Herne the Hunter 20

by John J. McLaglen

  ‘Even when you’re one of them?’ grinned Herne.

  She thought he wasn’t so mean looking when he smiled. Almost handsome in a knocked-about kind of a way. ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘even when I’m one of them.’

  Herne swished the water around to unsettle the thick crust that was clogging the surface. ‘I get paid?’

  ‘You get paid.’

  ‘In dollars and cents?’

  ‘What else?’

  Herne looked at her.

  ‘Dollars and cents,’ she said.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Stop by the place when you’ve done whatever else you got to do. Eat with us. Meet my girls. We can discuss the arrangements then.’

  Herne nodded and set both hands on the sides of the tub. Mary Anne Marie turned towards the door, hearing the splash and fall of water behind her. Just before the door,

  she turned and stared openly, water still trickling down through the dark hair of Herne’s chest, running between his thighs. Her eyes widened just a little: for a man who wasn’t any longer young, he wasn’t in bad shape.

  Herne reached for a towel and she closed the door behind her and he heard her quiet steps moving away. The look of appraisal stayed with him while he was rubbing himself down. He thought about it, tried to figure out what she thought of him, him amongst all those naked men she got to see in the way of her work.

  He thought she might turn out to be some woman.

  He didn’t know the half of it.

  Dressed in clean if crumpled clothes, dark brown wool pants with leather sewn inside the legs and back across the seat, a faded red shirt and the same black leather vest, Herne found the barber shop and settled down for a feast of local gossip, a shave and a haircut that trimmed his hair to above the collar line but no more.

  He checked into a room at the First and Last and got an envelope and paper from the clerk at the desk. He wrote a short note to the man he was working for over in West Texas, telling him that’d he come close and was fixing to head out north on the preacher’s trail. The writing was stiff and angular and he wrote painstakingly, chewing every now and then down into the inside of his bottom lip.

  He stopped off in the bar for a beer and whisky chaser and strode down the street towards the end of town, doing his best not to look as if he were visiting the local whorehouse.

  In view of events, the place was closed for business. Mary Anne Marie had gathered the girls together inside their normal place of work and with their help she had moved the partitions and cot beds to make it look more like a large dining room. Two kerosene lamps hung from hooks in the central beam and beneath it a long trestle table was covered with pieces of cloth of differing colors. Places were laid for six diners and the cutlery had been polished until it almost shone.

  The girls were sitting or standing when Herne entered and, as if on a signal, they all hurried forward to greet him, call him welcome, take his hat, show him to his chair.

  Mary Anne Marie moved between the girls and they fell back at her approach. Seeing her there with the others, Herne was quick to recognize the respect in which they held her, the firm manner that underlay the apparent openness with which she moved and spoke. She looked older than most of them, certainly, even half a head taller, but that wasn’t all of it. There remained something superior about the way she looked and spoke, something that she instinctively felt and to which the others instinctively responded.

  ‘We’re happy you could join us, Mr Herne.’

  ‘My pleasure, ma’am.’

  Herne smiled a little self-consciously and one of the girls, a slim blonde with pale blue eyes and a pockmarked face, began to giggle.

  A quick glance from Mary Anne Marie shut her up.

  ‘Let me introduce you to my ladies. This …’ she was looking at a round, almost dumpy girl who could have been any age between eighteen and forty. ‘ ... is Irma. She’s been with me the longest, haven’t you, Irma?’

  Irma blushed so that her cheeks resembled ripe apples and clasped her pudgy hands together at the front of what was presumably her best blue dress. She cooed something that nobody could understand and when the blushing wouldn’t recede and everyone kept looking at her, she hurried up from the chair and down to the far end of the room.

  Mary Anne Marie gestured towards a girl almost as tall as herself, strongly built and with angular limbs, elbows that poked out from beneath the arms of her green and cream dress and were rough red at the ends, feet in black boots that were spread wide. Her hair was the color of bleached straw and the features of her face seemed to have been ground down by a constant wind.

  ‘This is Ilsa. Ilsa has been with me for nearly a year. That’s not as long as Irma, but long enough for us to become good friends.’

  Herne looked for any sign of embarrassment, but there was none. Ilsa simply looked directly at Mary Anne Marie and said, ‘Yes, that is so,’ in an accent that was decidedly European.

  ‘Here’s Stephanie,’ the introduction went on, and the pockmarked girl pushed the heel of her hand to her mouth to prevent herself from giggling again. Behind her hand, her face rocked back and forth in quick, darting movements, like a hen pecking for food.

  ‘And lastly, Christiane. Christiane you know and I’m sure she has good reason to know you.’

  Herne hadn’t realized at first but as soon as the girl stepped out of the shadow at the end of the table he saw that she was the girl he had rescued from a beating. It was clear from the swellings and bruised that beleaguered her face that he had not left it a moment soon.

  Her right eye was all but closed, a scar stretching out from the edge of the pupil almost round to the top of her ear. Her mouth was puffed up and her left cheek in particular was marred by a purple and yellow bruise that glowed in the light. Some of her hair had been cut away in order to get at the wounds to her head. Her right arm was in a sling and crossed below her breasts. She took a couple more paces towards Herne and each one made her wince as though even that slight jarring hurt her inside.

  ‘I’m … I’m …’

  The words refused to come and tears took their, place, rolling silently over her ravaged face while she stood against the table and shook.

  ‘Christiane wants you to know that’s she’s grateful,’ said Mary Anne Marie for her.

  The girl smiled hastily through her tears and the others went to her and talked softly, wiping her face as carefully as they could and assuring her everything was all right.

  Mary Anne Marie took Herne to his place at one end of the table and she went herself to the other. The girls -apart from Christiane, who was clearly annoyed and upset at not being able to take on her share of the task -bustled to and fetched large bowls of soup from a black enamel pot that was simmering at one side of the rickety stove in the corner of the room. There were bottles of wine which Mary Anne Marie opened with a practiced assurance and passed liberally up and down the table.

  The highpoint of the dinner were the meatballs which had been made by Ilsa: two huge oval platefuls of them, piled so high that it was a wonder they didn’t tumble over and roll to the floor. They sat steaming under a rich brown sauce and looked so good it didn’t seem as if their taste could live up to expectations.

  It did – all that and more.

  Ilsa beamed from under her bleached hair when Herne complimented her and asked for seconds; she didn’t rest easy, though, until she had pressed him to a third helping.

  They ate the meatballs with potatoes and corn and squash and talked between mouthfuls of their experiences here and in other towns, Herne mostly listening, nodding, chewing, occasionally chipping in with a memory of his own.

  By the time the apple and currant pie was brought proudly to the table by a smiling, giggling Stephanie, Herne was firmly convinced that he was full and could eat no more.

  He was wrong.

  Stephanie giggled a lot more and pressed her fingers against the back of Herne’s hand when she passed his plate.

&nbs
p; Mary Anne Marie stared coldly at her from the far end of the table and let the girl feel the blast of her look as she returned to her own seat.

  It was the single suggestion of tension in the entire evening.

  With the wine drunk to the dregs, Mary Anne Marie whispered to Irma who nodded excitedly and ran for her shawl. When she returned ten minutes later she was clutching a bottle of brandy to her bosom.

  The barman at the First and Last,’ Mary Anne Marie explained, ‘he owes me more than a few favors. Best claim them now while we can. Most of this stuff we’re eatin’ off comes from there, too.’

  She tipped up her glass and shook out the last drops of wine, pouring herself a good measure of brandy and tasting it before passing the bottle along. ‘Don’t want to offer my guests anything I ain’t sure of myself.’

  The brandy was warm and rough against the back of the throat. Herne settled further back into his chair and wished he could pull off his boots and rest his feet up on the table. Instead he loosened his shirt and let out his belt another notch and wondered why he had such a stupid grin plastered to his face.

  Ilsa handed him the brandy bottle and for a moment his vision blurred. Stephanie and Christiane were sitting with their heads close together whispering and laughing, sounding close to the edge of hysteria. The table vibrated as they clung to it for support. Mary Anne Marie had done much as Herne had wanted to do himself-she had pushed back her chair and swung her long legs up onto the table, her short boots, largely unlaced, were crossed over one another beside her plate. She was nursing a glass in one hand and holding a cheroot between the fingers of the other.

  Ilsa was hunched forward, fingers toying with the rim of her glass, high musical notes coming from it at intervals. She was smiling like a happy child, remembering, maybe, when that had been the truth.

  It took Herne some little time to discover what had happened to Irma. Then he saw that she was sitting on the floor six or so feet back from the table, legs spread wide

  under her dress and arms pushed away from her sides. Her head hung down towards her chest, over to one side, hair hanging over her round, plump face. She looked as if she had fallen backwards off her chair and was now asleep, sitting up.

  Herne wished his head would stop swimming round.

  He thought about getting up and stepping outside for a breath of air. It was a long time since he had eaten so much, drunk so much, felt so damned warm and good.

  He stopped thinking about going outside. Thought about Mary Anne Marie instead. Tried a smile but she was sitting up there with her feet up, cheroot between her lips, looking at him through the drifting smoke.

  She wasn’t smiling.

  Damn it! She wasn’t smiling at all.

  Wasn’t even looking at him. Seeing through him. Seeing . . .

  It didn’t seem possible that he’d fallen asleep, but he was opening his eyes with a quick, almost painful jerk of the head and now Mary Anne Marie wasn’t there. Just an empty chair at the head of the table. Irma was still sitting on the floor. Stephanie and Christiane had tumbled across one another and appeared to be sleeping. Ilsa … Mary Anne Marie …

  Herne scratched the front of his head and groaned with his stomach. There was a couple of measures of brandy left at the bottom of the bottle if he could get to it and there didn’t seem to be any point in wasting good liquor like that. Not when it came for free.

  He only knocked one chair to the floor, two plates and a few forks. The brandy seemed harsher than before. One of the lamps had gone out and the other was flickering and emitting black smoke as though running out of oil. When he sat back down his head jarred badly and a voice that might have been his own shouted in protest.

  It had been one hell of an evening!

  Best damn evening he’d spent in a …

  In a …

  The floor didn’t have any right to be that comfortable but it sure was. He half-rolled, half-crawled towards the stove and found a blanket. His fingers pulled at it and he realized it was already wrapped around somebody else. On hands and knees he saw Mary Anne Marie and Stephanie stretched out close against each other. Mary Anne Marie’s hand was tight at the girl’s shoulder and her head rested on the girl’s breast. She was sleeping peacefully, a slight hissing sound coming from between her parted lips. Herne saw that Stephanie wasn’t asleep; she was looking up at him and she wasn’t giggling any longer. She looked at Herne as if she was proud that the woman had allowed herself to fall asleep in her arms.

  Herne turned away and found a space at the far side of the stove. He set his head down and inside a minute he was fast asleep. He slept through till dawn without stirring, without waking, without a dream.

  Three

  Christiane had cherished a dream ever since she was a little girl in Maine. She had run out down to the privy at the back of the cabin and sat with her legs dangling and the door ajar in case of bears, and hugged herself while she summoned up her dream. She was going to ride off with a handsome man with a red mouth and a black beard (just like papa) who would build a new cabin for her and let her sit in it all day near to the fire (when she wasn’t making pies in the kitchen or rocking herself on the porch outside). She would have babies (not lots, not as many as her mama) and they would smile all the time and coo and never smell dirty or try to wriggle their fat little way out of her loving hands.

  Christiane had to dream her dream down there by the trees on account of it was the only place she could get far enough away. Nights there were five of them piled under the patchwork quilt, the lumpy straw mattress almost no protection against the hard boards of the floor. Then most of the day she was jostled and chased and called from one errand to another, one of her spiteful brothers tripping her as she ran with a mixing bowl, one of her sisters poking out her tongue while she struggled to milk the goat with little success. But she clung to her dream and as she grew it grew with her, until that red-mouthed, black-bearded man was who she looked for whenever there was the sound of a horse or wagon upon the track that led to the farm. She looked for him so blatantly when they made their monthly expedition to the town store that her mother threatened to leave her home next time if she didn’t stop gawping so.

  Christiane tried to force the dream deeper inside her. She was proficient now with the goats, the cows; the hens came to her call and her father said he knew when she hadn’t been the one feeding them on account of they didn’t lay so many eggs.

  While her sisters sewed and knitted and made samplers that were hung with pride on the wall, Christiane worked in the barn or toiled in their failure of a garden, one eye always over her shoulder, looking for a husband, certain she would recognize him when he came.

  It was her mother who told her, the two of them bottling fruit in the sun at the kitchen table. She explained how Hank Grice had talked with her father in town and said as how he was finding it difficult to manage his place now that the fever had taken off his wife and the hired hand he’d taken on had run off with his best mule. Mr Grice would see she got enough to eat and had a place of her own to sleep out over the barn. He took her father’s word that she was a good worker and honest and he’d treat her fair and square.

  Christiane didn’t believe what her mother was saying. The words like shackles, cold and hard and uncaring. If she was living with Hank Grice as his slave and skivvy how was the man she’d dreamed about going to find her?

  But she knew there was nothing she could say; knew her folks were finding it impossible to make ends meet, to find enough food for them all to eat. One of the boys had gone and Lisa had been married to a farm boy who had a place out by Moose Head. She was next oldest and it was her turn. She understood; even as she cried and packed her few miserable belongings she understood.

  Her father was waiting by the barn with the team hitched and he turned away as she came towards him so that she couldn’t see his red-mouthed, black-bearded face.

  Hank Grice was forty and short, not even as tall as Christiane herself. He had a bald
head save for a few wisps of soft grey hair that dusted up from behind his ears and fell loose across his head. His nose had been broken and never set properly. He had red blotches down one side of his face and around his neck and when Christiane had to pour water over him for his weekly bath she saw they continued all the way down his chest and back.

  He didn’t seem to like her, didn’t trust her. Whenever she came into the house, he looked up sharply, ready to accuse.

  He made her work from dawn till gone dusk. She did the milking and made the butter, baked and stewed and there had to be meals on the table whenever he came in from the fields. At sewing and harvest she was out there with him and she learned to plough a straighter furrow than he could himself.

  At first she visited her folks every month but after a while it only hurt her inside so she stopped.

  In the second year, Grice seemed to withdraw his resentment from her. He encouraged her to wear the hand-me-down dress of her mother’s when they ate supper at weekends. He lent her his Bible to read and, even though she understood no more than half a dozen words, she took it gratefully as a sign of his mellowing.

  She still stirred at the sound of horses along the road.

  In spite of herself she began to take pride in the small farm and in the work she did. She looked at her calloused hands and felt good that she was using them to make things grow. In the dusk she stood alone amongst the corn and closed her eyes tight and heard it grow.

  He came for her that night.

  It was late and she knew from the dim light through the window of the house that he’d been sitting up long past his usual time. She’d fallen asleep and the banging of the barn door had broken her awake, his feet heavy and impatient on the ladder. She saw the shadow of his face, a glimpse of his eyes in the moonlight that came through the slats of the roof; his breath stank of too much bad liquor. His hands were clumsy and he used his knees to force her legs apart.