Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  She twisted her hand free of his grasp, her fingers closing. "It was a cane."

  "Why?" He could see her heart beating, a tiny flutter at her throat just above the cameo. "What'd you do that someone would take a cane to you for it?"

  "It wasn't someone, it was my father," she said in a sudden rush. "He found me looking at souvenir cards of the notorious outlaws of the Wild West. I was only supposed to get three strokes, but I wouldn't say I was sorry for it, and so he gave me more and more and more, and in the end I think he was the sorrier. He cried, but I didn't..."

  She stiffened her back and raised her chin, as if daring him to ridicule her. Which was what he knew he should do, since he wasn't going to get rid of her by being nice.

  But he couldn't do it, not with her standing there looking so proud and vulnerable. He wasn't going to let her completely off the hook, though. He gave her a slow, lazy smile. "I've been whipped a time or two myself for lookin' at naughty pictures. They weren't of notorious outlaws of the Wild West, though."

  He smiled to himself at the gleam of interest that sparked in her eyes. Lord, she was such a young innocent.

  "What were they pictures of?" she asked.

  "Why, naked ladies of the Wild West."

  He watched the tide of color begin at her neck above the cameo and flood her face. His smile turned wicked. "A curious mind is a dangerous thing," he drawled.

  "Oh! You are..."

  "I'm what?"

  She didn't answer him. Instead she walked away fast, almost running, and leaving her cases behind. He caught up with her in two easy strides. "I'm what?"

  "It is very obvious that you know well what you are, Mr. Rafferty. After all, why would a man brag if he could show off?"

  He laughed out loud at that, and to his delighted surprise she joined him. He liked her laugh; it went well with her mouth.

  She stopped it abruptly, though, when she got to the edge of the yard. She looked at the ruined laundry, and the blood came back up rich and high in her cheeks.

  The wind, mocking her, lifted Gus's hat off her head and sent it sailing toward the corral. Rafferty caught it and brought it back to her. He held it out like a suitor presenting a violet posy, but she didn't take it. She stood still, looking right at him, but he wasn't sure she really saw him.

  He set the hat gently on her head. "'They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind,'" he said as he gathered up a loose strand of spindrift hair and tucked it behind her ear. His rough fingers snagged in her hair, the way they had her night rail. The back of his hand brushed her throat where the pulse still throbbed, harder than ever. A shiver rippled across the pale skin, and he heard her breath catch.

  She jerked away from him. She started to rub the place on her neck where he had touched her and ended up crossing her arms over her breasts. "You... you astonish me, Mr. Rafferty. Although less with your accomplishment than with your courage—that you would dare to stand there beneath the eye of heaven and quote the Word of God."

  "Hell, yeah, I can recite whole chapters and verses and not miss a 'thee' or a 'thou.' And I ain't once been struck by lightning, either. Shocking to think, ain't it, Boston?"

  She made a little gurgling sound in her throat. He thought she was about to laugh again, and he held his breath, waiting for it.

  His old biscuit-colored hound came tearing around the barn just then, chasing a rabbit and barking. The racket enlarged Rafferty's world, so that it was no longer one small woman with light hair and green eyes.

  She began to gather the ruined laundry, tossing it in the tin tub. "I will wash it all again tomorrow," she said. She glared up at him, looking as if she wanted to heave the tub, laundry and all, at his head.

  "And the wind'll blow again tomorrow, and the day after that. Most every day right on through the summer. Come winter, though, it'll get so cold you can freeze your wash dry. But then, you probably won't be here come winter."

  "Your brother has been teaching me how to ride. Come winter I'll be riding your big gray."

  A moment ago he was laughing with her, almost liking her. Now his guts twisted with anger and a terrible longing, and he didn't know where these feelings came from or what they meant. He didn't want her learning how to ride. He wanted her gone.

  "When two play, only one can win," he said, his throat gritty. "It won't be you."

  "It will."

  "It won't, because you don't belong here. We all've met your kind before. Your ass tightens up and your mouth puckers when the wind so much as whispers hell, and you're so starchy you squeak when you walk. You're not only useless, you're a liability. If you were a dogie you wouldn't be worth the slaughtering."

  She compressed her lips and spun away from him so fast her skirt whipped his legs, and he found himself trailing after her.

  She stopped abruptly at the door to the cabin, and she looked back at him, a startled question in her eyes. She held in her hands a small wreath woven of sweet grass and white sage and decorated with bird feathers and dried wildflowers. It hadn't been there before, which meant they'd had a visitor during the last hour, a visitor who hadn't wanted welcoming.

  "It's a dream hoop," he said. "You're supposed to hang it over your bed, and good dreams'll come through the hole in the middle to sweeten your nights. Joe Proud Bear's squaw made them for a time and tried to sell them, but no one was buyin'. I reckon it's her way of thanking you for the milk."

  "Oh! But how do you know about that?"

  "All of the RainDance country knows, and not many are looking too kindly on you for your Boston drawing-room charity, either."

  A faint flush dusted her cheeks. "You are wrong about me. You all are wrong, and I shall prove it to you."

  "How? By paying calls on Indian squaws because you think it's something we think a respectable lady would never do?"

  "But that isn't at all why I..." The flush on her face had darkened to crimson and she sucked in a sharp breath. "You are cruel."

  "So's Montana."

  She studied him as she had before, out in the meadow, with those still, deep eyes that seemed to stir a part of him he didn't know he had. She turned slowly and went through the door, carrying the dream hoop. She stopped again when she saw his gift to Gus—a pair of candlesticks carved of elk horn that had been polished to a lustrous ivory. "Oh, my!" she said, with a funny little sucked-in gasp.

  She went to the table and picked one up. She rubbed her fingers over it, gently, as if she were blind and needed touch to see.

  He stepped just inside the door and propped the sole of one boot on the jamb behind him. He watched her from beneath the concealing brim of his hat. "I guess it's your day for getting presents," he said. A woman like her, she was probably used to great big silver candelabra all doodaded up with bows and foofaraws.

  She turned, surprise and wariness darkening her eyes. "These are from you?"

  He shrugged. "It ain't every day a man's brother takes himself a wife."

  "They're lovely," she said. And she smiled. A caressing smile, soft and sultry like the wind on a hot night. A smile that caught at his gut and stopped his heart.

  He stared at her, stunned, unable to think. Unable even to breathe. It had begun as a tightening in his chest when he'd first seen her sitting on Snake-Eye's buckboard, all prim and scared, and it had ended here in the cabin with her smile and a hard, throbbing ball of want low in his belly.

  He watched her arrange the candlesticks on the table, wanting her. She set one on either side of the coffee can with its pink and blue wildflowers. The candlesticks fit; she was the one who looked out of place. This little woman with fair hair and green eyes and a harlot's mouth.

  He wanted to take her with swift, rough lust, not on a bed with embroidered pillows and a feather-filled mattress but on the ground with larch needles for a cushion and the blue sky overhead and a hot wind to fan their naked, sweaty skin and drown out the groaning, sucking, panting sounds of loving. He wanted to make her let go of all that fine drawin
g-room polish, to make her scream and thrash beneath the hard, thrusting strength of him. He wanted to master her and to own her, and he wanted to make her want him. God help him, he thought as he turned and stumbled through the door, back out into the yard.

  He wanted his brother's wife.

  Thunder rumbled in the mountains as Gus McQueen raised the ax above his head and brought it down. The iron blade split the wood with a blow that reverberated against the cloud-heavy sky. He lifted the ax again and paused to listen. Not for more thunder. He listened for the rhythmic pang-ping of metal banging on metal coming from the smithy.

  Shadows danced in the red glow beyond the smithy's open door. With this storm brewing, it was too hot to be shaping a horseshoe. But then, maybe his brother ought to get used to such an environment, Gus thought with a sour frown, hell-bent as the boy was on sin and perdition.

  Gus anchored the ax in the chopping block and leaned on the helve, his chest pumping from exertion. He wiped the sweat off his face, but not the frown. He thought about crossing the yard to the forge and clearing the air with his brother. With words for once, not fists. He thought about it and decided against it, then found his boots heading in that direction.

  Zach's gelding was tethered just inside the smithy door. Gus ran a hand over the broad gray rump as he skirted around it. Heat and the acrid smell of hot iron and rank sweat washed over him. His brother stood at the stone forge turning a piece of iron in the burning coals. Ruddy light limned his dark hair and glazed the flaring bones of his cheeks, casting deep shadows in the hollows beneath. He looked like the devil come up from hell. A devil who'd had a dandy of a fight along the way, what with his purple eye and scabbed lip.

  He acknowledged Gus's presence with a glance but no greeting. He flipped the iron bar over in the coals, and they both watched it heat from red to yellow-hot. The split skin on the knuckles of the hand that gripped the tongs had started to heal. Gus poked his tongue into the gaping hole in his teeth made by those knuckles. He worried that the missing tooth spoiled his looks for Clem. Not that she'd ever mentioned his looks or whether she found them pleasing.

  Something cold and wet brushed Gus's hand. It was the calf sniffing him like a slobbering pup. "What do you want to go making a pet out of this acorn calf for?" he said, the first words spoken between them since the fight.

  His brother worked the bellows. Air whooshed on the fire, and sparks flew. Orange light flared on his face, highlighting the fading bruises. His eyes were puffy and red and sunken into his head. From the looks of those eyes he had been punishing the whiskey hard.

  "You want I should kill it?" Zach said.

  "I just don't want to have to watch you nursing a broken heart when he's shipped off for slaughter next fall."

  "I reckon my heart's tougher than you think, brother."

  "Your face looks kinda tender, though. Brother."

  Zach squinted up at him through the murky smoke from the forge. Sweat dripped from the hair that fell over his brow. A smile played at the corner of his mouth, deepening the faint groove in his cheek. "You oughta see the other fella's."

  Gus looked at his brother, and a logjam of emotions pressed against his chest. Exasperation and anger, resentment, envy, and love. Mostly love.

  He hooked a hip onto a workbench next to the forge. He enjoyed watching Zach work at anything—calf-roping, bronc-busting, shaping a horseshoe. His movements were spare, graceful, but underneath there was always this tension within him that gave an edge to even the most mundane moments. Sometimes, sitting in front of the cabin of an evening after a hard day's work, sharing a bucket of beer, Gus would search out his brother's taut profile in the twilight and he would be put in mind of a Colt with a doctored trigger, liable to go off at any moment.

  "I've sent over to Deer Lodge for some milled lumber," Gus said. "We're going to need to build us a bigger house before winter."

  Zach laid the white-hot bar of iron across the pointed end of the anvil. He brought the hammer down with an echoing, singing clatter and a strength that made the muscles bulge in his arm and back. "I ain't leavin' here, Gus."

  "Who said anything about you leaving?"

  The truth was, Gus lived in fear that his brother would simply drift away one day, that he had too much tumbleweed in his blood to light in any one place. There were times, looking over the ranch with clear eyes, when reality intruded on Gus's dreams. In those moments he could see that what they had here at the Rocking R was a cow-pen herd owned by a shirttail outfit. They couldn't even afford to hire extra hands, except for a couple of saddle bums at roundup time. The reality of the ranch was endless days of branding, trailing beeves, cutting hay, and breaking horses. They were a long way from being cattle kings. Gus wanted to make his brother see beyond that, to the potential of the ranch, of life. But even when they were boys he hadn't known what saw Zach through a day. Down in Texas they had a word for cattle or men who stayed apart from the rest of their kind—cimarrones. Gus figured his brother was a cimarron.

  "We'll team up all right, the three of us," Gus said. "You, me, and Clementine. This place might be work, but it sure beats ram-jamming around just for beans." He searched his brother's closed face for his thoughts. All he saw was that hair-trigger tension and the sweat of hard work. The combined heat of the forge and the storm was like soup steam. Gus mopped his own face with his bandanna. "We can build the house big. I 'spect you'll be wanting to get married yourself sometime," he added, then wished he hadn't. He had the horrible thought of Zach bringing Hannah Yorke out to the ranch as his bride.

  Zach rested the hammer's peen on the anvil and leaned over it, bringing him face to face with Gus, eye to eye, and Gus watched those eyes turn as cold and flat as brass platters. Outside, lightning flashed white as a winter moon, smelling of sulfur, followed almost immediately by a crack of thunder. Even before he spoke, Gus knew his brother had picked up on his last thought as surely as if he'd spoken it aloud.

  "The thing I'd like for you to understand is that Mrs. Yorke sells whiskey for a living, not herself."

  Other things besides whiskey got sold in the Best in the West, but Gus held his tongue. Mostly held it. He couldn't completely shut his eyes to the fact that Zach had formed a sinful alliance with a trollop. A visit every month or so, maybe—he could allow that a healthy young man had needs. But a week and one day, eight nights in a row, was sinful debauchery.

  "But she has done it," Gus said. "Even she would have to admit she's done it in the past."

  "She don't do it now."

  Gus wondered what she would call what she'd been doing this past week if it wasn't whoring, even if no money changed hands. It baffled him that his brother would feel such loyalty for a woman he barely knew and certainly couldn't respect. A loose woman.

  He exhaled a long breath through his teeth. "All right, Zach. Maybe she's reformed then, huh?" he said with a forced smile. He would live with his brother's association with the town harlot. That didn't mean he would tip his hat to the woman when he crossed her path. And he sure as sin wouldn't invite her over to Sunday supper with himself and Clem.

  Zach straightened up. He hefted the hammer, and the corner of his mouth tipped up into something just short of a smile. "You ain't gonna turn into even more of a boiled shirt on me, brother? Now that you're married to such a starchy woman?"

  Clementine. Just the echo of her name in his thoughts did something to Gus's soul. Marrying her was the single spontaneous act of his life. He had lusted after her, a seventeen-year-old girl, and so he had stolen her away from the bosom of her family and brought her to a life of toil and hardship. What he'd done had been wrong, maybe even a sin, but, oh, Christ, Clementine...

  The words gushed out of him, heartfelt. "I love her, Zach." He pressed a fist to his breast. "I love her so, it's like a constant pain, right here in my heart." Immediately he felt foolish. Men didn't talk of their hearts and of love.

  The hammer rang against the anvil. Zach's face had gone all white and taut.
With an almost savage gesture, he grasped the horseshoe with the tongs and thrust it into the burning coals.

  Gus straightened up and went to him. "Zach..." He wanted to tell his brother that he loved him, too, but men didn't talk of such things. "Man, you've forgotten more about busting broncs and whacking bulls than I'll ever know." He gripped his brother's arm. Zach's shirtsleeve was soaked with sweat, the taut muscle underneath quivering. "Clementine and me, we need you."

  Zach shrugged away from him, turning his back. Gus swallowed down a protest. His marriage was a sore point between them only because it had been so unexpected. Zach would come around to accepting it after a time. "I suppose you heard about the meeting at Snake-Eye's," he said by way of changing the subject. "I told the boys we could count on your gun."

  Zach spun back around. There was a wild look on his face, almost one of fear. But he couldn't imagine his brother being afraid of a couple of renegade cattle thieves.

  "Seems to me there's a lot of energy being wasted on them half-breeds," Zach said. And the fear, or whatever it was, roughened his voice. "Hell, they're only butchering a couple of head now and then for food. We can afford the charity."

  "What about MacDonald? He got a bullet in the back for his charity."

  "Joe Proud Bear sure didn't kill him, and I don't think Iron Nose did either." The grittiness was gone now from Zach's voice, and the strange wildness from his eyes. He pumped the bellows, turning the horseshoe in the coals. "If you ask me, this necktie party of yours ought to look closer to home. MacDonald and Horace Graham have been squabbling over the same piece of bottomland for months. Now he's dead, and Graham's cows are all over that creek-fed meadow, grazin' and gettin' fat."

  "Mr. Graham's got a wife and five children. He reads the psalms during prayer meetings. He doesn't drink, gamble, or whore around, unlike some I might mention. You going to stand up in front of everybody and accuse him of shooting his neighbor in the back?"

  Zach cast him a look full of mocking derision as he brought the iron back to the anvil. "You don't think a man can pray and kill all in the same breath?"