Heart of the West

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Heart of the West Page 35

by Penelope Williamson


  She thought she could feel the weight of the clouds when she stepped outside. The snow was coming down heavily now. She had to stop a moment on the porch and let the bite of another contraction pass. Her gloved hands grabbed the rail, crushing the tiny glittering icicles that were suspended from it.

  The blowing snow shrouded the whole world. She stepped off the porch and into the storm. The sharp-edged wind lashed the snow into a fury of whirling ice clouds. Within seconds she was caught up in a maelstrom of cold swirling flakes and white air. She couldn't see the buffalo hunter's cabin. She looked back to the new house. She couldn't see it, either, and she felt the grip of panic. She should have rung the bell. She should never have allowed her pride to keep her from ringing the bell.

  She drew in a deep breath. She looked down and saw a path cobbled with frozen bootprints.

  Yet she stood for a moment longer in the whirlpool of the storm, and a strange exhilaration burst inside her like a bubble rising through water and exploding on the surface.

  She put her feet into the marks he had left in the snow.

  Rafferty threw open the door. He closed his whiskey-blurred eyes for a moment as the wind-driven snow lashed his face. But not before he'd gotten a good look at the woman who stood before him—his brother's wife.

  Melting flakes silvered the dark fur of her hat. Her face was a pale oval in the fading light, but her lips were full and very red. He could have dipped his head and kissed them. He was just drunk enough to think of kissing them.

  Instead he hooked his thumb on his pocket, cocked his hip, and slouched against the jamb. "Well, 'pon my soul, if it ain't my starchy sister-in-law come a-callin'."

  "Good afternoon, Mr. Rafferty." Her back was so stiff he was surprised she didn't break in the wind.

  "It ain't, in fact, a good afternoon. And you don't have the sense God gave a prairie chicken. When a flurry kicks up like this, a body can get lost going from the house to the... woodshed," he amended at the last moment. He kept getting overtaken by this rather hopeless notion to try to watch his manners around her. To treat her like the lady she was and maybe show her that he had it in him to be the gentleman that he wasn't.

  The snowstorm raged beyond them, but a tense silence filled the space between them. It thrummed like Indian war drums in his blood.

  "I did not get lost, sir," she finally said. "I am right where i want to be."

  He didn't know quite what to make of that, and he sure as hell wasn't going to ask. He took a stumbling step backward. It occurred to him how scruffy and disreputable he looked with his shirttail hanging out of his jeans and three days' growth of beard grizzling his jaw. He suddenly wished he was sober. He'd sure picked one hell of an afternoon to tie one on.

  He gave her one of his surliest smiles. "Well, hell, step right on in and make yourself t' home." He started to perform a mocking bow and noticed the whiskey bottle in his hand. He drank deeply, then shot her a look that defied her to say something about it.

  And for a moment he thought he saw fear in her eyes.

  "You're drunk," she said.

  "Nope," he said. "I'm still standing, and I'm still seeing only one of you. And I ain't got to feelin' randy as a tomcat on a hot night just yet. Definitely not drunk."

  He took another swig of the whiskey, as if the situation could be easily remedied. He thought about belching and decided that would probably be pushing things too far. Christ, she really was driving him crazy. One minute he was trying to impress her, and with his next breath he was trying to disgust her.

  She had knocked the snow off her boots and come inside, shutting the door herself and bringing with her the smell of wet wool and wild roses. She unclasped her cloak and hung it on the peg. She peeled off her gloves, then raised her arms to take off her hat. Her breasts lifted above the proud mound of her pregnant belly, and Rafferty's chest tightened, making it difficult to breathe.

  Her lips parted as she tried to catch her breath. He wanted to take her face in his hands and kiss that mouth. He ached for her with a hunger that was a heavy hollow feeling in his gut. It didn't matter that she was great with his brother's child. He loved her. And he hated her for making him love her so, when it was so hopeless and so wrong.

  He studied her out of angry, narrowed eyes. She had turned away from him, and her back was bowed slightly so that her shoulders looked small and vulnerable.

  "Clementine..." He started to reach for her, then let his hand fall. "If you needed something why didn't you just ring the bell?"

  She turned to face him. She regarded him out of wide, solemn eyes. "Because I cannot bear having you in my house."

  His face tightened. "Yeah? Well, pardon me all to hell," he said. He took another long, hard drink of the booze so that she couldn't guess how her words had hurt him. The whiskey burned going down, and he almost choked on it. Her image blurred as he glared at her.

  Then he saw a trace of a strange smile soften the severe curve of her mouth. "Oh, Rafferty," she said, her voice so low and aching that he had to lean forward to hear her. "What woman would be so brave as to open the door and invite lightning into her heart?"

  He shook his head, thinking she must have said "house" and not "heart." Something seemed to explode inside his chest in a gush of pain and yearning, so that when he heard the wet splash he thought for one astonishing moment that it had come from him, that his own heart had burst.

  Clementine took a startled step back and looked down. A puddle of pale straw-colored liquid was spreading over the pegged floor; the front of her gray wool skirt was dark with it. Her gaze flew back up to his, more surprised than embarrassed.

  Rafferty, however, had hurtled past every other emotion on the spectrum and gone directly to holy terror. "Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed.

  She started to say something, but just then her body jerked and spasmed and a low moan escaped past her clenched teeth. He could actually see her stomach contracting.

  "Jesus Christ," he said again, more softly.

  She took a couple of shallow, panting breaths. He could hear his own breath coming out fast and uneven, and the sound they made together was like the sough of the wind through the cottonwoods.

  "As you can see," she said with utter calm, "I am having the baby."

  "Jesus God." He took a step back and then another, until he bumped into the sawbuck table. He shook his head again, trying to clear it of the pumping blood that suddenly roared in his ears. "You got to stop this now, Boston," he said. "Wait until Gus gets back with the doctor."

  She actually had the brass to laugh. He was in a gut-panic and she was laughing. "Oh, Rafferty... having a baby is hardly something that can be stopped once it's started."

  He carefully set down the whiskey bottle. He raked the hair back out of his eyes with his fingers. "But I can't... but I don't know... shit! What the hell did you come to me for?"

  That strange smile still hovered on her mouth, but he saw the fear now plain in her eyes. "Believe me, sir, if the good Lord had offered me any midwife other than an uncouth, drunken, and debauched excuse for a cowboy, rest assured I would have taken her."

  A taut silence had come over the cabin, underscored by the hissing of the oil in the lantern and the spitting of the snow against the window. Clementine closed her eyes on a stifled moan of pain, and a flutter of renewed panic stirred Rafferty's guts.

  "Should you just be standing there? I mean, shouldn't you be lying down?"

  "Not just yet, thank you," she said, so calmly that he wanted to shake her.

  "How long before... it happens?"

  "Oh, I shouldn't think for hours yet."

  Hours... He collapsed onto one of the nail-keg stools. He pressed his fingers against his closed eyelids. There was a pounding in his temples worse than a brass band. "God." He lifted his head and stared at her out of eyes that felt as dry as last year's tumbleweeds. "I ain't ever going to forgive you for this."

  "Why, I do believe you are scared, Mr. Rafferty."

  "'S
cared' isn't the word for it." His throat clenched as he swallowed, but he did manage to fire a cocky grin at her. "I feel like I'm standing bare-assed naked in a nest full of rattlers."

  On her face there was a softness now that he had never seen before. A tenderness. Her eyes were oceans deep, and he wanted to drown in them. "You remember that day I first came to the RainDance country?" she said. "You had brought that baby calf into the world after its mother was killed by timber wolves."

  "I don't reckon it's the same, Boston."

  "I don't reckon it's that much different, though, either," she said mimicking his drawl.

  Her chin had gone up and she looked down her nose at him in that way she had that could make her seem so starchy. The thought of that little nose leading the way so bravely into the world made him want to gather her in his arms and hold her safe against his chest. She was hardly older than a child herself, and she was about to have her first baby; it was kicking up a blizzard outside, and she was alone, with no one to help her but an uncouth, drunken, and debauched excuse for a cowboy.

  He got up and stood before her. He rested his hand against her face, tilting her head back until she could see his eyes. Then he let her go. "I'm not as drunk as I was behavin' earlier," he said. Her skin had been as soft against his hand as the down of a newborn chick. "I was just acting like that to rile you."

  "I know."

  His mouth pulled into a crooked smile. "And even if I'd been dead drunk, the sight of you messin' all over my floor like that would've been enough to sober up a peach-orchard sow."

  She started to laugh but caught it with her hand. "How drunk do peach-orchard sows get?"

  He laughed with her, feeling his heart grow warm. "Drunker'n boiled owls."

  The laughter spilled out around her fingers.

  "Drunker than a goose at a rooster fight," he said. "Drunker than the devil on a hot night in hell."

  "You're making those up," she accused, laughing openly now. And stopping suddenly as pain twisted her face and her whole body contorted.

  He gripped her arms as she swayed into him. The contraction was sharp and violent, and he felt it against his own stomach. And the intimacy of it was almost more than he could bear.

  He looked down at her bent head, at the whiteness of the part in her pale yellow hair. An overwhelming feeling of tenderness rose and caught in his throat. "It's true I've pulled a lot of calves and foals," he said, his voice rough. "Enough to know it can't be done blind. It's going to be messy and painful, and there won't be any place for modesty or... delicacy."

  She raised her head and looked at him with wide, serious eyes. "I know, Rafferty, and on this night, at least, I'm not afraid of you. Or of myself."

  "Easy now, sweetheart." He poured the sweet oil over her belly, rubbing it in with his palms. Beneath his hands her muscles quivered and contorted. "Take it easy, darlin'. You're gonna be fine, just fine..."

  Clementine clung to the rails of the iron bedstead until her knuckles turned white. Panting, she raised her head and stared at him out of bloodshot eyes. "Mr. Rafferty, you are speaking to me as if I were a dumb bronco you were trying to break. I am not, I beg to remind you, a horse."

  "Yeah? You coulda fooled me, big as you are." He waited until she was done grunting and gasping and panting through another pain. They came so hard and so close together now that she was barely able to catch her breath between them. "I thought some sweet talk might help things along here. You're taking your own sweet time about having this baby. Like you was tryin' to make it last as long as an all-day sucker."

  She shot him a murderous glare and gritted her teeth. "You, sir, can go straight to hell in a handbasket."

  "You're getting the words down real fine now, Boston, but not the tune. There's still too much starch in your voice."

  She grunted and huffed and did some more glaring, and he flashed a damn-the-world smile back at her. But inside, he was sick with fear.

  She had been laboring hard like this for over sixteen hours now. Her chest pumped so violently with the effort of it that he feared her heart would give out. She was drenched with sweat. She had long ago undressed to her shift, and now it was soaked through and rucked up around her waist. Her legs were bent and spread wide and trembling from exhaustion. She was gutsy and beautiful, and he loved her beyond lust or even liking and into a realm of emotion too vast for words, too deep to understand.

  And if she didn't give birth soon she would die.

  He wet her dry, cracked lips with snow and mopped her forehead with a cool, damp cloth. Please, God, he prayed over and over, like a litany. Please, please, please...

  He'd never begged anything of God before, but he was begging now. He was, in his heart at least, on his knees with his hands clasped in an agony of pleading. But the God he knew, the spirit of the prairie and the wind and the mountains, was an indifferent deity who believed in letting the nature of his creation take its course. So he prayed to Clementine's God instead, the God locked up in her green Bible with the gold clasp. Such a God, who proscribed and punished, must also, he thought, show mercy on occasion. So he prayed for mercy, for her sake and his brother's, and he was careful to leave his own name out of the negotiations.

  Her back arched and her belly contracted violently. She gripped the bed rails until the corded muscles of her throat stood out like white ropes. Her teeth clenched together and her lips curled back in a rictus of pain.

  Please, God, please, please... She grunted and heaved again, and a great ripping sound tore out of her chest, like a blunt saw being pulled through wet wood. He tossed the wet cloth on the floor and moved between her thighs, and he saw the top of the baby's head. His throat tightened and tears stung his eyes. Please, God, sweet God... "It's coming, Boston. I can see the top of its head," he shouted, relief welling in his chest to choke the words. Her stomach contracted and her back arched, her heels digging deep into the mattress. "I can see more of it. Jesus Lord. Push, sweetheart. That's it, darlin', push some more now..."

  In the middle of all the panting and grunting and heaving she was doing, she had somehow pushed herself up on her elbows and was trying to see for herself. "What does it look like?"

  "Like a baby." He took her hand, guiding her fingers between her spread legs to the soft honey-colored crown of hair. "Here, feel."

  She grinned at him, breathing hard. "Oh, my."

  "Yeah..." He turned his head and pressed his lips to her knee, tasting the salt of her sweat and his tears. "Oh, my."

  She fell back, grunting and pushing and convulsing. Slowly more of the head emerged and then part of one shoulder. The loop of the navel cord was wrapped around the baby's neck, but before he even thought to panic he had hooked a finger under the cord and gently worked it over the small head. Suddenly the baby slid, slick and wet, into his waiting hands.

  Rafferty's heart squeezed up into an area just below his throat. And where his heart used to be there was an aching sense of awe.

  He wiped the mucus off its tiny face with his fingers, laughing at its loud, squawking cry. He laid Clementine's son on her belly. The babe was wrinkled and scrawny and so tiny. He wailed and thrashed his legs, indignant, Rafferty thought, maybe frightened, too, to be wrenched out of his mother's warm, soft womb. "Look at him," he said, his throat thick, as love for his brother's child swelled in his chest, swift and fierce and heart-soaring. "Look at your son, Boston."

  She tried to struggle up on her elbows again and he supported her back with his arm. She was laughing, too, and he heard joy and relief and awe in her voice. "Oh, Rafferty... have you ever seen anything more wonderful?"

  He turned his head to look at her. Her hair was plastered to her cheek in wet, sticky strands. Her face was pale and drawn, her lips cracked and chewed bloody in places. He could see himself reflected in the wide, black pupils of her eyes. "No," he said. "I have never seen anything more wonderful."

  He cut the navel cord, and when the afterbirth came, he put it in a zinc bucket to be buried
later. Using the water he'd been keeping hot on the stove for hours, he bathed the baby and he bathed Clementine. He touched her naked body, her breasts and between her legs. Every time he looked up, it was to find her eyes on him, wide and dark and filled with some raw emotion he couldn't name.

  He didn't have anything proper to wrap the baby in. He finally settled on one of his soft chambray shirts. It curtailed the kid's thrashing some, but not his squawking, which was loud enough to peel the bark off trees.

  He put the squirming bundle into Clementine's waiting arms and sat beside her on the bed. They looked down together at the red face, with its tiny wailing mouth and eyes clenched into tight, angry slits. "I don't think he likes me," she said in a small voice.

  "Maybe he's just hungry."

  She wet her cracked and swollen lip with her tongue. "I'm not sure I know how to feed him."

  He dragged in an aching breath. He had to make fists with his hands to keep from taking hold of her face and kissing her poor ravaged mouth. "I reckon if you aim him in the right direction, he'll figure the rest of it out for himself."

  Clementine unbuttoned his shirt, which he had put on her in place of her sweat-drenched shift, and put the baby's face to her breast. The light pouring in through the window turned her skin creamy and golden, like freshly churned butter. Dawn had come and with it the sun. It had stopped snowing, and the world outside looked white and pure and born anew.

  He watched her nipple tighten and harden, and the baby's mouth turned toward it, latching on. "Oh!" she exclaimed softly. "He sucks hard."

  Rafferty stared in wonder at his brother's son. The transparent eyelids, no bigger than the nails on his little fingers. The little fists thrown back on either side of his head. The pink mouth sucking greedily.

  "I wish he was mine," he said. The words slipped out without thought, but there was no taking them back.

  She looked up at him, and he allowed his face to be naked before her. She looked at him forever, and the days flowed into nights, snow melted into spring. Then forever ended and began anew when she took his hand.

 

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