Coins, which at first she picked and counted behind shielding hands, laid one by one on the pile, mounted numberless and like lead across the table and quarters became dimes, nickels stone. But the disappointed women paused. They matched and bettered each card she turned with the same wry twistings of the jaw, they won by suffering and in silence; not clever, chinks missing from their spines, haltered by forebears and, large as they were, the prey of a few fork-tongued men, they won as they had been taught in sessions Biblical through hailing nights. They ate her money, it disappeared round the table and into the gullets of four usurers whose gold would never show, who hesitated to reach or even raise an arm before her face.
“That ain’t my hand.”
“You won it,” Lou spilled the coins, shot them with the flat of her palm, “take it.”
They sat as if still standing and their uneasy country gait knocked together legs ill-fitting under the table. Their thumbs were permanently scratched in ten years’ testing for the sharpness of a blade and they had lost no blood. These four met on the seat of a wagon, survived Ma’s wedding trip, thereafter packed away bonnets and allowed the barn to fall, fast friends.
Lou licked her diamonds. She moistened the ring finger first with the tip of a handkerchief touched to her lips, gently turned the band. Then she raised knuckles, bone, the thin stick to her mouth, gnawed as upon a hive, and one stone, another, ceased to roll and glittered in the center of the table.
With barely a whisper Thegna shut the door.
She had tacked no rawhide sheets across the windows, no smoke heavy on eyeshades filled the room. There were no watch chains on embroidered waistcoats, no weapons concealed in the finery, the feathered fronts of silken shirts. Black cigars, gold teeth, long wallets next to hot and scented breasts, these were buried under the young willow limbs of wing dams on the river.
“I ain’t sat with a reckless player. Before now.”
“Somebody give them to her.”
“There’s people wear such things.”