She heard a murmur of voices now coming from inside the cabin, and she paused at the door. Gus and his brother were usually out chasing cows this time of day, trying to keep the cattle from straying off the range and Iron Nose from straying onto it.
"You sure he had it, Zach? You didn't just shoot him because—"
"He had it."
Gus let out a long, shaky breath. "Well, then, don't you reckon she'd be showing signs of it by now, too?"
"Hell, brother, how're you ever gonna know? She's always acted crazier than popping corn on a hot skillet."
She stepped across the threshold with a deliberately heavy tread. They sat at the table, nursing steaming cups of coffee. The smell of the strong brew battled with the sweet scent of the phlox coming through the open door. Gus's head snapped up as she entered. He studied her intently, as though looking for signs of impending madness.
When she walked past Rafferty she caught the glint of laughter in his eyes, and she knew he'd sensed her all along, hovering outside the door, listening... She's always acted crazier than popping corn on a hot skillet. Hunh. She became flustered when he teased her. Gus rarely teased her, and her father certainly hadn't ever done so. It was a strangely intimate thing, this teasing. She wasn't sure she liked it.
She could feel the men's eyes on her as she set the bucket of berries in the sink. She spun around, hands planted on her hips. "What are you looking at?"
"Nothing," Gus mumbled down into his coffee. He blew on it, took a sip.
"You got berry juice all over your mouth, Boston," Rafferty said. His eyes weren't laughing at her anymore.
A gust of wind blasted the cabin. Clementine turned back to the sink just as a big piece of sod, soaked by last night's rain and shaken loose by the wind, fell with a sodden splat into her bucket of fresh-picked berries.
"Oh, drat this wretched roof!" she exclaimed. Wild laughter tickled her throat and she bit her lip. The tame curse, spoken in her fine diction, had sounded silly even to her own ears.
She whirled and caught them staring at her again, although they both quickly averted their faces.
She seized the bucket and advanced on them, growling and baring her teeth like Aunt Etta's snappish little terrier. When she got close enough she lifted the bucket high in the air and dumped muddy sod and mashed strawberries on top of her husband's head.
There was a stunned silence, and then the mud and berries began to slide off Gus's head and shoulders and onto the table. He stared up at her, his eyes wide, and he couldn't have looked more shocked if she had truly turned into a rabid beast like the wolf.
A great whoop of laughter built and built in her chest. She pressed her lips together and clutched at her waist and collapsed bent over onto the coffee-case couch. But she couldn't stop it. It burst out of her, a great loud sound of joy and wonder.
She laughed and laughed. She rocked back and forth, her feet coming off the floor and kicking at the air. Her hair came loose and her face turned red and her laughter filled the cabin.
She lay back limp against the old soogan padding. Her eyes brimmed with tears as she stared at her husband, at the mud and fruit that decorated his hair. She clapped a hand over her mouth.
Gus picked a muddy strawberry off his forehead. "Well, hell. That wasn't funny, girl."
Laughter burst out of her nose in a most unladylike snort.
Rafferty cleared his throat; he looked around the cabin and then at her, his expression wary. Gus half straightened off the nail-keg stool. "Clementine, girl, are you..."
Snorting and gurgling, laughing out loud, she jumped up and ran out the door.
She ran as if she were being chased by heel flies. She had never run like this before, never picked up her skirts and run all out, stretching her legs, straining her lungs. Running, running, running, with the wind blowing in her hair, pressing against her ears, legs pumping high, until she thought that maybe she wasn't touching the ground at all but flying above it.
She ran until she reached her favorite spot on the ranch, the meadow where the buffalo grass grew as high as her knees now and the willows bent thick and heavy over the river. She threw herself down into the grass, letting the laughter come. It was as if she had waited her whole life for a reason to laugh and, once started, she couldn't stop.
She squinted against the dense sunlight. The grass seemed to tremble with the light and the wind. Strange feelings stirred deep within her belly. She pressed a hand to her stomach. Perhaps she would tell Gus that they might be going to have a baby. Now that she wasn't going to go mad.
She rolled over, burying her face in the grass, digging her fingers deep into the root-woven earth. She felt like the grass, rooted to the red Montana earth, but not so deep that she couldn't be ripped free if she wasn't careful. She pulled loose a great clump of the grass, as if to show herself how easily it could be done. She tossed it away and pressed her face into the exposed dirt. She smelled its ripeness, felt its coolness. This dirt that was Montana.
She hated this place. It was too big, this country, too raw and wild. There were times when she thought she would be crushed by it. And other times... Times when she looked out over the prairie and saw herself astride a wild cayuse, chasing her shadow over the empty miles of grass, riding and riding until she fell off the end of the world. Times when she looked at the big Montana sky and saw herself flying like an eagle, spreading her wings against the vast and empty blue and soaring on the tail of the wind. Flying high, high enough to touch the sun.
A hot-blooded woman just waitin' for an excuse to bust out.
She dug her fingers into the damp earth. She didn't want to bust out. She wanted to be safe, to belong. To have roots. She wanted to have babies, and she wanted Gus to love her, and to live a decent, moral life.
She wanted to find peace in her heart.
She smoothed her hands out, pressing them against the Montana dirt. She hated this place, and she feared it. And she loved it fiercely.
She laid her cheek on the cool earth and slept. When she awoke, the wind had died and the sun burned noon-bright and hot. She sat up, stretching, feeling languid and sore, and yet humming with an odd excitement. She had dumped a bucket of mud and berries on top of her husband's head, and laughed, and run, and slept away a morning—all wicked, irresponsible things. She knew she ought to feel guilty, but instead there was only a strange sense of wonder and repleteness that she sometimes felt after Gus made love to her.
She walked slowly back along the path she had pelted down hours before. She could almost hear the larch needles falling to earth. The sun melted and flowed over her like hot butter. As she climbed the snake fence, she saw a plum-colored shay parked in the yard and a woman speaking to Gus, a woman wearing a dress the same bright ruby red as the wild strawberries. A woman with hair like antique copper, as tarnished as her virtue.
Clementine watched them a moment through the shimmering heat ripples. She could tell by the stiff set of Gus's shoulders and the way his hands were jammed onto his hipbones that he was angry.
Gus cut off a furious spate of words as she came up to them. Hannah Yorke's gaze met hers. Two bright spots of color enhanced her rouged cheeks.
"Clementine," Gus said, "get on in the house—"
"Mrs. McQueen, wait." The woman took a step forward. She placed a hand on Clementine's arm, then dropped it immediately when Clementine stiffened. "One of the women who works for me... her little girl died of the measles yesterday. She won't let us bury her. I thought if you could take little Patsy's likeness for her to have as a keepsake it might ease things for her, help her to let the child go. I know it's a terrible imposition and a..." She looked at Gus, and bitterness pulled at her mouth. "Saphronie might be only a whore, as you say, but she loved her little girl same as any woman would."
"But of course I will come," Clementine said. She had never photographed a dead child, but she'd heard of it being done. It had been the fashion ten years ago to mount tintypes on gravestones. "It will take
me only a moment to get my equipment."
But as she turned, Gus blocked her path. His face was set harder than she'd ever seen it before. "If you think I'm going to let you ride into Rainbow Springs and right up to that house of sin, sitting alongside the town harlot—"
"Gus, you can't mean to be so cruel. A woman has lost a child, her baby. If I can do something to help her through her grief—"
He gripped her arm, his fingers pressing through the heavy brown serge of her sleeve. "I forbid you to do this, girl."
She flung up her head and met his angry eyes. "You are hurting me."
He let her go, but that was all. "You are not going to—"
"But I am," she said. "I am going to ride into Rainbow Springs beside Mrs. Yorke. I shall go into her house and photograph that poor dead child, and you will not try to stop me."
They rode in silence all the way to Rainbow Springs, Clementine and the woman of the red-tasseled shoes. Clementine had seen those shoes when Hannah Yorke lifted her skirts high to climb into the shay. Had seen them as she braced her feet wide apart like a man, to drive the buggy over a road as rutted as a washboard. They were a harlot's shoes, yet she could not stop looking at them.
Mrs. Yorke pulled the shay up to the front gate of her house, which was by far the nicest in all the RainDance country, with its spool-railed gallery and fanciful gingerbread. She helped Clementine unload her equipment, all in silence except for a simple admonition to mind the steps.
Clementine paused on the gallery to savor the loveliness of the house. The wicker rocker with its blue-flowered cushion. The fanlight over the door, leaded with blue, red, yellow, and green glass that cast rainbows onto the painted white wood. The front windows lined with delicate lace curtains and decorated with pressed ferns on the panes. Clementine's gaze met Hannah Yorke's for a brief moment, and then she followed those red-tasseled shoes into the house of sin.
The air inside was cool and thick with the scent of lily of the valley perfume. She got a glimpse of the parlor through a green glass beaded curtain: thick wine-colored velvet drapes under tasseled valances, a medallion-backed sofa upholstered in gold brocade, a tree of life carpet. She followed Mrs. Yorke upstairs and down a hall papered in red flock and lit by a pair of fringe-shaded oil lamps. Murmurs of memories stirred within her, of other houses, of another life. Of the amenities and luxuries that she had fled from without understanding all that she would be giving up.
She passed by rooms with closed doors with shiny glass knobs. It was a large house, much too large for one person to live in alone. But then, Mrs. Yorke didn't always live in it alone. She tried to picture Gus's wild brother in this house. Rafferty, who had always seemed much too uncivilized even for the confines of a rough sod-roofed cabin.
An image flashed across her mind and was gone, like movement caught out the corner of one's eye, of that man and this woman of the red-tasseled shoes lying naked on a bed. A heat pulsated through her, and she felt the strangest awareness of her own body. Of the flesh of her thighs Ribbing together as she walked down the hall. Of her nipples, like smooth, hard pebbles beneath all her proper layers of clothes. Of a rippling deep in her belly, like a lake suddenly stirred by a gust of wind.
"She's in here," Mrs. Yorke said, and Clementine started. She blushed, sure that her sinful thoughts were as plain as the face on the moon to such a woman. A woman so worldly, so sinful herself.
They entered a small bedroom that smelled of camphor and hartshorn and, underneath, the sick-sweet stench of decay.
The dead child lay in a plain iron bed beneath a colorful flowerbasket petit point quilt. Her small golden head barely made a dent in the lace-slipped pillow. The room was quiet except for the tick of a long case clock and the sibilant whisper of a horsehair rocking chair, its curved slats rolling back and forth, back and forth, on the bare pine floor.
Mrs. Yorke knelt before the woman in the rocker and patted her knee awkwardly. The woman had her face buried in her hands. "Saphronie. I've brought Mrs. McQueen, who has kindly agreed to make little Patsy's photograph."
The woman made a strangled, mewling sound into her hands. An immense clot of pity clogged Clementine's throat. She turned away, toward the dead child in the bed.
Sunlight poured through the sheer lace curtains at the window, reflecting off the cranberry glass lamp that sat on a petticoat table beside the bed. The light gave the child's cheeks a glow of life. She was such a pretty little girl, it didn't seem possible...
A dizziness assailed Clementine, and a nausea, similar to what she'd felt after eating the strawberries. She hadn't known, hadn't understood what it would be like. She had felt sad for the woman and her loss, but only in the abstract, as one stranger thinks of another. Now she felt the woman's pain keenly. How can she bear it? Clementine wondered. How can any woman bear it?
She drew in a deep breath through her mouth as she studied the room. With the curtains pulled aside, enough light would come in the two large windows so that she wouldn't need to burn a magnesium wire, which produced a flat, harsh image. For this she wanted a gentle, soft effect. She didn't want the child to look dead in the photograph, but alive and sleeping.
A wavering voice began to sing a lullaby, scraping like a rusty chain. Clementine turned and nearly gasped aloud in shock. The woman had dropped her hands and lifted her head, and her face... her face was horribly disfigured by tattoos, like dark blue teardrops, that ran from her mouth down over her chin.
The woman rocked and sang and wept. Hannah Yorke straightened and stepped forward. "Will you need help?" She gestured toward the cases at Clementine's feet.
Clementine blinked and swallowed hard. "No, no, thank you, I can manage." Oh, God, she thought. Her face. Her poor face.
She had to force herself not to stare at the woman, not to be so unpardonably rude. "I will do a tintype for her to mount on the grave marker," Clementine said to Mrs. Yorke, as she went about setting up her camera and portable dark tent. The woman rocked and sang, rocked and sang.
"And a paper print for her to keep with her always... Oh, whyever has she done that to her face?"
"It was done to her. Indians."
Clementine's head snapped up in renewed shock.
"Comanches stole her off a wagon train when she was just a kid. They sold her to the Mohave, who like to tattoo their girls on the chin and arms by piercing the skin with sharpened bones and rubbing dye into the wounds. They think of them as marks of beauty, I guess." She cocked her head, studying Clementine's upturned face as if undecided whether to say more. While the woman still sang and rocked, lost in a terrible grief, Hannah pitched her smoky voice low. "Before they sold her, the Comanches did what they call 'passing her over the prairie.' I reckon even a lady like you can guess what that means."
Clementine nodded. Oh, yes, she could imagine.
"One of the Mohave braves eventually took her as his squaw. When our soldiers rescued her, they killed him and they killed the baby she'd had by him. Trouble is, by then she loved her man, even if he was an Indian, and her baby too, of course. And after all that, her family wouldn't have her back. Not when they got a look at her face and heard what had been done to her."
"But that was hardly her fault," Clementine protested, her throat tight. Unable to help herself, she stared at the woman, at her ravaged face. Ravaged by torture and grief. They had killed her baby and now she'd lost her little girl. It wasn't right that one woman should have to suffer such misery.
"Finding fault doesn't change what is," Mrs. Yorke said quietly. "Any girl who lies with a savage, willing or not, is going to come away from it branded a whore. There ain't no man going to marry her, and no one's going to hire her to sell hats or wait on restaurant tables. You look at her and tell me how you're going to change what is."
But Clementine no longer looked at the singing, rocking woman with her ruined face and ruined life. She looked at Hannah Yorke.
Color flooded Hannah's lightly painted cheeks, and she shook her head hard. S
he raised a finger to Clementine's nose as if to scold her. "Oh, no, you don't. Don't you go putting feelings to me that I don't have. I ain't nobody's savior. Saphronie does the swamp work no one else'll do, and I get one dollar out of three for every trip she makes to my back room. 'Cause whatever Saphronie was on the day she left that Indian camp, she's a whore now, plain and simple. So I reckon you know damn well what that makes me."
"I know what you are, Mrs. Yorke," Clementine said.
She held Hannah's angry gaze a moment longer, then lowered her head and began to peel off her soft ecru kid gloves. A lady's gloves that hid the scars made by her father's cane. He had beaten her for looking at souvenir cards. He would certainly think her beyond all redemption now if he found her in a house of sin, speaking to a fallen woman about such things as back rooms, which she wasn't even supposed to know existed.
Her mother had warned her about all the ways a girl could tarnish her virtue: speak to a boy who was a stranger to her family, return his smile, return his kiss... The loss of a girl's virtue was like a tar pit. If she dipped one little toe in the black gooey mess she would be stuck fast forever. Ruined forever.
And so Clementine had always believed that women fell into harlotry because of a wickedness in them that made them enjoy the carnal attentions of men. "Grant not, O Lord, the desires of the wicked." But Saphronie with her poor tattooed face wasn't a sinner; she had been sinned against. And what about Hannah Yorke of the red-tasseled shoes? What tar pit had pulled her down to a place where she rented out her back room for the easement of men's lust?
Clementine looked at the two women—Saphronie with her ruined face buried in her hands, Hannah kneeling by the rocker, stroking the other woman's back—and she felt something within her break away and die. Some of her youth and innocence.
Her hands curled into fists, her fingers pressing hard against the scars. She felt outrage at the tragedy she had found in this room. Rage at men like her father who made it possible. Oh, she could just imagine the Reverend Theodore Kennicutt standing high in his pulpit, pointing his righteous finger at Saphronie and calling her a harlot for lying with a savage, condemning her to a life of swamping out saloons and selling her body to strangers. And rage at men like Mr. Rafferty who took their pleasure from women in houses like this one, without sparing a thought for the souls and hearts within the soft feminine flesh they craved.
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