CHAPTER 8
Beck
◆
She has cooked supper.
That is the first fact of the first married night.
The plates are at the four places. The kettle is on the warming shelf.
The bread is out of the wooden dough-trough and laid by the salt.
She has lit the brass kerosene lamp at the center of the scrubbed plank table because the sun is off the west ridge.
I sit. I do not look at her too long. I have not earned the right.
I look instead at the angle of her shoulder where the slate-blue Sunday dress sets the seam, at the catch of her sleeve when she leans across to pour Tate's coffee, at the small soft place at the nape where the bone pin holds the braided coil.
She has the long forearms of a needle-worker and she pours coffee with the wrist of a woman who has poured coffee for a sick father at a tailor's counter for three years. I see it. I do not say I see it.
She has cut the bread thick. The crumb is even.
The salt-pork is fried out with a half-spoon of bee-balm honey.
She has known to do that without being told.
I scratch the scarred palm of my left hand with the right thumbnail under the table-edge.
The cable-burn web from heel of hand to base of thumb is a piece of the No.
4 colliery I have carried since I was sixteen.
Levi keeps looking at her past his plate. He has not lived with a woman in this house since he was fourteen. He takes a slice of bread and says, "Mrs. Carrow. " Willa nods once and pours him coffee. Tate says, "Mrs. Carrow," and Willa pours him coffee too. She pours mine last.
I eat the bread. I do not speak much. I cannot find the syntax for the thing I would like to say on this night.
At the end of the hour Tate stands and says he will go to the freight stable to check on the off-lead mule.
Levi stands and says he will go to the lean-to.
The two of them step into the cool dusk and leave me at the table with the woman who cooked the plates.
I take them to the wash-basin. She lifts the kettle off the warming shelf with the hand-towel folded twice in her palm and handles the cast-iron with the calm of a woman who has handled a flat-iron heavier at her mother's table.
We do not speak. I am aware of the inch of air between her elbow and mine and I am aware that she is aware.
The plates go up on the shelf. She wipes the table satin-pale where she scrubbed it the night before.
I go to the front room with the King James on my knee.
I sit in the rocker by the cold stove. I open to Ruth.
I have not been able to leave the book all week.
It is the only book in the cabin that talks like a man with a wife.
Whither thou goest, I will go. I read slow and my lips move on the longer words because a man who learned letters at a coal-patch chapel-school three nights a week from ages six through ten does not read fast at thirty-two.
I hear Willa cross to the foot of the loft ladder. I hear her go up. Eight rungs. I count them.
The loft floor-board above the front-room ceiling creaks once. Then nothing.
I think of my mother at the Bethania chapel in November the year I was eight, her voice the alto under the other voices, my father in his shift-shirt with the soot at the collar putting his hand on my shoulder for the length of the hymn.
I learned three things from my father: how to dig, and how to wait, and how to bury what I could not say.
He said it once at the kitchen-mantel of the row-house with the watch in his palm and the hands at four-eleven. I do not say it aloud now. I scratch the scarred palm and I do not say it.
On the kitchen table she has lit a beeswax candle on a tin saucer beside the kerosene lamp.
I see it from the rocker through the doorway.
The wax slides down the side of the candle and falls onto the tin saucer in a single round drop the size of a small pea, and cools.
Then another. One drop every six seconds.
She lit a candle for the table after the lamp, and she has gone up the ladder and left it burning.
She has left it for the table. A kitchen table at night should not be dark in a married house.
I think also, low, because I will think the true thing once and put it down — she has left it burning in case she comes down.
I do not name what I hope will happen.
I sit until the second wick of the lamp burns down and goes blue at the cracked-chimney edge.
I turn the lamp down. I do not snuff the candle.
The drip slows because the wax has built a small reservoir at the base of the wick — one every eight seconds, then one every twelve — and the small uneven flat dome of cooled beeswax on the saucer is the size of a half-dollar by the time the basin's deepest cold comes in through the front-room east-wall knothole.
She does not come down.
I sleep an hour, perhaps, between two and three, with the book open on my lap, and I wake to Old Brigham at the first paling of the east window.
The candle is still burning. I snuff it with the back of my thumb at last because the new day has started and a candle in daylight is no longer a candle for a kitchen at night.
---
The second married night Tate sets the lamp at the kitchen end of the table and lays out the pencil ledger and the assay receipts, and he pulls the chair next to me out and sits down.
Willa has gone up the loft ladder to mend a sock for Levi — his wool sock at the heel went through in his boot two days ago.
Levi has stepped out to check on the chestnut's hay. The kitchen is mine and Tate's.
Tate opens the ledger to May. He reads aloud.
He reads in his clean priestly hand-voice, the low even Scots-Irish baritone of a man raised on the King James at his mother's kitchen table on Sunday afternoons.
He reads the columns the way Margaret Halloran would have read the Psalms. May seventh, one-half ounce dust, south ridge sluice.
May fourteenth, one-half ounce. May twenty-first, three-eighths.
May twenty-eighth, seven-sixteenths. He looks at me. I do not look up.
I am following his finger on the column with my own eyes because the figures are mine, in pencil, in the rough hand I learned at the coal-patch chapel-school, and I can read them faster when his voice is on them.
He reads on. June first, three-eighths. June eighth, five-sixteenths. June fifteenth, a quarter. He pauses. He says, "The slate has been thin."
"It has been thin," I say. "The water's low at the south ridge already; we are not getting the wash."
He nods. He reads the cattle weight at the north ridge — the herd is up three head this month, two heifer calves at the lower and one bull calf at the upper. He reads my figure — twenty-five head as of June fifteenth — and stops.
"Twenty-six," I say, low. "I counted twenty-six on Monday. The bull calf at the upper was born Sunday night."
Tate picks up the steel pen, dips it, crosses out the twenty-five and writes twenty-six over it in his copperplate. He hands me the pen. I make a small pencil-mark next to his correction so the mark is mine as much as his.
He reads on — the freight-axle replacement of June fourth, the dry-goods account from Bayle's, the gold band for four dollars twenty against the dust at Hattie's, June fifteenth.
The line goes still in the lamp-light for a half-breath and then he reads on, because the gold band is on her finger upstairs and he is not going to make a thing of it at the column.
He reads the half-pound of beeswax candles from Bayle's last month, hand-dipped, twelve.
He does not look at the candle on the saucer at his elbow. I do not look at it either.
He closes the ledger. "That is May and the first half of June."
"It is square," I say.
He says, low, "The yield will be down ten percent through July and August in this dry. The August thirty-first deadline is not the trouble — we will make the patent application by the fifteenth — but the September yield will be thin."
"The smoke is coming," I say.
"Aye."
He puts the ledger back in the kitchen-table drawer. "I'll go to the freight stable a while. Be back at ten."
Up in the loft the floor-board creaks once.
I do not look up. She has been listening through the boards — a loft above a kitchen is not a sealed room, and a woman mending a sock by candle-light four feet above a kitchen table is in the kitchen whether she means to be or not.
She has heard him read for me. She has heard me correct him twice.
She has heard the price of the gold band on her finger said aloud at the table.
She has heard the price of the candle she lit last night. She does not say anything. She is a careful woman.
I sit at the table by the candle. I think the candle is for her. I am leaving it burning in case she comes down. I do not name what I hope will happen. I scratch my palm.
She does not come down.
I cross to the front room at eleven and the rocker, and I sit with the wild-goose-chase on my knees and listen to the basin around the cabin. The candle on the kitchen table goes on burning. I do not snuff it.
---
In the morning I am at the assay shed with Tate.
The shed is at the toe of the slate band, three hundred yards from the cabin. The iron door is open against the post; the small assay-fire is going; the brass weights are out on the balance. The air smells of warm pine and the iron tang of the brass.
Tate weighs the test. I weigh the dust. The day's wash is four and one-eighth ounces in two small bags from the south ridge sluice; twenty-two dollars and change at Granite Forks rate. Not bad for a low-flow June.
I take out the watch.