The hammer had immediately swung back on the upstroke and it hovered now in the air as Jere's eyes widened in horror. The crowd groaned and gasped, and Drew shuddered from the pain that must have burst suddenly upon his consciousness like an exploding giant cracker. But he flung up his head and shouted at his brother, "Bring it down, damn you! Bring it down!"
Jere brought the hammer down.
Thick red blood welled out of Drew's bruised and lacerated flesh, but he still gripped the drill, turning and lifting it as was necessary with each successive blow. Blood ran into the hole and was flushed out with the water. The puddles around the granite block turned a bright pink. A fierce pain squeezed Hannah's chest. She didn't realize she was holding her breath until the timekeeper, his face pale, touched Jere on the shoulder. It was Drew's turn to swing the hammer.
Jere hesitated, but Drew was already back on his feet, with his own hammer in his fists. He raised the sledge in the air, and blood ran down his arm. He brought the hammer down, and blood sprayed in a fanlike arc, splattering those in the crowd closest to the platform. Again and again he pounded at the drill, although each blow must have sent pain flashing like fire up his arm. Hannah stared, so tense her whole body quivered, as the sweat and blood ran in slow rivulets down his chest, over the ridges of muscle, following the arrow of hair that disappeared into his britches.
Once again the brothers changed places, and the last three minutes seemed to crawl by. Hard white lines bracketed Drew Scully's mouth, and a glazed look had come over his eyes. Hannah dug her nails deep into her palm as if she could take some of his pain onto herself.
"Fifteen minutes!" the timekeeper finally bellowed, and Hannah's pent-up breath left her in a thick rush. The crowd burst into a loud and spontaneous cheer at the sheer courage and strength of will that it had taken for the Scully brothers even to finish the contest.
The timekeeper flushed the bloody water out the hole and inserted the measuring rod. The crowd was silent now, holding its collective breath. "Twenty-eight and one-quarter inches!" he shouted, and the air exploded with loud whoops and even some gunfire.
"Luly's gone to fetch the doctor."
Hannah's gaze jerked around to Clementine, her cheeks flushing as if she'd been caught doing something wicked. Clementine's own face was as pale as the granite dust that coated the platform, but wet, red drops speckled her forehead and her smooth golden hair. Hannah realized that she too must be splattered with Drew Scully's blood.
"Mama, that man's bleeding," Charlie announced.
Clementine turned her head and pressed a trembling mouth to the boy's cheek. "Yes, he is. Let us go down to the river and see if we can spot some trout swimming in the shallows, shall we?"
The timekeeper had the Scully brothers on either side of him. He was all set to raise their hands in the air, proclaiming them the winners, when Drew sagged to his knees. His head lolled and his face turned white and waxy, as if the blood now pooling on the platform was the last he owned.
"Give way!" Hannah heard someone shout. "Here comes the doctor."
Dr. Kit Corbett was as tall and skinny as a snake on stilts and ugly to boot. But he was young and he wasn't a drunk, two attributes that were hard to find in doctors out in western Montana. He was new to Rainbow Springs, but he wasn't new to double-jack drilling contests. He didn't even blink at the sight of the blood-splattered wood and granite. "You might have had the sense not to finish it" was all he said as he leaped agilely onto the platform and knelt beside Drew, opening his black bag.
The schoolmarm, who had escorted the doctor this far, did not climb the platform after him. She stood back in indecision, her teeth sunk into her lower lip. Hannah reckoned a sweet young thing like Miss Luly Maine was too shy and innocent and well brought up to approach a man she had yet to be formally introduced to, even if he was on his last breath.
Hannah Yorke had also been well brought up, but sure as man needed woman, she was no innocent. And that crib in Deadwood had finished whatever shyness she had once possessed. She pushed through the men who were now wedged in front of her around the platform. Drew flung his head up, flicking his sweat-wet hair back out of his eyes, and their gazes met with the force of a sledge slamming into rock.
He looked so hurt and vulnerable on his knees like that, cradling his injured hand. She wanted to do something to him. Smack him, maybe, for being such a fool. Or cradle his head against her breast and comfort him with sweet words and gentle kisses, which showed that she was the bigger fool.
Instead she said in a voice as tart as vinegar, "I reckon if you were able to grip a hammer, your hand ain't busted."
He flashed a cocky grin at her. "You're some fine comfort, Mrs. Yorke."
"And you are some fool, Mr. Drew Scully."
"A fool who's twenty dollars richer, though."
His brother put a bucket of beer into his good hand, and Drew swigged it down. The doctor was flexing his bruised and bleeding fingers, trying to determine if any were broken. Drew swore and pulled his hand free of the man's rough treatment. "Go on with you, you bleeding sawbones. I've been hurt worse."
What a boy he was, Hannah thought, chock full of brag and fight. From the hindsight of thirty-three years of rough and tough living, she saw Drew Scully's youth hanging out all over him, as obvious as his ready-made three-dollar suit. Yet something about him intrigued her... It was the pure, unadulterated guts of him. Courage came easily to some men, because they so rarely knew fear. But Drew Scully, she suspected with the innate sense of a fellow sufferer, was intimate with fear. He knew fear as she knew men—he knew the stink of it and the taste of it and the way it ate at your pride and slowly, like water dripping on rock year after year, corroded your soul.
The doctor settled for wrapping a bandage around the injured hand and consigned his ungrateful patient to hell. Men pressed around Drew, slapping him on the back and offering to buy him a drink, but he broke away from them, his gaze intent on Hannah.
He came to where she stood and looked down at her. "Will you be nursing me back to health, Mrs. Yorke?" he said. "I could be using an angel's sweet ministrations."
"What you could use is a clout on the side of the head, and then maybe you'd acquire some sense. And besides, I ain't no—"
"Angel," he finished for her, and he smiled. Not one of those cocky grins this time, but a slow, soft smile that changed his face and left her feeling as if she'd been punched in the stomach.
He squatted and, putting his weight on his good hand, swung to the ground. He hooked his butt on the edge of the platform and wrapped his arm around her waist, somehow maneuvering her so that she was between his legs. She was amused by this blatant trick and shocked at herself for letting it happen. His spread thighs brushed hers. Her breasts pressed against his chest. Her belly arched into his groin as his hand splayed across the small of her back, pulling her closer. His thighs were as solid as the rock he had drilled so proficiently. She drew in a deep breath that was thick with his scent, of male sweat and granite dust and the violent, coppery odor of blood.
And though it seemed their faces were but a breath apart, she couldn't look at him. Her gaze drifted over to the refreshment tent just as Zach Rafferty turned away from the makeshift bar, a tin pail of foaming brew in either hand. Across a meadow of crushed grass and wafting gun smoke their gazes met, and Hannah stiffened within the boy's light embrace.
Callused fingers gripped her chin, pulling her head around, and she looked up into eyes the hard, dark gray of the flint the Indians had once used for their arrowheads. They were old eyes.
"When you're with me, m'lass," he said, his voice low, and as hard as his eyes, "you'll be keeping those lovely brown eyes of yours on me, then, and you'll not be looking at him."
She pushed off his chest with such force that his head snapped on his neck. "You are sorely mistaken, Mr. Scully. I am not with you. Indeed, you may go straight to hell, and you may go there by yourself!"
"Aye." His smile came again and it was
irresistible. She thought she probably hated him. She definitely wanted him. "I've been told to go to the nether regions often enough and by enough women. I suppose if they have any say about it a-tall, that sure enough is where I'm bound."
He brushed her cheek with the backs of his bandaged fingers. "G'day to you, then, Mrs. Yorke," he said, and sauntered off without a further by-your-leave. She stared after him, her chest heaving with anger and bludgeoned pride.
Blue and red ribbons flashed in the corner of her eye and she turned her head. Miss Luly Maine had come up beside her. The girl's chin trembled, but she managed to get it up in the air. She swept aside her skirts as if the ground around them had suddenly become defiled, and she too walked away, the twitching of her bustle more eloquent than any words.
Hannah watched her go. She wanted to call the girl back, but she knew it would do no good. When you are seventeen there are only good girls and bad girls and no in-between girls.
Every man's girl and no man's girl...
Hannah's eyes blurred, and she blinked angrily. She focused her gaze across the meadow, where the Rainbow River wound its way, sparkling like tinsel, through the aspens and cottonwoods. Oh, what she wouldn't give to be seventeen again. She wanted to be innocent and pure, with a heart that hadn't been broken and patched together so many times it resembled the last whiskey glass in the last honky-tonk on earth. She wanted to have it all to do over again, with her life stretching ahead of her, empty and shiny, just like the river.
And with love at the end of it.
CHAPTER 21
Erlan knealt on the bank and launched a paper boat into the river, a plea to the river god to answer her heart's desire. She thought of the many times she had sat high on the garden wall of her lao chia, her back pressed against the rough, sun-warmed stones, hugging her knees as she dreamed of doing just this—setting her secret wishes adrift on the distant, mysterious river.
This river surely was different from the Min, which was muddy and silty, yellow as an old man's skin. This river was so clear she could count the stones that lined the bottom. White down floated like snow flurries from the tall trees overhead. And those other trees, those slender silver ones—their leaves glittered where they caught the light and shivered even when the wind was still.
Erlan rose to her feet and drew in a deep breath of air, filling her head with the smell of the river and the sun-baked grass. A string of firecrackers went off with a rat-a-tat-tat, and the new fire wagon's bell clanged like a bronze gong. The sounds reminded her of the New Year's Day celebrations back home. There had been fireworks then, of course, rockets that burst into stars and flowers of colored lights, dragons that writhed across the sky trailing green fire. And, oh, had they feasted! On steaming meat dumplings and long rice noodles for long life, on moon cakes and good-luck oranges.
At one time, even just a short while ago, these thoughts of home would have made her soul ache, but now she smiled. She could bear to think of her lao chia, now that she believed in her heart that she would see it again someday.
Her smiled faded, though, as her thoughts turned to her anjing juren, her gentle giant. A while ago, as she had walked along the river, she'd seen him up on a wooden platform, wielding an enormous hammer. As if possessed of a spirit of their own, her feet had started toward him. But then she had made herself turn away. In this life it was their fate to be like the moon and the sun, only passing in the vastness of the sky with no hope of ever being together. And though she thought perhaps she could come to love him, still he frightened her. He was too big, too fierce.
Lost in her thoughts, Erlan rounded a bend in the river and, lifting her head, saw a woman kneeling on the stony bank. The woman had a child with her, and she'd just finished cleaning his face with a white cloth. As Erlan watched, the woman dipped the cloth in the water and began to scrub at her own face, rubbing vigorously. Erlan took a step, and her golden lilies sent a trickle of pebbles splashing into the river. The woman's head whipped around. Erlan smiled and bowed when she realized it was Clementine.
"Good day to you, my friend."
"Oh, Erlan, I didn't see you there..." Clementine pushed to her feet, struggling with heavy dark green skirts. Her fingers shook as she pushed stray wisps of hair off her brow, tucking them beneath the curled brim of a straw bonnet. Her face was whiter than the cottony tufts that floated through the air, and there was a fine trembling going on inside her.
Erlan held out a concerned hand to the other woman. "Are you ill?"
"No, no. A man was hurt, and his blood splattered..." Again she smoothed back her hair, and her hand still shook. "Oh, it was nothing, really. I am being silly, but..." She shuddered hard. "Oh, God, I hate this country sometimes. I just hate it."
Erlan felt a tug on her chang-fu, and she looked down into the child's face, which was as round and bright as a moon cake. "You got funny eyes." he said. "They're skinny at the corners."
Clementine laid a hand on her son's head, drawing him back against her knees. "Hush, Charlie. It's impolite to point out another's differences."
A pair of young girls ran past them, just beyond the trees, pulling a kite through the air. The kite's rag tail was laced with playing cards and whistles so that it sang and hummed like a dovecote. The boy Charlie twisted out from beneath his mother's hand and went running after the girls with the kite.
Clementine started to follow, then she saw that the other children had gladly welcomed him into their game, even passing the flying line into his dimpled hands. The kite dipped and soared through the breeze-ruffled sky. Charlie shrieked with laughter, and the sunlight turned his head into a cap of gold.
"He is a beautiful little boy," Erlan said.
Clementine turned back, smiling now. "He's a bit wild, though, I'm afraid."
They began to walk side by side along the riverbank, following the children as they were pulled along by the kite. Clementine had stopped trembling, had even smiled, but Erlan sensed that a battle still raged, deep in the well of her being. There were too many spirits in this woman, Erlan thought, pulling her this way and that and allowing her no peace.
"Why, whatever do you have on your feet?" Clementine said.
Erlan lifted her chang-fu the better to show off her new shoes. "Do you like? They are called croquet sandals." She had found them tucked away in a back corner in the mercantile. The box they'd come in had said they had a vulcanized rubber sole with a canvas upper. Some of these English words were unknown to her, but she did discover that the shoes were wonderfully comfortable. She stretched out her curled and deformed toes, pushing them against the soft sides. "I am allowing my feet to become as big as boats, like a regular American girl."
She'd been loosening the bindings gradually, bathing her golden lilies in herbed water every night to make the calluses and bones soft again. The process was horribly painful, and her feet swelled up like melon gourds every time she walked on them. Her crippled toes would never lie completely flat again, and she would probably always walk like a drunken sailor, but with each passing day, as her feet broadened, she felt all of herself grow stronger. Strong in body and strong in spirit.
She nodded in the direction of the open field, where the band played and couples moved in a circle of swirling skirts and clapping hands, their heels tapping a gentle cadence on the packed earth. "Perhaps someday I shall dance like those ladies. What is it called—the poker?"
"The polka." Clementine flashed another one of her sudden smiles. "You seem happy today, Erlan."
"Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I am at peace. I have stopped cursing my destiny and have decided instead what I shall do."
"You will go home?"
"No. I shall stay. And then I will go home."
So many hours she had spent thinking about her fate, taking long walks, walks that hurt her golden lilies and her head. At times it seemed she had to hold on hard to her jumbled thoughts. She yearned so for the Flowery Land, for her home and for her father, for her sisters and cous
ins and aunts. Merciful heavens, she even missed her father's three wives. She could not bear to accept a fate that meant she would never see them all again. But she wondered, too, if she were only dragging the lake in search of the moon, if she was not destined after all to spend her life in exile in this alien land, where the gods had surely sent her as a punishment for her mother's shame. And then one day she remembered a proverb her father had once told her: "Many paths of honor lead out of a forest of shame."
She sought now for words to explain. "We Chinese believe that to be born is not enough, to live is not enough. And if that is so, what matters then? Honor matters, and hope." She looked into Clementine's strange eyes, that were wide and intent and full of restless, shifting currents. "I will go home someday because I must. I cannot bear to think I might never see the green tiled roofs and scarlet pillars of my home again. But there is honor involved as well, for what my mother has done will shame all future generations that come of my womb. I must return to the place of my ancestors and find a way to atone for her disgrace. Until then I have no face. i am unable to lift up my head."
"But it seems so unfair to hold you to account for what she did."
Erlan shrugged, for that was the way of things. You were tied to your ancestors and they to you, and what each did affected the honor of all. She would return to her father and seek redemption so that Tao Huo would know peace in the spirit world. Just how she would accomplish this she didn't know, but she couldn't let ignorance or fear cause her to stumble on the path of duty.
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