And she felt a rage at virtuous women like herself, who condemned their own kind for the things that were done to them by men.
"Are you sure you aren't gonna need some help?"
Clementine looked down into Hannah Yorke's face. She saw a wariness there, and the stamp of a sleepless, grieving night.
And she saw another woman grown. A woman who had loved probably, and lost certainly. A woman who had broken the Lord's commandments and the laws of men and now must forever pay for her transgressions. A woman who was ashamed of what she was and proud of what she had become. A woman just like any other woman born of woman. A woman like her.
Saphronie had stopped singing. Once again the only sounds in the room were the tick of the clock and the creak of the rocker.
It wasn't until she was outside on the gallery, preparing to expose the print, that she and Mrs. Yorke spoke again.
She had already sensitized the albumen paper and was now fitting it onto the negative plate in the printing rack, which she had set up on the unshaded end of the porch. "It shouldn't take more than half an hour of this bright sunshine before we have a print," she said. She was kneeling before the rack and had to tilt her head way back to meet Hannah's eyes. She produced a shy smile. "I guess you must find it hard to believe, but I really do know what I'm doing."
Hannah's answering smile was hard and brittle. "Oh, I don't doubt you know what you're doing, honey. You might be an innocent, but you ain't nobody's fool. What I'm wondering is why such a genteel lady as you, such a smart little lady, would defy her husband and risk ruining her reputation simply to ease the grieving of a worthless whore."
"You asked me to come."
"You could've spat in my face. You should have spat in my face. Your Gus did, in a manner of speaking."
Clementine glanced up at the window, where ragged snatches of lullaby spoke of a heartbreak too terrible to bear. "That poor woman up there—she isn't only a..." But she couldn't bring herself to speak the vulgar word aloud, even though Hannah Yorke had been tossing it about all afternoon like rice at a wedding. She looked down at the printing rack. She felt the heat of blood rushing to her face. "She is also a mother. No matter in what ways you both have sinned, you are women. Like me." No, that had not come out at all right. It made her sound self-righteous, to talk of sinning like that. She looked up to explain herself and saw to her dismay that Hannah Yorke's eyes were awash with tears.
Clementine stumbled to feet. "Mrs. Yorke, please, I didn't mean—"
Hannah backed away, shaking her head so hard the tears splashed onto her cheeks. "Oh, my," she said. She pressed her fist to her mouth and, whirling, crossed the porch so fast her heels rapped like castanets on the wooden boards. But at the door she stopped and her spine stiffened. Turning, she said, "Will you come back into the house when you're done out here? I could serve you some refreshment while that thing..." She gestured helplessly at the printing rack.
Clementine thought of tar pits and the scars on her palms, prices women paid for defying convention, for disobeying the laws of God and of men, who were allowed to make up all the rules. She lifted her chin. "I would love something cool to drink, Mrs. Yorke."
Hannah sliced up two pieces of dried-apple pie. Not that she'd be able to choke down a single bite, her stomach felt so jittery. And her hands shook as she stirred the lemonade she'd made with citric acid crystals.
She entered her front parlor on legs as shaky as a newborn colt's. The room suddenly seemed ugly to her eyes. Too stuffed with things: plaster busts, cushions, gimcracks, and vases. Back before she'd taken over the house, there'd been lewd paintings in here as well, and a slate board with the menu and price list. Cost you three dollars if you want it straight, cowboy. Five if you want it done the French way. Hannah thought she could still smell the stale whiskey, the unwashed cuspidors, and the sweat of men in rut. No matter how much dried sweet grass she burned, the parlor of this former parlor house still stank of old sins.
Clementine McQueen sat perched on the end of the gold brocade sofa, her gaze focused on the giant grizzly bear rug spread out before the nickel parlor stove. But as Hannah entered the room, the girl turned her head and greeted her with an uncertain smile. It was a hot day, and the stiff, tight black collar of her dress butted up under her chin, yet she looked as cool as an ice-cream soda. She was so very Bostony, with her perfect manners and quiet courtesy. She'd been born knowing to leave her hat and gloves on when taking tea and never to leave the spoon in the cup, knowing what hour to pay a social call and how to address an invitation in a fine copperplate script. Hannah Yorke hadn't even owned a pair of shoes until she was twelve, let alone a hat and gloves.
Hannah set the tray of lemonade and pie on an oval mahogany tea table. One of the glasses teetered, and the sharp smell of the citric acid tickled her nose. She pressed a finger against her nostrils to stop a sneeze, and snorted instead. "Pardon me," she mumbled, and handed the lemonade to Clementine, along with a napkin and a tight little smile. "It ain't—isn't the real thing, I'm afraid."
Hannah settled down in a chair opposite her, wishing herself in a deep, deep hole somewhere on the other side of the world.
Clementine opened the napkin and laid it across her lap, rubbing her fingers over its pink-flowered border done with tiny, delicate Irish stitches. "This is very pretty. Did you embroider it yourself?"
"Lord, honey." The words gusted out of her, too loud. "I wouldn't know the sharp end of a needle if I sat on it."
Clementine lifted the lemonade to her lips and took a dainty sip. "Mrs. Yorke..."
Hannah leaned over and waved a hand through the air, nearly knocking over her own glass. "You might as well call me Hannah. The Mrs. business is a lie. Oh, I came close to it once, but someone forgot to remind me to keep my drawers buttoned until the ring was on my finger." She forced a laugh because it was such a tired old story—every whore had a similar one. Hers just happened to be true.
Clementine was staring at her now in that intense way she had that made Hannah want to wriggle like a cutworm. "I have a question I would like to put to you," the girl said in her very proper diction, which had Hannah despising the Kentucky twang in her own voice. "I don't mean to offer you insult with the indelicacy of it, but I..." She faltered. She ran a finger beneath the stiffened velvet edging of her high collar. A telltale blush stained her cheeks.
In the world where Mrs. Gus McQueen dwelled, women of breeding said "limbs" instead of "legs," even when talking about a piano. In that world women bathed in their shifts and made love wearing nine yards of flannel to a husband in a union suit. And in such a world there were no rules of etiquette for how to make polite conversation with a saloonkeeper and retired whore.
Hannah decided to take pity on her. "I've never been with Gus," she said. At the girl's look of utter shock, she let out another hard laugh. "I guess that wasn't your question."
Clementine slowly shook her head, her eyes wide. "I'm glad that you and Gus never..." A tide of color now flooded her cheeks. She dropped her gaze to her lap. "Mrs. Yorke—Hannah..."
"You want to know how a sweet little gal like me got into such a business?"
"Oh, no, that wasn't what I... But I must confess I have wondered..." Hannah watched with amusement as the girl's perfect manners warred with her all-too-human curiosity.
"Listen, it wasn't any grand tragedy like what happened to Saphronie. I just listened to too many sweet-talking men. So what is it you want to ask me, Mrs. McQueen? You'll find we drink our liquor straight out here in the RainDance country, and we do our talking straight as well."
The girl lifted her chin and met Hannah's gaze squarely. "How does a woman know if she is with child?"
Hannah felt a stab of envy so acute it was an actual pain just below her heart. It left her breathless, and she thought she could actually feel all the blood drain from her face. A baby. This girl who had everything, who'd been born having everything, was now going to have a baby.
Clementine set
down her lemonade and started to stand up. "I know, of course, how improper it was of me to introduce such an indelicate topic into the conversation, but you did invite me to speak frankly. I only thought that perhaps you might have had some experience with the condition—"
"Lord, honey, we weren't exactly having a delicate conversation to begin with." Hannah hurried over to the sofa. She seized the girl's hands, pulling her back down. She looked at their entwined fingers. Hers soft and white because she was careful to keep them that way, Clementine's covered with expensive ecru kid. She raised her head and met Clementine's gaze and actually managed a smile. "I've had experience with a number of conditions—'experience,' of course, most times being just another word for 'mistake.'"
Clementine was looking at her with eyes that were guileless and so very, very young. "So you have had a baby?"
"I... oh, Lord a-mercy, no. I ain't never made that particular mistake," she lied. "But in my line of work I've come across plenty of whor—women who have. After all, when it comes to what goes on in a bed, and what comes out of it, men and women all got the same fixin's whether they be paupers or kings. So, when did you last have the curse, honey?" At the girl's bewildered look, she smiled gently. "When was the last time you bled?"
"Oh." A hint of fresh color rose on Clementine's cheeks. "Not since before the first time Gus and I... since I came here to Rainbow Springs."
There was no privacy in a one-room miner's shack. Hannah Yorke had grown up pure, but not ignorant. There had been nights when she'd awakened to the sound of her parents coupling behind the curtain that shielded their bed. She had helped her mother bring two stillborn babes into the world and a little brother who had died before his first year. And those times when the women all got together, for weddings and birthings and funerals, Hannah at her mother's side, helping with the endless cooking, the women's work, had listened as they talked about their men and their marriage beds, their pregnancies and the cycles of their woman's bodies.
"Well, if you ain't bled since the first time you and Gus... made love, then you'd be, let's see, about four months along." She studied the girl's slender waist. "You should be showing by now."
Clementine looked down at herself. "I have gotten rounder."
Hannah hooted a laugh. "Honey, you're gonna get a whole lot rounder before you're done. All of you's gonna get as swolled up as a dead frog."
That ravishing smile flashed across Clementine's face. "Oh, I shouldn't mind that, for I do so want a baby. But, Mrs. Yorke... Hannah, how does one know?"
Hannah struggled with the thickness in her throat. "Have-have you been feeling sickish in the mornings, and dizzy at unexpected moments?" She smiled at Clementine's eager nod. "And your breasts should be getting tender and your nipples turning darker, like blueberry stain, maybe."
Clementine stared down at her bodice as if she could see through the thick serge and cotton to her woman's flesh beneath. Her hand come up, hovered a moment, then touched. She smiled. "Oh, they are! They have been. I had thought it was because of what Gus—" She stopped, blushing furiously.
Hannah pursed her lips to keep from laughing. "Well, I expect you'll be experiencing other not-so-pleasant sensations soon. Why I remember how I... how this girl I knew belched and farted so much her first six months, she went around sounding like a locomotive going up a steep grade."
"Oh, my!" Clementine exclaimed, her face glowing red and yet she was laughing. And in that moment Hannah knew that for the first time in her life she'd found another woman she could love as a friend.
But Clementine McQueen was a lady, and she was... who she was.
"Tell me more," Clementine said. "Tell me everything."
Hannah's voice took on even more of a Kentucky drawl as she spoke of labor pains and water breaking and a baby's suckling. But she didn't talk about the whore she knew who'd died after drinking bluing to induce an abortion, or the opium addict who had given birth to a spastic child. Or the cones of cocoa butter and boric acid sitting on top of her own dresser, which she used to keep a baby from ever getting started. Or of her mother's stillborn babies, and her own little boy who'd been born when she was so alone and so scared. Whose first view of the world had been a room in a brothel.
Afterward, when Hannah thought about that afternoon, it was to marvel at how strange it would have seemed to anyone listening—a Montana whore imparting the facts of childbirth to a Boston blue blood. And when she was done, Clementine
McQueen had stood up and thanked her with those polished, impeccable manners as if Hannah had simply been giving her the recipe for dried-apple pie.
They went outside, onto the gallery. The photograph as it came off the printing frame was a solid purple square with no image to be seen. But Clementine draped herself in the dark tent again, and when she emerged, the likeness of Saphronie's daughter was there in the sepia tones that Hannah was used to. It smelled of strange chemicals and varnish.
Clementine mounted the photograph on a stiff card with a pretty floral border. She held it in her hands, and Hannah looked at it over her shoulder. The sunshine gilded it like the light of her own memory.
"She was a beautiful little girl," Clementine said.
"Yes. Yes, she was..." Her own child's face, his dear little face, was only a blurred image in her mind, but she could vividly remember his smell. That baby smell of milk and talcum and soft, moist flesh. "I reckon surely Saphronie will let us put the poor thing in the ground now."
They looked up together at the clatter of wheels on the road. Clementine's husband pulled up to the front gate in the buck-board. He wrapped the reins around the brake handle, jumped down, opened the gate, and came toward them with long, purposeful strides.
Hannah watched him come, thinking she'd been wrong about him. Gus McQueen might have a stiff neck, but at least his head was on straight. He'd given his wife enough time to make her photographs before coming after her.
He stood at the bottom of the steps, his hands on his hips, and looked up at them. There was anger on his face, but there was something else there as well, Hannah thought. An uncertainty, perhaps. A dawning comprehension that his young wife was not at all as malleable and submissive as he might want her to be.
"You ready to come on home now, girl?" he said.
She looked back at him. If she was afraid of him, she didn't show it. "Yes, Mr. McQueen. I am ready."
Gus didn't help his wife pack up her camera and things. He went back to the buckboard and waited for her there, as if tlinger too close to the former parlor house was to risk being sucked down willy-nilly into the jaws of sin.
"I won't bother you again," Hannah said to the girl when she was ready to leave. "Your Gus is right. You hadn't ought to be seen around the likes of me."
The girl walked across the gallery, her back as straight as a plumb line, her head high. Skirts rustling, shoes tapping.
But at the top of the steps she turned and looked back. "Mrs. Yorke, if i wish to pay a call on you, I shall."
She eased her horse down to a walk, breathing deeply, filling her lungs with air that was said to be better than whiskey in the belly. She could feel the pinto's heart thumping beneath her legs, feel his muscles trembling with the excitement of the run. It had been like straddling thunder and riding it across the sky.
She followed an old buffalo trail that had been washed deep by the rains in all the years since the buffalo had last used it. She rode out from beneath the pines and descended into a coulee with the sun warm at her back. A bawling calf disturbed the silence, and a man's slow, melodious cursing.
The mouth of the gulch was deep in shade cast by the yellow pines and larches above. There were still patches of winter snow where the sun never reached. The miry ground gave beneath her horse's hooves.
Her husband's brother knelt at the edge of an old buffalo wallow, wiping off the face of a calf with his bandanna. He was calling it all manner of profane names, but in the gentlest voice she'd ever heard from a man. The calf must have
gotten bogged down in the wallow and Rafferty had hauled it out. It was hard to tell which of them was wearing the most mud.
She thought he didn't know she was there, but he didn't act surprised when she spoke. "I've seen pigs that were dirtier, Mr. Rafferty."
He stood up slowly and turned, cuffing the worst of the mud splatters off his face. "Well, now," he said, his deep drawl making music of the words, "that's mighty cruel of you to say, Boston. I'd've thought you'd have more of a care for the tender feelin's of this here poor dogie."
She laughed aloud. Today felt wonderful.
He came at her, his gaze hot and intense in that way he had. He came right up next to her, so close the toe of her boot brushed his chest. He looked up at her and she thought he was going to smile, but then his eyes focused on the gun she wore around her waist, an old Colt that Gus had given her.
"What in hell you aimin' to do with that?"
She lifted her chin. "Protect myself."
"Uh-huh. I guess you figure if you meet up with trouble you can wave that in its face and scare it to death."
"I'll have you know that while I might not yet be able to shoot the head off a rattlesnake—"
"Lord, I bet you couldn't hit the side of a barn if you were standing inside it and had all day to aim in."
He was mean to her sometimes. Most times. And she wasn't very nice to him. But other times, like now, he'd tease her or suddenly smile in that way of his that creased his cheek and warmed his eyes, and she'd forget to be careful.
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