Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  She slipped her arm through his and leaned her head against his shoulder. "That was sweet of you, Rafferty—defending my honor. No one's ever done that for me before."

  "Shit, Hannah." A dark flush spread across his sharp cheekbones, and without even looking at her this time, he stole another tiny piece of her heart. She'd always had a weakness for a man who could blush.

  She leaned back on her outstretched arms and looked at the sky. It was like staring into the bottom of a deep blue bowl. Nothing could be so blue and vast and empty as a Montana sky. She felt absurdly happy. She wanted to laugh some more, yet her silly eyes kept filling with tears.

  She heard the squeal of a wagon axle, the jangle of harness chains, and she sat up to watch Gus McQueen and his wife leave town. That fourteen-karat lady had had herself quite a busy afternoon, she thought. Tangling with renegade cattle thieves, visiting with a calico queen, and bringing the local wild boy low. It was almost as if she'd made up her mind to get all the pea green rubbed off her in one day.

  Hannah swung her head around to look at Rafferty. He, too, watched his brother and his brother's wife as they drove away. It was hard to tell what he was thinking from his bruised and battered face. She tried to read the expression in his eyes, but they were as empty as the blue bowl of the sky overhead.

  Clementine pressed a poultice of raw potato onto the swelling bruise beneath his right eye. Gus jerked, the breath hissing out of him on a curse.

  "Ow! Jesus..."

  "If you can't stand the cure, then you shouldn't court the trouble."

  "Hunh. You're starting to sound like a wife, Clem. Be careful or someone'll think you love me after all-—ouch!" He grasped her wrist, pulling the hand with the poultice away from his face. He gave her an earnest, boyish smile. "It wasn't what you thought."

  She tossed the poultice onto the table. It landed on the brown oilcloth with a sodden plop. Her husband, the self-proclaimed teetotaler, reeked of the devil's brew. "I find you brawling with your brother outside that woman's thirst parlor and you have the gall to tell me it wasn't what I thought."

  "Because it wasn't. The only reason I went into the Best in the West was to put a stop to Zach's carousing with Hannah Yorke and get him back home here where there's work to be done."

  He'd been sitting at the old sawbuck table, but he pushed himself to his feet and paced the small cabin. He moved as stiffly as a rheumatic old man, and his face was as bloodied and raw as a side of beef hanging in a butcher's window. It hurt her to look at him. She didn't understand why he had been fighting with his own brother outside that saloon, swinging his fists and grunting and growling like some animal.

  And she didn't understand herself. She had picked up a club of wood and stuck a man down with it, and she'd been glad to do it. No, more than glad—she'd been triumphant.

  "That brother of mine gets wilder by the day," Gus was saying, the anger in his voice as raw as his face. "Whiskey, cards, and women are all he cares about."

  Clementine didn't like talking about Mr. Rafferty. That man disturbed her, and he fascinated her, when she didn't want him to do anything to her at all. She wanted him gone.

  "Maybe he doesn't want to be saved," she said. "Maybe the best thing you can do for both of you is to buy him out of his share in the ranch and let him ride away." To perdition, she added to herself.

  Gus thrust his fingers through his hair, gripping his scalp. He sighed, his shoulders slumping. "You don't understand."

  "Then tell me."

  He turned, and she saw that his lips were pressed together tight in that way they did whenever he was facing something distasteful, as if the taste of it was in his mouth.

  "That last summer Zach and I were together as kids, you know what that brother of mine did?" He laughed raggedly, shaking his head. "He taught himself how to pick pockets. You see, Clem, while the old man—he was running a traveling salvation show up and down the Mississippi in those days—and while the old man would be up front praying and amening and hallelujahing, Zach would be moving through the crowd and cleaning it out slick as butter. Mostly all he ever got was a few cheap gilt watches and rusty pennies, but there were times when, slim pickings that it was, it kept us from going to bed hungry." He huffed another forced laugh. "That brother of mine... he was always trying to protect us from the consequences of the old man's ways and follies."

  He paused, his gaze hard on her face, seeing what she made of this.

  "Oh, Gus, I would never think to judge you," she said, "or your brother, either, for what happened when you were children."

  He shook his head again, hard. "Yeah, but you gotta understand. I was never good for much of anything except dreaming, making up stories inside my head, and hiding out in them. Not my brother, though. He was born tough—tough as jerked meat. And that last summer... well, one night the old man came home—we were living in a tent, and he came stumbling into the tent reeking of blood and whiskey, and missing an eye. Zach was with him and he... he had more blood on him than Pa did. His shirt was black and shiny with it, with blood, and it was caked in his hair and stained his hands like Indian war paint. And all the while Pa just sat in the middle of the tent, bleeding and whimpering over and over, 'Son of a bitch took my eye,' Zach went about packing up and striking camp, cool as you please. Except for once when he told Pa to shut up."

  He trailed off as if that was the end of it, and Clementine thought it a strange story. And a sad and strange life her husband had led as a boy. Her husband and his brother, who had taught himself how to pick pockets and had been as tough as jerked meat.

  "Then a week later," Gus went on abruptly, "in another town I saw a newspaper account of a riverboat gambler who'd been found dead, stabbed through the heart with his own bowie knife."

  It took a while for her to see what the one thing had to do with the other, and then she couldn't quite believe... "Are you telling me your father—"

  "Lordy, no. Not Pa." He gave another of those rough, forced laughs. "You'd know that as soon as you met him. He might be a bunco man and a petty thief, and he might like to bed other men's wives and cheat at cards. But he's always run like a prairie chicken at the first hint of violence."

  She understood then, and yet she didn't want to. She didn't want to think what kind of mad courage and wild terror it took for a boy of ten to stab a grown man through the heart with his own bowie knife. She didn't want to think of the kind of mark such a thing would leave on a boy, even one as tough as jerked meat.

  "Gus, perhaps—"

  "But that brother of mine," Gus said, "he's never run from anything."

  She laid her hand on his arm. It was rigid beneath her touch. "If he did such a thing, if he killed that gambler, then perhaps it was to save your father's life. Or perhaps the one thing never had anything to do with the other—what you read in that newspaper and what happened to your father."

  Gus pressed his lips together, and she saw his throat move as he swallowed. "Yeah, perhaps... It was right after that time, though, right after Pa lost his eye, that we split up. Ma said she was gonna make a trip up north to visit her kin. She took me with her and she left my brother behind, and she knew all along she wasn't coming back.

  "Zach might be two years younger than me, but he must've been born old, 'cause he always took care of us, even stealing when he had to. He always took care of us, and we left him, me and Ma. We left him with no one to take care of him."

  She looked up into his battered face. There was something in his eyes... guilt, she supposed. And fear. And as always, the discovery of fear in him frightened her, for he was supposed to be the one with all the certainties. But she knew him a little better now; she knew that what he feared most was failing himself, not living up to the man he thought he should be.

  "I owe him, Clem. I can't let him down a second time."

  "No, Gus," she said. "You won't let him down. He is your brother, after all."

  The day had started to fade. She took down the coal-oil lantern fr
om its ceiling hook. As she lifted off the paper shade to light the wick, she heard Gus give a little snort, then a rumbling chuckle, then an all-out dish-rattling laugh.

  She looked up at him, the match poised to strike. "What?"

  "I was just remembering the look on Zach's face when you walloped him with that post." He laughed again, real laughs this time. His shoulders shaking, wheezing and huffing and wincing as the laughter pulled at all the cuts and bruises on his face. "Lord... Lord... When he does get around to coming home, I reckon he'll think twice about getting within swinging distance of you."

  Clementine sucked on her lower lip, wanting to smile and thinking she really ought not to. Gus's laughter wound down though and an uneasy, speculative look came over his face as he stared at her. She knew what he was thinking. What she had done didn't set well with his notion of what a gently reared lady would do.

  As she drew water from the pump to boil the potatoes, her mind moved on to tomorrow's chores. First there was the washing to do; she was down to her last clean camisole and shimmy. That lampshade was black with soot; it needed a good scrubbing. They were nearly out of bread again. Maybe she would try baking those sweet biscuit things, those bannocks, that Gus had told her about.

  He had gone to the door of the cabin to look out at the yard. The dying sun turned his light brown hair the color of pulled taffy. She felt a softening within her when she looked at him, a tenderness. She thought she must love Gus, but it seemed the feeling should be stronger. Powerful and dangerous and fiery, like lightning flashing across a hot black summer sky. Being in love ought to feel as if you held that bolt of lightning in your hands.

  And a fine way to get yourself good and burned, she thought with an inward laugh. She'd better hope the Lord wasn't listening to her silly musings right now, else he'd probably send a lightning bolt straight down through the sod roof of this old cabin to carry her down into the lake of everlasting fire. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

  That Hannah Yorke, now, the town harlot. Clementine wondered if she had ever loved any of those men she'd lain with for money and for pleasure. She had certainly looked like a prime example of tarnished virtue today in that poppy-bright dress of hers and those red-tasseled shoes. Clementine didn't know what to think of her, although she knew what she ought to think. She ought to think she was a brazen hussy who was no better than she should be. She ought to cross the street rather than cross shadows with such a soiled dove. She ought to pray for the salvation of Hannah Yorke's soul—but from a safe distance, of course, so that none of the tarnish would rub off on her.

  That was what she ought to do. What she wanted to do was say to Hannah Yorke: "Tell me what you feel when you lie with a man. Do you hope he will be the one to rescue you from your shame with love and a wedding ring? Or do you revel in the wickedness, those wild impulses that have led you to sin? Are you frightened for your immortal soul or do you feel free?"

  Oh, Clementine thought, imagine sitting down to have such a conversation with the town harlot. Imagine asking her if you could try on those red-tasseled shoes—

  "Clementine?"

  She nearly dropped the stew pot, only catching it in time by one of its handles so that it tipped and splashed water all down the front of her skirt. Her whole body flushed as hot as a coal fire. Imagine if Gus had been able to read her thoughts just then.

  "Come here, girl," he was saying, beckoning to her from the door. "Come and watch the sunset."

  She went with him out into the yard. They stood side by side and watched the sun sink into a rocky bed of buttes. The wind had come up cold, smelling of last winter's snow and this spring's mud. The sky was a hard, brassy yellow, the color of his eyes.

  Not Gus's eyes...

  She wanted to slide her arm around her husband's waist.

  She wanted to lean into him and bury her face in his neck and lick his warm, salty skin. Yet she held herself apart, unable to be the first to touch. She felt so alone of a sudden, so separate from Gus and from everything around her. "Clementine..."

  She turned her head. She saw a man's hunger in his eyes, and she was beginning to understand how she could satisfy that. But she saw a soul's need as well, and that she despaired of ever knowing how to satisfy. There is something missing in me, she thought. Great empty gaps in my heart. Or it was as if something had seized her heart long ago and squeezed and squeezed, had wrung it dry until it was this hard little shrunken ball in her chest.

  Out on the prairie a coyote bayed. There was so much loneliness in the sound, she thought.

  CHAPTER 8

  The muscles in Clementine's back screamed in protest as she bent over to pick up the last wet shirt from the bottom of the tub. She stayed hunched over a moment, sure that she would never be able to straighten up. Her body was one enormous ache. And on the stove inside the cabin another copper of sheets was boiling. Sheets that still had to be rinsed and wrung out and hung up to dry.

  She creaked upright and blew a sigh up into the brim of Gus's old hat, which shaded her face from the burning sun. She stumbled toward the rope that had been strung up between two big cottonwoods. Her shoes, thick with mud, were as heavy and clumsy as wooden clogs. The hem of her sodden skirts trailed in the mud. Frayed threads and gaps showed in the puce dimity where she had ripped off the stylish ruching and train.

  She had been reared by a mother who insisted that no true lady should ever be caught looking less than her best. But all of her bonnets were utterly useless against the sun, and the train on her skirt scooped up dirt and debris more proficiently than the cowcatcher on a trolley car.

  The soiled clothes and linens in her father's house on Louis-burg Square had been handed over to an Irish laundress on Monday to be delivered to their kitchen door the following week in paper-wrapped parcels smelling of soap and starch. Until she had taken it into her head to elope with a cowboy and follow him out to this godforsaken wilderness, Clementine had never appreciated the smelly, sweaty, dirty work involved in keeping clean.

  Build up the fire in the range to boil countless kettles of water. Lift the heavy kettle from the stove and empty it into the washtub, again and again and yet again. Plunge your arms up to the elbows in steaming suds and scrub and scrub and try not to whimper when you scrape all the skin off your knuckles on the washboard. Drop the soapy clothes into a rinse tub of more boiling water and stir and stir with a broomstick, then stir some more. And then with what's left of the strength in your two hands, wring and twist the scalding water from each piece of sodden, sopping clothing. With your two hands...

  She looked at her hands, amazed not to see flames shooting from her wrists, they burned so. Whatever skin she had not scrubbed off had been melted away by boiling water and the caustic soda in the soap, leaving her flesh raw and cracked.

  The clothesline had been strung up high where the deer couldn't catch their antlers in it, and so she had to climb up on a stack of empty hardtack boxes to reach it. Just as she flung a shirt over the rope, the wind caught it, slapping its tail against her face. She searched blindly for the spilt-wood pins she had thrust through the front placket of her bodice. She wrestled the shirt into place and anchored it down with the pins.

  The wind slammed into her again. She swayed, grabbing for the clothesline. The boxes slid out from under her, and she landed on her fanny with a splatter of mud and a teeth-rattling jar.

  She sat still for a moment, breathing heavily as the mud oozed around her. The wet clothes flapped and sang overhead. She squelched to her feet. She wiped at the mud on her face with her sleeve, smearing it into her mouth. A dollop of mud fell off the brim of Gus's hat, splatting onto her bodice. She looked down at herself and laughed. She was covered from head to foot with mud. Surely there wasn't this much mud in all of Massachusetts.

  They all thought her too much of a genu-ine starched-up lady with not enough grit in her heart to survive out here. Well, she would prove them wrong. She had done Gus's shirts and her underth
ings. Now she would tackle the bed linen. She had just lifted the empty tub onto her hip when once again the cursed Montana wind came roaring out of the mountains.

  A great gust ripped into the wet clothes, whipping them around the line, snapping the wooden pins free. The wind shrieked and howled, sending Clementine's entire wash sailing and scattering across the muddy yard.

  The washtub fell from her burning hands. She swayed beneath the buffeting wind, a scream of frustration welling up in her breast. It built and built and came bursting out of her in cries that tore at her throat.

  "I can't stand it! I can't stand it! I can't stand it!"

  The gust died as suddenly as it had come up. The mountains echoed her words, mocking her:... can't stand it... stand it... A jay flew overhead, laughing at her. She stood in the boggy yard and waited for the wind to come again, waited, waited... and it didn't come. Even the wind mocked her.

  She left the wash to lie where the wind had flung it and began walking.

  She climbed the snake fence that bordered the pasturelands around the ranch. She walked along the river, but after a while the bank steepened and the trail veered off into a stand of larches and yellow pines. The pine-spiced wind shrilled through the treetops. The jay followed after her, hopping from branch to branch. "Coward," it squawked. "Quitter, quitter..."

  She emerged into a small moon-shaped meadow and took a deep breath.

  The air smelled sweet. Wildflowers decorated the meadow like the embroidered border of a schoolgirl's sampler. Tiny pink fairy slippers, white pinwheels and bottlebrush, and cheery yellow blossoms shaped like miniature sunflowers. The sun floated across a hazeless sky, gilding the wind-riffled grass with a shimmering light. A meandering line of willows followed the river, casting gentle shade onto water that rolled and shimmered like spilled coins.

  Oh, how she longed to capture it all in a photograph.

  She would do it, do it now. She would photograph this meadow.