CHAPTER 29
Willa
◆
The basin is green at the edges and I stand in the dooryard with the green-and-cream travel dress on my body for the third time since the wagon came up this slope, and the bone pin is at the nape of my braid for the second night since the August I let Beck lift it out and lay it on the dresser, and the gold band is on my left fourth finger where it has been since the sixteenth of June.
It is four o'clock by the small clock on the kitchen mantel.
Three weeks of rain have brought the grass back at the south lip and at the upper pasture's lower edge.
The iron pump is full to the lip; the squeak under the handle is the lower note the basin learned in September.
The springbox is filling. Levi has brought the cattle down to the lower pasture in twos and threes since Tuesday; the snowmelt seeps at the upper rim will hold the rest of the herd a month yet.
The four-poster's posts are stacked against the south wall of the dooryard, peeled pale, and the wood-shavings of them drift across the plank floor inside in small curls every time the door is opened.
Beck stands at the door with the Hudson Bay blanket folded across his right shoulder and his hat tipped low against the soft west light.
Tate stands beside him with the freight canvas folded across his left shoulder and four lodgepole poles bundled with rawhide at his hip — the same lodgepole stock the men have been peeling for the bed-posts, cut down last week for tonight and re-purposed by morning.
Levi stands at the corral fence ten yards off with Ardent at three feet of lead-rein and the saddle-blanket folded over his left forearm. The small tin pot of stew is roped at his belt with a leather thong.
The pot is small and the stew is small. I have brought the last of the dried apple in a square of cheesecloth folded inside the basket along with the loaf I baked at one o'clock and the small tin of the Highland tea I keep for Tate.
The last carrot from the kitchen garden I kept alive through the dry is cut into small rounds in the pot. The meal is small, and it is full.
I look at the three of them in the dooryard with the late-afternoon sun behind them.
I think the words I have been thinking since the iron pump's note dropped in September: my men.
"Down-pass," Beck says, soft.
Tate says, "Aye."
Levi says, "Easy, love. " It is to Ardent and it is to me at once.
We go.
The dry-creek bed is no longer dry. The channel runs two feet deep at the lower bank, brown with the upper-pasture wash and clear at the eddies under the alder roots, and the four of us walk along the bank now, not in the bed, the way a person walks beside a thing he had thought was gone.
Beck is at my right. Tate is at my left.
Levi walks four paces ahead with Ardent's lead-rein at his left fist, his copper-red braid tied at the nape with the strip of saddle-leather, his sea-blue eye half-turned over his shoulder at me every twenty steps.
He will not leave Ardent at the corral tonight.
The stallion will graze the lower pasture's south edge while we lie under the canvas. I love him for it. I do not say so.
Beck's scarred palm is at the small of my back when the bank narrows. I count three beats of his pulse through the cloth at my lower spine — the count of a woman whose hands have always known how to measure tension before a stitch and have now learned how to measure tension after it.
We come down to the rain-fed creek's lower bend.
Levi raises the freight canvas on the four lodgepole poles.
Two go in upright at the back where the rock overhang catches them; two slant forward where the dry hollow opens to the creek.
The canvas is twelve by sixteen, oiled this week by Tate's left hand, and the brass grommets at the corners catch the soft west light once each as he ties the lines.
The roof is low — a man can sit easy under it; a man cannot stand.
The Hudson Bay blanket goes down on the dry hollow under the overhang, and the indigo-and-cream quilt of Beck's goes over the wool double-folded, and the small fire Levi built last evening under the rock overhang has its little ember still warm under the kindling Tate adds.
The creek runs ten yards below. The cottonwoods at the basin's south rim are yellow-leafed.
The first drop hits the canvas at six o'clock — a single tick at the canvas's center, a small dry tap at the oiled cloth — and then a second drop at the corner — and then the rain comes steady, not hard, the rain of an October Sunday that has decided to hold.
We eat the stew on tin plates with the tin spoons Beck has brought in his satchel.
We eat the bread. We eat the dried apple, the last of it, four pieces apiece.
The rain on the canvas above us is a soft drum I have not heard in this country before tonight — the drum of an answered question, not an asked one.
Beck takes the pewter flask out of his vest.
He has carried this flask since spring. He has not opened it the whole summer.
The whiskey inside is the only whiskey in the basin — a small inheritance, the kind a man carries because his father had carried one.
He pours into each tin cup once, a small swallow, no more.
We drink in turn. Mine goes down warm and small.
The whiskey is the small ceremony Beck has been keeping for a use; the use is tonight.
The rain holds. The basin under it goes dim.
Tate looks at me across the indigo-and-cream quilt.
His gray-blue eye holds mine. He says, low — and the canvas catches the lifted milk-white light from Levi's small lantern set on a stone at the corner of the hollow, and the canvas's underside above us pools in that soft milk-white — he says, into the rain:
"I would have her now, if she will have me. I would have us all."
I say, "All. Yes."
The rain on the canvas.
Beck's eyes are on my face. Levi has gone still at the foot of the blanket. Tate's hand is open across his knee.
Beck speaks first. "Willa."
I say, "Beck."
Levi: "Love."
I say, "Levi."
Tate: "Darlin'."
I say, "Tate."
Beck's hand goes to my jaw. His thumb is at the corner of my mouth — the same thumb at the same corner he set in the kitchen on the ninth of June with the kettle on the stove — and he says, "Are you sure, sweetheart?"
I say, "I am sure."
Levi has come closer on the blanket. His sea-blue eye is on my face. "All of us, love?"
"All of you."
Tate is on his knee at the quilt's edge. He says, soft, "Darlin'. Yes or no."
"Yes."
The three of them look at each other across my shoulder — once, a half-second, a brother's nod — and then they look only at me.
Beck unbuttons the green-and-cream travel dress at my back.
He works the eighteen bone buttons slow, top to lower-spine, the same buttons he has done up for me four mornings of this week and one morning of June.
The dress falls forward at my shoulders.
Levi unties the corset-laces at my ribs with his lean freckled hands — easy and quick, the knot he taught his fingers to undo on his own saddle-girths at fourteen.
Tate slides the chemise off my shoulders the way a man slides a square of fine linen off a thing he has been keeping, and the cotton drawers and the clean shift go onto the rock-shelf with the bone pin laid carefully at the rock-shelf's edge — the pin is not coming out of my hair tonight. I have kept it in.
The men have looked at each other once over the matter of the pin yesterday morning at the kitchen table; they have decided together. The pin is part of me tonight. None of them speaks the decision aloud. The pin stays.
I am bare under the canvas.
The men undress to skin — Beck's broad chest with the starburst-scar at the third rib, Levi's freckled shoulders and the cleft scar at his sternum, Tate's burn-mark down the inside of his right forearm. The fire under the overhang catches Beck's scarred left palm in a small low-gold line.
I look at each of them once.
I am the gravity well in the milk-white pooled light of the canvas's underside, and the rain on the canvas above is a soft drum, and the three of them are bare around me, and I am bare, and I do not press my thumb to the cleft of my eyebrows because I have nothing tonight I am refusing to feel.
Tate lowers himself to his back on the indigo-and-cream quilt.
I come over him slow. He guides me with his left hand at my hip, the burn-mark forearm under my belly — a steadying, not a leading.
I lower onto him by inches. I feel his cock against my entrance once, then the head of him at my slick, then the slow give of my body around him.
I take him to the hilt. I sit up over him.
His gray-blue eye is on my face. His hand spreads at my hip.
Levi is on his knees beside the quilt at my shoulder.
His cock is at my mouth. I lift my hand to the back of his neck — copper-red hair under my palm, the strip of saddle-leather tying his braid soft against my knuckles — and I take him on my tongue.
He says, low, "Love. " He says it again.
His left hand finds the cleft scar at his own sternum and rubs it with two fingers for the half-second of his own anxiety, the tell I have been watching across four months.
Then his hand goes to my hair at my temple — Beck is the man who takes my jaw, and Beck and Levi know which hand belongs where — and the heel of Levi's hand rests at my temple, the bone pin a hand's-width from his thumb, the pin staying.
Beck is at my right ankle.
He has come around the foot of the blanket on his knees.
He has my right foot at his cheek. His scarred palm holds the heel; his other thumb is at my clit where I am joined to Tate.
He turns his face into the bone at my ankle and kisses the curve of the arch and the inside of the foot, his eyes lifted at my face above him.