They would snub her, she was sure of it. Those respectable sheepherders' and cattlemen's wives. Up would go their noses, down would pull their mouths, and the next thing she'd see would be their stiff backs walking away from her. And there would be men at the jamboree, too, who probably wouldn't be real excited to come upon her face to face outside of her saloon. Men she'd cut the pasteboards for and served her hell brew to, men she'd seen disappearing into her back room with one of her girls.
Her hands trembled as she lifted the black linen hat off the sideboard. She anchored it down on her head with a quartz-studded hatpin, covering her scarlet hair. She adjusted the black muslin veil over her face, so that she now looked at her mirror image through a shroud. "Hannah, you are a fool," she told the veil-draped stranger in the glass.
Before she lost her courage entirely, she left the house and went out onto the gallery. The trunks of the quaking aspens shone silvery in the late morning sunlight; their leaves shimmered gold. A triangle of wild geese harrowed the sky. It was only early September, and the days were still warm and long, but the geese were a promise of the winter to come.
She tapped her foot in time with the tinny sound of a piano coming out of the open doors of her saloon: "Oh, dem golden slippers. Oh, dem golden slippers..." She'd finally found someone who knew how to make those ivories dance, a man called Doc, of course. She knew nothing about him, not even his name, and she wasn't going to ask. He was a worn-down soul, with the haunted look of a man running from something. But then, everyone out here was either running away from something or lusting after something else.
With Shiloh playing his fiddle at the frolic, she was leaving the tonk in charge of Annie, the most reliable of all her girls. The chippy would probably skim off one dollar for every four she took in, but Hannah would just have to consider that the cost of her holiday. Oh, Lord, she really did need to get away for a time from the smell of spilled booze and tobacco slop and old sweat.
And then over a burst of laughter and the tinkle of the piano, she heard the singing of buggy wheels, the rattle of a harness.
Zach Rafferty pulled up in the pretty little plum-colored shay she often rented from Snake-Eye. He swung down with a jaunty air and tied the horse to her front fence. She watched him come up her path, walking with that tight-hipped gait of a man who spent more time in the saddle than out of it.
The sight of him this morning took her breath away. She'd never seen him looking so fine, dressed as he was in striped pants, burgundy brocade vest, and pristine white shirt with a stiff linen collar set off by a black bolo tie. But when he caught sight of her, the smile slid off his face.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps and propped his hands on his hips, which looked strangely naked without a gun belt. "What the hell've you got on?"
She lifted her chin high, though it quivered a little. "This happens to be a very proper dress."
"'Proper' ain't the word for it. Too somber for a funeral is more like it."
"You're the one forcing me to go to this shindig. You gonna tell me how to dress for it now, too?" He came up next to her on the gallery. So handsome and so much of a man, and a good one, too, for all of his wild ways. "We're going to be seeing all your family and friends, Rafferty. And there I'll be, standing beside you, my hand on your arm... I don't want to shame you."
"Hell, woman, you think people believe I'm keepin' company with you because of your virtue?"
That hurt. She looked at his handsome face through the mesh of her veil. His hard face. Tears blurred her eyes. The words came spilling up from a dark, sad corner of her heart. "That's all I am to you, isn't it? A good poke. A warm and ready quim to ease yourself with when the mood takes you."
"No, that ain't all you are to me and you damn well know it. And quit talkin' dirty like that. You sound like a—" He cut himself off, but she finished it for him.
"Whore."
He thrust his fingertips into his pockets and turned away from her, blowing an exasperated breath out between his lips. She wanted to kiss those lips. And she wanted to kiss his cheek, tan, and shaven smooth just that morning. She half expected him to up and leave her, which would serve her right and likely please the good folk of the RainDance country, who would be spared her sinful presence at the frolic.
But he didn't leave. He cast a sideways look up and down the length of her. His face might have been carved out of the granite of RainDance Butte, for all she could read of it.
"Putting on sackcloth and ashes ain't gonna change you into other folks' idea of what's respectable," he said. "You want to sell your saloon and marry me, Hannah? Move out to the ranch and into that sod-roofed shanty, make me chokecherry preserves, scrub the sweat stains out of my shirts, and watch your belly swell up every year with my babes?"
The ends of his tie danced in the breeze. The scent of bay rum wafted to her beneath the veil. "Are you proposing, cowboy? 'Cause if you are, I oughta serve you the bad scare you deserve by accepting."
Oh, there wasn't a whore breathing who hadn't dreamed of a day when some man would walk into her sordid life, sweep her off her feet, and marry her. Make her magically into a lady of respectability and virtue. To be a wife, to have babies...
But not even for a baby would she give up all she had now to go back in time and live her mother's kind of life. She certainly didn't need a man to complicate things, telling her what to do and how to be and trying to do her breathing for her. Oh, there were some things she still wished for at times. A man's face smiling up at her over a stack of flapjacks of a morning. His longhandles flapping on her line. The feel of a baby pulling on her breast, to smell that baby smell again and have those soft arms cling to her neck.
To love and be loved.
Oh, Hannah, you are such a fool. How many years and how many men is it gonna take before you learn that love lasts only as long as the bedsprings squeak?
She made another little upward nudge with her chin. "What makes you know so much about me anyways?"
"You talk in bed." His mouth curled into a naughty-boy grin. "Keep me up, you do, you and that frolicsome tongue of yours."
His wicked words startled a laugh out of her. But the hurt lingered underneath, like the smell of bay rum in the air. "Someday I'll marry you when you aren't lookin', Zach Rafferty," she said, her voice rough. "And then you really will be sorry."
His hand slipped behind her neck, tilting her head. He lifted the veil so that she could see his eyes and he could see hers.
"Whatever happens with us, Hannah, I won't ever be sorry." He lowered his head and kissed her. He spoke into her open mouth. "Now go put on your dancin' rags, darlin'."
She knew better, but she just couldn't seem to help herself. She loved him most when he called her darling.
"You got your dancing shoes on, Mrs. McQueen?"
Clementine lifted her skirts to show off her French kid shoes, shiny with fresh blacking. They pinched some, for her feet had swollen over the summer months, along with her belly. "And what about you, Mr. McQueen?" she teased, smiling just a little. "Does a bowlegged cowpoke like you even know how to dance?"
Laughing, Gus shuffled his feet like a minstrel showman, making music with the jinglebobs and heel chains on his silver spurs. If he swung his boots just right he could make the rowels spin and ring against the wooden floor.
Clementine laughed out loud when he tried to jump and click his heels together and had to make a wild grab for the end of the bed at the last minute to keep his balance. Their new bed was of white iron fancied up with acorn knots. She loved that bed and her other new things: the walnut dresser with its marble top and the matching washstand, the blue gingham curtains she had made for the window, the pink-flowered china chamber set they had sent away for from the Altman and Stern catalog. Above the bed she'd hung the dream hoop Joe Proud Bear's woman had made for her, for the good dreams to come through and sweeten their nights.
And there was her man, trying to dance and make music with his spurs.
He noticed the way she was looking at him, and he struck a rakish pose. He had on a white buckskin vest and a red silk bandanna, and his face beamed like a harvest moon. "What do you think?" he said.
"Beautiful. The house is beautiful and you're beautiful." Today even Montana was beautiful, for the wind was pretty much behaving. The sun shone like a new five-dollar gold piece and cotton-ball clouds floated across a blue, blue sky.
He came up to her and took her hand, fitting his palm to hers, entwining their fingers. "I want to make you happy."
"You have, Gus. You do."
"I only wish I could give you more. Three, four years from now, I swear I'll build you the biggest house in the territory with two stories and a double parlor." He rubbed his free hand on his canvas pants, laughing. "And a water closet, so's we won't get our feet wet every morning, running through the wet grass on the way to the privy. Would you like that, Clem?"
She brought their entwined hands up to her mouth and kissed his knuckles. He made her the happiest when he was like this, laughing and chasing after the next big dream.
A crotchety old-man's voice came bellowing at them through the open window. "Crucified Jesus! Ain't there supposed to be a frolic goin' on somewheres around here? Where in holy hell is everybody?"
This was followed by the whacking sound of a hat hitting a substantial belly. "Quit your cussing, you blasted fool. We ain't even here yet and already you're bluing up the atmosphere."
Gus winked at Clementine and put his finger to his lips. "Did you invite those two scalawags to our classy to-do, Mrs. McQueen?" he said loud enough to be heard outside.
Clementine had to suck on her cheek to keep from laughing.
"Reckon they must've invited themselves then." He heaved a mock sigh. "I guess I should go make 'em welcome anyway."
They were smiling at each other, she and Gus, as Clementine followed him into the parlor. But she paused a moment there to savor the silence of her new home before it was overrun with company. It really wasn't all that fancy a house, just a white frame box with four rooms and a tin roof. Gus fretted that it wasn't up to the civilized standards she'd been raised to, yet already she felt more at home here than she ever had in the crimson-draped gloom of the house on Louisburg Square. Her father's house had smelled of beeswax and wood oil and too much godliness. This parlor smelled of its new pine plank floor, and of hope.
She stepped into the kitchen, which was already beginning to smell of the yeasty crock of sourdough that had been brought to rest in its new place above the brand-new nickel-plate range, a range that had—blessed day!—a hot water reservoir. And next to it—even more blessed day!—was a washing machine with a hand-cranked wooden wringer.
She heard Gus calling to her that their guests were starting to arrive. A wave of shyness washed over her, and she rubbed her damp palms over the swell of her belly. She had altered her brown serge dress as best she could to try to conceal her pregnancy, but she'd had to loosen her corset to a shameless degree.
She walked out onto the porch that wrapped around three sides of the house, her pretty white porch with its spooled railing. Skeins of smoke drifted from a pit in the ground where a whole steer lay roasting, and the smell of it mingled with the smell of curing hay that came from the stacks lined up like giant bread loaves at the edge of the meadow. Squinting, Clementine looked across the yard and gasped aloud in pleased surprise.
Buggies and buckboards and men on horseback were coming down the road and over the prairie toward their little house. Most of the RainDance country would show up for any sort of jamboree, so Gus had told her, but she hadn't quite believed him. They would come riding for miles, he'd said, some getting up hours before dawn to arrive by noon, wearing their Sunday finery and bearing kettles of pea soup, legs of pork, venison chops, raspberry pie, and dried-apple duff.
There was Mrs. Graham, gripping her Horace's arm as if she feared every woman present would jump on him and ravish his body beneath her very nose. And Mrs. Weatherby, her pale face made paler by a coating of flour paste that had begun to crack in the heat like a dry gulch bed.
There was Mr. Carver, who ranched the high country above the buffalo canyon, a man who had come to Montana ten years ago and hadn't yet found the time to go back to Philadelphia and fetch his wife. And Sam Woo, who had gotten involved in a cutthroat game of poker at the Best in the West last month and lost all the money he'd been saving up to buy a Chinese girl to marry.
There was Snake-Eye, for once without his leather apron, and Shiloh with his fiddle tucked under one beefy arm. Cowboys painfully attired in tight new boots and celluloid collars. Sheepherders with woolly vests and bells on their hats. And prospectors sporting new red flannel shirts and trimmed beards.
Clementine spotted two more familiar faces and she went to them. Pogey was trying to lasso his partner's arm with a blue bandanna, and Nash was having none of it. Gus had told her of this western custom: at dances where women were scarce, the men partnered each other and those playing the ladies in the set had to wear bandannas tied around their arms.
Nash, however, had snatched the bandanna from Pogey's hand and thrown it in the dirt, then stomped on it for good measure. "I ain't the one being heifer-branded this time, and that is that! What makes you think I'm gonna want to dance with a gimped-up old saddle stiff like you anyways?"
"God and all the little god-almighties!" Pogey flung back his head in an appeal to the heavens. "You'd dance with any old gazabo fool enough to ask you."
Nash shook his finger beneath his partner's nose. "Now, there's where ye're mistaken, you see. 'Cause I got standards. And besides, playing the lady ain't a job fitting to my talents. I'm more the courting swain type, being known as I am for my dash and vinegar and savvyfair."
"Savvy-what the hell? There're times when you make no more sense than tits on a bull. Yappity-yappity-yip goes your tongue, on and on, till a man starts to wishing for a shotgun just so's he could shoot off his head and put his ears out of their damned misery—"
Nash whipped off his hat and flattened it against Pogey's stomach. "Hobble your lips. There's a lady present."
"Eh?" Pogey spun around. He took off his hat and made a surprisingly courtly bow, so low his long yellow beard swept his knees. "Mrs. McQueen—my, but if you don't look prettier'n a little red heifer this mornin'."
The heifers Clementine had seen thus far weren't pretty at all, but the sentiment behind the compliment couldn't help but make her smile. "Howdy, Mr. Pogey. Mr. Nash."
Nash grinned and nodded. Pogey pulled a woeful face and tugged at his ear as he resettled his hat. "I wish I could say I was fine, ma'am, but I ain't." He rasped his hand across his whiskery neck. "Got me such a touch of the dry throat i can't even spit without primin' the pump."
"What he's trying to say," Nash supplied, at Clementine's quizzical look, "if'n he had the vocabulary for it and weren't so all-fired concerned all the time with being pithy... is that he's thirsty."
Clementine laughed. "Oh, of course. Gentlemen, this way, if you please."
She led the two prospectors over to a pair of barrels sitting on a trestle table tucked beneath the shade of a giant cottonwood. Gus had taken a week to make this cider from the dried apples that came from Washington Territory, strung like beads on strings and looking like pieces of old saddle leather.
She filled a tin cup from one of the barrels and passed it to Pogey. The smell of apples was sweet and biting, but he cast a dubious eye at it. "Is this teetotal stuff?"
Nash sighed loudly. "What for you even wasting your breath by askin? And you normally such a pithy man. You think that Gus, with his abstemious ways, is gonna pack any kinda wallop into his cider?"
Clementine pressed a brimming cup into his hand. "Nevertheless you must try it, Mr. Nash. You might be pleasantly surprised."
Both men took tiny, tentative sips, screwing up their faces as if they were being asked to take a dose of cod-liver oil. Nash swallowed first, and his owl eyes grew even rounder.
Pogey choked as his went down. He stifled a grin behind the cuff that wiped dry his beard. "Now, that's what I call prime cider."
Clementine sucked on her lower lip to hide her smile. She had seen Rafferty dump six bottles of spirits into one of the barrels when Gus's back was turned. Her temperate husband, Clementine knew, was not going to be pleased.
She leaned into the two prospectors and lowered her voice. "Now, Mr. Pogey, Mr. Nash... may I trust you both to ensure that only those gentlemen so inclined to drink cider with any kind of wallop in it will fill their cups out of this particular barrel?"
"Eh? Oh, sure, sure." Pogey nodded so vigorously his beard slapped his chest.
Nash placed his hand over his heart. "You may trust us, ma'am, to your dyin' breath. Wild cayuses couldn't drag out the truth if we didn't want it told. You could hang our guts on a fence post and braid 'em for lariats, you could drag us naked over a cactus patch, you could whittle whistles outta our shinbones—unh!"
Pogey smacked him hard in the gut with his empty cup. "Try exercisin' yer arm instead of yer tongue and pour me some more of that deeelicious dried-apple cider."
Just then Clementine spotted Gus heading their way, and she hurried off to intercept him. He walked around the edge of the dance floor, which was a canvas sheet pegged down on the flattest part of the yard. The brothers had chopped down little pine trees and hung lanterns on them in a circle around the canvas, for the dancing would go on all night long.
"You tried any of my cider yet, Clem?" Gus said as he came up to her.
"Oh, well, I..." She searched frantically for a reason to divert his attention from his precious brew. A group of cowboys, she noticed suddenly, stood in the middle of the canvas, their thumbs hanging off the back pockets of their pants, their jaws working on plug tobacco like cows chewing their cud. She pointed a finger at them. "Why, really, Gus! Go tell those men not to spit on the dance floor."
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