CHAPTER 30 #3
I had a sense of warmth I had not had before. I did not have a word for it. I did not need one.
Tate said, soft, against the back of my neck, I dreamed of a child once and it did not live. I do not dare to dream tonight. But I would not say no to the dream.
I closed my eyes. I counted three at the line of my own throat with my own fingers under his.
Stay.
Beck said, I am here.
Levi said, Love.
I said, All of you stay.
They stayed.
I said, into the dark before dawn, half against the pillow and half against Tate's arm, I knew it the day I got off the train. I just did not have the words.
Nobody answered. They did not need to. The watch ticked. The lamp burned. The bee-balm breathed. The four hands at my belly held.
I slept.
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I woke at six.
The lamp had gone out an hour ago. The cabin was the gray light of pre-dawn and the smell of cold pine and woodsmoke from the dying kitchen-range.
The three men slept. Beck on my left, his scarred left palm open on the quilt at my hip.
Levi on my right, his copper-red hair across the pillow.
Tate at my back, his arm across my hip, his face against the bone pin in my hair.
I lifted Tate's hand a half-inch and slid out. He breathed once and settled. I drew the wedding-ring quilt around my bare shoulders. The bone pin held; my mother's second pin held; the gold band caught the first faint glint of dawn through the south window.
The pale wood-shavings under my bare feet were cold where they had been warm last night. I bent and gathered a small handful as I crossed to the dresser. The Mason jar was where I had left it. I added the morning's shavings and screwed the zinc lid on.
I walked through the front room. The rag-rug under my feet — the round braided rug I had pieced from worn shirts and the torn hayloft sheet through July and August and September, forty-eight inches across in its final size — was cool, dry, mine.
The Greer family Bible lay closed on the kitchen table.
The certificate of October 12 was folded inside its quarto cover beside the certificate of June 16.
The flyleaf bore the four new names in Tate's copperplate from last evening — Willa Greer Carrow Halloran Thorn — Beckett Lloyd Carrow — Tate Owen Halloran — Levi Thorn — joined, October 12, 1879.
I stepped onto the porch barefoot. The Mason jar in my right hand. The quilt at my shoulders.
The basin's dawn was cold and clean and green at all its edges. The cottonwoods at the south rim were yellow. The lodgepoles still green. Frost on the dooryard grass. The air smelled of woodsmoke and new wet earth and the late wild bee-balm at the southeast lip.
Old Brigham was at the chicken-yard fence. He saw me, stretched his neck, crowed — the full Mormon-evangelist crow Beck had named him for at a coal-patch revival, the crow of a barred-rock who had survived the September fire.
I walked across the dooryard. The grass under my bare feet was frost-cold and the gold band had warmed against the iron of the Mason jar.
I came to the iron pump.
I set the jar on the trough's stone rim. I laid my right hand on the iron pump-handle. The handle was cold under my palm. I pumped it once, slow.
The pump squeaked. The rain-fed squeak. The soft answer-pitched note it had held since the September evening when the rain had broken the drought.
The pump asked a question all summer, I thought. The answer was the four of us.
The water came up clean. I drew the dipper and let the water pour into the stone trough.
Ardent was at the corral fence — the wild chestnut Levi had broken in the August barn, the horse who had saved the colt from the September fire — and he tossed his head at me at the sound of the dipper.
The bone-and-rawhide charm was on the east bedpost of the new four-poster behind me now; a small flat oval of cottonwood I had whittled for Levi on Wednesday was at the cheek-piece in its place.
The pump squeaked once more, soft.
I looked at the gold band and the iron pump under my palm and the green of the basin and the dawn coming up over the southeast lip where the bee-balm had come back at the new sandstone above my husband's first wife and her daughter under one stone, and I held still.
The pump asked a question all summer. The answer was the four of us.
I lifted my hand off the pump and picked up the Mason jar.
Old Brigham crowed again, smaller, the second crow that always marked the first.
I stepped onto the porch. I set the Mason jar on the kitchen shelf beside the cast-iron kettle.
I laid the wedding-ring quilt across the back of Beck's rocker.
The watch in the big bedroom ticked soft and steady.
The three men slept. The bee-balm breathed.
The horse-charm on the east bedpost was still.
I closed the cabin door behind me.
I stood in the lamp-warmed kitchen in my bare feet on the rag-rug and laid my left hand low on my own belly under my shift, where four hands had met across the night.
I said, soft, half to the empty kitchen and half to my own belly:
Until next summer.