look at her past the slice.
She passes it next to Tate at her left; Tate does not look at her at all. She passes it last to me. I cannot stop watching her.
I am the loudest of us. I have known that for a month.
What I learn at the table tonight, with the bread going around, is that I am also the most afraid of the three of us, because the other two have a wife in the house they signed for and I have a wife in the house I cannot bring myself to look at when she passes me the plate of bread.
I take the bread. I say thank you, Mrs. Greer.
---
In the morning the wrist is healing fast under her linen. The swell is half what it was. I go to the corral after breakfast. I do not bring the blanket. I do not bring a halter. I sit on the corral rail with the wrapped wrist in my lap and I do not call to him. I wait.
He comes within ten feet of his own accord, and stops.
His head is low. The white star is steady between the eyes. The eight years of him stand in the round-pen like a weight a man does not get to argue with. He does not snort. He does not stamp. After a minute I speak low, because when something matters I speak low.
"She is a woman, mate. She does not know what she has signed for. Neither do we."
He exhales. The exhale is a long silver thing, half-vapor in the cool air, the most willing sound he has made at me in three weeks.
I laugh, half under my breath, half at him, half at myself, and I name him then in my own head and not aloud, because the name has been there in my own mouth since the second week and has waited only for a man's permission.
Ardent as the devil and as proud as the lot of us. I do not say it. I keep it for later.
It is a name a man does not give a horse he has not been able to put a saddle-blanket on; I will give it to him when he gives me the blanket.
But it is his, and he is mine, and that is the thing I have just decided in private.
I rub the cleft scar at my sternum with two fingers. He watches me do it.
---
In the afternoon I mend a rail at the corral's south side.
A rail had come loose under last night's wind.
I fit a new peeled lodgepole into the old notch and tap it home with the heel of the maul, and the resin on the new wood goes onto my left palm and onto the knuckles of the right where yesterday's splitting had already laid down its line.
The smell of green pine resin on my knuckles, fresh-cut, is on my hand all morning and will not leave it for the rest of the day.
I go up to the cabin for the water-bucket. Willa is at the iron pump with her own pail half-full, pumping the handle with a long even down-stroke, the way a woman does who has not been at an iron pump for the first week of her life and has now been at it for five mornings.
I stop ten paces off and wait. Do not crowd her, I tell myself. She turns with the full pail to walk back up. She sees me. She nods once. She does not stop.
"Mrs. Carrow," I say, and I keep it light, and the tease is the smallest joke I can fit into my own mouth at this hour. "You are doing a man's work with a man's bucket. I will take it up for you."
She does not laugh, but she does not bristle either. She says, in her dry careful seamstress's English, "Mr. Thorn. The bucket is no business of yours with that wrist. Mrs. Carrow on the porch step requires a teasing tone I am not sure you have earned yet."
She walks up to the cabin with the pail.
I stand at the pump a second with the empty pail in my own right hand and a feeling at my sternum I do not have a name for. The cleft scar gets the two fingers again.
---
At dusk on the third day she comes down off the porch with a tin cup in her right hand.
I am at the corral fence. The chestnut is at the round-pen rail.
The sun is off the west ridge and the light is the long gold light that lies on the basin in June at half-past seven.
Beck and Tate are at the assay-shed with the small balance.
I have spent the last hour braiding a length of horsehair into a soft lead for the chestnut and have made a mess of it because my left hand is wrapped and the right is doing the work of two, and I have not minded.
She comes down with the cup.
"Mr. Thorn. " She holds it out. "Mint. I found a sprig in the dry-goods shelf two days back; I have dried it on the kitchen-window sill and made tea of it tonight for the men.
This is yours. The arnica is bitter at the back of the throat and the mint cuts it.
" She puts the cup in my right hand. The cup is warm.
The smell of the mint is clean and pale and high.
"Mrs. Greer," I say, soft.
"Levi. " She says it the way she said yes on the porch step at five-thirty on the fourteenth: once and clearly. The way a careful woman says a careful thing.
She turns. She walks back up to the cabin in the dusk. I watch her go. The gray dress is darker in the light that is leaving. The bone pin holds the braid steady. She does not look back at the corral fence.
I rub the cleft scar at my sternum with two fingers, slow.
The chestnut at the round-pen rail blows once at the wind, the silver exhale a yes and a no at the same time, and I lift the tin cup in my right hand because my left is wrapped in her linen and I cannot, and I drink a swallow of the mint, and the heat of it goes down to my sternum, and I say it aloud, half to the chestnut behind me, half into the cup, half into the basin that has heard me say worse and stranger things.
"I am in trouble."