by Denise Dietz
*****
“I love poking you,” said Ned, rocking back and forth. His clean trousers and Berry’s gown lay in a heap by the door. Her long hair covered a goodly portion of his body as she straddled his lap, her head against his chest.
“Don’t talk dirty,” she said, raising her face.
He grinned. “I purely enjoy the act of copulation.”
“What’s copulation?”
“Poking.”
“We can’t do this no more when I’m a lady. A lady loves from the bed, in the dark, with her drawers and nightie on.”
“I’d love to present you to my father. I might do that even if my gold doesn’t pan out. Father has a weak heart and I’m his only heir. I’ll take you to Denver, knock on his door, and introduce you as Mrs. Edward Lytton the Third. While he’s floored from my kick in the teeth—”
“You aim to kick him in the teeth?”
“That’s just a turn of phrase, you idiot. It means a surprise.”
She opened her eyes wide, trying to keep the tears from falling. “Don’t talk nasty, Ned.”
“We don’t have to talk at all. Let’s poke.”
“Not if you spit that dirty word.”
“Are you defying me?”
“No, but I’ll boot you out if you ain’t respectful.”
He tilted her chin with his finger and stared into her eyes. “Would you care to join me in coitus, Miss Blueberry?”
“That’s better,” she said, although she had the feeling coitus and poking meant the same thing. But she didn’t want to fight, not while Ned sucked her breast and pushed at the floor with his boot heels. He rocked the chair, faster and faster, until she didn’t care if he called it copulation, coitus, or poking.
“I love you,” she cried.
“I’m coming,” he hollered.
*****
Ned had thrown his hat in the air, digging where it fell. He had heard about others who staked claims that way. Eventually, he unearthed a vein of bright yellow-brown chips. Without assaying his find, he used the last of his trust fund to host a celebration party. He invited the most expensive parlor house girls and gave Berry a red dress. Its décolletage scooped to her breasts.
Minta twisted Berry’s hair into swirls on top of her head. Curly tendrils escaped and wisped around her mama’s ruby earrings.
“Have you told Nugget Ned about the baby, Blueberry?”
“No. I wanted to be sure. I’ll tell him tonight, after the party.”
*****
Ned impatiently fastened the gown’s small back buttons while Berry tried to pull up her bodice. “This ain’t a ladylike gown,” she said. “If I bend, it shows my teats.”
“But your teats are so purty,” he mocked, sipping from a bottle of whiskey. Suddenly, he clutched his stomach and gagged.
“Are you sick, Ned? Fevered? Minta told me Old Jeb up and died of the fever.”
“No, not fever. Whiskey. Happy. I’ll hand a sack of gold over to my friend, Richard Reed. Did I tell you ’bout the Ku Klux Klan?” Thrusting both thumbs inside his ears, he waggled his fingers. “I wore donkey ears.”
“Donkey ears? Whatever for?”
“Can’t tell. Secret. Go smear some paint on your lips, sweetheart. I want everyone to see your mouth.”
Berry felt like purring. Ned had called her sweetheart for the very first time.
*****
As soon as Berry entered the saloon, Ned hoisted her atop a crude wooden stage, joined her there, and whistled through his fingers for attention.
“I’ve brought the entertainment,” he announced. “This here is Blueberry Smith. Some of you know her from Poverty Gulch. But you don’t know she was once a Denver dance hall girl.”
“That’s a secret,” she gasped.
He leaned closer and she smelled whiskey on his breath. “You’ll sing for my friends, Blueberry, or suffer the consequences.”
“How can you do this to me? I’m your lady.”
“If you don’t sing, I’ll never marry you.”
“If I sing, do you promise we’ll be wed good and proper?”
“Sure, sweetheart, you have my oath on it.”
Tearfully, she stepped to the front of the stage and clasped her fingers together until they formed a tight knot. “In a corner of the churchyard,” she sang, “where the myrtle boughs entwine, grow the roses in their poses, fertilized by Clementine. Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’…”
As she sang, she saw Ned plunge his hand down the bodice of a woman in a yella gown. The woman shrieked with drunken laughter as she pulled Ned toward the staircase that led to the bedrooms on the second floor.
The crowd pressed closer and Berry could have sworn she heard coochie-coochie. “I have need of the privy,” she cried, her cheeks hot.
The men passed her over their heads until she arrived at the back of the room. When her feet hit the floor, she fled. “I told Minta I wasn’t stupid like that crippled cow,” she murmured, limping toward her crib. “But we’re the same, that cow and me.”
*****
Ned’s overflowing vein turned out to be chips of iron and sulfur pyrite — fool’s gold. A week after his celebration party, he pounded at Berry’s door.
“Go ’way,” she said. “You ain’t no gentleman to treat me so nasty at your shindig. I prayed you were fevered like Old Jeb. A shame God didn’t answer my prayers, you runty toad. I’ve told all the girls how small-sized you are. They don’t call you Nugget Ned no more. They call you Runty Ned.”
“Blueberry, please open the door.”
“You done me one favor. I’ve been practicing my talk and manners so’s I can work at a different trade. I ain’t gonna lay with men and I’ll sing no more bawdy songs for the asking.”
“I only came to tell you that I’m leaving Cripple Creek.”
“Good riddance.”
“I thought we’d be wed before I go.”
She opened the door a crack. “Truly?”
“I swear. Preacher should be here first thing tomorrow morning. Please let me in.”
“I’ll let you in tomorrow morning.”
“I’m leaving after we say our vows, so I’d like to spend my last night with you. I plan to travel through the mountains with Preacher as my guide. After we’re wed, I’ll sell your ruby earrings. A wife wouldn’t deny her husband a stake and I must leave soon.” He clenched his fists. “Everybody’s laughing at me.”
“Can’t you file a new claim near the crick, I mean creek?”
“There’s too many digging. Why should I dig when there’s gold for the asking farther north?”
“It ain’t that easy up in the mountains and winter’s coming.” She opened the door.
He entered, pressed his face against the hollow of her neck. “You don’t understand. All I need do is kneel. Bow down and ask.”
“You’ll pray to God?”
“Yes, I’ll ask God. I tried, Blueberry, but my pit was full of fool’s gold.”
She felt his tears. Ned weeping? Lost in wonder, she maneuvered their bodies toward the bed.
Early the next morning Preacher entered the crib. “Afore God, Nugget Ned Lytton an’ Blueberry Smith are now wed,” he said, making the sign of the cross with his gnarled finger.
Preacher waited outside while Ned shed his clothes and hers. She didn’t feel him remove her earbobs because his tongue wickedly circled her inner ear, sending shivers up and down her spine, and when they lay upon the quilt, she used all her skills to make him hoot a song.
“I’ll miss you, sweetheart,” he said afterwards, and she heard the God’s honest truth in his voice.
“When you come back,” she said, “I’ll have a kick in the teeth for you.”
“A what?”
“A surprise.”
“I’ll be back soon,” he said. “You have my oath on it.”
*****
Throughout the following weeks, Berry sat in her rocker and dreamed about how she would soon be a rich lady. It
snowed every day. She figured the drifts prevented Ned’s return, and used the last of her coins to pay three months’ rent on her crib house.
She nibbled whatever food she could scrounge from trash bins of scraps behind the cafés. One night she fought with a mangy mongrel over a small carcass. Throwing rocks at the snarling dog, she recalled her brother hurling his nugget at Tiny.
I’ll name the babe George Edward, she thought, kissing Ned’s nugget ring, twined with thread to fit her finger.
She hadn’t told anybody about her marriage, not even Minta. Ned had asked her to keep it a secret until he came home. He owed money, he said, and didn’t want his wife hounded by creditors.
His wife. Mrs. Edward Lytton. Berry didn’t mind the hush-hush ploy because God knew.
You can’t play hidey-seek from God.
*****
“Per’fessor just come from Denver,” Minta told Berry one afternoon. “He says Nugget Ned’s there, living high on the hog.”
Berry stroked her bloated belly. “Per’fessor’s mistaken. He saw someone who looks like my Ned.”
Preacher returned for Christmas, his emaciated body blue with cold. Several tattered shirts and jackets hugged his thin frame. With his beak of a nose, he looked like a vulture and folks whispered that Preacher had picked the bones of dead prospectors for his sustenance.
Some citizens recollected the Packer Party of 1847, when only Packer had returned alive. At his trial, the judge had supposedly said, “Goddamn you, Alferd Packer! There was only six Democrats in Hinsdale County and you et four of them!”
“I don’t believe it’s true what they say about Preacher eating folks,” Berry told Minta. “He’s a man of God.”
“No, he ain’t. They named him Preacher ’cause he sinned so awful in his youth.”
In her head, Berry heard Whiskey Johnnie’s words: “People seem to favor the reverse.”
Ned believed him a man of God. That’s good enough for me and George Edward.
She waylaid Preacher as he walked down the icy street. “Why didn’t Nugget Ned come back with you?”
“He never gone with me.” Preacher chuckled through decaying teeth stumps. “Why would Nugget Ned travel with a preacher man?”
“To look for gold.”
“I ain’t looked for gold. I brung the word of God to them sinners with their yella idols. ‘Repent,’ I said.” He eyed her swollen belly, five months full. “Repent, child!”
“For what?”
*****
Spring arrived, but Berry in the throes of labor couldn’t appreciate colorful buds dotting the mountains while lush green brought the hope of new beginnings.
The delivery took two days. Crib girls worked in shifts. The midwife refused to help until money was advanced. Minta insisted that Mab scrub her hands, including long filthy fingernails, before payment. Mab’s body looks like bread dough dropped in dirt, Minta thought with disgust.
Placing a knife beneath the mattress to “cut the pain in half,” Mab sat by the cookstove and swilled from bottles of beer.
Late afternoon arrived and the scent of cooked food drifted down the row like a thin shadow. Mab rooted in her garden for turnips and plucked the feathers from a slaughtered chicken, which she then fried for her supper. The red painted name BERRY shone in the glow of sunset as Mab reentered the crib and thrust her grimy fingers into Berry.
“The babe’s turned wrong,” she said, opening another bottle of beer.
At dawn, Whiskey Johnnie kicked the door open. He soothed Berry through the last of the difficult delivery and cut the cord with his hunting knife.
The baby mewed piteously.
Berry opened her eyes and saw crib girls. They all floated through the room like ghosts.
Am I dead? If I’m dead, where’s Geordie and my turkey, Noah?
About to shut her eyes again, Berry heard a sneeze then a loud wail. “George Edward,” she whispered.
Minta leaned closer. “What did you say, love?”
“Baby.”
“She’s perfect, Blueberry.”
“I birthed a girl? Let me see her.”
“She’s right here.”
“Dark.” Berry thrashed her head from side to side. “Ned?”
“He’s on his way.” Minta choked back a sob.
“No. I was a fool to believe. Johnnie says there’s peace of soul in the dark. I ain’t feared to sleep. It’s just . . . my poor baby . . . no mama.”
Irish Mary knelt by the bed. “What do you want to name your wee girlie, Blueberry?”
Behind her closed eyelids, Berry saw Geordie toss his lucky nugget from hand to hand.
No, Geordie, no. It’s not real gold, it’s . . .
“Fool’s gold,” she whispered.
Five
A dozen or so miles from Poverty Gulch lay the town of Divide, Colorado. Its population of one hundred included a postmistress and a drugstore proprietor, but no census had ever recorded the swarthy outlaw who rode through the sleepy village just before dawn.
The sound of hoofbeats did not rouse the drugstore proprietor, who had spent the evening at Cripple Creek’s Butte Opera House Saloon. He had been returned to Divide in the back of a buckboard, whereupon his wife had carried him inside. A stampede wouldn’t have disturbed the druggist’s slumber, nor his wife’s, for she had donned earmuffs to drown out his drunken snores.
The postmistress peered through her window. Not a blessed thing interrupted the peaceful symmetry of the desolate, unpaved street. The railway station, saloon, hotel and livery were all eerily silent, and yet the postmistress could have sworn she’d heard a steady clip-clop, like the echo of an Indian tom-tom.
*****
Cherokee Bill reined in his black stallion on the crest of a hill. Silhouetted against a predawn, slate-colored sky, he was tall and graceful, with dark wavy hair falling to his shoulders. Except for a slight flare to his nostrils and a dusky tinge to his skin, his features were more white than Indian, yet he proudly clothed himself in doeskin and spiked a cocky feather in the band of his black Stetson.
His fingers gripped the pommel of a silver-mounted saddle, his hand only inches away from his holstered Peacemaker .45 and the long Winchester rifle that rested beneath his thigh. Leather saddlebags held the result of a recent express-office robbery. A partner on that successful endeavor had told Bill about a wealthy Divide rancher, John McDonald, but Bill would wait until tonight to survey the landowner’s vast acreage. Tonight there would be a full moon.
“Gracias, Dios,” he said. Cherokee Bill never forgot to thank God, or the people he robbed and killed. Placing a blanket on the hard ground, he decided to take forty winks, one wink for each twenty-dollar banknote stashed inside his saddlebags.
He was awakened several hours later by the warning whistle of his stallion. Instantly alert, Bill peered through the brush at a field below. The field unfolded as far as the eye could see, finally merging into a panorama of jagged mountains. He focused on two distant figures, a man and a woman. Both rode golden horses.
*****
“I don’t know how I let you talk me into this, Dimity.” John McDonald bent sideways to check the cinch on his saddle. “Reckon I should be rounding up strays, rather than straying round the ranch.”
“You promised, John. You said the first warm May afternoon we’d picnic. Now it’s June, and you’re growling like an old bear.”
McDonald smiled at his young wife. Her green riding habit was designed to enhance her narrow waist and flat stomach. Too flat. Her monthly flux had commenced ten days ago. What was the use of running the largest ranch in the area if he had no heirs? Was Dimity, at age sixteen, too young to conceive?
Poppycock. John had friends with wives just as young who’d already spawned children. Dimity didn’t seem to enjoy the act, spreading her legs at his request but not quite hiding her sigh of resignation. Granted, she was well-bred, but his Cripple Creek parlor house girls feigned twice as much joy at his touch.
; Dimity stayed abed until noon then moped about the house like a mare off its feed. She should be happy. She had few responsibilities. Rosita and Tonna cleaned and cooked while she read books — romantic applesauce. How could he compete with knights in shining armor? Or altruistic outlaws? How could he compete with Romeo, a pantywaist of the first order, who had poisoned himself for love? Dimity’s loud boohoos had nearly triggered a stampede.
Perhaps this picnic frippery would raise her spirits. A fine lunch, with lots of wine, and she might be more receptive to his advances.
Was he too old?
Poppycock! At age fifty-one he had reached his prime. Prime, like the bellowing bulls that thrust their horns toward God’s rump. McDonald chuckled at the irreverent image and nudged his palomino toward a distant copse of shade trees. The pastoral scene felt peaceful, and yet he held his shoulders straight, stiff, as though he wore a tight tunic and crossed sabers.
John McDonald had been a soldier in Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s company during the war, and had hooked up with an ex-slave named Black Percival, a roustabout in the same company. Percy had a “feeling in his bones” that Custer would suffer an ignoble end, so after the war McDonald bought land in Texas and began to build his first ranch.
By the spring of 1866, he and Percy had good crops and a fine herd of cattle. Seven years later, they decided to pull up stakes and head for Colorado. McDonald sold the ranch, added two thousand head to his herd, and began his cattle drive down the route of the old Butterfield overland stage, planning to turn north at the Pecos River and proceed toward New Mexico. He had learned that the value of the Texas Longhorn increased with each mile it was driven north; a steer worth seven dollars and twenty cents in Texas was worth eighteen dollars and forty cents in Colorado. The cost of getting a steer to market varied with distance, but it could be driven to the northern range for two dollars, and after a few months on free grass, it tripled in value.
From the drive’s start they had problems. The herd contained both steers and cows. Steers traveled faster than cows, and cows were further delayed by calving. Calves couldn’t keep up at all. On short trail drives there’d be a calf wagon. McDonald planned a long drive, so the calves had to be killed and their mothers prodded along with the rest of the herd. At night the cows had to be hobbled to prevent them from going back to look for their missing calves.