Butcher's Crossing (36 page)

Andrews swallowed. “You said they would be hard when I got back. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she said. “I remember.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yes,” Francine said. “All winter I’ve thought you were dead.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Francine—” He paused, and looked down at her face. Her pale blue eyes, wide and transparent, waited for whatever he had to say. He closed his fingers around her hand. “I’ve wanted to tell you—All winter, while we were snowed in, I thought about it.”

She did not speak.

“The way I left you that night,” he continued. “I wanted you to know—it wasn’t you, it was me. I wanted you to understand about it.”

“I know,” Francine said. “You were ashamed. But you shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t as important as you thought. It is—” She shrugged. “It is the way some men are with love, at first.”

“Young men,” Andrews said. “You said I was very young.”

“Yes,” Francine said, “and you became angry. It is the way young men are with love....But you should have come back. It would have been all right.”

“I know,” Andrews said. “But I thought I couldn’t. And then I was too far away.”

She looked at him closely; she nodded. “You are older,” she said again; there was a trace of sadness in her voice. “And I was wrong; you have changed. You have changed so that you can come back.”

“Yes,” he said. “I have changed that much, at least.”

She moved away from him, and turned so that her back was to him, her body outlined sharply by the lamplight. For a long moment there was silence between them.

“Well,” Andrews said. “I wanted to see you again, to tell you—” He paused, and did not finish. He started to turn away from her, toward the door.

“Don’t go,” Francine said. She did not move. “Don’t go away again.”

“No,” Andrews said; he stood still where he had turned. “I won’t go away again. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to make you ask me. I want to stay. I should have—”

“It doesn’t matter. I want you to stay. When I thought you were dead, I—” She paused, and shook her head sharply. “You will stay with me for a while.” She turned, and shook her head sharply; and the reddish-gold light from the lamp trembled about her hair. “You will stay with me for a while. And you must understand. It’s not like it is with the others.”

“I know,” Andrews said. “Don’t talk about it.”

They looked at each other without speaking for several moments, making no move toward each other. Then Andrews said: “I’m sorry. It’s not the same as it was, is it?”

“No,” Francine said. “But it’s all right. I’m glad you came back.”

She turned away from him and leaned over the lamp. She lowered the wick; still leaning, she looked back over her shoulder at Andrews, and for a long moment studied his face; she did not smile. Then she blew sharply into the lamp chimney and darkness cut across the room. He heard the rustle of Francine’s clothing and caught a glimpse of her dim shape as she walked before the window. He heard the rustle of bedclothing being turned back and heard the heavier sound of a body sliding upon sheets. For a while he did not move. Then he fumbled at the buttons of his shirt as he moved across the room to where Francine waited in the darkness.

He turned in the darkness, and felt beneath him the bed sheets dampened by his own sweat. He had awakened suddenly from a deep sleep, and for a moment he did not know where he was. A slow, regular rasp of breath came from beside him; he reached out his hand; it touched warm flesh, and rested there, and moved slightly as the flesh was moved by its breathing.

For five days and nights Will Andrews had stayed in the small close room with Francine, emerging from it only when he took food or drink or purchased some articles of clothing from the depleted stock of Bradley’s Dry Goods store. After the first night with Francine he lost all consciousness of time, much as he had lost it back in the mountains, during the storm, under his shelter of snow and buffalo hide. In the dim room, with its single window that remained always curtained, morning became indistinguishable from afternoon; and so long as the lamp was kept burning, it was difficult for him to tell day from night.

In this close half-world of perpetual twilight he immersed himself. He spoke to Francine infrequently; he clasped her to him and heard themselves speak only in their heavy breathing and wordless cries, until at last he thought he found his only existence there. Beyond the four walls that surrounded him he could imagine only a nothingness which was a brightness and a noise that pressed threateningly against him. If he looked too long and too intently, the walls themselves seemed to press upon him, and the objects in his sight—the red couch, the carpet, the knick-knacks scattered upon the tables—seemed obscurely to threaten the comfort he found in the half-darkness where he lived. Naked in the dark beside the passive body of Francine, with his eyes closed, he seemed to float weightlessly within himself; and even in waking he partook of some of the quality of the deep sleep he found in the moments after his love-making with Francine.

Gradually he came to look upon his frequent and desperate unions with Francine as if they were performed by someone else. As if from a distance, sightlessly, he observed himself and his sensations as he fulfilled his needs upon a body to which, meaninglessly, he attached a name. Sometimes, lying beside Francine, he looked down the pale length of his own body as if it had nothing to do with himself; he touched his chest, where fine hair like down curled sparsely on the white flesh, and wondered at the sensation of his hand brushing lightly above his skin. Beside him, at these moments, Francine seemed hardly to have any relation to him; she was a presence which assuaged a need in him that he barely knew he had, until the need was met. Sometimes, heavy upon her and lost in the darkness of his passion, he was surprised to find within himself qualities of sensation of which he had been unaware; and when he opened his eyes, meeting the eyes of Francine open and wide and unfathomable below him, again he was almost surprised that she was there. Afterward, he remembered the look in her eyes and wondered what she was thinking, what she was feeling, in the close moments of their passion.

And finally this wondering drew his mind and his eye away from the center of his self and focused them upon Francine. Covertly he watched her as she walked about the dim room, clothed loosely in her thin gray wrapper, or as she lay naked on the bed beside him. Not touching her, he let his eyes go over her body, over her round untroubled face framed loosely by the yellow hair that in the dimness was dark upon the bed sheets; over her full breasts that were laced delicately with an intricate network of blue veins; over her gently mounded belly, which flowed beneath the fine light maidenhair caught in the faint gleams of light that seeped into the room; and down the large firm legs that tapered to her small feet. Sometimes he fell quietly asleep gazing at her, and awoke as quietly, his eyes again upon her, but upon her without recognition, so that he searched again her face and her form as if he had not seen them before.

Near the end of the week a restlessness came upon him. No longer content to lie torpidly in the warm dark room, he more and more frequently left it to wander about the single street of Butcher’s Crossing. Seldom did he speak to anyone; never did he linger for more than a few minutes at any place he stopped. He was content to let the sunlight seep into him, as he blinked his eyes upon the brightness. He went once to Butcher’s Hotel to pick up his bedroll, to pay for his brief lodging there, and to inform the clerk that he would not be back; once he wandered down the road west of town and rested beneath the grove of cottonwood trees, gazing across the area piled with baled hides that had been McDonald’s place of business; several times he went into the bar of Jackson’s Saloon and took a glass of luke-warm beer. Once, in the bar, he saw Charley Hoge seated at a rear table, alone except for a bottle of whisky and a half-filled glass. Though Andrews stood for several minutes at the bar, sipping his beer, and though Charley Hoge’s glance passed him several times, Charley Hoge gave no sign that he saw him.

Andrews walked the length of the bar and sat down at the table; he nodded to Charley Hoge, and spoke in greeting.

Charley Hoge looked at him blankly and did not answer.

“Where’s Miller?” Andrews asked.

“Miller?” Charley Hoge shook his head. “Where he always is, down at our dugout by the river.”

“Is he taking it pretty bad?”

“What?” Charley Hoge asked.

“About the hides,” Andrews said. He put his nearly empty glass before him on the table and turned it idly between his hands. “It must have been a blow to him. I guess I never realized how much this all meant to him.”

“Hides?” Charley Hoge said vaguely, and blinked his eyes. “Miller’s all right. He’s down at the dugout, resting. He’ll be along directly.”

Andrews started to speak, and then looked closely into the wide blank eyes that stared at him. “Charley,” he said, “are you all right?”

A small perplexed frown crossed Charley Hoge’s face; then his expression was clear and empty. “Sure. I’m all right.” He nodded rapidly. “Let’s see, now. You’re Will Andrews, ain’t you?”

Andrews could not look away from the eyes that seemed to grow larger as they stared at him.

“Miller’s looking for you,” Charley Hoge went on in a high monotonous voice. “Miller says we’re all going somewhere, to kill the buffalo. He knows a place in Colorado. I think he wants to see you.”

“Charley,” Andrews said; his voice trembled, and he clutched his hands hard around the glass to keep them from shaking. “Charley, get hold of yourself.”

“We’re going on a hunt,” Charley Hoge continued in his singsong voice. “You, and me, and Miller. Miller knows a skinner he can get in Ellsworth. It’ll be all right. I’m not afraid to go up there any more. The Lord will provide.” He smiled and nodded, and continued nodding toward Andrews, though his eyes had turned downward to his glass of whisky.

“Don’t you remember, Charley?” Andrews’s voice was hollow. “Don’t you remember anything about it?”

“Remember?” Charley Hoge asked.

“The mountains—the hunt—Schneider—”

“That’s his name,” Charley Hoge said. “Schneider. That’s the skinner in Ellsworth that Miller’s going to get.”

“Don’t you remember?” Andrews’s voice cracked. “Schneider’s dead.”

Charley Hoge looked at Andrews, shook his head, and smiled; a drop of spittle gathered on his lower lip, swelled, and coursed into the gray stubble around his chin. “Nobody dies,” he said softly. “The Lord will provide.”

For another moment Andrews looked deep into Charley Hoge’s eyes; dull and blue, they were like bits of empty sky reflected in a dirty pool; there was nothing behind them, nothing to stop Andrews’s gaze from going on and on. With a sense almost of horror, Andrews drew back and shook his head with a sharp movement. He got up from the table and backed away; Charley Hoge did not change his empty stare or give any sign that he saw Andrews’s movement. Andrews turned and walked quickly out of the bar. On the sidewalk, in the bright sunlight, the sense lingered; his legs were weak and his hands were trembling. Swiftly, unsteadily, he went up the street, turned, and took the stairs that led up the side of Jackson’s Saloon to Francine’s room.

He opened his eyes wide to the dimness of the room; he was still breathing heavily. Francine, lying on the bed, raised herself on an elbow and looked at him; with that movement, her loose gray wrapper parted and one breast drooped toward her forearm, pale against the gray material. Andrews went quickly to the bed; almost roughly, he pulled the wrapper away from her body and let his hands run swiftly, desperately, over her. A small smile came upon Francine’s face; her lids dropped; her hands came to Andrews, fumbled with his clothing, and pulled him down upon her.

Later, as he lay beside her, the tumult within him quieted; he tried to tell her of his meeting with Charley Hoge, and of that sense of horror that the meeting had released in him. It was not, he tried to make her understand, so much a result of his recognition that what Charley Hoge showed him in a blind and enveloping stare was something that each of them—Miller, Charley Hoge, Schneider, and even himself—that each of them had had inside them, all along. It was something—he tried to tell her—that McDonald had spoken of by the flickering light of a lantern in the great empty sleeping house the night they had returned to Butcher’s Crossing. It was something that he had seen on Schneider’s face as he stood stiff and upright in the middle of the river, just after the horse’s hoof had split his skull. It was something—

The faint afterlift of a smile hung on Francine’s full, pale lips; she nodded; her hand moved softly, soothingly, over his bare chest.

It was something, he continued, speaking in broken phrases that did not say what he intended, it was something that he had felt even in himself, from moment to moment, during the long trek across the plains, and in the kill of the buffalo at the instant the great animal shuddered and crashed to the ground, and in the hot smothering stench that came with the skinning, and in the vision of whiteness during the snowstorm, and in the trackless view in the aftermath of the storm. Was it in everyone? he asked, without using the words. Did it lurk hidden in everyone, waiting to spring out, waiting to devour and rend, until there was left only the blankness he had seen in the blue stare that Charley Hoge now had to give the world? Or did it wait without, crouched like a timber wolf behind a rock, to spring suddenly and horribly without reason upon anyone who passed it by? Or beyond one’s knowledge, did one seek it out, this shape of terror, and pass it by in an obscure, perverse hope that it might spring? At that swift moment in the river, did the splintered log seek the belly of Schneider’s horse, and the hoof Schneider’s skull? Or was it the other way around, Schneider passing by precisely in search of the gray shape, and finding it? What did it mean? he wanted to know. Where had he been?

He turned on the bed; beside him, Francine had dropped into a light sleep; her breath came gently from her parted lips, and her hands lay loosely curled at her sides. He got up quietly, went across the room, turned the wick of the lamp down, and blew into the chimney, extinguishing the light. Through the single curtained window across from him, a last gray light filtered; outside it was growing dark. He returned to the bed and lay carefully next to Francine, on his side, looking at her.