Gus stood over her. His face seemed to collapse in upon itself, to crumble. "Oh, Jesus, Clem. Lord Jesus. I'm sorry, g— I'm sorry." He reached down to help her up, but she jerked away from him, lurching to her feet. Her chest heaved as she tried to draw in a breath. The whole side of her face burned.
His hand came up as if he would touch the mark he'd left on her cheek, as if he could soothe it away. A muscle jumped at the corner of his mouth. "I never meant to hit you."
"You did hit me, though, Mr. McQueen."
She felt behind her, her fingers grasping the stirrup. She watched him, watched his hands and his eyes, watched him until she was safely back in the saddle.
"Clementine!" he shouted after her. And kept shouting, but by then she could no longer hear him over the thunder of Gay-feather's hooves and the rush of the wind.
She sat on one of the nail-keg stools, hunched over, hugging herself, pressing her elbows hard against her belly. She wasn't crying, though. She never cried.
Her face throbbed. The tears she couldn't shed burned the back of her eyes, the sobs built and subsided, built and subsided, deep in her chest. Outside, a hammer pounded rhythmically—Gus working on the house, brooding. He probably had himself convinced by now that she'd brought the punishment on herself, and perhaps she had. "Thy desire shall he to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." But her anger with him was a hot cloud in her mind.
"Clementine?"
She straightened and turned.
Rafferty stood in the doorway. His gaze fastened onto her face, and fury leaped into his eyes, hot and bright as a grass fire.
He spun on his heel and started across the yard toward the hay meadow and the house that Gus was building for her.
"No, don't!" she shouted, running to catch up with him, clutching at his sleeve to stop him. "Stay away from him, please. Please."
He swung around. "You're carryin' his child and he puts bruises on your face, and you want me to stay away from him? I ought to kill him."
"He is my husband. I belong to him. Not to you, Zach Rafferty. Not to you!"
She saw the hurt in his eyes before he lowered his head so that his hat brim shielded his face. "A man don't ride into another man's business and take over," he said. "It goes against the grain, against what's right. Yet you asked me to take a stand against my own brother, to stop him from doin' what he felt was just and right, and I did. For you, because you asked, and that changes things, Clementine, whether you want them changed or not."
"Don't..." She spoke as if her throat hurt. "Don't make me choose between you. It isn't... What happened between us that day at the river, it was wrong, a sin. I am married to your brother. Not only is that a tie made by God that only he can sever, but Gus... is what I want."
One corner of his mouth tightened. "Hell, you haven't a fool's notion of what it is you want yet." He stared at her now, his face hard. She tried to control her breathing, to keep from trembling. It seemed she could feel the ebb and flow of her blood in every part of her. "I ain't going to make you choose between me and my brother, but that's for his sake and has nothin' to do with you. Still, someday you got to make a stand on it, Boston. Inside yourself, if nowhere else. That's what it's all about out here. Having the freedom to decide just what sort of person you're going to be, and having the guts to face up to it when you do."
He half turned, then snapped back around and pointed a stiff finger in her face. "And here's another thing. Don't you ever, ever again pull a gun on a man—"
"But I wasn't going to shoot anybody. I was only going to fire into the air, to stop them."
He sighed and shook his head. He brushed his thumb along her cheekbone, just above the bruise his brother had given her. "Once you pulled that gun from the holster you should've been ready to kill with it if that's what it came down to. If you pack a weapon, you got to be big enough to carry its weight. You understand what I'm sayin' to you?"
She pressed her fist to her lips and shut her eyes, nodding. He was telling her that she had been behaving like a child and that she must begin to be what she was now. A woman grown.
"You goin' to go make things up with Gus?" he said softly, still stroking her cheek.
She nodded again.
"Then go do it."
She went past him, her eyes on the ground, walking toward the new house. The hammering had stopped.
Her feet felt heavy, weighted down, as was her heart. Thunder rumbled in the air. She looked over her shoulder at the mountains. Like jealous mothers the mountains had gathered up the storm clouds, hugging them close.
She had said she belonged to Gus and she knew this had to be so. " Wives submit yourselves... he shall rule... he shall rule..." God demanded that it be so. But she refused to live in fear like her mother. Her poor cowed mother who unlike the mountains had never hugged her child close. Her poor furtive mother who had filled a sachet with coins, one by one, trying and failing to protect her daughter from the pain of being a woman grown.
A mother who had told her daughter to go with joy, but hadn't told her how.
She walked through what would someday be the back door of the house in which she would probably live with Gus McQueen for the rest of her life. It smelled of new wood and her man's sweat. He sat on a sawhorse, his hands pinched between his knees. At the tap of her boots on the rough floorboards, he lifted his head. His mouth twisted, and he looked away.
She knew this time would pass. She had borne his weight, taken his body into hers. He was her husband and she would come to care for him again. But at the moment there was this vast emptiness inside her. She felt nothing, nothing at all.
She crossed the space between them and laid her hand on his shoulder. Rubbed her palm over and over the soft red flannel of his shirt.
His back hunched, he wrapped his arms around her waist, crushing her. He buried his head in her breasts. His words were muffled by the stiff bone and sateen armor of her bodice. "I swear I'll never hurt you again, Clem. I love you, love you, love you..."
She looked through the kitchen wall, which was only wooden studs framing air. Rafferty stood in the yard where she had left him, and seeing him, she felt a tearing inside, as though pieces of herself were breaking off. Jagged, jigsawed pieces that settled wrong, not quite fitting together again.
Her hand hovered over her husband's head, then fell, her fingers twining in his sun-shot hair. "Sssh, it's all right," she said, comforting him. Comforting herself.
August came, and the chokecherries hung sour and black down by the river. The days were warm and still, smelling of dust and summer and dry grass. The wind had finally quit blowing.
But on this day, although the sun beat down stove-hot on the cabin's sod roof, Clementine was next door in the coolness of the stone springhouse. She was watching an owl change color, from purple to red to lilac to a golden brown.
A hum of delight fluttered her lips. Oh, she had done well, if she did say so herself. The print was sharply focused and clearly defined from edge to edge, with rich gradations of light and shadow. Using a pair of tongs she moved the print from the toning bath to a hypo fixing solution. Windowless and with troughs of spring-fed water, the springhouse made a perfect darkroom.
She heard a holler out in the yard, and she leaned over to open the door. "Gus! Come see what I've just done."
His shadow fell over her as he came to the door, ducking his head beneath the low lintel. "You shouldn't be kneeling on that wet stone floor," he said.
She cast a bright smile at him and stood up from the troughs. Her pregnant belly made her awkward, and her knees creaked like an old gate. She blew a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. "I managed to make a photograph of that big gray owl that roosts on the stump by the corral every afternoon. He just sat there, Gus, unmoving, staring at me the whole time, while I set up my equipment and made the exposure, and he didn't so much as blink."
Gus looked at the print but he said nothing. Red dust filmed his mustache and the front of his hair that fe
ll out from beneath his hat. He smelled of the dust and of sweat and horses.
"I thought you and your... and Mr. Rafferty were going to be rounding up the mustangs this afternoon."
"And I thought you were going to finish putting up the chokecherry preserves."
Angry heat flushed her cheeks. She pressed her lips together to dam back the words she wanted to fling into his hard man's face. She kept her silence as she washed the print and hung it on a line to dry, and kept her silence as she left the springhouse. The shock of walking out of the damp, stony coolness and into the sun-drenched yard made her shiver.
Gus fell into step beside her. "I thought I'd drive on into town, and I came to see if you needed anything." She kept her silence. "Well, you got time to think on it," he said. "There's a split in the buckboard's wheel rim that needs fixing before I leave."
He turned toward the barn as she went on to the cabin. A wall of heat and the sickening, too-sweet stench of boiled chokecherries and sugar syrup struck her in the face as she stepped inside. Jars and pots and purple-stained cheesecloth littered the table, just as she'd left it when she spotted the gray owl at his roost on the stump and knew she couldn't let another day pass without trying to capture the scene with her camera's eye.
She stared at the mess, her hands clenched at her sides, and then she spun around on her heel and strode back outside. She crossed the yard, passing Gus, where he'd rolled the buckboard out of the barn to work on it. He called out to her, but she ignored him and began to run.
She waded all the way out into the middle of the rich buffalo grass, where it grew as dense as a fur pelt. The sun beat down on her head, thick and hot. She'd forgotten to bring her hat.
She sat in the grass and drew her knees up, curving her back. She imagined that the grass grew so tall she was lost from sight in it, that she could lose herself in the grass forever.
She sat that way for a long time, listening to the snapping of the grasshoppers. Then she stretched out her legs and leaned back on her elbows. Her head fell back and she stared up into the vast and empty blueness of the sky.
"Clementine?"
Blinking, she turned and looked up into her husband's red, sweating face. "I called after you," he said. "You didn't answer."
"Because I want to be alone." She knew the words would hurt him, but she couldn't seem to help it. Perhaps she didn't want to help it. It seemed sometimes that she deliberately tried to show him the ugliest parts of her.
She held herself stiff, waiting for him to go. Instead he sat down next to her, his hands clasped together between his legs, his spread knees pressed into the crooks of his elbows.
"I wasn't scolding you earlier, Clem. Leastways, I didn't mean to. Oh, I won't deny I minded it some at first—the time you spend gallivanting around the countryside making photographs when you oughta be at your chores. But I've tried to understand. I mean, I can see that things might get tiresome and lonely for you, by yourself in the cabin all day long and with nothing but kitchen work to occupy your thoughts."
Clementine shut her eyes. Sunspots danced behind her closed lids; an insect chirred loudly, calling for a mate. Gus stirred beside her, and she turned her head to look at him. He was staring hard at the river where the sunlight dappled the willows like lace. His hands tightened their grip on each other.
"Why is it, girl, that every time I try to get close to you, you push me away? It's not enough that we come together in bed at night. We got to come together during the day, with words and feelings."
She sat up. "I don't know what you want from me," she said.
"I want you to be a true wife to me. A soul mate and a heart mate as well as a lover."
I can't, I can't she wanted to cry. Because I don't know what that is. How could she give him what he wanted when it wasn't there within her in the first place?
He pulled loose a sheaf of grass, running it through his fists. "We got to start learning how to talk to each other or this marriage won't ever be an easy one."
She felt a renewed wave of panic. What could she say to him? Your brother unsettles me; he stirs things within me that are better left buried. But even though I don't want it to be so, even though I am trying to stop it, still there is something going on between us that you'd probably hate us for if you knew of it. And if you came to hate me I would want to die, because I need you so much. Truly I do need you, Gus. More than you can ever imagine.
He pushed himself to his feet, leaving her.
"Gus!" she cried. She looked up at him, squinting against the glare of the sun. He was so tall, as tall as the trees and the mountains. As tall as any cowboy she had ever dreamed of marrying. "In that house on Louisburg Square we never talked to one another. All we did was pray."
"I am not your father."
She pushed out a big breath, relieving some of the ache, but only a little of the fear. "No. I know." She held up her hand to him as if she would hold him, keep him from leaving. "I can't speak easily of what I feel. I try, but the words stop up in my throat as if there's a dam there."
He clasped her hand with his big one and sat back down beside her. "Clementine... all I ever wanted, all I want is for you to be happy." He'd kept hold of her hand, and he was stroking the pad of her palm with his thumb. "But I don't reckon you are... happy."
She turned her head and looked at him, at his eyes, which were as open and blue as the sky. There were moments, like this one, when she thought he was wonderful and she was a fool. "Oh, no, Gus, I am, I am. Especially now that we're going to have a baby. I want us to have lots of them—a dozen at least."
She squeezed his hand, then slipped her fingers from his. "I do admit it was hard for me at first, coming here and finding out I was going to have to live in a log cabin with a sod roof. And the mud that was everywhere." She tried for a smile, but her throat had closed up so tight it hurt. "The way it got into everything, that mud, including the cracks between your teeth, so that you could taste it when you swallowed. But still and all, Gus, I wasn't so much unhappy as scared and, well... unsettled. Things have changed—"
He gave a harsh laugh. "Sure they have. The mud's all dried up now. Now you got the dust to complain of."
"That's unfair. I wasn't complaining." She began to withdraw deep inside herself again, where he couldn't see her, couldn't hurt her. It was a mistake to have encouraged this conversation. He thought he had married someone who would be a virtuous, obedient wife. A genu-ine starched-up lady. He would never come to understand what lay beneath her silk and whalebone.
"I should never have brought you out here," he said.
She turned her head away. Maybe he would find a way to divorce her, to send her back to Boston and her father's house. No, he would never do that, for he prided himself on being a man of his word, and speaking a marriage vow was like giving your word to God. But it would never be the same for him, never be right. She would be another one of his hopeless, improbable dreams.
"You talk about being scared," he said, and his voice broke. "Well, I'm scared I can never make things good enough for you, as good as what you're used to. That I can never be what you want."
She had said that to his brother, that Gus was what she wanted, and he was. Oh, yes, truly he was.
But when she looked up into his face, to tell him this and make him believe it, something in the universe slipped and she saw wild yellow eyes that wanted her, and a hard mouth that had spoken of heartfire and once had kissed her.
She reached out and recaptured her husband's hand, seized it hard, as if she were drowning. "But you are what I want. I am the one who is lacking. Oh, I am young, and a tenderfoot to boot, but I've never been so foolish as to think there wouldn't be some rough times mixed in with the smooth. We vowed to stay together through better or worse. I'll take your worse along with your better, if you'll take mine."
He brought their linked hands to his mouth, turning them so that her palm was against his lips and he could kiss the scars. His mouth was warm, his mustache soft.
It moved as he smiled, and she felt the brush of his breath on her skin as he spoke. "Did you mean what you said about wanting lots of babies?"
"Oh, yes, Gus. I do, I do."
His smile widened. "Well, at least so far I'm doing that right."
He brought her hand down and pressed it against the swell of her belly. The baby, as if sensing it had an audience, stirred. She laughed. "Oh! Did you feel that, Gus? He moved!"
She took his hand and placed it so that he, too, could feel their baby's life. He looked deep into her eyes, his own eyes smiling. "It's going to be good, girl," he said. "You'll see."
She smiled back at him. "Yes, Gus. It will be good."
CHAPTER 14
Hannah Yorke's dark maroon skirts rustled over the oiled floor like dry leaves. She stopped before the mirror above the mahogany sideboard in her hallway. She peered at her face and frowned, then noticed the little chicken-track wrinkles around her eyes and made her mouth relax.
Without the touch of rouge she usually wore, her skin looked sallow. She blew out a long, shaky breath. Her ribs itched beneath her tightly laced corset. The high-banded neck of her polonaise jacket seemed to be strangling her. She had splashed rosewater beneath her arms, but already she could feel nervous sweat beginning to gather in every crease of her skin and clothes.
Lord, she was more jittery than a schoolgirl stepping out with her first beau. Not that she hadn't stepped out with plenty of men in her time, and she'd charged most of them a pretty price for the privilege of her company, too. But she couldn't remember the last time she'd been invited into a respectable home.
News of the jamboree had spread over the RainDance country and beyond. The Rocking R was holding a frolic to celebrate the finishing of their new ranch house and the beginning of the fall cattle roundup that was to start next week. Folk within a hundred miles would be coming. All decent folk, though, and no saloonkeepers like her. In a weak moment she had promised to come, and now, oh, Jesus Lord, she was so damned scared.
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