Heart of the West (35 page)

Clementine smothered a laugh with her hand. She darted a look out the open kitchen door to be sure none of the other women, especially Mrs. Graham, had heard what Hannah said, although there was little fear of that. Whenever Hannah came into the kitchen, the other women left it. As soon as Hannah left, the women came back. Like the tide, Clementine thought, in and out, in and out. And like the tide, they were wearing Hannah down. Her dimples had appeared less and less often as the day went on, and the easy laughter had left her mouth.

"Clementine..." Hannah set the crock of beans on the new round oak table. "I want to thank you for making me feel t' home here. I can tell it hasn't been easy." She nodded her head at the open door. "Those women, they won't soon forget that you took my part against theirs."

Clementine looked down at the pie. She licked a drop of sweet purple juice off her finger. "I get so lonely out here some days, Hannah, I go out and talk to the cows just to hear something besides the wind."

Hannah reached out to touch her hand, pulled back, then did it after all. Their fingers curled together, resting a moment on the table's shiny white oilcloth. "I get lonely, too," Hannah said.

Clementine cut another wedge of pie. A burst of manly yelping came from the direction of the corral. Someone shouted, "Ride 'im hard, Gus!"

"Hannah, do you think you might ever... that you and Mr. Rafferty might be married?"

Hannah twisted a thick curl around her finger. Bright color flooded her cheeks. "Funny you should ask that, since we talked about it ourselves for the first time this morning... Well, sorta danced around it like a coupla bears dancing 'round a beehive. I 'spect the whole idea of domesticity spooks the both of us."

Clementine was suddenly feeling a sick churning in the pit of her stomach, as if she'd eaten too much green fruit. She didn't want to think of Hannah and that man...

"I mean, marriage changes things, doesn't it?" Hannah said. "Being a wife can make for a whole lot of drudge work, not to put too fine a point on it. And when you're dead tired at the end of the day it's kind of hard to make your man whoop an' holler, let alone do any whoopin' and hollerin' yourself."

I will not ask her, she thought. I cannot. "Do you mean to tell me you actually whoop and holler when he... when you and a man..."

Hannah laughed. "It's kind of hard not to, honey. When the lovin' is so hot and sweet you think you're going to come bursting right out of your skin if you don't let it all out of you somehow... Well, you know that feeling."

The kitchen grew quiet. Clementine glanced up from the pie she was massacring and caught Hannah studying her. "Oh,
that
feeling," she said.

She suddenly became aware that the tenor of shouts and yelps coming from the corral had changed from laughter and cheers to cries of alarm. She and Hannah looked at each other and then started together for the door, knocking aside the new spindle chairs.

Hannah got there first and held her back. "They're bringing him up to the house."

"Who?" Clementine asked, her heart pounding so hard in her ears it drowned out Hannah's answer.

Three men carried Gus through the kitchen door. He was covered with corral dust and bleeding from a cut on the head.

"Where do you want him?" Horace Graham said, as if it were a sack of meal they carried, and not a woman's husband whose dust-streaked face was as white and waxy as a Christmas candle. A man whose dust-streaked face looked dead.

"This way," Clementine said in her most collected voice. A western woman, she knew, was never supposed to make a scene when her man was tossed by a bronc. It was a measure of a man's manliness—how he handled a horse. A man expected his woman to understand why he risked his neck trying to break one. Clementine looked at her man's pale face and wanted to pull it tight to her breast. But she was also angry enough to knock his head off his shoulders. She would never, she thought, understand what drove men to do the things they did.

She had them lay Gus on their new squab sofa, part of an upholstered parlor suite that had come all the way from Chicago. A good saddle horse had been sold for the money to buy that sofa. Dust rained off Gus onto the bottle-green damask. His spur caught, ripping the delicate material. Clementine put a needlepoint pillow under his bleeding head.

The men pressed around her, offering advice: wrap his head in brown paper soaked in vinegar; heat up a gummy paste of chewing tobacco and flour; make a compress of raw chicken; pour a slug of whiskey down his throat.

"He'll be all right," said the one person she had been waiting for. "If y'all will just step back, please, and give him some air."

Rafferty squatted down on his haunches beside the sofa. His hand hovered over Gus's hair, then gently fell, touching him in the way a father would touch his son.

Gus wrenched his eyes open, biting back a groan. A look passed between them, charged with something Clementine didn't understand. It was part of the game they played constantly, a sparring match of feints and jabs and occasional head-rocking blows. A game played deep in some masculine dimension that Clementine couldn't fathom. She thought she hated men sometimes, and these two men most of all.

"You ridden him yet?" Gus said.

Rafferty shook his head.

"Well, what the hell you waitin' on, a telegram from President Rutherford B. Hayes himself? Go peel the son of a bitch."

"Gus—"

"You scared? Is that it? You scared, little brother?"

"Yeah, sure I'm scared. Who wants to get his ass pitched clear into next week?"

Gus struggled to sit up. "Liar. You're a goddamn lying son of a bitch. Go on out there and break him. Go on, dammit. Go!"

Rafferty pressed his hands on his knees, pushing himself to his feet. He left without looking back at his brother, and the other cowboys all stampeded out the door after him. "Wrap them long legs of yourn twice around his belly," one of them shouted, "and mebbe then you can stick 'im."

Gus swung his legs off the sofa. He groped for Clementine's shoulder. "Help me up, girl. I want to watch this. The son of a bitch—always so damned cock-robin sure of himself."

She staggered as he put his weight on her and lurched to his feet. He swayed, groaning and wincing as he touched his head. "Son of a bitch," he said.

"Mr. McQueen, why are you behaving this way?" She had never heard so much cussing coming out of Gus's mouth. He trembled from a shakiness that came from deep inside him and had, she thought, only partly to do with having been thrown from a horse.

Gus looked up and saw Hannah standing in the doorway, her arms crossed under her full breasts. "I never met a man yet who wasn't stupid stubborn as a rock at times," she said.

Gus gave her a hard smile. "That horse fights like a polecat with its tail on fire, and your man is going to turn him into a pussycat. Don't you want to watch him do it?"

"No," Hannah said and went back into the kitchen.

Gus leaned on Clementine as they walked out of the parlor onto the porch. Gus's father stood at the bottom of the steps.

"I always thought you were all gurgle and no guts, boy," he said. "I'm beginning to see as how I might have wronged you."

A dark flush stained Gus's cheeks. "Yeah, well..." He straightened his back and pushed off of Clementine and hobbled down the steps alone. "Come on, Pa. Come let that brother of mine show you how it's properly done."

The setting sun cast a yellow glamour over the land, filling the sky with lariats of gold. A dust cloud hung over the corral. A dirty yellow horse lay on its side in the middle of the corral, its legs trussed like a Christmas turkey's.

Clementine did not like this bronco-busting. The little she had seen of it earlier had disturbed her so much that she couldn't bear to watch. If she were a mustang, used to running wild and free out on the range, she wouldn't want the intolerable degradation of a man on her back, either. And yet they were
broken
to it; there was no other word for it. A cowboy whipped the horse's haunches with his quirt and raked its flanks with his spurs each time the animal bucked, driving home the lesson: obey, obey, obey. Or suffer for it.

Rafferty went into the corral, telling the men behind him to leave the gate open. "Let him up," he said to the man who held the end of the rope that was cross-hobbling the bronc.

The mustang erupted out of the dirt in an explosion of dust. He stood, legs splayed, froth dripping from his mouth. He snorted through his distended red nostrils.

Rafferty stroked the horse's quivering neck, speaking to him in dulcet tones that sounded strange coming from such a hard mouth, such a hard man. He was still crooning sweet words in that soft, gentle voice when he grabbed the mustang's ear and twisted it cruelly, at the same time thrusting his boot into the stirrup and swinging into the saddle.

The horse stood frozen, head up in surprise and pain... then erupted into a whirlwind of muscle, hair, and bone. The bronc bunched and jumped and twisted itself into a corkscrew, and it seemed that Rafferty's head must surely be snapped off his neck.

"No bucking strap for my little brother," she heard Gus cry, pride and envy both deep in his voice. "He rides 'em slick."

The man won, as she had known he would, although it pained her to know, too, that the wild horse could be mastered. The bronc gave a last, mighty buck and then stood still. Foam flecked his chest. Sweat stained the man's shirt and dripped from his hair. Man and horse sucked in deep breaths that shook their chests and made their straining muscles quiver.

Clementine imagined herself going to him. She imagined getting up on that half-broken horse with him and riding into the wild and lonely mountains where no one would ever find them. She imagined being with him there, among the rugged peaks, sitting by a campfire with the stars for a roof, and having the courage to say to him the things she could never say to anyone else...

But she didn't go to him. He touched the horse's flanks lightly with his spurs. Then there was just settling dust where they had been, the whip of the bronc's tail as it flew out through the gate, and the flash of hooves before they were swallowed by the wind-stirred grass.

CHAPTER 16

Gus McQueen's mustache curled up around his generous smile, catching wisps of snowflakes out of the air like a feather duster. "This storm won't stick long," he said. "Why, we could still have ourselves another warm spell before winter really sets in."

"But I like the snow." Clementine leaned back to let it fall on her face, into her open mouth. Lacelike flakes floated out of the sky as if the clouds were crumbling. She wanted to hurl herself into it, to roll in a tumble of skirts and petticoats and laughter, like a child.

"Clementine..."

Something in his voice made her lower her head to look at him. A heaviness had come over his eyes, a tautness to his mouth. He glanced over his shoulder at Pogey and Nash, who sat bundled up side by side in matching buffalo coats on matching gray burros. He pulled her to him and kissed her long and hard and deep on the mouth.

She drew in a little gasp of pleasure when he was through and steadied herself by grasping the folds of his mackinaw poncho. He brushed the melting snow off her cheek with his knuckles. His gaze fell to her stomach, which strained against the soft gray wool of her dress. She had only tossed an old brown wool shawl over her shoulders, even though it was snowing hard.

He felt the shape of her stomach with his palm. The baby, as if knowing its father's touch, squirmed. "I'm going to fret about you, girl, while I'm gone."

"There's no need to. Hannah says I'm as healthy as a bee in butter." She let a peep of a smile show. "Though Pogey says I look all swoll up like a toad in a churn."

"Still and all, I'm bringing that doctor back with me when we pass through Deer Lodge," he said instead, "even if I got to do it at gunpoint."

"Yes, Mr. McQueen. Thank you." She rather wanted a doctor on hand when the baby was born, which would not be for another month, although she felt monstrous, as if she'd swallowed a dozen watermelons whole. She hadn't told anyone, not even Hannah, how frightened she was of what was coming. She dreamed some nights of her mother. In the dream her mother would not stop screaming. She screamed while they sealed her in the coffin and screamed while they buried her in the cold, windswept cemetery, but only Clementine seemed able to hear her.

"And you know what to do if there's trouble?" Gus said.

"Yes, Mr. McQueen."

She resisted the urge to shiver. Gus had mounted an old fire bell on the roof of the new house. It made a ferocious clang and clatter when rung. Rafferty, living now by himself in the buffalo hunter's cabin, could hear it easily. All she had to do was pull on the rope and he would come. It made her feel safe and at peril, both at the same time. She trusted Zach Rafferty to protect her from Indians and wolves and grizzlies, but who would protect her from him? Who would protect her from herself?

The other times Gus had ridden to Butte Camp on mining business she had gone with him, but this time she was too bulky with child. It had taken six months and four trips before Gus had at last put together a consortium of investors to operate the Four Jacks. The final paperwork was to be signed this week, and the mining works and stamp mill would be in operation by spring. The investors, calling themselves the Four Jacks Consortium, had leased the mine from Pogey and Nash, agreeing to pay them half the profits on all the ore the consortium dug up and refined that yielded at least twenty-five percent silver. And Gus in turn would get twenty percent of the two old prospectors' share.

They didn't look to be getting rich off it any time soon, though. Gus had told her there was a saying that you needed a gold mine to keep your silver mine going.

He pulled on her lower lip with his thumb, a lip that was red and slightly swollen from his kiss. "I've learned to trust you least, wife, when you're yes-Mr.-McQueening me." His mouth turned serious. "I know you two get along about as well as a pair of polecats in a sack, but you
will
call on Zach if you need him?"

"Yes, yes, I shall. I promise," she lied. Iron Nose would have to burst into her parlor bristling with scalping knives and wielding half a dozen hatchets before she pulled that bell. It was comforting that, with half a hay meadow between them, whole days could pass now when she and Rafferty didn't even have to exchange a howdy. And as long as he stayed away from her, she didn't have to think about the sweet seizing she felt now in her heart when she saw him, and the way he made her soul tremble.

"Jeeeesus God!" Pogey bellowed, white clouds billowing around his head like steam from a locomotive stack. "We leavin' any time this week, Gus? My ass is already so frozen stuck to this saddle I couldn't crack a fart without losin' skin."

Nash whacked him in the stomach, causing a minor avalanche to slide off the brim of his hat. "Quit cussin'."

"What else is a man to do in weather like this, 'sides cuss? Cold like this sure do make a soul hanker for hell."

"You call this cold?" Nash scoffed. "Why I recollect the winter of 'fifty-two. It was so cold that year your spit'd freeze solid before it hit the ground. It was so cold the hair on your chest broke off when you scratched it. It was so cold icicles a foot long—"

"Ha! When a hen cackles, she's either layin' or lyin'. Who ever asked you for a blamed lecture on the subject?"

"A man can learn a heap of things if he keeps his ears washed and his mouth shut."

"I guess I better get," Gus said, "before those two melt all the snow with the hot air they're blowing and we find ourselves drowning in a flash flood." He squinted up into the floating flakes. "I reckon one good thing'll come out of this storm. It means the Reverend Jack will be crawling into a hole somewhere to drink away the winter, and we'll be spared the embarrassment of his preaching to our friends and neighbors while he fleeces them of their hard-earned coin."

Clementine brushed the accumulating powder off his shoulders. "I think perhaps Mr. Rafferty is right about your father. The best way to fight him is to ignore him."

"Hunh. At least that's one thing you two've managed to agree on." Smiling, he drew her to him to kiss her one last time. "I'll bring you a surprise from Butte."

"What?" she said eagerly. "What will you bring me?"

His laugh bounced across the snow-blanketed valley. "Now, if I told you, girl, then it wouldn't be a surprise."

She watched them ride away until they were swallowed by the snow. It was falling harder now. Big clumpy flakes swirled around her head, wetting her face and hair. She gathered the shawl closer to her. The air was raw and piercing, and dozens of chores awaited her inside, yet she lingered still.

She felt an odd tightening in her womb, and again the baby squirmed. Until yesterday she had felt as if her belly was almost up beneath her chin, but this morning she had awakened to a strange lightening. The baby felt alien to her now, like a thing apart from her.

She drew in a deep breath, smelling the cold that pinched her nose and the smoke from the chimney that rose blue against the sky. She lifted her face to the snow, tasting it on her lips, letting its coldness sting her flushed face. She opened her eyes wide, watching the flakes fall, one after the other, from the blank infinity above. She laughed suddenly, out loud, and stretched her fingers toward the sky, as if they could grow and turn into wings and carry her up into the crumbling clouds.

She heard the
snick
of wood rolling over crusty ice and frozen grass, and she felt a suffocating, heart-juddering jolt of panic before she turned.

Rafferty's long legs cut toward her across the hay meadow. He was pulling a cord of wood on a red pung behind him. She watched him come, squinting against the winter glare. Silhouetted against the stark and whirling whiteness, he was fierce and beautiful and frightening. She stared at his face, at the strong lines and angles of bone under the dark, taut skin. His black Stetson shaded his eyes from her, not letting her see how he was looking at her.

He suddenly seemed too fierce and beautiful to bear. Her gaze dropped to the braided frogs on his sheepskin coat as he stopped before her.

He had a bridle draped over his shoulder—a bridle of smooth, well oiled leather and etched silver cheek plates and buckles. He slung it off and held it out to her.

It dangled from his hand, a hand that looked dark and naked against the cold white light around them. She didn't take it. "What's this?" she asked, though she knew what it was: Moses's bridle.

"This is the first snowfall, and you're still here."

"I have plenty of bridles, I don't need another."

He tossed the tack onto the load of wood. "I'm not giving you the bridle. I mean, I am, but only as a symbol of the horse it belongs with."

"I don't want that horse. He's big and he's ugly and he bites."

"He don't bite." He shifted his feet, his boots squeaking in the fresh snow. "You're hard on a man, Boston. Hard on his pride. I've played some crooked games in my time, but this is one bet I don't aim to welsh on."

A heavy silence fell between them. She felt an overwhelming urge to touch him, simply touch him.

She couldn't see his eyes, but she felt their heat like a caress on her face. "Do you still want me gone?"

"Yes." The word had left his taut mouth in a huff of white breath.

"Why?"

For a moment he stood there, not moving, saying nothing.

But she saw his chest give a hard hitch. His voice broke over the words. "You know why, Boston. And God damn you to the hottest hell for it."

Something cracked inside her. Those jagged, jigsawed pieces of herself shifted again, shifted and came together in a way that couldn't, should never, have been possible.

He didn't fill the empty spaces in her heart, this man; he deepened them. He didn't calm the furies of her soul; he stirred them. And yet, oh, how she needed him. She needed him in her life the way the eagle needed the wind to soar with, and the buffalo the tall grass to roam in. The way thunder needed lightning to make a storm. He was, and she needed him to be.

She needed him, and he could never, ever be hers.

She lifted her head and with the tips of her fingers pushed his hat up so that she could see his eyes. But they never showed anything, those eyes, not really. Always hard and flat, and as cold as a winter sun. If he had mowed her down on the streets of Boston with a big-wheeled ordinary she would never have had the courage to run off with him. Not with those eyes.

"I will not take your horse, Mr. Rafferty."

"You damn well will take him."

She took a step back and then another. She stopped and scooped up a handful of snow, packing it into a ball. "I damn well will not," she said in the Bostoniest voice she owned, and heaved the snowball at his head.

She hit his chest instead, and the startled look on his face would have made her laugh, if she hadn't wanted to scream and scream and scream from the terrible, aching pain of needing him.

She bent over to gather more snow and straightened up, only to catch a ball of it flush on her face.

"You will," he said, panting a little.

She spat snow out of her mouth, shook it off her eyelashes and her hair. "I won't," she said as she threw one that hit him on the chin. She huffed a pleased little grunt when she saw him shudder as the snow went down inside the open collar of his coat.

He took a step toward her, and she whirled to run.

But she was bulky and clumsy and he caught her easily. His hands fell on her shoulders and pivoted her around so they were face to face. Her swollen belly made a space between them, but it was not enough. Where he touched her she burned, and where she wanted him to touch her, she burned even hotter. She wet her lips, tasting ice and the heat of memory.

His gaze fastened on her mouth. He lowered his head and his hand stole up to frame her cheek, his thumb stroking the line of her jaw. Their breath entwined like white wedding ribbons in the air. Snow fell between them, gentle and cold. She watched the crease in his cheek deepen as his lips moved. "You will," he said.

"I won't." Her eyelids drifted closed and her mouth softened, and she waited, waited, waited...

She heard him pull in a deep breath. When at last she opened her eyes, he was gone.

Clementine looped the last string of popcorn around the branches and stepped back to admire her handiwork. It was a fine Christmas tree, so tall it brushed the ceiling. Its heavy limbs dripped with candles, strips of paper, and pieces of ribbon and lace. Its spicy scent filled the room.

But the sight of the tree brought her no pleasure, and she turned away from it to the ice-latticed window. It was a lead-colored day, still and cold. The clouds, dense and soggy, promised more snow. She pressed the heels of her hands into the small of her back, wincing from the pain, trying to stretch it out. She glanced over her shoulder at the calendar clock that hung beside the fireplace—nearly three o'clock. It would be dark soon.

Sighing, she let her forehead fall to rest against the chilled pane. Gus was over a week late coming home. She worried about him, and she was lonely. The loneliness seeped into her like the cold from the glass. It was Christmas Eve and her birthday, and she was great with child. Monstrous and swollen and irritable with child. No one should have to be alone on such a day.

She moved restlessly from the window to the fire. She held out her hands to the flickering flames, but their warmth brought her no comfort. On the stone mantel she had put a milk-glass bowl filled with pinecones and wild rose berries. The smell of the cones reminded her of Christmases past. Two years ago, on the Christmas Eve when she turned sixteen, they had gone to Aunt Etta's for dinner. In the afternoon they had made that fateful visit to Stanley Addison's Photographic Gallery, and she had still been humming and crackling like an electrical wire with the excitement of it.

That day was also the first time she had pinned up her hair into coils on the back of her head and gone without a cap. She'd kept catching glimpses of herself in the mirrors and pier glasses and windowpanes, in the crystal balls that decorated Aunt Etta's tree, and each time she'd been startled. Was that grown-up girl really Clementine? When the family gathered around the tree in the parlor, Aunt Etta and her family had toasted the holidays with mulled orange wine in tall, thin glasses. Clementine had wanted so badly to join them, but her father's sharp negative shake of his head had stopped her.