Rafferty whipped around and grabbed the lapels of his father's coat, hauling him up on his toes so that they were eye to eye. "If I didn't already know there was such as thing as pure trouble in this world, you would alter my mind." He flexed his muscles once, then relaxed his grip, letting the reverend slide out of his hands. He smoothed out the wrinkles in his father's coat and spoke in a flat, soft voice. "You keep your thoughts to yourself and your mouth shut, and if you come even close to causing her misery in any way, I'll kill you for it."
Jack McQueen's clever mouth turned disdainful. "Such a display, dear boy. And all for naught. You can't seriously expect me to believe you would slaughter your own flesh and blood. You're tough, but not that tough."
Rafferty waited a beat, long enough to see the uncertainty settle over his father's face. Long enough to see the tic take up its pulse below the black patch. Then he smiled his meanest smile.
"Tell that to the man who took your eye."
The mustang bawled and pitched, squealing as it crashed into the poles of the corral.
The Reverend Jack cupped his hand around his mouth and shouted across the minced dirt of the arena, "He's too much horse for you, Gustavus!"
The brothers stood next to each other, watching as four men tried to saddle the crazed horse. "He's spoiled," Rafferty said. "Someone's already tried to break him and mishandled it." The horse was a claybank, the same color as a mountain cat and just as wild.
A muscle bunched along Gus's jaw as he stared at the bronc. Gus was a fine rider, but the fact was he didn't much like horses, and deep down in the guts of him he had a fear of the really raw ones.
Rafferty saw the fear in his brother's face, in the taut skin over his cheekbones and in his bright, shifting eyes. "Sun's close to setting," he said. "Might as well just turn him loose and call it a day."
"A man," the reverend said loud enough for all the other fence riders to hear, "shouldn't fork a saddle if he's scared of being throwed. Or so they say."
Gus's gaze stayed riveted on the bronc—all bunched and quivering eight hundred pounds of him. Rafferty felt a flash of irritation with his brother. Some days tormenting him was as easy as squashing an ant with a sledgehammer.
"You're all the time bragging that you can ride anything with hair on it," Gus said. "I'm surprised you don't have calluses from patting yourself on the back." He pointed his chin at the bronc. "So why don't you try that one?"
"Because he ain't worth messin' with." And he hadn't done any bragging, either, but Rafferty let that pass.
"Some men," Jack McQueen said, "can't help feeling a certain shame to discover they've fathered a boy with a weak gizzard. 'Be strong, and quit yourselves like men,' so saith the Lord. I, on the other hand, am more tolerant of human foibles. You have nothing to prove to me, Gustavus."
Rafferty started toward the mustang, to turn it loose, not to ride it. Gus caught his arm.
"Leave the saddle on him."
"How many times've you watched the old man stir up trouble just for the hell of it? Why are you letting him chouse you into this?"
Gus jerked his head in a hard, sharp nod. "You know why. Okay, so maybe I'm scared, and maybe it's harder to do it when you're scared. You wouldn't appreciate that, because you've never been scared of a blasted thing in your entire life. For once I'm going to prove it to him. I'm going to prove it to myself."
"Prove what, dammit—that you're stupid?"
Gus pushed past him, mouth and jaw set rigid.
"Ah, hell," Rafferty said, and followed him.
The bronc was snubbed to a corral post by a lasso tight around its neck. Two men with braced feet had either side of the hackamore. Held down as he was, the horse still looked ready to explode, crouched back on its haunches, ears flat, nostrils flaring. Gus was going to get his fool neck broken, and Rafferty was mad enough at him now not to give a good goddamn.
Rafferty slipped the lasso and took hold of the hackamore's left cheek strap, forcing the bronc's head sharp around toward its neck. The other men melted back, putting the fence between themselves and any flying hooves.
Rafferty stroked the trembling withers. "Easy, boy," he said softly. "Easy, easy, now." The horse snorted hot breath on his neck.
Gus approached the mustang's side, quirt in his hand, silver spurs glinting in the sun. The bronc's right rear leg flashed, the hoof slicing air. Gus tugged his hat down tight and low over his eyes, as if he actually thought he might still be wearing it after all this was over.
Rafferty gave him a taunting smile. "Hadn't you ought to take off that pretty vest of yours, big brother? You wouldn't want to be getting it all dirty."
The smile Gus gave back to him was tight and full of fear, but Rafferty was being careful not to look directly at him. "Are you implying, little brother, that I'm going to wind up eating dust?"
"Soon as your butt hits the saddle."
Gus gathered up the reins and with his right hand turned the stirrup for his boot. "Use the bucking strap," Rafferty said, pitching his voice low so that only his brother could hear.
Gus's mouth flattened, but he wrapped his fingers around the strap. The bronc snorted, hindquarters dancing.
The brothers' gazes met, and deep in Gus's eyes was the same bruised and bewildered look he would get as a boy when the old man would lay into him like this, not with a strap or a fist, but with words that could hurt down to the bone. Gus hadn't understood it then and he didn't now—how cruelty could exist in the world without a reason. He just kept on thinking there should be a way to make his father love him.
Rafferty took a deep breath, trying to shake off the ache. "Gus, you don't have to do this."
"It's always been so easy for you," Gus said, the words coming out mangled from the tightness in his throat. "You're not only tougher than the rest of us poor sons of bitches, you know you're tougher. You make me sick—"
"Shut up and get on the fucking horse."
Rafferty released the cheek strap and whipped the blindfold off the mustang's eyes as soon as Gus's right foot left the ground. The horse jackknifed and Gus slammed into the saddle with such force Rafferty heard his teeth crack. The mustang bogged its head and boiled, lock-legged, its back arched like a bow.
And Gus flew off him like crack-the-whip.
"What do I do with this?"
Clementine looked up from the purple slabs of huckleberry pie she was cutting to the huge brown crock full of baked beans in Hannah's arms. "Oh, dear..." Mrs. Graham's beans had been a dismal failure, which was not to be wondered at with men who, seven days out of seven, ate beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. "Perhaps White Hawk...?"
Hannah shook her head, dimples flashing. "I already tried him. He pointed to the beans, down to his belly, back to the beans again, then bent over and made a noise like he was going to puke."
Clementine smothered a laugh with her hand. She darted a look out the open kitchen door to be sure none of the other women, especially Mrs. Graham, had heard what Hannah said, although there was little fear of that. Whenever Hannah came into the kitchen, the other women left it. As soon as Hannah left, the women came back. Like the tide, Clementine thought, in and out, in and out. And like the tide, they were wearing Hannah down. Her dimples had appeared less and less often as the day went on, and the easy laughter had left her mouth.
"Clementine..." Hannah set the crock of beans on the new round oak table. "I want to thank you for making me feel t' home here. I can tell it hasn't been easy." She nodded her head at the open door. "Those women, they won't soon forget that you took my part against theirs."
Clementine looked down at the pie. She licked a drop of sweet purple juice off her finger. "I get so lonely out here some days, Hannah, I go out and talk to the cows just to hear something besides the wind."
Hannah reached out to touch her hand, pulled back, then did it after all. Their fingers curled together, resting a moment on the table's shiny white oilcloth. "I get lonely, too," Hannah said.
Clem
entine cut another wedge of pie. A burst of manly yelping came from the direction of the corral. Someone shouted, "Ride 'im hard, Gus!"
"Hannah, do you think you might ever... that you and Mr. Rafferty might be married?"
Hannah twisted a thick curl around her finger. Bright color flooded her cheeks. "Funny you should ask that, since we talked about it ourselves for the first time this morning... Well, sorta danced around it like a coupla bears dancing 'round a beehive. I 'spect the whole idea of domesticity spooks the both of us."
Clementine was suddenly feeling a sick churning in the pit of her stomach, as if she'd eaten too much green fruit. She didn't want to think of Hannah and that man...
"I mean, marriage changes things, doesn't it?" Hannah said. "Being a wife can make for a whole lot of drudge work, not to put too fine a point on it. And when you're dead tired at the end of the day it's kind of hard to make your man whoop an' holler, let alone do any whoopin' and hollerin' yourself."
I will not ask her, she thought. I cannot. "Do you mean to tell me you actually whoop and holler when he... when you and a man..."
Hannah laughed. "It's kind of hard not to, honey. When the lovin' is so hot and sweet you think you're going to come bursting right out of your skin if you don't let it all out of you somehow... Well, you know that feeling."
The kitchen grew quiet. Clementine glanced up from the pie she was massacring and caught Hannah studying her. "Oh, that feeling," she said.
She suddenly became aware that the tenor of shouts and yelps coming from the corral had changed from laughter and cheers to cries of alarm. She and Hannah looked at each other and then started together for the door, knocking aside the new spindle chairs.
Hannah got there first and held her back. "They're bringing him up to the house."
"Who?" Clementine asked, her heart pounding so hard in her ears it drowned out Hannah's answer.
Three men carried Gus through the kitchen door. He was covered with corral dust and bleeding from a cut on the head.
"Where do you want him?" Horace Graham said, as if it were a sack of meal they carried, and not a woman's husband whose dust-streaked face was as white and waxy as a Christmas candle. A man whose dust-streaked face looked dead.
"This way," Clementine said in her most collected voice. A western woman, she knew, was never supposed to make a scene when her man was tossed by a bronc. It was a measure of a man's manliness—how he handled a horse. A man expected his woman to understand why he risked his neck trying to break one. Clementine looked at her man's pale face and wanted to pull it tight to her breast. But she was also angry enough to knock his head off his shoulders. She would never, she thought, understand what drove men to do the things they did.
She had them lay Gus on their new squab sofa, part of an upholstered parlor suite that had come all the way from Chicago. A good saddle horse had been sold for the money to buy that sofa. Dust rained off Gus onto the bottle-green damask. His spur caught, ripping the delicate material. Clementine put a needlepoint pillow under his bleeding head.
The men pressed around her, offering advice: wrap his head in brown paper soaked in vinegar; heat up a gummy paste of chewing tobacco and flour; make a compress of raw chicken; pour a slug of whiskey down his throat.
"He'll be all right," said the one person she had been waiting for. "If y'all will just step back, please, and give him some air."
Rafferty squatted down on his haunches beside the sofa. His hand hovered over Gus's hair, then gently fell, touching him in the way a father would touch his son.
Gus wrenched his eyes open, biting back a groan. A look passed between them, charged with something Clementine didn't understand. It was part of the game they played constantly, a sparring match of feints and jabs and occasional head-rocking blows. A game played deep in some masculine dimension that Clementine couldn't fathom. She thought she hated men sometimes, and these two men most of all.
"You ridden him yet?" Gus said.
Rafferty shook his head.
"Well, what the hell you waitin' on, a telegram from President Rutherford B. Hayes himself? Go peel the son of a bitch."
"Gus—"
"You scared? Is that it? You scared, little brother?"
"Yeah, sure I'm scared. Who wants to get his ass pitched clear into next week?"
Gus struggled to sit up. "Liar. You're a goddamn lying son of a bitch. Go on out there and break him. Go on, dammit. Go!"
Rafferty pressed his hands on his knees, pushing himself to his feet. He left without looking back at his brother, and the other cowboys all stampeded out the door after him. "Wrap them long legs of yourn twice around his belly," one of them shouted, "and mebbe then you can stick 'im."
Gus swung his legs off the sofa. He groped for Clementine's shoulder. "Help me up, girl. I want to watch this. The son of a bitch—always so damned cock-robin sure of himself."
She staggered as he put his weight on her and lurched to his feet. He swayed, groaning and wincing as he touched his head. "Son of a bitch," he said.
"Mr. McQueen, why are you behaving this way?" She had never heard so much cussing coming out of Gus's mouth. He trembled from a shakiness that came from deep inside him and had, she thought, only partly to do with having been thrown from a horse.
Gus looked up and saw Hannah standing in the doorway, her arms crossed under her full breasts. "I never met a man yet who wasn't stupid stubborn as a rock at times," she said.
Gus gave her a hard smile. "That horse fights like a polecat with its tail on fire, and your man is going to turn him into a pussycat. Don't you want to watch him do it?"
"No," Hannah said and went back into the kitchen.
Gus leaned on Clementine as they walked out of the parlor onto the porch. Gus's father stood at the bottom of the steps.
"I always thought you were all gurgle and no guts, boy," he said. "I'm beginning to see as how I might have wronged you."
A dark flush stained Gus's cheeks. "Yeah, well..." He straightened his back and pushed off of Clementine and hobbled down the steps alone. "Come on, Pa. Come let that brother of mine show you how it's properly done."
The setting sun cast a yellow glamour over the land, filling the sky with lariats of gold. A dust cloud hung over the corral. A dirty yellow horse lay on its side in the middle of the corral, its legs trussed like a Christmas turkey's.
Clementine did not like this bronco-busting. The little she had seen of it earlier had disturbed her so much that she couldn't bear to watch. If she were a mustang, used to running wild and free out on the range, she wouldn't want the intolerable degradation of a man on her back, either. And yet they were broken to it; there was no other word for it. A cowboy whipped the horse's haunches with his quirt and raked its flanks with his spurs each time the animal bucked, driving home the lesson: obey, obey, obey. Or suffer for it.
Rafferty went into the corral, telling the men behind him to leave the gate open. "Let him up," he said to the man who held the end of the rope that was cross-hobbling the bronc.
The mustang erupted out of the dirt in an explosion of dust. He stood, legs splayed, froth dripping from his mouth. He snorted through his distended red nostrils.
Rafferty stroked the horse's quivering neck, speaking to him in dulcet tones that sounded strange coming from such a hard mouth, such a hard man. He was still crooning sweet words in that soft, gentle voice when he grabbed the mustang's ear and twisted it cruelly, at the same time thrusting his boot into the stirrup and swinging into the saddle.
The horse stood frozen, head up in surprise and pain... then erupted into a whirlwind of muscle, hair, and bone. The bronc bunched and jumped and twisted itself into a corkscrew, and it seemed that Rafferty's head must surely be snapped off his neck.
"No bucking strap for my little brother," she heard Gus cry, pride and envy both deep in his voice. "He rides 'em slick."
The man won, as she had known he would, although it pained her to know, too, that the wild horse could be mastered. The
bronc gave a last, mighty buck and then stood still. Foam flecked his chest. Sweat stained the man's shirt and dripped from his hair. Man and horse sucked in deep breaths that shook their chests and made their straining muscles quiver.
Clementine imagined herself going to him. She imagined getting up on that half-broken horse with him and riding into the wild and lonely mountains where no one would ever find them. She imagined being with him there, among the rugged peaks, sitting by a campfire with the stars for a roof, and having the courage to say to him the things she could never say to anyone else...
But she didn't go to him. He touched the horse's flanks lightly with his spurs. Then there was just settling dust where they had been, the whip of the bronc's tail as it flew out through the gate, and the flash of hooves before they were swallowed by the wind-stirred grass.
CHAPTER 16
Gus McQueen's mustache curled up around his generous smile, catching wisps of snowflakes out of the air like a feather duster. "This storm won't stick long," he said. "Why, we could still have ourselves another warm spell before winter really sets in."
"But I like the snow." Clementine leaned back to let it fall on her face, into her open mouth. Lacelike flakes floated out of the sky as if the clouds were crumbling. She wanted to hurl herself into it, to roll in a tumble of skirts and petticoats and laughter, like a child.
"Clementine..."
Something in his voice made her lower her head to look at him. A heaviness had come over his eyes, a tautness to his mouth. He glanced over his shoulder at Pogey and Nash, who sat bundled up side by side in matching buffalo coats on matching gray burros. He pulled her to him and kissed her long and hard and deep on the mouth.
She drew in a little gasp of pleasure when he was through and steadied herself by grasping the folds of his mackinaw poncho. He brushed the melting snow off her cheek with his knuckles. His gaze fell to her stomach, which strained against the soft gray wool of her dress. She had only tossed an old brown wool shawl over her shoulders, even though it was snowing hard.
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