CHAPTER 27 #2
I kneel on the rug. I unlace his boots. I pull the right; water comes out at the heel. I pull the left. His socks are wool, soaked black. I take them off. His feet are bone-cold; I feel the bone of the heel against my palm.
I stand. I unbutton his shirt at the throat and at the breastbone. I pull it off. His undershirt is wet through. I pull it over his head. The silver streak at the left temple shows in the lamp-light, and the burn-scald at the inside of his right forearm shows pink at the wet skin.
I unbutton his trousers. He helps me at the belt. The trousers come down. He steps out of them.
He stands bare on the rag-rug in front of the cold stove. He is shivering. I press my palm to the breastbone over his sternum where my hand has lived since the night of the loft.
"Tate."
"Yes or no, darlin'."
The canonical phrasing. He has asked it at every threshold I have crossed with him. He is asking it bare in front of his wife on the morning of the third day of the rain.
"Yes."
I undo my own buttons. The nightdress is the white linen one; the buttons are six. I undo them without counting. The nightdress comes off at the shoulders. The wool wrapper falls behind me.
I am bare on the rag-rug in front of the cold stove.
Tate's eyes go to my face first and then to my throat and back to my face.
He does not look away. He puts his hand at my jaw — the burn-scar at the inside of his right forearm cool at my chin — and brings my mouth to his.
Closed mouth, then open. His mouth tastes of the rain and the watch-coffee and the long cold of the porch.
I pull him down.
He goes down with me to the rag-rug. He is above me. Eye to eye. His weight is at my hip and at my shoulder; he is not shaking now; the warm of my body has come up to meet him. The lamp-light from the kitchen reaches the doorway; the rag-rug is at the edge of the light; his gray-blue is at my gray.
"Stay with me, Willa?"
"I stay."
He puts his mouth at the inside of my wrist.
His mouth is at the small blue place where the pulse-counting lives.
His lips are warm there. He lifts my hand and lays the palm at his own sternum — the chest he has had me lay my palm on at the loft and again now — and I feel his pulse against my palm at the same moment he feels mine at his mouth.
He enters me slow.
He is hard and warm against me at the entrance and he comes into me by inches — the slow long stroke of a man who has been cold for eight hours and is being held now.
The give of my body around him at the first inch is small and full.
The second is the slick at the join and his held breath at my temple.
The third is the long fill — his cock to the root, his hips against the cradle of mine, the slow seat.
He holds. He breathes.
"Darlin'."
"Tate."
He moves slow. Full strokes. He does not run on.
He looks at my face the whole time; his gray-blue is at my gray.
His mouth comes back to the inside of my wrist between strokes.
He kisses the small blue place. He kisses the half-inch silver line at the pad of my left index finger — the sewing-machine needle of '65.
His hand goes between us at my clit. The flat of his thumb. The pad of it is gentle, the pressure slow, building.
"Look at me, darlin'. Let me see you in this rain."
I look at him.
The rain is at the cabin roof. The smell of fresh rain on hot pine is at the open kitchen door behind us, carrying into the stove-corner where we lie. The lamp's thin ray reaches the rug at his shoulder. His shoulder is freckled at the throat. His silver streak is at my eye-line.
I think — clean — he is mine.
I come around him with the warm pressure of his body against my chest. The come is long; it goes a long slow wave through my belly and into my thighs; his thumb stays.
He moves through it. I count pulse beats at his throat where my hand finds the back of his neck — three at his throat, three at my own.
He comes inside me slow. He holds the breath for one beat; he lets it go on my name as a sound that is not the word and not the saying. He stays inside me. His weight is on me at the rib and at the hip. He looks at me — gray-blue at my gray.
He says, low: "I am yours."
The rain holds at the cabin roof.
I say, "Tate. Yes."
He stays inside me. He puts his forehead against mine. He breathes against my mouth. "Ach, Willa."
I hold him.
---
He lies on me a long minute.
He is warm now from my body and the act. His face is at my throat. His mouth is at the hollow under my jaw. The bone pin is still in my hair; I have not set it down; the rag-rug is the rug I will walk barefoot across in the dawns to come, and tonight the pin has stayed.
The rain on the cabin roof. Fresh rain on hot pine. The basin's resin has wakened a second time at the wet; the smell is at the kitchen door and in the cabin and at the rag-rug where we lie. I have lived eleven weeks without it and I am living in it now.
He breathes. I breathe.
We have not spoken more than the canonical lines.
---
The back door of the cabin opens.
It opens onto the chicken yard at the cabin's north wall; the latch is the small one Beck mended in July; I hear the latch lift, then the swing, then the boot. I have a half-second to know.
Levi is at the back door.
He is dripping wet. The English shotgun is in his right hand. The bone-and-rawhide horse-charm is in his left — he has taken it off Ardent's bridle for the watch; he has carried it across his palm. The bone bead is at the heel of his thumb.
He sees us on the rag-rug. He does not flinch. He does not say what he has not come to say.
"Beck. Beck is at the assay shed. Get up."
Tate is up. Tate is half off me and his hand is at my hip and then at the rug at his trousers. "Levi—"
"I rode up from the lower pasture. The assay shed light has gone out. Beck's signal — he was to light the lamp at five and keep it lit. The lamp has been out for half an hour. Get up."
Tate grabs his trousers. He pulls them up the cold-wet legs; he buttons at the waist; he leaves the belt for after.
He grabs the Spencer carbine off the pegs at the kitchen wall.
The carbine is at his shoulder in one motion the way the carbine has been at his shoulder for nineteen years on the freight road.
I am up. I grab the nightdress, then the wrapper. The wrapper goes at my shoulders. The nightdress I drop on the rug. The bone pin is in my braid; I have not lost it; my hand finds it at the nape and finds it where it lives. The gold band is on my left hand.
I think, sharp at the back of my own teeth: Christ. Christ.
The closing image of the front room is Tate at the kitchen door with the Spencer in his hand and his trousers half-buttoned and the canvas sling untied at the back; Levi at the back door with the shotgun and the horse-charm; me half-dressed at the cold stove with the wrapper at my shoulders and the gold band on my left hand and the smell of fresh rain on hot pine in the air at the open kitchen door behind me — the basin's resin and the wet, the answer the country has been writing for three days.
Levi says, low, "Beck. Get up."