CHAPTER 9 #2
He said, "I would like to court you, Mrs. Carrow. The slow way."
I said, "We are already married."
He said, "Not yet."
His thumb did not move from the inside of my wrist. He turned the wrist gently, the smallest turning, palm-up, the way a man would turn a piece of velvet to see the nap. He looked at me. I looked at him. I did not yet have the language for what was happening in the kitchen, but I had the count.
He lifted his right hand. He laid the pad of his right thumb at the corner of my mouth.
He did not press. He did not stroke. He set the thumb there, the small flat pad at the line where my upper lip met the lower, just at the corner, and he held it.
Lord — the word came up in me as a breath at the back of my throat and stopped there; I did not say it.
The heat of the kettle was at my right palm.
The heat of his thumb was at my mouth. The heat of my own face was at the inside of my own throat.
I began to count.
The first beat was at my own wrist where his thumb at the inside of it lay against the artery.
One. The second was the same place. Two.
The third was the small surprise of the third — that I had begun to count, and that I was not afraid.
Three. He did not move. Four. The basin was silent.
Five. I felt the corner of my mouth where his thumb was.
Six. The kettle steamed. Seven. His eyes were on mine.
Eight. My thighs pressed together inside the gray work-skirt without my asking them to. Nine. The wind at the door lifted once. Ten. He breathed out, the smallest sound. Eleven.
He let my wrist go.
He took his thumb from the corner of my mouth.
He stepped back one half-step and his scarred left palm went off the door-frame at last. He looked at me with the steam between us thinning. He said, soft, "Pour the kettle, Mrs. Carrow. Pour it before it scalds your hand."
I poured.
I did not look down to pour. I poured by feel — by the wrist-weight of the kettle's tipping, by the iron's slow lean, by the sound of the water hitting the smaller kettle's belly and rising.
I did not spill. The water filled to the third rivet and I tipped the kettle back upright and set it on the trivet at the table's near edge.
My hand was steady. I had not known it would be steady. It was.
He said, "I have measured you a long time."
I said, "I have measured you back."
He said, "Then I will ask. The slow way. Soon."
He took the kettle off the trivet himself and set it in the center of the table where the heat would not sit against a hip — as a man might fold a cuff a woman had pinned. He looked at me once more and went out the kitchen door to the dooryard. I heard his boot on the porch step, then nothing.
I stood at the table with my right hand still holding the hand-towel folded twice and the kettle gone out from under it, the cotton warm against my palm with the held heat.
I laid my left fingers at the nape and felt the bone pin loosened in the braid — the pin had moved a hair-width on its own, the way the pins moved in my mother's hair when she lifted her face. I set the pin straight without looking.
*
Tate and Levi came down from the upper pasture at quarter past seven.
I had supper laid — beans soaked from the night before, a quarter of the morning's loaf, the last of the dried apple stewed in saleratus water for sweet.
Beck washed at the basin and dried his hands on the iron towel-bar where the folded-twice towel was waiting.
He hung his hat on the peg and sat. Levi came in with a chunk of pitch on his left knuckle and the smell of horse-sweat on his shirt; he said "good evening, Mrs. Carrow" and took the seat opposite Tate.
Tate sat last and inclined his head and was silent.
The four of us at the scrubbed plank table.
I ate. I did not eat much. The corner of my mouth was where his thumb had been at half past two and the corner of my mouth was still where his thumb had been.
I tasted bean and saleratus and pork-fat and beneath those I tasted nothing, because there was a small bright wire running between two of us through the wood-grain of the table and the wire took up the room left for the taste of beans.
Levi looked at me without looking at me — once, twice, then at his bread. Tate kept his eyes on the south window where the last sun lay across the slate. Beck ate slow.
I cleared the plates. Levi went out to the lean-to.
Tate went to the freight stable to bank the off-lead.
Beck stayed at the table with his coffee cooling in front of him and looked at the table-grain.
I washed the kettle and set it back on the warming shelf, and lifted the hand-towel folded twice off the iron bar and refolded it again and laid it back.
The cotton was cool against my palm. The held heat that had been the kettle was gone.
I went up the loft ladder.
*
I did not take the bone pin out.
I lay on the corn-shuck pallet in my bodice and skirt with my stockings still on and the cream-and-pink quilt at my feet, hands at my sides. My thighs were pressed together inside the gray work-skirt. I could not undo the press. I did not try.
I thought: eleven pulse beats. He counted with me. I did not know if he had counted. I knew that when he had let go he had let go on a beat — the eleventh — and that a man does not let a woman's wrist go on a beat unless the beat is what he is reading.
I counted again. One. Two. Three. The pulse was at my own wrist where I had laid my own fingers. Four. Five. Six. The corner of my mouth was warm. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. I stopped at eleven because that was his count, and I would not count past it.
Then I thought Beck — only the one syllable, in the silence inside my own head, not aloud — and I let the count run again, and this time past him by two, because he had said the slow way, soon, and the soon was past eleven. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.
The thighs would not part inside the skirt. I did not slide my hand under the skirt. I had said to myself on the first night of the marriage that I had other work. I had other work. I held the want at the inside of the press of my own thighs and let it sit there.
Below me, through the loft floor-board, the beeswax candle on the kitchen table dripped once onto the tin saucer.
He had lit a candle. He had not yet snuffed it.
The wax fell at one drop every six seconds, the rate I knew from the third night, and Beck was in the rocker by the cold stove with the King James open on his knee or the rocker still or the rocker moving — I could not tell which.
The candle dripped a second time. He was leaving it for the table.
I pressed my thumb to the cleft between my eyebrows once and lowered my hand.
I thought: the slow way. Soon.
The pump-handle in the dooryard squeaked once where Beck must have gone out to lay his bare hand on the cold iron to think. The falling note was the question still. I did not answer it.
I did not sleep.
Eleven. Eleven again. Eleven a third time, and then I stopped, because that was his count and I would not count past it without his hand at the wrist to read it.