CHAPTER 26 #2
The three of us sit a long minute.
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The afternoon is the work of recovery.
I clean the freight stable of the spark-fall ash. The east wall took two cinders the night of the fire, both dead before the planks could catch. I sweep with the long pine broom and carry the ash out in the dust-pan.
Levi brings the cattle down to the lower pasture. The smoke is gone; the cattle can come back. He is at the corral rail when I come back across the dooryard, Ardent at the snubbing-post, the bone-and-rawhide charm still on the brow-band of the bridle.
I say, "Levi."
He says, "Aye."
I say, "I laid Eliza down."
He says, "Aye."
I say, "You are my brother."
He says, "I am."
We do not embrace; we stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the corral rail and he rubs the cleft of his sternum-scar with two fingers and I do not look at him. Ardent puts his ears forward at the lower rail and blows once.
Beck is at the assay shed all afternoon with the small balance and the brass weights and the dust pouch at his elbow. He has been making nine dollars a day in the dust the last six weeks, slow but steady, the bag built up for the patent fee Marshal Lawler will need within the week.
Willa bakes. She has saved the last of the August flour against this day — two loaves and a small dried-apple pie from the string in the pantry.
At noon I cross the dooryard and she is at the iron pump with the two tin pails, and I say, "Darlin'," for the second.
She says, "Tate."
She works the pump-handle once. The water comes thin and tastes of iron when she lifts the carved birch dipper to my mouth, and her gold band clicks once against the dipper-handle as she lifts.
She says, "Drink."
I drink.
She says, "Now me."
I take the dipper. I work the pump-handle once.
I lift the dipper to her mouth. She drinks.
The lavender at the bone pin at the nape and the bee-balm in the window-sill cup and the iron of the pump-water meeting at the corner of her mouth — the small ordinary grace of a man and a woman at an iron pump at noon on a day a man has set his wife down.
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By six o'clock the four of us are at the scrubbed plank table.
She has made stew. The cast-iron kettle is on the warming shelf.
The brass kerosene lamp is on the table — lit, because the September sundown is at twenty past six already.
The cracked chimney throws the thin ray across the cabin's east wall.
The two loaves of bread are on the dough-trough.
The small dried-apple pie is on the warming shelf beside the kettle.
The four chairs at the table are the four chairs they have been since June ten, 1879: Beck at the head, Tate at his right, Levi at his left, Willa at the foot.
Beck reads a verse from the King James before he picks up the spoon — Psalm 91, slow, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. Levi rocks back on his chair, his Welsh-English running soft about Ardent's off-shoulder mane.
I say, "Darlin'."
I say it at her across the table at the lit lamp, and she looks up.
She says, "Tate."
The third darlin' of the day. The small smooth stone is in the ground beside the cross at the southeast lip of the basin. The spectacles are in the ground beside the cross. My coat-pocket is unweighted for the first time since the February the cold took my wife.
We eat.
At twenty past six the first sound comes.
It is the patter of a single thin drop on the cabin's shake roof.
Beck stops his spoon halfway to his mouth.
Levi stops his Welsh-English mid-clause.
I stop with the bread in my hand at the bread-plate.
Willa lifts her chin a half-inch.
The patter pauses.
A second drop. The shake roof at the north slope — clear, small, the sound a thing makes when it has not made the sound in seventy-two days.
Beck says, low, "Hush."
The patter pauses again.
A third drop. A fourth. A run of small thin drops the length of a held breath. Then a longer pause. Then a small steady patter on the shake — three seconds, five, ten — then nothing.
Willa says, "Lord."
She is up. She is at the cabin's south window — the window above the wash-basin counter, four lights of poured glass, looking west to the iron pump and beyond to the corral.
Her right hand is on the window-frame. Her left hand is at the cleft of her brows for a half-second and falls.
She is not weeping. She is not even trying not to weep. She is listening.
Beck sets his spoon down.
Levi sets the rocker-back of his chair down on its four legs.
I stand.
I cross to the south window beside her. Beck stands too — slow, his chair pushed back without scrape, his thumbnail at the scarred palm of his left hand. Levi steps to the cabin door behind us.
The rain comes again.
Small thin drops, hesitant at first — a single drop on the iron pump-handle in the dooryard, a tick of sound against the iron — and then a second drop on the porch shake — and then a small steady patter on the porch and the iron pump and the chicken-yard wire all at once.
The iron pump-handle's squeak shifts pitch.
I hear it. Beck hears it. Levi at the door hears it.
Willa at the window hears it. The pump-handle has had the hoarse two-strokes-pulling-air-before-water squeak through the deep-drought weeks, the squeak of a basin asking a question that has not been answered, and the rain hits the iron of the pivot at the handle's heel and the squeak drops a quarter-tone lower and clears.
The pump is no longer asking. The pump is the pump that answers.
She does not turn her head. She lifts her chin and says it.
"Listen."
Beck puts his hand at her shoulder. Levi at the door puts his hand on the door-frame. I put my hand at the small of her back, at the curve like a quarter-moon where the wagon-wheel hub bruised her at nineteen on a St. Louis cobblestone, and the palm is what I have.
Old Brigham in the chicken yard is wing-spread.
He hates the rain. He is making the sound he makes when he is angry — half-crowing, half-clucking — and the sound is comic in the dooryard, and Willa laughs once.
A small clean laugh. Beck laughs once at her shoulder — slow, dry, the laugh a man laughs when he has lost a coal-patch and gained a basin.
Levi laughs once at the door — short, ash-cracked.
I do not laugh.
I weep once.
A quarter-minute. One tear off my left cheekbone onto the windowsill below.
I say, soft, into her hair at the nape under the bone pin.
"Mo chridhe. Mein Liebling. Aye."
She says, soft, "Tate Halloran."
She does not turn. The rain steadies on the shake. The iron pump-handle's squeak is the new lower pitch — answered, not asking. The basin holds.
I close my eyes for one beat longer than I should.
I have laid the stone down, I think, into the cabin's south window.
I have laid the stone down and the rain has come.
I will not visit her grave every week. I will visit her grave once a month.
I have a wife who hums her mother's German over the iron pump and three men whose company is her marriage. Eliza, mo chridhe, the answer was yes.
Willa stands at the kitchen window.
She says, "Listen."
The rain comes.