by The Outsider
Quinten rode his horse up the coulee through the jack pines. If there had been someone else with the boy, hiding up in these trees, they were both long gone now. He went on climbing the slope of the butte. His horse shouldered through the timber, and he had to duck under low swags of pine branches or lose his hat. From time to time he caught the cold whiff of an old snowbank.
He broke through the tree line. The way was rugged here with shale and rocks thrusting out of the red earth. This was wild, tangled country. He looked up, squinting against the glare of the sun. The sky was so wide and empty and blue it hurt to look at it.
He stopped when he got to the shoulder of the high bluff. Up here, the wind was blowing strong, and he had to anchor down his hat with the bonnet strings. Yet the wind brought with it its own silence, he thought, until you began to wonder whether it was the wind you were hearing or the beating of your heart.
He straightened his legs to stand up in the stirrups, stretching out his body, stretching out his mind.
God, it felt so good to be home.
Sometimes it seemed that he could feel his very blood and breath in the big sky, wide as forever, in the ragged mountains and open prairie. Feel it so deep that it hurt, a sweet, sad seizing of the soul.
For almost two years he'd tried to please his father by attending college back in Chicago. He'd been shut up indoors all day, hunched over books in the winter, slaving in the heat and stink of the stockyards during the summer. He thought of Chicago, with its soot-grimed buildings that blocked out the sky and sun, its belching smokestacks and the blood stink of the slaughterhouses always thick in the air. To Quinten's mind that place had a jump on hell when it came to creating the miseries in a man.
But at least he'd discovered one thing of importance during what he'd come to think of as his time of exile. He was only nineteen years old, but already he knew what he wanted for the rest of his life.
He wanted that life to be here, on the Circle H. He wanted to wake up every morning and look out to see the mountains propping up the big sky. He wanted to ride the miles of prairie and not see another living thing, except maybe for a jackrabbit or a sage chicken, and his own shadow moving ahead of him on the thick buffalo grass. He wanted to raise cattle and horses and a family on this land, where you could ride and breathe and feel alive.
Below him a hawk had been riding the wind. The hawk banked suddenly now and flew straight off, like a shot arrow, into the deep and empty sky. From up here Quinten could almost convince himself he was seeing the Miawa as it had once been, back when it was new, before it had been claimed and tamed. Back when there were no towns, but only sagebrush and the wind. Back when this high mountain valley had been dark with buffalo and his mother's people had hunted the woods and fished the streams, and lived in tipis that left behind no mark on the land but a white circle of bare earth in the tall grass.
Now his mother's people lived on a reservation and bought their food from a general store with government scrip. And the only signs of buffalo were the bones left scattered among the rocks and sage and tumbleweed.
His father, who had been born near the coal mines of Glasgow, had once told him of a Scottish epitaph that went: "Here lies all of him that would die." Quinten didn't think often about dying—he was too young to worry much over the inevitability of death. But he did understand that epitaph. He wanted the heart and the guts and the spirit that were Quinten Hunter to live on in this land forever.
Quinten Hunter pulled his galloping horse up hard beneath the ranch gate.
So maybe it wasn't the prettiest place on earth, he thought. The signboard above his head was pocked with bullet holes. The cottonwoods that lined the road shivered naked in the wind. The grass was gray, the corrals were muddy, and the windmill was missing a sail. But the sight of the big white house, with its gables and dormer windows and stately spooled-rail galleries, still made him smile.
It was good to be home.
He rubbed his lathered horse dry with a gunnysack, and gave him an extra ration of oats. On the way to the big house, he walked by some of the cowhands, who were playing a game of pitch on the bunkhouse porch. He called out a good evening to those he knew, and nodded to those he didn't.
He paused on the gallery, sitting down on a bent willow rocker long enough to unbuckle his spurs so he wouldn't leave marks on the parquet floor. He used the iron foot scraper next to the door to clean the mud and stable muck off the soles of his boots.
Once inside, he paused again in front of a hall stand made of stag antlers to hook his hat on one of the points. He slicked down his shoulder-length black hair and rubbed the worst of the spring mud off his face with his bandanna.
From the winter parlor he could hear the sounds of two people talking. Or rather he could hear his father shouting in a voice roughened by thousands of cigars, and the cool, murmuring response of his father's wife.
"I built up this spread when there was damn-all out here but Indians and coyotes. You're daft if you think I'll brook the death of it."
His father's wife said something then, too low for Quinten to hear.
His father roared back in his gruff Scottish brogue. "We made a bargain, you and I, and for fourteen miserable years I've kept to my end of it. So you just go on keeping to yours, you bloody-minded bitch, or by God I'll—"
His father must have cut himself off then, for Quinten heard nothing more. Yet he held his breath, waiting. He knew the bargain his father spoke of had something to do with him, to do with that time when he had been brought to the ranch after his mother had died when he was a boy of five. For a lady born and bred as Ailsa Hunter was, to agree to take in the breed son of her husband's squaw, there had to have been one hell of a bargain struck. A Devil's bargain.
Quinten started when his father appeared suddenly in the parlor doorway. He stood spread-legged with his thumbs in his breast pockets, anger sharpening the prominent bones of his face.
The Baron had a face that was all blades: a bowie knife of a nose; a jaw shaped like an ax, as if he used it to chop his way through life; a mouth that curved sharp and down like a sickle. He was a bit bandylegged after years of straddling a horse. The skin of his face and hands had been leathered by the Montana wind and the sweat of hard work, the grindstone life of ranching. His hair grew thick off his broad, flat forehead, white and flowing.
As usual, the Baron had emerged from his wife's presence in a riled mood. He looked his son over now with eyes that were hard and black, staring down at him as if sighting a rifle. "Where the hell've you been?"
"Out riding."
"I was led to believe that you were going to start in on taming those wild broncs for the spring roundup. Now you tell me you spent the time 'out riding,'" he said, with a mocking lilt on the last words. "You're a lazy scalawag, boy, and if you weren't my kin, I'd fire your bloody arse."
"When did that detail ever stop you before?" Quinten said with a wry half-smile.
The Baron had thrown him off the Circle H a half dozen times over the years, only to go after him and bring him back. And Quinten had let himself be brought back, because of the ranch that he loved with his every breath and heartbeat. And because of the woman, his father's wife, listening in the other room.
Quinten had to jerk his head back as his father's stiff finger stabbed at his face. "If you think, just because I'm letting you get away with quitting on college, that I'll tolerate you going back to the blanket, living up there on the res with your mother's people, to squat outside a bloody tipi, wearing a breechclout and tippling firewater like some no-good breed—"
"Not like some breed, Baron. I am a breed."
"What you are is my son. And, by damn, you'll stay here on the ranch and you'll work for your bloody keep, and you'll start by taking the buck out of those broncs tomorrow. Maybe getting your tail pounded proper will nail some sense into your thick head."
"Yessir," Quinten said. But he was talking to his father's disappearing back.
No sound came fr
om the parlor, but Quinten knew she had heard. And that she would now be expecting him. He almost kept on going down the hall and into the kitchen to wash up, which was what he had been headed to do. It would serve her right, for once, for him to do the thing she did not expect of him... except that he knew it would serve her nothing. He could come to her, or walk away, and she would care not at all.
He went to her because he couldn't help himself.
He stopped just inside the door, and he let the old feelings come and settle deep, the yearning and raw longing that gripped his heart whenever he looked at her.
The room smelled of the lemon oil that had been polished into the gleaming satinwood wainscoting. The walls were papered in a pale green silk stripe to complement the thick forest green velvet curtains and cream satin upholstered sofa and chairs. Dried flowers were arranged in a spray of white in a gilded vase on the mantel. The parlor was elegant and beautiful and cold, and a perfect setting for the woman within it.
Her hair was the blue black of a crow's plumage, her skin a pale translucent white. She had violet eyes. Not dark blue, but the pure deep purple of hothouse violets.
Elegant and beautiful and cold.
She had been born Ailsa MacTier, the tenth daughter of a Scottish lowland squire. The family might have been titmouse poor, but they were gentry. The centuries-old kind of gentry where the bloodline was as cherished, and as fragile, as old crystal. It was a mystery to Quinten what had ever drawn her to this wild, crude place to marry a coal miner's son. He thought it was probably a mystery to her by now as well.
She was cleaning the milk glass globes of the parlor's brass chandelier. The arms of her gray silk dress were protected by a pair of white linen dust sleeves, which showed not a mark of soot or dirt. Even doing this mundane task, she moved with the fluid straight-backed grace of a princess at a ball.
It was not unusual to see her working, for she was a rancher's wife, after all. Yet in all the years of his life in this house, Quinten couldn't remember ever seeing her face damp with sweat, or a single strand of hair come loose from her tight chignon. He had never heard her shout. If she had a temper it was tamped down inside her so deep it never blasted loose. He had never heard her laugh. He had seen her smile only rarely, and never once for him.
And yet sometimes he thought that the only thing he'd ever truly hungered for in this life was something as simple as the touch of her hand in his hair.
He knew she was aware of him, aware that he had come into the room just to be with her. But she gave no sign of it. He thought he could stand there until he turned into a pillar of salt, and she would merely walk around him on her way out the door.
He went up to her, his boots making no sound on the thick Turkey carpet. He was conscious suddenly that he must smell of mud and horse sweat.
"Let me help you with that, Mrs. Hunter," he said. He'd always addressed her formally, since his first day here at the ranch, and she had never once asked him to call her anything different.
"Thank you, Quinten." She had a voice that was as silky and cold as dry snow.
As he took the polished globe from her hands, their sleeves brushed with a soft sigh and he caught a whiff of lavender water. He climbed the stepladder and began to screw the globe back into the chandelier. She stood beneath him and looked up at him in that way of hers that made it seem as if she wasn't seeing him at all.
An old Chesterfield clock chimed softly. The fringed drape on the fireplace mantel stirred. He turned his head and looked at their reflection in the gilded mirror.
He was struck by how they had the same crow black hair and slender build. Two years of living in a city had leached out his skin some, and he was dressed no differently than any other man on the ranch.
A stranger, walking into the room in this moment, he thought, could easily have mistaken them for mother and son.
His father said: "It appears to me you spent precious little of your time back there book-learning and most of it girling about, behaving like a randy tom in a cathouse. And if you're opening your mouth to lie, then you can just shut it."
Quinten hadn't been opening his mouth to any purpose at all—unless it was to stuff in one last forkful of Saratoga chips. The crisp disks of fried potato were one of his favorite things, although he'd never told anyone that. If he had, he knew he'd sure never see them served at Ailsa Hunter's table again.
He glanced down the length of the table with its pristine lace cloth. His father's wife brought a crystal glass filled with whiskey up to her pale lips. Her violet gaze was lost in the red flock wallpaper above his father's head, but they both knew she was listening.
He looked back to his father and gave him a man-to-man grin. "Why should a fellow lie when he can brag, Pa? Soon as those big city ladies, with all their la-di-da airs, discover I'm part savage, they get all hot and bothered to discover the particularly savage part of me that stands tall beneath my breechclout."
His father laughed, puffing out his chest as if his son's "girling about" somehow reflected on his own sexual prowess. Not that the old man needed a beacon to draw attention to himself in that regard. Hell, he didn't even need to strike a match. The Baron paid gentlemanly calls on the girls of the Red House every Saturday night, come blizzard or high water.
To Quinten's surprise he suddenly felt her watching him. Not just listening, but watching. When he turned his head and looked down the table and into her dark purple eyes, he thought he caught a glint of something—amusement, contempt? To his disgust he knew he was grateful for either one.
As it was, he thought, this was a conversation more suited to the bunkhouse than a proper dining room, and especially one with a lady present. But then the lady present was the whole reason for the conversation in the first place.
The Baron sat at the head of the table, wearing pearl gray California trousers, a black frock coat, and a gray silk four-in-hand tie fastened with a ruby stickpin. His flat belly was spanned by a watch chain hung with a half dozen gold seals.
At the other end of the table sat Ailsa Hunter, in a black taffeta gown and a shawl of jet-studded lace that glittered in the light cast by a matching pair of crystal candelabra. She wore pearl drops in her ears and a pearl choker collar around her neck.
They could have been a Chicago society couple, man and wife enjoying a quiet evening together in one of those fine mansions that graced the city's lakeshore, Quinten thought. Except for the man's red-skinned bastard and Wild West Wharton, hired gun, who were also in attendance.
The hired gun had placed a wad of damp chewing tobacco on one side of his gold-rimmed eggshell china plate while he ate. Now he put the plug back into his mouth and sucked hard on it.
Quinten looked again at his father's wife. As always, she sat straight as a hat pin. He knew she put Woodrow Wharton into the same category as what was scraped off the bottom of a horse's hoof, yet he knew as well that she would never question her husband's reasons for inviting the man to their table, any more than she would have questioned the topics he chose to converse about. To say anything would have been to admit a defeat.
Red-skinned bastards, Wild West Whartons, and conversations about whores—they were just some of the salvos the Baron fired in the daily war he waged with his wife.
His father's tobacco-fed voice cut into Quinten's thoughts. "Well, now that you are home, Quin, you can help me to rid the valley of those bedamned, holy-howling, Bible-banging mutton punchers. Christ, who would've ever thought they'd stick like they have for ten long years, like bloody cockleburs on a blanket."
The Baron had taken a fat cigar out of a silver case and was lighting it now with the candelabra. "I ask you," he went on when the cigar was drawing, "what kind of people is it goes to kirk in a barn?"
"The Son of God was born in a stable."
Quinten spilled a good part of the whiskey he'd been aiming for his mouth down the front of his vest. He looked at his father's wife, but she was back to contemplating the wallpaper again. She could do
that—be silent for hours and then say something that would stop a person cold.
In many ways she was much better at war-waging than his father could ever hope to be.
She used to bring him to church with her sometimes, Quinten suddenly remembered, whenever the saddlebag preacher was passing through on his circuit. He went along to please her. Even after he came to understand that there was no pleasing her, or displeasing her for that matter, still he went with her.
That church in Miawa City was little more than a board-and-batten shanty with a tin roof that rattled in the constant wind. During its busy times, it probably smelled no better than those barns the Plain folk did their praying in. He wondered if she still went there on Sundays, if her faith was so strong. It surprised him to think of her believing in anything beyond herself.
The Baron was glaring down the length of the table at his wife. He puffed so hard on his cigar, a nub of ash fell from its tip, leaving a gray smear on his black frock coat.
"I don't give a sweet damn if those holy-howlers were born in the muck straw right alongside the baby Jesus. They think they can come into this valley after the fact and reap the reward of those who came before. It took grit and brawn to make the Miawa what it is today. Grit and brawn. Not like those men you knew back in the old country, eh, Ailsa? Those pansy-faced lords, with their white hands and gilded titles—they couldn't have managed to make of this spread what I've made of it." He waved the hand that held the cigar, drawing smoky patterns in the air. "To wrestle all this out of nothing."
"Those men you speak of, Fergus, they have never felt a need to wrestle anything." Even with that silky lady's voice of hers, she'd managed to imbue the word "wrestle" with the same meaning it bore when used to describe a pair of drunks brawling in the mud in front of a saloon. And Quinten saw that she had cut his father deep.
The Baron stared at his wife, a hard glitter in his black eyes. Then his wide, handsome mouth broke into a sudden and dazzling smile.
"I've never flinched before anything, not even before your tongue, my lovely Ailsa. And I'll not begin with a bunch of holy-howling mutton punchers."