CHAPTER 5 #2
Tate took the paper and read aloud, in his quiet Scots-Irish baritone, each clause from one through seven. Beck's lips moved a half-beat behind on the longer phrases. When Tate finished, Beck nodded once.
"I add one clause," he said. "The principal claimant shall give the loft chamber his second-best quilt against the winter."
Tate's mouth went up at the corner once before he closed it. "I will write it in, Beck."
Levi laughed once, soft. "Bloody hell, mate."
I let the smile come to the corners of my mouth and did not let it become more. I put my thumb to the cleft between my brows for a single heartbeat and let it down. I took the pen back and wrote the clause in at the foot of clause four:
The principal claimant shall, before the first snow of the season, lay his second-best quilt across the foot of the loft pallet. The quilt shall be the loft-keeper's to keep.
I read it aloud. Beck nodded once. I sanded the page. It was a quarter past midnight.
---
They signed in the order of the claim.
Beck first. He turned the pen once at the nib the way a man turns a tool in his palm.
He dipped. He tapped twice. He set the nib at the paper, and the rasp came in the long careful letters of his mother's chapel school — Beckett Lloyd Carrow.
He shaped each letter as if he had set it once in a colliery wages-book and was setting it now in a thing he would honor longer than a paycheck.
When he laid the pen down he looked at his own name for the length of a breath and laid his thumb on the scarred palm of his left hand. He did not speak.
He passed the pen to Tate.
Tate took it left-handed — his right was the burned arm.
He dipped, tapped twice, set down Tate Owen Halloran in the clean priestly hand I had watched on the freight bill of lading — copperplate, even, every loop closed at the same height.
The rasp was steadier than Beck's, faster.
He looked at his name on the page for half a beat longer than he had let himself look at anything since the spectacles had moved to the windowsill.
He passed the pen to Levi.
Levi took it right-handed — the schoolmaster had beaten that habit into him at nine.
He dipped. He tapped once. The rasp came in a quick scrawl with a flourish under the L — Levi Thorn, the L heavy, the Thorn trailing, the underscore beneath the surname a small horseman's flourish that would not look out of place on a saddle-maker's bill.
He laughed once, soft, against his own collar.
He passed the pen to me.
I took the pen. I turned it once at the nib, as Beck had turned it. I dipped. I tapped twice. I set the nib at the paper.
I wrote Willa Greer. Not yet Carrow.
I had decided at the iron pump-handle that the household pact would carry my father's name; the certificate on Monday would carry the name of the marriage.
The cabin held the silence after.
---
Beck folded the paper in three with the careful flat hand of a man who had folded a colliery wages-bill ten thousand times.
He went to the southwest bedroom and came back with the small tin lockbox from the top of his trunk.
He set it on the table and lifted the lid.
The box held only a brown paper twist and the small canvas pouch in which he kept the day's gold dust.
He laid the folded paper on top of the pouch, closed the lid, and turned the small brass key. The lock made the soft round sound that a household paper makes when it goes into the box that will hold it.
Tate said — and it was the first long sentence he had said all night — "It is a paper, Mrs. Greer. We are honor-bound by it."
Beck nodded once. "That we are."
Levi did not speak. He looked at me across the table for the count of three and slid the pen back to the center of the table with his right index finger.
He stood. "I will be in the lean-to. " He nodded at me — a slow nod, the small nod of a man who has signed a thing he intends to keep.
He went out by the doorway Beck had cut into the lean-to.
The leather flap fell behind him. The latch clicked.
Tate took the kettle off the warming shelf and set it on the trivet for the morning. He looked at me a quarter-inch longer than the country way. "I will be at the stable."
"Goodnight, Mr. Halloran."
"Goodnight, Mrs. Greer."
He went out by the front door. The freight-stable door went on the top hinge and the lower hinge and the catch, and his boots crossed the dooryard and went up the outside stair, and the small landing creaked once, and the loft door closed.
The cabin had Beck in it and me in it.
---
The candle had burned to a stub — the tallow stub I had used to seal Mrs. Doss's letter that morning, which Beck had brought to the kitchen table at midnight in case the pen ran dry. It had not been needed. It guttered.
Beck stood up. He did not come around the table. He stood at the north end with his hand on the back of the chair and looked at me across the scrubbed plank length. The lamp's cracked chimney threw its uneven ray across his throat. His hazel-green eyes were more green than brown in the lamplight.
"It is a paper, Mrs. Greer," he said. "We are honor-bound by it."
He said it the way Tate had said it — as the household line he wanted to be the last word of the table tonight.
I said, "Mr. Carrow."
He looked at me for the count of three breaths. "Beck," he said. "If you would, Mrs. Greer. Inside the cabin. At the table. Beck."
I let the name come up to my mouth and turn there for a moment the way the pen had turned in my fingers before I had signed. I said it.
"Beck."
I did not say my own first name back to him. I held it. He had asked for his given name at the household table and I had given it; I had not yet given him the name my mother had said over me in a Cherokee Street kitchen. The name on the pact tonight was Greer. The name in the loft was mine.
The candle guttered again.
Beck reached across the table and pinched the wick between his thumb and forefinger and the small light went out. The cabin had the lamp now and only the lamp.
"Goodnight, Mrs. Greer."
"Goodnight, Beck."
He left the lamp burning low and went to the rocker in the front room. I heard the cane of the seat take his weight and the rockers' first careful set against the planed pine. He did not rock. He sat the way a man sits in the chair he will sit in until first light.
I picked up the lamp by the small wire handle and carried it to the loft ladder. I went up a rung at a time, set the lamp on the small wooden box at the head of my pallet, and sat down on the corn-shuck with my hands flat on my own thighs.
I did not undress. I lay back on the pallet, and I did not sleep.
I counted pulse beats at the inside of my wrist — one, two, three — and the count went on past ten and past the number I had stopped counting at on the night of my father's death.
I had said yes once and clearly on the porch, and Beck once and clearly at the table, and I had not yet given any of them the name Willa to use across that table.
I would not, I knew, until I had given it to myself first.
Below me Beck did not rock.
Across the dooryard, in the loft above the freight stable, Tate sat with his late wife's steel-rimmed reading-spectacles in his hand and held them as he had not held them since February of '77.
I would learn this tomorrow. Tonight I knew only that the freight-stable door had closed and the landing had creaked once.
The tin lockbox sat on the scrubbed plank table. The rasp of the steel-nibbed pen on cheap county paper had gone out of the cabin an hour ago, and the cabin held the silence after.
I did not sleep.