Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  His bare forearms rested on the worn brown oilcloth as he shoveled in the last bite of a stack of flannel cakes. His hat was pushed back from his sweaty face, his collar lay unbuttoned against the grimy neckline of his union suit. He looked so big and rough and masculine sitting at her table. She hadn't known that men could look like him, be like him.

  Gus glanced up, his gaze meeting hers, and he smiled. And though the strange, hot restlessness within her eased some, the memory of it lingered still, like yesterday's ache.

  He stood up, the nail-keg stool scraping across the rough floor. "How about if I pour you some more of my famous horseshoe coffee?" he said, his voice booming in the cabin's stillness.

  She wiped a strand of hair out of her eyes, leaving a streak of flour on her cheek. She watched his hands as he poured the coffee, hands that were rough and callused and strong. Hands that worked her body the way she worked the dough, worked at being gentle when they touched her now at night, gentle and patient. A gentle man... Her father was a gentleman, but the only touch of his she remembered was the bite of his cane.

  Gus added a dollop of canned milk to her coffee and passed her the tin cup, his hands staying on hers a moment. His smile was pure Gus McQueen, lighting his face like a sunrise; his eyes laughed. "I ought to get you a milch cow so's you can have fresh milk for your coffee. And maybe a flock of laying hens, too."

  "You'll spoil me if you aren't careful," she said. She had only the vaguest notion of how to go about milking a cow. And hens. Would she have to do anything to the hens to get them to produce eggs? Yet if other women had managed to learn these things, then so would she.

  She felt her husband's gaze on her. His eyes had narrowed to sleepy slits, and there was a tautness to him as he looked at her. She knew that look. She knew he saw a woman's body that belonged to him, and he wanted her.

  She turned away, fumbling with her recipe book to cover the wild beating of her heart. She propped the thick book up against the lard bucket. Her fingers, lumpy with drying dough, left stains on the pages. Behind her she heard Gus release his breath as a sigh.

  The book was The Woman's Exchange Compendium. It instructed a wife on how she must order her life. On Monday, wash; on Tuesday, iron; on Wednesday, scrub the floors and bake. Not until the last Friday of the month would she be able to sit down and rest a spell, for that was the day set aside to polish the silver and clean the crystal lusters on the chandeliers. Even Clementine knew that tin spoons didn't need polishing, and she doubted there was a crystal luster to be found anywhere in western Montana.

  On each page was a thought for the day. Today's thought was "It is better to do one thing one hundred times than one hundred things one time." It seemed like a silly sentiment, especially if one had a hundred things to do. The book, with its preachy tone, annoyed her. But then, the wind and everything else was unsettling her today.

  She had stolen the book from the kitchen of her father's house on Louisburg Square. At the time she had thought she might find a use for it during her adventures in the Montana wilderness, and, oh, how provident she had been. But the recipes it contained were unforgiving of inexperience. The bread she'd made yesterday had baked up as hard as the seat of a mule skinner's wagon.

  She put the dough she'd kneaded on the back of the stove to rise. She moved the stew kettle to a hotter spot on the range and added more water. In another three hours she would be setting the table for dinner. Today was Monday; she should be washing. She could wash tomorrow, but then when would she iron? So much to do... She wanted to take her camera out of the trunk, where it had remained hidden from Gus's sight, and photograph the cabin and the cottonwoods and the way the black mountains ringed the valley, looking like a choir of nuns in their stiff white caps of snow. But there was the washing and the ironing and dinner to get and the bread to bake.

  Gus scuffed across the floor behind her in his stocking feet, and she went still, wanting him to touch her and yet not wanting it. He reached around and ran his finger slowly through the dusting of flour on her arm. "There's something about a woman up to her elbows in baking that makes a man want to..." His words trailed off as his breath fluttered warm on her neck. She felt the heat and urgency within him, and she leaned back into him.

  "You smell good," he said.

  "I smell like beer."

  He hummed and nuzzled her neck. "Beer's good."

  He turned her so that they were standing chest to chest. Her breasts tightened, her nipples beading up against his searching fingers. She pulled away from him. "Not in the daylight. It isn't proper," she said, even though she wanted him to take her in and lay her down on that big iron bed and join with her.

  "I was only going to kiss you. You want me to kiss you, don't you, Clem? Admit it. In fact, you want me to do more than kiss you."

  "Maybe." She ducked her head, hiding the heat in her cheeks. She was coming to like what he did to her in bed at night, although she wasn't sure why, or even if she really did like it. It aroused within her such a feverish restlessness, a heat in the blood. And yet it left her feeling hollow inside. And sad and lonely.

  He heaved a loud sigh that was mostly put on. "I suppose I oughta get back to fixing that drift fence."

  He picked up his work boots from in front of the stove, where they'd been drying out. He sat on the woodbox to tug them on by their mule-ears. Mud drifted in pastrylike flakes onto her kitchen floor. Yesterday it had rained hard, what Gus had called a toad-choker, and the sod roof had dripped mud. She had spent all morning cleaning the floor, and now he was dirtying it again already.

  She pointed a finger at the mess he was making. "If you'd done the scrubbing of that floor yourself, Gus McQueen, you'd have more of a care where you go planting your filthy boots."

  He looked up in surprise. "What's got you so riled this morn—"

  A dreadful howling cut him off in mid-word. Long-noted high-pitched whoops that sounded like a hundred lonesome coyotes all crying at once.

  Clementine's gaze flew to the gouge in the wall, and fear clogged her throat, stopping her breath. Indians.

  The howls died away, and for the space of a heartbeat all was quiet. Then a cacophony of hoots and yips and hollers erupted right outside their door. Clementine's one thought was to run, but when she went to move her legs they were as stiff as stilts.

  "What in the blazes...?" Gus stood up, stomping his heels down into his boots. He gripped Clementine's shoulders, propelling her forward, out of his way. "It sounds like we're being shivareed, though it was supposed to've been done on our wedding night, not two months after."

  He threw open the door, pushing Clementine out ahead of him, and she thought maybe he was laughing, but she couldn't hear him above all the hooting and hollering. The two old prospectors, Pogey and Nash, were doing a jig in the yard, their hobnailed boots splattering mud. They accompanied themselves by rattling strings of tin cans and pulling a rosined bow across a splintery board.

  They stopped when they saw they had an audience. Big grins creased their leathery faces. They managed to look both guilty and proud, like two wolves caught in a henhouse and all set to brag on it.

  Clementine's heart still pounded from the fright she'd had. After all that hollering, it seemed strangely quiet, though the wind whistled through the lattice of cottonwoods along the river and whipped her skirt against her legs. The river was running high from yesterday's rain, rushing as loud as a train through a tunnel.

  Gus wrapped his arm around her waist and drawled behind a laugh, "Outraged citizens have been known to tar and feather certain scoundrels for disturbing the peace like that."

  Pogey combed his beard with grimy fingers while he eyed Gus slowly up and down, making a show of it. "Looks downright sassy and satisfied in his married state, don't he, Nash? Content, I guess you could say."

  Nash nodded in solemn agreement, his big owl eyes unblinking in his bony face. "'Content' is just the word I was searching for. Content as a frog with a bellyful of flies."

>   "Content as a honeybee in a buckwheat field."

  "Content," Nash said, "as a dead pig in pink mud."

  Pogey whirled on his partner, flinging his arms wide. "How in hell can a pig be content if'n he's dead? And who ever heard of pink mud? You never do make any sense, Nash. Yap, yap goes yer jaw, flap, flap goes yer tongue, and the two of 'em don't work together long enough to make a lick of sense. Do you think the sun comes up in the mornin' just to hear you crow? Good God almighty—"

  Nash whipped the slouch hat off his head and whacked Pogey hard in the stomach with it. "Curb your tongue. You promised you wouldn't cuss."

  Pogey's gaze fell to the scuffed toes of his boots. He tugged at the pendulous lobe of one ear, then slanted a sly glance up at Clementine. "Reckon I ain't used to bein' round a genu-ine lady."

  Clementine stood with her arms crossed behind her back. The stance squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, making her look even more the lady, though she was unaware of it. "Thank you, Mr. Pogey, for your consideration of my tenderfoot sensibilities," she said, and she shocked the men by flashing one of her rare and ravishing smiles. "I am pleased to see, Mr. Nash, that you were able to redeem your teeth."

  Nash stared at her, his jaw agape. "Huh? Oh." He plucked out his teeth and looked at them as if his mouth was the last place he'd expected to find them.

  Pogey tugged on both ears, then scratched his chin through his beard. "Well, hel—shucks, we done brought you a wedding present. Mrs. McQueen."

  The men had walked out to the ranch leading an old sway-backed burro that was now tied to the hitching rack in front of the cabin. The burro carried a small pannier, and out of one side of it Pogey took something wrapped in a piece of canvas. With a grin so big it lifted his ears, he gave the canvas to Clementine.

  The thing squelched in her hands as she unwrapped it slowly. The rancid smell of butchered meat rose up to sear her nose. The meat was thick and flat and black, and dripping blood onto her gray sateen skirt. It looked like the severed tongue of some monstrous beast.

  She tried to keep the horror she felt from showing on her face. "Why... thank you, gentlemen."

  Gus's eyes laughed at her. "It's a beaver tail, Clem. What you do is make soup out of it. The old mountain men consider it a great delicacy."

  "I... I'm sure it must be delicious." She wondered if her book had a recipe for beaver tail soup, and the thought made her smile again.

  From out the other side of the pannier Nash produced a clay jug with a cork stopper. "We know you're a temperate man, Gus. So we brought us along our own refreshment."

  "Don't stand there in the mud," Gus said, laughing. "Come in."

  The two old men trailed Gus through the door, tracking more mud onto her floor. Clementine didn't mind; she was pleased that someone had come out to see them. She doubted there would be many others. She knew what they all thought of her, what the RainDance country thought of her—the whole of this merciless, unforgiving place. She was an outsider, a genu-ine starched-up lady with no grit in her heart, and they were all laughing at her for it. Sometimes she felt even the mountains and the wind were laughing at her.

  Gus drew himself a small tin pail of home brew. He had two buckets of beer every noon with dinner. Each evening, while Clementine washed up, he took a bucket outside with him to watch the sun set. In Montana drinking beer wasn't considered drinking.

  The men settled around the table. The prospectors' rank smell overwhelmed the cabin. They not only patronized the same tailor as Nickel Annie, they had her bathing habits as well. Clementine put the beaver tail in the sink. She hoped Gus wouldn't really expect her to make soup out of it.

  Pogey lifted the whiskey jug in a toast. "Here's how, Gus. Man, you could've knocked me over with a whistle when you introduced the purtiest gal ever to come to Rainbow Springs as your wife."

  Nash rubbed his beaky nose, honking a laugh. "Yup. Pogey here was so surprised his eyes were popping like a stomped-on toad's."

  Pogey slammed the jug into his partner's bony chest. "Try corkin' your lips with this, you ol' flannelmouth. Some men talk when they got somethin' to say. You talk 'cause you figure you always gotta be sayin' somethin'."

  There was a Montana way of doing everything, Clementine realized, and that included arguing and whiskey-drinking. She studied Nash as he curled his forefinger around the handle, rested the jug on his bent elbow, put his mouth to the spout, and tilted his arm. He drank for a long time, and when he lowered the jug his mouth puckered up tight as if pulled by a drawstring. He swallowed, shuddered, and smacked his lips. "What're you acting so proddy about, Pogey? Nobody expects a man to sit silent as a stuffed duck when he comes a-visitin'."

  "Nobody expects im to gabble like a turkey neither. Gimme that jug before you drink it all."

  Clementine went to the low coffee-case couch and settled down on the soogan padding, her stiff sateen skirts rustling loudly in the silence. She leaned forward, wrapping her arms around her bent knees. She wished that Gus would say something, but he had turned brooding of a sudden, cradling the pail between his two big hands and staring down into the dark brew.

  "I expect you gentlemen have been friends for a long time," she said.

  Pogey wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "I been soppin' gravy out the same skillet with this ol' son of a... gun for nigh on fifty years."

  It was like a marriage, Clementine thought. Their petty bickering only hiding a deep fondness that had built up over time and shared memories. She tried to imagine how she and Gus would be with each other fifty years from now and found that she could not yet see her future beyond Gus's next bucket of brew and the setting of the sun. "And how do you come to be here in Rainbow Springs?"

  Nash grinned, obviously pleased things were taking a turn toward conversation. "Well, we was just passing through, and Pogey was feelin' kinda parched, so we decided to wet our gullets at the Best in the West. We got into a card game, and durned if we didn't win a silver mine off some old geezer who shoulda known better'n to try and draw a fourth jack when Pogey had three queens showing on the table plain as daylight."

  He chuckled, shaking his head. "We named that mine the Four Jacks as a way of reminding ourselves not to be as big a fools when it comes to the pasteboards as the fella that went before us."

  He fell quiet then, and in the shadowed light of the cabin, his gaze searched out Clementine. She imagined she could see a wisdom in his strange owl-like eyes, an understanding. She imagined he knew of those aching, empty places in her heart and of the girlhood that had driven her to marry Gus and follow him out here to this alien place. She imagined that he could name the missing things for her and tell her where to find them.

  Nash blinked, his gaze breaking away from hers, and she saw only an old miner who smelled of sour sweat and liked to talk. "We been working that hole off 'n' on ever since. Which reminds me, Gus, of what we rode out here to tell ya—"

  "Well, hallelujah," Pogey said. "Ye're finally circlin' up to the point."

  Nash turned his big sad eyes onto his partner. "You're wearing me out with all your complaining about my talking. You don't think I can be a pithy man, a man economical with his speech? From now on, if you want pithy, I'll be pithy. I'll boil the whole blamed tellin' of it down to one pithy word..." He looked at Gus, licked his lips, and drew in a big breath. "Bonanza."

  Gus laughed and wagged his head. "What?"

  "There, you see, Pogey, what happens when a man gets pithy? He ain't understood, that's what happens."

  "You ain't understood 'cause you never make any sense. Let me tell him, or 'tis never gettin' done." Pogey braced his elbows on the table and leaned forward. "You know the Four Jacks mine..."

  "I ought to," Gus said. "Aside from the fact that Nash here was just jawing about it, I'm supposed to own a twenty percent share in return for grubstaking you old sourdoughs for the last two years. So far it's been nothing but twenty percent of muck and gangue."

  "Yeah, well, we too was beginnin' to think tha
t ol' claim had about as much poke to it as a dead man's dick—ugh!" He grunted as the jug slammed into his belly. A blush spread over his jowls and big ears, turning them the dark purple of overripe apples. "Beg pardon, ma'am."

  "Let me tell it," Nash said. "So's the missus can be spared your foul tongue. We was sort of fiddling around one day when Pogey bit into a vein of quartz that looked promising. So we went along to Sam Woo's and got ourselves some—"

  "Giant powder," Pogey finished for him. "We had Sam add it to your tick, Gus. Hope you don't mind."

  Gus waved a hand. "Why should I mind? The Rocking R's already so deep in debt, what's a little more?"

  "That's what we figured." Pogey took a swig of whiskey, then rested the jug on the ledge of his barrel gut. "We blasted out a nice piece of that quartz and sent it to the assayer's office over in Butte Camp, and damned—durned if it didn't prove to be veined with silver."

  Nash produced a small flat stone out of his vest pocket. It flashed like a new dime as he dropped it into Gus's hand. "There's a whole lode of it down there where that come from. And it looks to go on for just about forever."

  Gus rubbed the silver nugget between his fingers. Then he startled Clementine by leaping to his feet and letting to go with a loud yipping yell. He swung her up into his arms and they danced around the table, his laughter bouncing off the rafters.

  When he let her go, she was breathing hard. Her cheeks felt flushed, and her hair was tumbling loose from the tight knot at the nape of her neck. Gus's face glowed like a child's with his excitement. "Here you go, girl," he said, tossing the silver stone at her.

  She caught it, smiling because this was the Gus McQueen she liked best, the Gus of dreams and laughter, the Gus she knew she could grow to love. She held the stone up to the light of the window, marveling at how it shone. "I don't understand... What is it?"