Portraits

by Stef Ann Holm

  Money.

  A man was nothing without it.

  Wyatt’s fingers began to tingle, and he had to get a lung full of fresh air or he’d bust. “I’ve got to get going, Hartzell.” Backing away, he gave the elder man no opening for argument. “I promised Leah I’d meet up with her and the kids. I’m running late.”

  Hartzell made no motion to stop Wyatt, but he did ask, “You like Leah?”

  The question threw Wyatt off a little. “I like her.”

  “And the children?”

  “Yes.”

  A distant memory faded the light in Hartzell’s eyes. “My son was a good man, but he was very ambitious. He wasn’t at home much for Rosalure. And Tug was only a baby when Owen died. A boy needs a father around to look up to so he’ll know how to be a man. I fell short of that with my own son.” Hartzell flecked a speck of dust off his lapel. “Leah’s been alone for three years now. She’s never seriously entertained a caller since the day we buried Owen. There was that National Geographic writer, but he was here and gone within a couple of weeks, and she sure didn’t pine after him when he left. I don’t count the postmaster and the headstone carver as callers. Quigley and Winterowd are about as bright as dogs barking at knotholes. But she’s friendly to them, because she’s that kind of woman.” He lowered his head a fraction.

  “Are you getting at something, Hartzell?”

  “You’re the first man she’s encouraged since she became a widow. I wanted you to know that if you have any intentions toward Leah, I wouldn’t be against the two of you. If that’s where you’re headed.” Hartzell’s expression grew somber. “And if you ever need a loan, I think I’ve gotten to know enough of your character this past week to vouch that you’d repay your account.”

  Wyatt didn’t know what to make of Hartzell’s offer. “I don’t have anything worth a damn to put up as collateral.”

  “You have your integrity.”

  The statement fell hard on Wyatt. Just minutes before, he’d been thinking about how effortless it would be to steal Hartzell’s money from the vault, and now that man was telling him he had integrity. The two thoughts didn’t go together.

  “Thanks for the faith,” Wyatt managed to reply.

  Then he strode from the bank without a backward glance.

  * * *

  Leah wasn’t any good at gunnysack races. She and Tug lost, but they did come in fifth and not last.

  Standing off to the sidelines to catch her breath, Leah watched Tug and Rosalure participate in the wheelbarrow races. Their laughter and attempt at walking on their hands made Leah recall the times she hadn’t participated in Anti-I-Over, “How Many Miles to Miley Right,” pop-the-whip, or shinny-in-the-hole. Her fun came in solitary play, and what she could recall at the moment was when she’d found a discarded wagon in the alleyway behind the Gunnison mercantile and hitched a turkey to it.

  Grown-up now, with children of her own to raise, it seemed as if she’d never been a child herself. Her childhood had been one of moving from one mining town to another so her father could take portraits of the miners and their working conditions for the various unions. Her early years had been spent in Wyoming, but as soon as she was of school age, they settled in Silver Cliff—only until she was seven. After that, it was Querida, Bonanza, Cripple Creek, and White Pine. Leah didn’t have any bosom friends, and those whom she did start to feel close to, she distanced herself from because she knew soon they’d have to be moving on again.

  School would be starting up next week for Rosalure and Tug and she didn’t want them to have to go through the same taunts as she had been. Arithmetic had bewildered her, and her passage through the five readers was a grim march. Instead of concentrating on school, she’d begged her father to teach her how to use his camera. Just as she was teaching Rosalure and would teach Tug when he grew old enough.

  It was on those mining streets, where at least one man was killed each week in either accidents or gunfights, that she gained her independence. It was also where she followed her mother, desperately craving attention and nurturing from the woman who had given birth to her.

  Loath to the idea but having no choice in the matter, Momma took in laundry while they were at the Cornucopia Mining District. Leah went along to deliver the fresh clothes and linens to the women and establishments her mother took in work for. One of them was a bordello, and Leah had the strangest feeling Momma wanted to be one of the fancy women who sat around in satin all day waiting for gentlemen callers. But Momma never left, and she never smiled either. Leah always thought it was somehow her fault her mother was so unhappy. But that didn’t stop her from wanting Momma’s love and affection.

  When she was old enough to understand the double-edged words her mother would sometimes speak to her, she realized that Momma hadn’t been able to pursue her acting career because she’d gotten pregnant with Leah. She’d had to stay home and take care of a daughter. When Leah had been five and her father made a living out of photographing sod house folks on the Wyoming prairies, she’d overheard her mother telling her father that the first opportunity she got, she was hitching a ride to Denver. Only she never made good on her threat. She found out she was going to have another child. But resentment had made her reckless, and she’d miscarried.

  The loss of the child had left her bedridden and close to death. Momma begged Leah’s father not to let her die. Father nursed her back to health, and Momma had promised she would stay with him if he made her better.

  Momma kept her promise, but she wasn’t happy in the mining towns. Leah tried all her young life to make her mother smile and look at her with love. But it was never to be.

  “Momma!”

  Rosalure’s excited shout brought Leah from her memories, and she looked up to see Rosalure and Tug running to her waving a blue ribbon.

  “We won!” Rosalure cried. “I can’t believe it, but Tug actually can run on his hands.”

  Remnants of pink sugar strands from cotton candy smudged Tug’s cheeks. “ ’Course I can!”

  Leah embraced them both, but Tug wiggled free. “Where’s Wyatt? He said he’d be back.”

  “I am back.”

  The three turned together. Leah’s heart skipped a beat, as it did whenever Wyatt was near.

  “Am I too late for horseshoes?” His smile was white and dazzling.

  “Nope,” Tug said.

  Rosalure held up the ribbon to show Wyatt. “Tug and I won the wheelbarrow races.”

  “Well, good for you.”

  Leah composed herself and tried to keep her demeanor calm. “The horseshoes are over there.”

  “Let’s go.”

  An area of graded sand with a slight pit had been groomed by the ushers of the First Presbyterian Church. Rather than traditional stakes, the pegs were crosses. If a person made a ringer on the horizontal of the cross, he automatically had to make a donation—of whatever he could afford—to the church.

  A free court became available, and Leah challenged Wyatt to a game. Once in position, she took aim while Wyatt stood next to her before walking to his end of the court.

  “I don’t think you can throw that fifty feet,” he remarked with a half-smile.

  “This is the one sport I’m good at. Don’t try and distract me.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  She gave him a knowing smile in return. “Yes you were.”

  “A little.”

  “A lot.”

  “Yup.”

  “Hmm.”

  Leah took on the correct form, trained her eye on her target, and released the horseshoe. It fell short of the mark by a mere inch. She straightened. “I was close.”

  “You were.”

  “Let’s see you do it.”

  Wyatt walked to his end of the court, took aim, and threw. His horseshoe hit the cross with a ping before thudding into the sand several inches from the base of the stake.

  “Not bad for a novice.”

  “I’m out of practice,” Wyatt commented as
he walked toward her.

  A giggle worked its way up her throat. “I’m sure.”

  “Momma knows how to play horseshoes, Wyatt.” Tug sat next to Rosalure, eating his third cotton candy, while his sister had gone off to purchase a pecan bar.

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it.”

  “Yup.” Tug repeated Wyatt’s cowboy reply.

  Leah got her bearings, looked down the court to the cross, and threw with a steady hand. Zing! She made a ringer. Her triumph made up for coming in fifth on the gunnysack races.

  Unable to contain her joy, she jumped up and grasped Wyatt by the arm. “See! I told you I knew how to play this game!”

  Wyatt leaned in close to her, his mouth inches away. “I guess you do, darlin’.”

  Explosive currents raced through Leah. A familiar shiver of awareness melted her bones and she was barely able to stand. “The game isn’t over yet,” she managed to say in a murmur.

  “Nope. But I think you’ll be the winner of this one.”

  “The church is the winner,” Leah said, trying to keep her mind off Wyatt’s firm lips. “For every ringer you make, you have to contribute a donation.”

  His eyes were a blue so deep that it was all Leah could see when he replied, “That a fact?”

  “Hmm.” She was walking down to the end, but she wasn’t really thinking about where she was walking. “The First Presbyterian has been sponsoring this event as a fundraiser ever since they had to pay for a new cross on the hill.”

  Wyatt slowed down midstride. “That one up there?” He pointed to Infinity Hill.

  “Yes. That’s the one.”

  “What do you mean about a new cross? The old one wear out?”

  “Actually, the old one got struck by lightning.”

  “When?”

  Leah was puzzled by Wyatt’s sudden concern about the cross. “I couldn’t exactly say. Before I moved to Eternity. At least fifteen or sixteen years ago.”

  “But they put up the new one just where the old one was.”

  “No.”

  His eyes had chilled with reserve. “Where was the old one?”

  Leah pointed to the clearcut on the mountainside where the timbers had been shorn down to stumps amid grass and pockets of sandstone. “I believe the original was there. Some twenty feet west of where the cross now stands. Wyatt, what’s wrong?”

  His face had grown the color of ash and his hands balled into fists. He swore beneath his breath.

  She touched his sleeve, truly concerned about his upset. “Wyatt?”

  “It’s nothing. Never mind.” He stalked to the end of the court and picked up a shoe. “Forget about it.” But his hand was gripping the iron so tight, his knuckles had whitened; and when he threw the shoe, he missed by a foot.

  17

  To see a man do a good deed is to forget all his faults.

  —Chinese proverb

  Wyatt’s lack of concentration threw him off for the rodeo. He didn’t make the points needed to advance in the final round of either calf roping or steer wrestling. When it came to the bronc riding, he’d drawn a sorrel mare known as Grasshopper and was bucked in the first four seconds. A greener by the name of Tuff Callister won the hundred-dollar purse. To come this far with his determined practice and fall flat on his ass was humiliating. But his mind kept being pulled to what Leah had told him not an hour earlier.

  That cross had been moved.

  The cross that he’d buried his money under seventeen years ago was not the cross that he’d been digging under. Landslides or not, he’d been picking in the wrong spot all this time.

  “Next event,” the announcer called. “Bull riding.”

  Wyatt snapped himself from his thoughts and remembered that Tug was in the audience, right smack on the front bench, watching as he lost three events in a row. This was his last chance to dazzle the boy, and misplaced cross or no, Wyatt was going to give it all he had, or die trying.

  “Come on, Wyatt!” Tug’s high shout carried through the anxious noise of the outdoor crowd, but Wyatt didn’t turn to acknowledge the boy. He had to focus on the pens of Brahma bulls and hope like hell he wouldn’t pull one that was known for his one-way spinning. That would mean he’d have to initiate his spurs to get him to turn in the opposite direction for a better ride.

  The officials gathered the bull riders together, and they drew lots. Wyatt ended up with Squirrely for his first attempt. Squirrely had no pitfalls that Wyatt had heard of, but that didn’t mean the bull was a dream to ride. Several riders went before Wyatt, and then it was his turn to ease his legs around Squirrely’s flanks and adjust the rope as two men kept the bull from bucking in the narrow pen.

  Sitting atop a ton of muscles, bone, and guts, Wyatt’s adrenaline surged sharply through his veins. Squirrely’s hide was loose on his body, making it hard to hang on. The cowbell beneath the bull’s belly jangled as he shifted and snorted, rearing to go.

  Wyatt withdrew inside himself, putting his concentration on the core of what he must do: hang on for eight seconds.

  Lifting his chin, he mentally checked his position. He’d pounded the rope into his gloved fist as tight as he could make it, his hat was slung as low as the brim could be without blinding him, the heels to his boots were down with spurs poised to the inside, his chaps—borrowed from Casswell Tinhorn—protected his legs, and his spine was erect yet fluid. Keeping his gaze on the official standing on a high platform with a stopwatch, Wyatt saw nothing else and tuned out every sound except for the one that would give him the go-ahead.

  The official held his arm up, staring at Wyatt, then abruptly lowered his hand and hollered “Time!” in the same instant.

  The gate was pulled open by a rope attached on the other side, and Wyatt ejected out of the shoot.

  Squirrely bucked and kicked, thrashed and bawled. Wyatt held on with his right hand, while his left arm was shaken out of its socket. Twisting and pounding and skyrocketing muscles tried to hurl him off, but Wyatt kept his head down and squeezed with his legs in those fractional seconds until he was sure he’d be bowlegged for life.

  The bell beneath Squirrely’s belly clanged out. Wyatt stayed on tight as the bull turned around to the right, changing directions as many times as a woman changes her mind. He kept his shoulders tall and squared Squirrely up for a ride that was taking endless seconds to complete.

  When the official yelled “Dismount!” into the megaphone, Wyatt released the rope and leaped from the bull’s back. He had to make a run for it, as Squirrely turned around and was set to charge. The cowhands who were trained at handling the bulls once a ride was over took command and herded Squirrely back into the pen area.

  Wyatt bent and picked up his hat, not realizing until he saw it lying upside-down in the churned-up dirt that he’d lost it.

  “Wyatt! Wyatt!” Tug leaned over the railing, nearly toppling from the bench seats. “You hung on!”

  Replacing his hat, Wyatt nodded briefly to Tug, not meeting Leah’s gaze or responding to Rosalure. Wyatt was only as good as his last ride, and he had two more if he wanted to win the purse.

  His ability to stay on, and his scores, advanced him to the second round. Tuff Callister also proceeded to the next phase of the contest. He rode to a near-perfect score on Cricket. When Wyatt was up next, he drew Boot Hill and had a time keeping the bull from whipping him down. He felt himself starting to fall and lifted himself up square, not wanting just to hang on, but to impress the judges with his control of the animal.

  When the dismount was called, Wyatt made the same smooth release as he had before, earning him a respectable score and a round of applause. His pulse hammered double-time, and he spared a glance at Leah, who had risen to her feet with the others. She clapped with enthusiasm and he felt good. Her fears about the sport had apparently diminished. He hoped that meant she’d give Tug a chance when he got old enough.

  Going into the final round, Wyatt and Tuff Callister were tied for the lead. Wyatt’s last bull was Pop
corn. Halfway into his eight-second run, he figured out why. The Brahma hopped and skipped like hot popping corn on a griddle. He jumped back and under, swung his head to the left, then abruptly to the right. Wyatt began to fall, the thrust of the bull more than he could handle. But before he ran back off his rope, the call for dismount was given and Wyatt got off that bull with a quick snap of his wrist for a release.

  Popcorn recoiled, hung his head low, and aimed those vicious horns of his at Wyatt. Wyatt ran for it, not wanting to be disemboweled or have his teeth crammed down his gullet and tromped on besides, with Leah and her children witnessing. With a quick strut and high leap, he flung himself over the pen rail as Popcorn smacked into the planks.

  The bull was subdued by the cowhands and taunted into the pen. Wyatt took a deep breath and leaned his forehead against the rail post. His heartbeat was battering, his legs like jelly, and his guts so stirred up, he felt liable to throw up. Christ Almighty, he was just plain too old for this kind of craziness. And all his innards jarring could be for nothing if Tuff Callister scored higher than he.

  Wyatt gazed at the scoreboard and saw that he’d scored his highest mark yet. A degree of relief flooded through him, but the knot of tension remained. He didn’t want Callister gored, but he’d sure like to see that kid sail off his bull before the eight seconds were up.

  The crowd had risen to its feet once more, and Wyatt could only wait and wonder with them. Tuff was let out of the pen and took a wild ride on White Lightning, Tuff’s head lashing against his chest as the bull bucked and kicked.

  Tuff Callister appeared to be having the ride of his life, until his bull went down wrong on his left foot and stumbled. Tuff went headfirst over White Lightning’s neck and caught a hoof in the ribs as he scrambled to stand. The cowhands got the situation quickly under control, getting Tuff out of the arena and the bull into the pen.