He poured what was left of the whiskey down his throat.
CHAPTER 20
Clementine McQueen's fair brows drew together in a frown as she studied the fizzling brown liquid in her glass. Erlan saw the face she was making and eyed her own glass with trepidation. Because they were guests in the fire woman's house, good manners compelled them to drink this... this whatever-it-was down to the last drop and then smack their lips with pleasure.
Erlan took a surreptitious sniff of the drink. It smelled of the lily plant, so perhaps it didn't taste too terrible. But it was hissing like a serpent.
"What on earth is this foul brew?" Clementine said.
Erlan bit her lip to hide a smile. She had just caught the glint of laughter in the other woman's eyes.
Hannah Yorke's eyes were dancing as well. She planted a fist on her hip. "You know darn well that's sarsaparilla, Clementine—a la-di-da lady's drink. So don't go wrinkling your Boston nose at it."
"Yeah, but what I wanna know is why you're trying to choke me with this teetotal stuff," Clementine said in a gravelly voice that sounded as if she were speaking with a mouthful of beans. Erlan had to cover her own mouth with her hand to keep from giggling. "Break out the Rosebud, woman, and let's get pie-eyed."
Laughing, Hannah went to a lacquered bureau and took out a brown bottle. She fetched three fresh glasses and into each she poured two fingers' width of the fon-kwei drink called whiskey.
Erlan took a cautious sip. It tasted bitter, but it left a tingling in her belly more potent than rice wine. She took two bigger sips. A most pleasant drink. She took a generous swallow. Her lips nearly pulled back from her teeth and her belly buzzed. A most relaxing drink.
She cast a covert glance at the two women who sat across from her on the gold brocade sofa. The merchant Woo had warned her that she would never be accepted in this demon land, that they would call her insulting names and laugh at her lily feet. He had seemed surprised, and perhaps secretly pleased, when Hannah Yorke had invited his new wife into her home. But then, as the merchant Woo had explained, Mrs. Yorke had once been a joy girl and thus was an outcast herself.
Erlan bowed her head to her hostess. "I am honored," she said, "that you would invite me for a visit."
Hannah's smile put deep dimples on each cheek. "Well, Clementine and I did get to thinking you must be feeling awful lonely for some female company 'round about now, what with being newly married and all."
Clementine smiled as well and took a swallow from her glass. Erlan was pleased that good manners dictate she follow suit. This whiskey was a most pleasant drink.
Hannah was looking at Clementine with exaggerated round-eyed wonder. "Lord, girl, I don't know what's come over you. Sitting on my sofa cool as you please and drinking hell brew like a fish... Imagine what Gus would say—"
"The man can't suffer over what he doesn't know." She shook a finger in Hannah's face. "And don't you dare go blathering to Rafferty, either."
"I won't. I promise." Hannah licked a finger and drew an X over her heart.
Erlan watched with interest. It must be the fon-kwei way of fooling the ears of their listening gods. She would have to remember this ritual.
Hannah poured more whiskey into their glasses. Erlan took another deep swallow. "The merchant Woo shall also remain ignorant," she said. "I promise." She licked her finger and crossed her heart.
A breeze blew in the open window, stirring the fringed scarf on the piecrust table and the fronds of the fern on its stand. Although it was not what she was used to, Erlan liked this house. In this Rainbow Springs where all was in disharmony, where even the roads were dangerously straight, this house was like a lotus growing in a pond of choked weeds. Perhaps it was because a woman dwelled alone here, and so the atmosphere was overwhelmingly yin. She wondered what it was like to be Hannah Yorke and have only oneself to please, only oneself to serve. The thought was unsettling, and she put it away.
Clementine set her glass on the tea table in front of her. "Oh, dear, Erlan. I almost forgot." She picked up a square parcel off the sofa beside her. "It's the photograph I made of you and Sam on your wedding day." The stiff brown paper crackled as she unwrapped it. "Hannah supplied the frame."
Erlan took the gift and bowed low. "A thousand times a thousand thank-yous. It is a thing truly worthy of an empress."
She stared with wonder at the photograph in its silver frame. There she was in her wedding robe with the flying cranes, her features as stiff as an opera mask, and there the merchant Woo in his barbarian coat with the swallowlike tail. He looked pleased with his bride, but then, that was before she had put the cleaver to her neck.
"You know, Clementine," Hannah was saying, "you ought to do that more often—take people's likenesses at weddings, and for other occasions, too, like birthdays and such. Then you could sell them. Imagine all the little extras you could treat yourself to with a bit of money of your own."
Clementine folded the brown paper into a perfect square and laid it with care on the table beside her empty glass. "Gus's pride would never stand such a thing—his wife working to give herself luxuries he thinks he should be providing."
Hannah sniffed. "Most times I don't even see him providing you with the bare necessities, and I don't notice his pride sparing you from all the drudge work you do out on that ranch."
Clementine gave her friend a hard look. "Don't start, Hannah. Gus is good to me. You know he is."
A silence came between them then. A silence Erlan could feel, for it was thick with words that had never been spoken, with secrets too dangerous to share.
Hannah shrugged, lifting her chin, as if, Erlan thought, she could draw her pride around her like a tattered straw cloak. She raised her glass in the air. "I want to propose a toast. To something I'll always admire and never be—a true lady."
"Oh, Hannah." Clementine flushed, shaking her head. "You are foolish sometimes."
Now the two women shared a smile, calming whatever deep currents had been stirred between them. "If you like the photograph, Erlan," Hannah said, "Clementine can make you another to send home to your folks in China."
Erlan could not bear to look at the women now. If she wished to become a friend to them—and, oh, she did so wish it—then they would have to know her shame and come to accept her in spite of it.
"I thank you for your kind offer, but there is no family left to me. My mother is dead, and my father has cast me off." Erlan laid her palms on her thighs. She made herself lift her head, made herself meet their eyes. "He sold me to the Foochow slave trader for one hundred taels of silver."
"Oh, whyever would he do such a thing?" Clementine was suddenly in the chair beside hers, gripping her hand. Erlan felt the woman's yang strength, her warrior's spirit, and took comfort from it.
"My mother wore the green skirt of the concubine, and still the patriarch honored her by not sending her away when she bore him only a worthless daughter. But instead of repaying this kindness with veneration and absolute obedience, she dishonored the House of Po and heaped shame upon the ancestors by lying with a... with another. And then when she was given the scarlet noose, she soiled the purity of her own spirit by cravenly not making use of it. The patriarch was forced to nail her into her coffin alive. Her shame has become my shame. Her dishonor, my dishonor."
Hannah sucked in a sharp breath, shuddering. "My God. That is the most barbaric thing I've ever heard of."
Aiya, this whiskey did something to the tongue. She had meant to reveal some but not all. Erlan looked down at her hand, still held tightly by Clementine's slender white fingers. Their two hands seemed like bare wisps of things, boneless. Yet she could feel the strength of the other woman's grip.
Hannah had come over to stand beside her chair. She laid a gentle hand on Erlan's shoulder. This custom of touching was not such a disagreeable thing after all. "Did you leave behind a beau in China?" Hannah asked softly.
"A beau?"
"A young man you fancied. Someone you hoped
to marry someday."
"In China there is no such thing as a beau. Marriages are arranged by Tai-Tai—First Wife. A girl does not see her husband until the day they are wed, when he lifts her red veil."
Hannah huffed a laugh. "I bet that makes for some mighty interesting wedding nights."
Erlan caught a smile with her hand. "Of course we say we wish only for a husband of good heart, but in truth no girl wants to find beneath the silk covers of her marriage bed an aged and withered root that not even a tai-fung could stir to life. Rather, she looks forward eagerly to one that is long and thick and quivering with excitement like a divining rod."
Erlan's smile faded as she noticed the startled looks on the faces of the two women. Embarrassment burned in her chest. It was like being a tightrope dancer, trying to maneuver her way through this demon land's strange customs and ways.
"I have given offense," she said.
Hannah snorted and choked as if she was trying to hold back a laugh. And then the laughter did burst out of her in great loud whoops, and she was joined by Clementine. The two women looked at each other and laughed harder.
Hannah clutched at her belly. "Oh, oh, Clem, just imagine! Quivering like a divining rod!"
When she had caught her breath, Hannah asked, "But what if a girl isn't ready to be married?"
Erlan was pleased that she had not made a fool of herself after all. "Getting married and birthing children are a woman's happiness. Of course a husband is not found for every girl. If there are many daughters and the clan is poor, the younger ones often are sold as concubines or to houses of leisure to be daughters of joy."
"Lord knows, being a whore ain't an easy life," Hannah said. "And I 'spect it's no different in China. But I reckon I'd rather be a—what did you call them?—a daughter of joy than be married off to some man I've never set eyes on before. Why, what if he turned out to be a beast, or a tyrant?"
"Even the lowliest peasant acts like a warlord beneath his own roof. It is the way of men. To be a woman is to be like the brown larks my father keeps as pets. We only exchange one sort of cage for another."
The two women fell silent, and Erlan wondered again if she had given offense. She raised her head and met Clementine's eyes. Sea eyes, frothing, shifting, restless. And Erlan had a strange thought: she understands; she understands all there is of me. In another life we might have been sisters.
"Don't mind Hannah," Clementine said. "She's always going on about single blessedness, but someday she'll find a man who needs her to take care of him and she'll go willing into the cage, just like the rest of us."
Hannah laughed. "Me, take care of a man? Hunh. That'll be the day." She made a soft clucking noise in the back of her throat and ran a finger along the curve of Erlan's cheek. "Look how chapped your poor cheeks have gotten already. With this wind and the alkali dust, if you don't have a care your skin'll get as dry as a sand bed. I'll make you a batch of complexion salve. I'll make some up for you, too, Clementine. You can get it when you come back for the Fourth of July frolic."
Hannah continued to stroke Erlan's cheek. A strange mixture of excitement and sweet contentment settled within her. It made her tingle inside, like the fon-kwei whiskey. She looked up and smiled. "What is this Fourth of July everyone is talking about?"
The first thing a body did on a Fourth of July morning in the RainDance country was to step outside and sniff the weather.
The old-timers swore up and down that it had been known to snow on the Fourth. 'Most everyone else, though, being new to the place, hadn't seen this particular phenomenon and didn't care to. But Montana weather had other tricks up its sleeve that could spoil a day. Howling wind and slashing rain and battering hail as big as hens' eggs, to name but a few.
So on that Independence Day morning of 1883, the RainDance folk poked wary noses out their doors and found to their relief a light, sage-scented breeze and butter-yellow sunshine. It was going to be a fine afternoon for the festivities.
Rainbow Springs, Montana Territory, had changed from the bobtailed town it had been four years ago. Why, just last winter it had been incorporated, and in the words of that old prospector, Pogey, "she was struttin' regular city airs like a two-bit whore in a French silk gown." There had even been talk lately about putting up streetlights. Nash, Pogey's partner in mischief, predicted that within the first five minutes of a Saturday night any streetlight worth going by the name "would get itself shot deader'n a beaver hat just for being there and handy."
It was silver that had changed Rainbow Springs. The Four Jacks had proved to be a solid, steady little mine. It had brought people to what was once nothing more than a burp in a road heading west. High-toned, high-handed people like the managers and engineers who ran the workings. Hard-fisted, hard-drinking people like the miners who blasted the rock and mucked the silver ore, and the mule skinners who hauled it to the smelter over in Butte. Church-going, root-putting people like butchers, bakers, and saddlemakers.
Many were foreigners, people with thick accents and odd customs and a hunger to take advantage of the opportunities the West claimed to offer. They were mostly Irish and Cornish and Welsh, who hired on at the mine and lived within its shadow in the shacks and boardinghouses nicknamed Dublin Patch. And the Chinese, who worked the old gold placers and the tailings of silver ore waste the Four Jacks Consortium didn't care to mess with. The Chinese put up their shacks on the outskirts of town, across the river, where a circle of bare earth still scarred the grass from a long-gone tipi.
There was an air of permanence about Rainbow Springs that the town had never had before. Most of the buildings were still made of roughhewn logs, but a few, like the Miner's Union Bank, had been constructed of milled lumber. The haphazard grid of streets that had sprung up willynilly around RainDance Butte had been named and their names put up on wooden signs for those folk savvy enough to read them. In Luke's Barber Shop a man could keep his very own shaving mug on a shelf, an act of faith that he would be there tomorrow and the next week and the week after that to use it.
Most of the old-timers recognized the flow of change, called it progress, and went along with it. Snake-Eye acquired a last name to go with the new barn he put up in 1881. Painted above the barn's big sliding double doors in bright red letters was a sign: Smith's Livery, Horses Bedded and Shod, Several Conveyances for Rent and Sale. Sam Woo carried giant powder and caps and fuses in his mercantile now next to the bags of seed and sheep shears and cowhide reatas. Nickel Annie had given up the open road and now drove her string of mules for the Four Jacks. And Hannah Yorke had fancied up the inside of the Best in the West Casino, putting in gilt mirrors and a brass bar rail and a parquet floor until it looked like the sort of high-toned den of sin a man would expect to find in San Francisco, or maybe even in New York City.
And there was a schoolhouse in Rainbow Springs now, painted red, and with a pine flagpole in the yard and a copper bell on its roof.
The schoolhouse proved to be a bit too much progress for some. "The country," Pogey told his crony Nash, over a bottle of Rosebud whiskey in Sam Woo's mercantile on the day the new schoolhouse opened for business, "done got tame on us when we wasn't even lookin'."
"Tame as a neck-wrung rooster," Nash said.
"Tame as an old toad in the hot sun."
"Tame as a toothless coyote."
"Holy God," said Sam Woo.
On that Fourth of July afternoon in 1883 a miner stepped out of his boardinghouse in Dublin Patch. He hooked his hands on his hips, threw back his head, and breathed deeply of the warm sage-spicy air.
"'Tes a fine day," Jere Scully said aloud to himself. "A fine day for a frolic." Jere rather liked the idea of celebrating an Independence Day, the Cornish being of an independent bent themselves.
He spotted little Meg Davies coming down the dusty road, a straw basket of posies on her arm, and he waved her over.
"You want to buy some flowers for your girl, Mr. Scully? Only cost you a nickel," she said, trying for a smile and n
ot quite making it. Her red hair was twisted into such tight braids they curled out from the sides of her head like jug handles, and freckles splashed like spilled cinnamon flakes across her cheeks and nose. But bleak shadows haunted her eyes. She was taking the death of her brother Rolfe hard; the whole of the Patch had taken the nipper's death hard.
Jere bent over for a better look at the bunches of flowers in her basket. "What have you got here?"
"Bluebells and shooting stars and wood lilies. I picked them fresh just this morning. Which do you like best?"
Jere didn't know one flower from another, except maybe for roses. "I'll be having the orange ones, then," he said.
Meg Davies plucked a posy of the orange flowers out of her basket, at the same time dropping Jere's nickel into her pinafore pocket with a deft flourish. "Do you got a girl, Mr. Scully?"
Jere looked up and down the road, then bent way over until they were nose to freckled nose. He put his finger to his lips. "Don't you be telling anybody."
The little girl pressed her lips together, but her eyes glinted with laughter. "I won't... Oh, look, here comes your brother!" she shrieked, and hurried off down the street, giggling.
Jere whipped off his derby and stuffed the posy inside the crown, slammed the hat back on his head, and turned with an easy smile. "'Tes about bloody time..." His eyes opened wide at the sight of his brother resplendent in a brown windowpane-checked suit, a stiff white collar, and a yellow four-in-hand. "Cor! But if you don't look prettier than the primroses on a lady's Sunday bonnet."
Drew Scully took an exaggerated sniff at the air, wrinkling his nose. "Peeyew! And who smells worse than a sailor on a Saturday night, then?"
Drew scrubbed at his cheeks with his big rough hand. "'Tes the bay rum I splashed on me face after I shaved. Do you think 'tes too much, then? Mebbe I should go and wash it off—"
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