CHAPTER 7
Willa
◆
The wagon came down off the basin at half past seven in the morning, and the four of us went with it.
I wore the green-and-cream travel dress — the dress I had come west in, the mended collar my mother's hand from a Cherokee Street upstairs room, the velvet turned out so the lavender could be pressed into the lining.
The bone pin was straight as a plumb-line at the back of my head.
I owned a Sunday dress — slate-blue, the dress I had buried my father in — and I would not be married in the dress I had buried my father in.
The green-and-cream was the dress in which Beck had first laid eyes on me. If the man is the same man, I had decided at five-thirty, I will be the same woman.
I had a dollar fifty-five in folded notes in the drawstring purse pinned inside my bodice.
Yesterday I had given Hattie a dime for the rooster-crate she had let us borrow back in June.
Beck had four dollars and twenty cents in his vest, paid to Hattie three days ago for the band — her uncle's wife's, eighteen-carat plain gold, no engraving, a quarter-inch wide, held in her drawer ten years and parted with for the four and twenty cents above bullion price.
I lifted my ringed hand to my lap and remembered there was no ring on it yet.
*
The freight road took the better part of two hours. Levi spoke from the wagon-bed at Old Granite Drift. "That's mile five, ma'am. The placer pit Beck and I poked at in '76 and decided was not worth a half-ounce."
I turned to look at him. "Mr. Thorn. Levi."
He laughed short into his collar. "Yes, ma'am."
"You are not to say ma'am at the parlor."
"No, ma'am."
Tate laughed under his breath. Beck did the quarter-second softening at the line of his mouth I had begun to learn was his laugh.
We came down the Last Switchback at the seventh mile and the road bent through the cottonwoods at the eighth, and Larkspur Bend lay in front of us.
Bear Fork Street was empty but for a freight clerk in shirtsleeves sweeping in front of the assay office and an old woman in a black bonnet on the bench outside the Bend, waiting for the stage.
Neither looked up. The town does not stop for a wedding. I was glad.
Tate halted the team at Hattie's porch at twenty minutes to nine.
*
Hattie met us in her good Sunday apron, clean and gray, the pewter buttons polished until they caught the morning light. She had a tea tray on the post-office counter inside — the rose-blue cup with the chip at the rim, the cup she had given me on the first day.
"Sit, child. Eat. Talk after."
"I have eaten, ma'am."
"You will have eaten again."
I laughed once. The laugh caught at the back of my throat the way a thread catches when the needle is going wrong.
The Reverend Ezra Pell came down Chapel Lane on foot at five minutes to nine — a thin reed of a man with white side-whiskers and blue eyes nearly silver, his black coat brushed but not new, a small black-bound book against his side.
His nephew walked at his left elbow — a head shorter than Levi, freckles across the bridge of his nose, pale red-blond hair lighter than Levi's, fifteen and growing.
He kept a small black slate in his right hand and signed good day to me at the porch step with two quick movements of his free hand against his hat-brim. I nodded.
"He says he is glad to see you back, Miss Greer," the Reverend said. "This is Davie. He likes the green dress. Mrs. Carrow, by eleven o'clock."
"Miss Greer for forty more minutes."
*
The back parlor was the post-office side. Hattie had set the writing-desk with brown paper as a desk-cloth, a fresh bottle of iron-gall ink, and a steel-nibbed pen — a Gillott No. 290, the same nib Beck had used on the household-pact paper four nights ago.
The Reverend laid his black-bound book on the desk and beside it a sheet of cream rag-paper with a faint watermark at the lower right and the county seal blind-stamped at the upper left, a small tall pine and a pickaxe inside a circle.
He turned the paper to me. The front: Mr. Beckett Carrow.
Miss Willa Greer. He turned it over. The verso had four printed lines that read household-pact clause, territorial statute 1877 Ch 41, and several blank ones below.
"Mrs. Carrow. " His voice was soft. "I would like to read you this clause aloud once before we begin."
"Please."
He read it slow. The clause named all three men as cohabitating partners and lawful claim co-owners of Last Claim Basin; the marriage of record on the face was to Mr. Beckett Carrow as principal claimant; the marriage of household, on the partners' joint paper of June fourteenth, was to all three.
Mrs. Carrow held equal moral standing with her three husbands of household, and the partners undertook to maintain her in honor through the working of the basin.
His copperplate filled in the men's names as he read.
He looked at me. His eyes were the color of mine, faded to silver where mine were the color of dawn river-water. He waited for me to nod.
I nodded.
"You understand it, Mrs. Carrow."
"I understand it."
"Then we will begin at eleven."
*
I drank a cup of black tea standing.
The Reverend wrote at the desk; the pen rasped on the rag-paper the way it had rasped on the cheap county paper four nights ago.
Cheap county paper rasps higher; rag-paper rasps lower.
I had spent twelve years at my father's tailor-shop and had learned to hear the kind of paper under a nib before I learned to add the price of broadcloth.
Hattie laid a hand on my elbow. "Sit a minute, child."
"I am all right."
"You are not. Sit."
I sat. My hands had begun to shake at the wrist — not the whole hand, not yet, but at the inside of the wrist where the pulse goes, the way a thread shakes when you have pulled too hard on the bobbin and the tension has not yet given.
Damn me for shaking now.
The thought arrived in my own voice in plain English and I said it once under my breath against the rim of the cup, and then it was said.
It was the first time in my life I had used the word with intent.
Lord had been in my mouth; that word was not.
Once it was out I felt the wrist-shake settle and the seam set.
Davie stood at the parlor door. I lifted the cup again and looked at him. He signed yes once against his thigh — three small movements — and inclined his head a half-inch, and I thought, in plain German because the thought came in German and stayed: gut Kind.
I set the cup on the saucer. I stood.
*
It was eleven o'clock.
The Reverend had set us at the back of the parlor: Beck to my left at the writing-desk, Tate behind my left shoulder, Levi behind my right. Hattie stood at the doorway with both hands folded on her gray apron. Davie was at the door behind her.
"What God has joined, the land does not separate," the Reverend said. "What the land joins, God has the patience to bless."
He looked at Beck. "Beckett Lloyd Carrow.
Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others...
" He paused. He glanced at the verso of the cream rag-paper.
"...keep thee only unto her, in the manner this household has agreed and this paper records, so long as ye both shall live? "
Beck said, slow and even, "I will."
I had heard Beck say I will once before — on the porch on the afternoon I had said yes to the paper. He had said it then as foreman. He said it now as husband. The two registers were not the same. I was glad they were not.
I did not look at Levi. I did not look at Tate. I looked at the Reverend.
"I will."
He turned the page and read the household-pact clause aloud for the men — that they undertook to maintain Mrs. Carrow in honor, that they would hold her standing equal to their own and her word as binding as any of their three names.
"Mr. Halloran. Do you stand by the partners' joint paper of June fourteenth?"
Tate said, low, "I will."
Levi said, half a beat too quick, "I will. " He laughed short into his collar. The Reverend smiled at him for half a breath.
The Reverend laid his hand flat on the open Bible and on the cream rag-paper.
"Then by the authority vested in me by the law of the territory of Colorado and the patience of the Almighty, I pronounce you, Beckett Lloyd Carrow and Willa Greer, husband and wife in the household this paper records; and I pronounce the partners of this paper bound to one another as husbands of household to the lady of Last Claim Basin, by the joint paper they have signed and now affirm. "
He looked at Beck. "Mr. Carrow. The ring."
*
Beck reached into his vest.
He had been carrying the band in a small square of butcher's paper in the inside pocket of his Sunday waistcoat for fifteen minutes — Hattie had given it to him at the porch when we came in, palm to palm, without ceremony — and the paper opened in his hand now.
He took my right hand in his left, the scarred palm at the inside of my wrist — the long pink crescent of the cable-burn turned in toward me for the first time. He brought my fourth finger up to the band in his right. He slid the band on.
The band was cold.
The cold was the cold of an iron pump-handle in summer that pulls heat from a hand. It went down to my knuckle and stopped at the second joint and the band was cold across the joint for the length of a breath I did not take.
Then the band warmed.
It warmed with the heat of my own finger first, and after that with the heat of Beck's palm wrapped around my fingers to hold them steady while he slid the band the last quarter-inch.
I counted in pulse beats at the back of my throat: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
At eleven the metal was the temperature of my finger and I could not tell where my finger ended and the metal began.