His hand came up to touch her, because he could no longer bear another moment of not touching her. "Clementine—"
Her palm swung up and around, striking his cheek with such force that his head snapped to the side. She pulled back her hand to hit him again, but he grabbed her arm.
The slap kept echoing until it faded into the sounds of the river. They stared at each other, breathing hard. The fire surged and crackled between them again, raw and violent.
"Don't touch me!" she cried. She tried to pull away, and that was when he saw the smear of fresh blood, the gaping cut on the white inside of her arm. Terror whipsawed through him with such force that he swayed.
"I thought you said he didn't bite you!" he shouted, his voice guttural with fear and unleashed hunger. "Dammit, woman, did he bite you?"
"I don't know, I don't know! Why?" She shuddered and backed away, pulling against his grasp on her arm. "Oh, God, I hate you."
He let her go and then gripped her face hard between his two hands. "Clementine, look at me, listen to me. That lobo had rabies."
Her head moved, shaking a denial. Horror filled her eyes. "Oh, God," she whispered, "what am I going to do?" And he knew the question, and her terror, had nothing to do with a rabid wolf.
He swung her up into his arms. She stiffened and pushed against him, but he pressed her head into the curve of his neck and spoke to her softly. "Lie still, lie still. I'm only taking you back to the cabin."
She went quiet as he waded across the river and climbed the bank.
Gus had just begun to nail the siding onto the framework of the new house. When he saw them emerge from the cottonwoods, he threw down his hammer. He cut across the furrows of the freshly mown hay meadow in an awkward, staggering run.
"Clementine!" Gus stumbled to a halt before them, his chest heaving. He saw the blood on her arm, and his face went stark white. "Jesus, Jesus, Zach, what's—"
"A rabid wolf attacked us down at the river," Rafferty said. He pushed past Gus, unable to look into his brother's face, to meet his brother's eyes when he could still taste his brother's wife on his lips.
He carried Clementine into the cabin and laid her on the coffee-case couch. Gus halted in the doorway. "You sure it bit her?"
"No, dammit, I ain't sure." The way he'd been plunging her in and out of the water... The cut was ragged and deep. It could easily have been made by a submerged stick or a rock. Or teeth.
He reached for his knife and realized it was still in the wolf's neck. He swung around to Gus. "You got a toad-sticker on you? Give it here."
But he had to cross the room to take the knife out of the sheath at Gus's waist. Already a glazed look had come over his brother's eyes. Gus was running away inside his head as he'd done so often when they were kids.
"That wolf couldn't have been rabid, Zach. You said he attacked y'all down by the river. Rabid animals are scared of water."
"This one wasn't. He ran right through it to get at us."
"I'm going to ride to Deer Lodge for the doctor. Just in case." But he stood unmoving in the doorway, his hands hanging helpless at his sides. "I mean, he probably wasn't rabid anyway, 'cause rabid animals are scared of water. And you said yourself you don't even know whether he got to her."
Rafferty set the back of his teeth. He didn't say what he wanted to, which was that there wasn't a damn thing any doctor could do, whether the wolf had gotten to her or not. He used a poke to open the door to the round iron stove and squatted on his haunches before it. He dumped wood into its belly, then thrust the blade of Gus's knife into the freshly fed flames.
One day to Deer Lodge, one day back... And that sawbones over there was next to useless anyway. He spent most of his hours dead drunk in a whore's bed. It would take a whole day just to sober him up enough to fork a horse.
"There's an Indian cure I heard of," Rafferty said into a room so quiet he could hear Gus's harsh breathing. "They burn out the infected wound with a red-hot iron."
He looked over his shoulder. Clementine sat in stillness on the couch. She might have just been resting there, out of the heat of the day, except for the faint line between her brows and a tautness in her jaw. Gus still hovered at the door. He rocked from one foot to the other.
"Gus," Rafferty said, "you're gonna have to—"
"No!" Gus backed up, shaking his head. "No. No, I couldn't..."
"She's your woman, brother."
A retching sound tore out of Gus's throat. He whirled and stumbled outside.
Clementine's wide-eyed gaze, deep and still, fastened onto Rafferty. "You must do it for him," she said.
He swiveled around and thrust the knife deeper into the fire. His hand shook. A moment passed. The sound of a hammer pounding hard smacked through the heavy air. Then all was quiet except for the hiss and crackle of the burning wood.
"Do not tell me, Mr. Rafferty, that it won't hurt unbearably, that it will only singe off the hair and a bit of hide."
He shook his head, unable to force any words past the tightness in his throat. He put a tin cup brimming with whiskey into her hand.
"I don't know as how I dare to allow the devil's brew to touch my genu-ine, starched-up lady's lips," she said, staring up at him with eyes that were too wide and too bright.
"Drink it, dammit!" He drew in a ragged breath. "God, I'm sorry."
He laid his hand on the side of her face and tilted her head back. "I'm going to take a knife, Boston, a knife that will be hot enough to burn through leather, and I'm going to push it deep into that cut in your arm and hold it there while I count to ten and then count to ten again, and it's going to hurt much worse than any branding. Much worse than anything you could possibly imagine."
Her lips trembled, and her throat jerked as she swallowed. "There are times, like now, when I think I must truly hate you. But you've always been unfailingly honest with me. Don't ever stop."
He allowed his fingers to trail down her bare neck. He didn't know the smile he gave her was full of pain and tenderness. "Drink up. And then I'm going to make you hate me even more, because I'll be tying down your arm before I burn it."
She swallowed again, hard. "Oh. Yes, of course."
When he took the knife from the fire, it was white and glowing. She watched him with eyes that were dark and heavy-lidded with whiskey and fear. And then he did just what he'd told her he would do. He pressed the searing hot knife deep into the wound and held it there while her flesh hissed and burned and her arm jerked against the bindings, and he waited for her to scream, waited for it with a scream choking his own throat, and yet no sound came from her at all except for the breath sucking harshly in and out of her nostrils. It wasn't until he was untying her arm that she fainted, and by then he was shaking so hard himself he could barely manage to undo the knots.
It took him a long time to bandage the wound, because he was still shaking, and because he kept stopping to look at her pale, still face. When he was done, he lifted her into his arms and carried her into the bedroom. He laid her on his brother's bed.
He brushed away the drying wisps of hair that had caught in her pale lashes. Then he stepped back and back until he was up against the wall.
The air hurt his skin. He could feel each separate stroke of his heart. He looked at her. At her hair spilling across the pillow like tangled sunbeams. The gentle curve of her cheek. The soft, full lips parted slightly in sleep. The white slope of her brow. Each part of her brought him pleasure.
Somewhere between the time at the river when he had touched her face and kissed her mouth and now, standing with his back flattened against the wall unable, afraid, to breathe... somewhere deep inside him something had been shattered beyond repair.
And outside, the sound of his brother's hammer, pounding, pounding, pounding.
The blue of early evening had settled over the room by the time she awoke. Her eyes, luminous in the half-light, rested on him a moment, then moved to the window. Her lips formed a word, breathing it more than speaking it a
loud. It sounded like "lightning."
She lay still for so long he thought she'd dozed off again. He could still hear his brother's hammer, though it had surely grown too dark to see a nail. He told himself that he could leave her now, but he stayed. A rising moon cast light through the window, glossing her face with silver. He felt something inside him tear, and it bled and hurt. Oh God, it hurt. After an eternity she turned her head and speared him with her gaze. "Come here, Mr. Rafferty."
His legs nearly buckled beneath him as he crossed the room. He leaned over her, and she reached up and grabbed his shirt, pulling him closer. For a wild moment he thought she was going to kiss him, and he was convinced his heart had stopped. When it started up again it beat in unsteady lurches.
But she only wanted to see into his eyes. "How long does it take to die of the rabies, once you've gotten it?"
He let his fingers hover over her cheek, desperate to touch her. Forbidden to touch her. He breathed in her name on a stab of anguish. "Clementine..."
Her grip on his shirt tightened. "How long?"
"I don't know. Days... a week, maybe." Too long.
"If I go mad like the wolf," she said, "you must shoot me."
He drew in a breath that clutched at his chest. "Christ Jesus."
She shook her head, hard. "I don't want to die raving and foaming at the mouth. Rafferty, please... Shoot me cleanly. Like you did the snake."
He could do that, he thought. For someone he loved.
The old biscuit-colored hound never came home.
Every day for over three weeks Rafferty rode out to look for him, in between the constant chores at the ranch. He always took his Winchester with him.
And Clementine knew the day he found him. When she spotted Rafferty from her bedroom window, riding into the yard in the middle of the afternoon. It was the way he sat his horse, stiffly and drawn deep inside himself.
He dismounted and the little orphaned calf came trotting up to him, but he shooed it away. Gus talked all the time now about how that dogie was going to be shipped off for slaughter next fall. It was some kind of test that Gus had set up for his brother. A dare. Like finding Atta Boy had been a test Rafferty had set up for himself.
He disappeared inside the barn. She didn't want to go to him.
Unlike Gus, he never tried to spare her or coddle her. He'd told her straight out it could be weeks before she would know if she had the canine madness. In the beginning she'd thought about it all the time, and her terror was like a moth trapped in her throat, fluttering there. But the sun rose and set and the days went on, and there was the washing and the cooking and the cleaning to get done and one couldn't live on the knifepoint of fear every moment.
And that kiss... She couldn't bear to think of it, of what he had made her feel. She didn't want to feel such things for her husband's brother. She was as much afraid of that kiss, of him, as she was of dying.
She didn't want to go to him, yet she found herself watching her feet as they crossed the yard, heading for the barn. It was a rainstormy day, the clouds dense and dark and heavy. And the wind... it roared through the valley, making the cottonwoods groan and give. It whipped foamy spray off the river. And it whipped up such terrible frenzied achings within her that she was sure the wolf's madness coursed through her blood.
Weak light seeped through the open doors of the barn. A swallow fluttered past her cheek and disappeared into its nest up in the dark rafters. Inside, the air was damp and cool. Straw rustled, a horse nickered softly. She had never ventured as far back as the stall where Rafferty slept when he stayed at the ranch. When he wasn't with the woman of the violet dress and red-tasseled shoes.
At the moment, he was outside the entrance to the smithy. He had his gray gelding's forehoof up on his thigh and was scraping caked mud and dung out of it with a hoof-pick. She remembered the day she'd seen him for the first time. He'd been half naked and covered with the orphaned calf's birth blood, and he had hunkered down on his heels in the yard and scratched his dog behind the ears and laughed like a young boy. And she had hated him that day. More than she had hated the mud and the sod-roofed shack and the hot, restless wind, she had hated him. She felt sorry for him now, and she thought with some satisfaction that he wouldn't like it even a little bit-— her feeling sorry for him.
She looked down at his bent back. At the play of muscle beneath the thin chambray shirt. At the way his hair folded over his collar in soft dark curls. At the way he... was.
"You found him," she said.
He was quiet for so long she didn't think he would answer. Then he straightened up and faced her. There wasn't any pain or sorrow in his eyes. There was nothing. They were flat and cold and hard. If he felt anything at all, it was buried so deep no one was ever going to find it.
"He'd gotten to be pretty much of a useless old dog anyway," he said, his voice flat and cold and hard as well. "Blind as a snubbin' post. I shoulda put him down a long time ago."
"Did you shoot him clean, like the snake?"
His shoulders lifted in a careless shrug, but she thought his mouth tightened just a little bit. "I owed him that much."
She drew in a deep breath of air that was sour-sweet with the smell of hay and dung and sweaty horse. She nodded once, then turned on her heel and left him.
If he'd done it for Atta Boy, he would do it for her.
Gus behaved as if that day at the river had never been.
He talked to her constantly about the house: "I'm giving it two bedrooms, Clem, for when the babies start to come. And we can always keep adding on rooms—if we have a baker's dozen."
And about the ranch: "I don't care what Zach says. We're never going to amount to more than a cocklebur outfit here if we don't mix some grade blood with our herd. I've sent back to Chicago for some breeding catalogs."
And only once, obliquely, about the terrible dangers that lurked in the wilderness that was Montana: "I can't be with you every minute of the day, girl. So I'm going to teach you how to use the Colt, and I want you to take it with you from now on every time you leave the cabin."
As if by speaking enough about the future he could ensure that there would be one.
But on the day his brother found Atta Boy, the dreamshine left Gus's face. He watched her go about her wifely duties that afternoon, the cooking of supper and the cleaning up afterward, as if he expected her to start convulsing and foaming at the mouth at any moment. That night, with rain thudding like galloping hooves on the sod roof, and the noise and flash of thunder and lightning, she awoke to find him leaning over her, intently searching her face. He wasn't ruthless with himself, like his brother. He allowed himself to feel, and when he did, he wasn't always able to keep it from showing.
She wrapped her arm around his neck, pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him hard on the mouth.
She could feel a fine trembling going on deep inside him. He touched his mouth where, a moment before, her lips had been.
"What'd you do that for?"
"Why were you awake and staring at me in the middle of the night?"
"Why'd you kiss me like that for?"
"I guess I must have gotten the rabies and gone crazy. Now you got it, so we can both go crazy together."
"Stop it, Clementine."
She pressed her hand against his cheek. "My husband. I love you." I have to love you. I am going to make myself love you. He lowered his head, pressing his face into her neck. His words were muffled by her hair. "I've been waiting forever to hear you say that, and now you have, and all I can think of is that you might die."
"I'm not going to die." She said it with conviction because she thought it to be so. Death was a stranger to her, and so she could not really believe in it.
Her hands moved over his broad shoulders and down his strong back. She wrapped her arms around his waist and held him tightly against her. Held him fiercely. "Tell me how it's going to be, Gus. Tell me how we're going to make the ranch into the best spread in all of western Montana
. Tell me about the house you're building and how happy we'll be in it, you and I and all the babies we are going to have. Tell it all to me again."
She held her breath, waiting for him to speak. But all she heard was the wind and the drumming of the rain on the roof. And the drips where the sod leaked. Then she felt his chest move as he breathed, and she heard him building dreams out of words. And as she listened, she held him close to her heart, as if she could fill up the loneliness by an act of will.
"Tell me that one story, Gus. Where you are riding through a snowstorm and there's a warm fire waiting for you at home and stew bubbling on the stove and—"
"A wife with hair the color of a wheat field in August and eyes like a pine forest at dusk."
"Yes..." The trouble with dreams, she thought, was that sometimes they came true.
Lightning flashed and he raised his head. She looked up at him through a blur of memory, seeing him as she had four months ago, when she was someone else. His was a good face, with strong bones and a wide mouth framed by a mustache that was not so thick and long that it could hide his smile. And his eyes, those laughing eyes, were as blue and open as the Montana sky.
The cowboy of her dreams.
She could love him; she would make it so. And she would never allow herself to think again about that day at the river.
CHAPTER 12
Clementine tilted her head pack and looked up at the shanty's sod roof. A bed of sweet pink phlox had taken root there and burst into bloom overnight. A roof of flowers. The thought was so beautiful it made her smile.
Last night's storm had blown away, and the sun shone its heart out in a sky too blue to be real. It would have been a perfect day, but for the wind.
Clementine had taken a bucket down to the south meadow to gather the wild strawberries that grew there, before they could all be eaten by the jays and the flickers. Red juice stained her fingers, lips, and tongue. The berries had tasted as sweet as the sod-roof flowers smelled. But it was too much sweetness too early in the morning, for they had left her stomach feeling queasy.
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