"God damn," he said. The word tasted foul, but he said it again, trying to ease the weight off his chest, which was heavy with failure. "God damn it all to hell."
He squatted on his haunches beside the river and scooped up a handful of water, splashing it over his face. The water tasted foul, too, so alkaline it was almost thick enough to chew. It was no relief against the heat.
The sun seemed to melt and pour out of the sky, shriveling the grass and beating relentlessly at the air, and drying up the once muddy riverbank so that it curled and cracked like old paper. In all the years he'd ranched in this valley, he'd never seen the Rainbow running this low. Hell, it didn't even run now, it trickled. If it didn't rain soon he would go bust. But then, with cattle prices so low it didn't pay to ship the beeves to market, he'd probably go bust even if the sky suddenly started gushing water.
He stood up slowly, feeling old, his bones creaking. He unwrapped his horse's reins from around a chokecherry tree that had borne no fruit during this summer of drought, and headed toward home. His mare plodded along, her head hanging so low her nose nearly scraped the parched ground. It was too hot and dry to do anything but suffer.
As he emerged from the shadows of the cottonwoods, he disturbed a black-tailed doe that was grazing off the withered grass beside the salt block. The doe lifted her head and bounded away, her ribs showing through her hide plain enough to count. But her coat was long and shaggy. Yesterday Gus had caught sight of a white Arctic owl sitting on the snake fence. The wild geese and ducks and songbirds were already flying south, and lately the stars had been flashing and glimmering brighter at night. Even his own beard was growing faster. These were all signs that a bad winter was coming—although he didn't know how he knew this. Maybe Zach had once told him.
Zach. A sigh stretched across his chest, leaving behind an ache. He couldn't think of his brother without feeling this ache that was a convoluted mixture of love and hate, jealousy and longing.
Sometimes he would awaken in the stillness of the night and he would be haunted by images of his brother: Zach astride a bronc, his hand reaching for the sky; Zach cradling a bloody newborn calf in his arms; Zach dancing with Hannah on a summer's night, their laughter floating up into a star-filled sky... Zach left alone on the Natchez wharf, his head held high in rigid pride as the steamboat's paddles began to churn. And in the stillness of the night Gus would look at his wife's face and want to touch her, and he would be afraid to.
In the stillness of the night, when he had nothing to listen to but his own thoughts, a man couldn't hide from the truth of what he thought about himself. Down deep in the guts of him, in that secret, vulnerable place where a man lived, Gus thought he would never be the man his brother was.
He stopped now to look up at the big house through the shimmering heat ripples. They called it the big house not because it was big—though it was of a good size, with two stories and four bedrooms, even a water closet with a patent toilet— but to distinguish it from the buffalo hunter's sod-roofed cabin, which still stood in the shade of the cottonwoods along the river. The house had green-painted shutters, a double gallery wrapped all around it, and a shake roof with a pair of gables. He had at last given his wife some of the luxuries he'd promised her, even if he was already on the verge of losing it all again.
The new boards of the gallery steps squeaked beneath his boots. He entered by way of the front door, his nostrils pinching at the thick smell of burned niter papers and ginseng steam. He paused a moment, his heart clenched, as he listened for the wheezing sounds that meant the boy was having another attack. And let out a sigh of weary relief when the house gave back nothing but silence.
Their baby son, Daniel, born just last New Year's Day, suffered from what the doc called spasms of the lungs. Burning niter papers helped a little, and Lily Woo had shown them a Chinese remedy that involved inhaling the steam from boiling water heavily laced with ginseng. This soothed the spasms sometimes, but not always. Sometimes the baby's lips turned blue and his chest heaved with the frantic beating of his heart, and his arms waved wildly as if he were trying to pull the air into his wheezing lungs with his little hands. In those moments the helpless terror they felt was almost unendurable. Gus didn't think Clementine could survive having to bury another child. He didn't think he could survive it.
He took off his hat and ran a finger around the inside leather, wiping out the sweat. He hung the hat on a steer-horn rack just as a murmur of voices floated out from the kitchen—one shrill and petulant, the other soothing and patient: Saphronie trying to coax his two-year-old daughter, whose middle name was Stubborn, into finishing her stirabout.
A year ago if someone had told Gus that he would allow a harlot, even a reformed one, into his house to tend to his children, he probably would have called them a liar and spat in their eye. But Daniel's birth had been hard on Clementine, and with her stuck out here alone on the ranch, with the one baby barely weaned and the new one being so sickly, and then Hannah arriving that day with the tattooed whore in tow and acting mad enough to hiss fire, and...
And she had gone at it with him nose to nose. "You so impressed with what you got in your britches, Gus McQueen, that you can't keep 'em buttoned long enough for your woman to get over the last babe before you're planting another one in her belly? I 'spect you go easier on your broodmares than you do on your wife."
Angry words had built up in Gus's mouth to be stopped by a rigid-jawed shame. He lusted after his wife, he always had, and he couldn't keep himself from taking her. It was a weakness in him that he admitted to and didn't even bother to try to over- come. In his selfish desire to satisfy his carnal urgings he was his father's son. His brother's brother.
"You're just damn lucky, mister," Hannah had gone on, "that Saphronie here has agreed to do the heavy work and help care for your two babies and all for only board and a dollar a week. So damn lucky that you're gonna keep your mouth shut and let it happen."
And so he had done just that.
But he had never gotten used to the sight of her ravaged face—those dark blue teardrops running silently and forever down her chin. This mousy, morose woman bore the marks of cold, rough handling on her mind and body. Although he'd occasionally come upon her laughing and chatting with Clementine, and the children obviously adored her, she was always sullen around him, drawn deep inside herself. Perhaps it was because she sensed his thoughts, which Gus had to admit weren't charitable. But he just couldn't help feeling that somehow she should have found a way to stop the savages from taking her. A decent woman, it was said, always saved the last bullet for herself.
Gus came into the kitchen just as Sarah bellowed, "No more stir 'bout!" and turned her bowl upside down on the table. The milk-thinned oatmeal mush splattered over the table and made a fine mess. Sarah looked at what she'd done and grinned. It probably wasn't good for his daughter's character, but Gus couldn't help grinning along with her.
Gus's gaze went to his son. The boy'd had another lung spasm attack last night, but now he seemed fine. He sat on Saphronie's lap, chanting nonsense sounds to himself and waving a spoon through the air.
Saphronie had cast a swift covert glance up at Gus when he entered the room, and now she lurched awkwardly to her feet while holding Daniel tightly to her chest. "I'll put him down for his sleep now," she said to Clementine, who stood at the ironing board, pressing the flounces on one of her petticoats.
"No sleep!" Sarah declared.
Clementine's eyes were on Gus, watching him intently, even as she sprinkled water on the wrinkled cloth and the smell of lavender filled the kitchen. "You may help Miss Saphronie gather eggs," she said to their daughter.
Sarah climbed off the chair herself and marched from the room, her back straight, her arms swinging like a little general's, making Gus smile. Already she had the world figured out, and she was in charge.
Saphronie, with Daniel in her arms, followed her. The woman definitely had some strange quirks, Gus thought. Today she wore
yellow-striped knickerbockers that reached to her boot tops.
Gus wondered if Saphronie would leave if he told her he could no longer afford to pay her a dollar a week. Somehow he doubted it. And besides, it was Clementine's butter-and-egg money that paid Saphronie's salary. His wife churned butter, which she sold for twelve cents a pound, and raised hens, whose eggs she sold for five cents the dozen. It was Clementine's butter-and-egg money that had kept the ranch afloat this summer, and he hated having to admit that, even to himself. It was supposed to be the man's place to provide.
Clementine turned to the hob on the range and clamped a handle around a hot iron. She lifted it, and he saw the fragile bones and sinews of her hand stand out against the chapped and reddened skin. A fine sheen of sweat coated her face, and yet there was that stillness about her that had always come from deep within her and had always shut him out. Sometimes he hated the strength he saw in her.
Sometimes he thought he was married to a woman he didn't know, and didn't like.
"Isn't it a mite hot to be doing that sort of work?" he said.
"It's got to get done, no matter what the weather," she answered, causing his jaw to tighten. She made him feel responsible for the heat and the drought, responsible for the whole miserable, sorry state of the world.
She set the iron on a trivet and lifted her head in time to catch the look on his face. "Gus? Is something the matter?"
"Why, heavens no, Mrs. McQueen," he said, mimicking her Boston reserve and high-blown manners that she could use like a shield to force people to keep their distance. "Everything's just as fine as frog hair. I got cattle out there dying on their feet, and it looks to be another wonderful day of a hundred degrees in the shade and hot winds that shrivel up the grass and dry up what's left of the water holes. Why, I don't reckon I remember when things've ever been this good."
He stopped to catch his breath and glare at her. "Why don't you just go ahead and say it. Go on, God damn you, say it!"
He shouldn't have cussed at her. He never cussed at her. But he saw no condemnation in her eyes, only concern.
"What do you want me to say, Gus?"
"That I should've seen the beef-market glut coming, should've known a drought was on the way when it didn't snow more than a few flurries last winter. That I shouldn't've run amok and overstocked the range just because we had one good boom year. That I shouldn't've borrowed to buy that timberland I wanted just because it'd come up for sale. Or mortgaged my soul to build an eastern house for my eastern wife out in the middle of a godforsaken Montana prairie where droughts and bad winters and hard winds and grass fires are as common as weeds in June..."
His eastern wife was looking at him, saying nothing. Whatever she was feeling she had under control, buttoned up tight like her stiff collar. The only times he'd ever known Clementine to let herself go were in bed, in his arms, and that one time at Charlie's grave when she'd screamed her guts out in rage and pain. He wished she would let go now, rant and rail at him, maybe even cry. Hell, what kind of woman was it who never cried? He wanted her to act scared so that he could play the man and comfort her.
She took a step toward him, and he backed away from her, horrified at the sudden tide of feelings that surged in his chest. He was the one who wanted to rant and rail and cry. He was the one who needed comforting.
"Gus, what is it? What's wrong?"
His hip knocked into a chair, and he sat down in it. He went to bury his head in his hands and planted one of his elbows in a glob of Sarah's mush. "Well, hell," he said and started to laugh, but the sound that came out his mouth was a sob. He pressed his fist hard against his lips.
A hot wetness burned the backs of his eyes and he squeezed them shut. When he opened them again she was standing beside him. He couldn't lift his head, couldn't let her see his face, not with the stinging heat filming his eyes again. Her hand came up and touched the fist he still had pressed tightly to his mouth, and it was like pulling a bung out of a barrel.
The words spewed out of him, harsh and grating. "Oh, God, Clem... we're stone-broke, the taxes are coming due, and the whole blamed ranch is mortgaged from root cellar to chimney. The cattle aren't just thirsty anymore, they're dying, and what's still living are pure scrubs. I borrowed against the land to build this house, and I'm so blasted..." Scared. But he couldn't tell her that. He couldn't tell her how scared he was. He was the man. He was the one who was supposed to take care of her. He was the one who'd always been so full of big talk about giving her back all the things she'd given up when he talked her into running off with him, full of such big plans about how he was going to make the Rocking R into the best spread north of Texas.
Somehow her hand had wound up on his head and she was smoothing his hair over and over the way a mother would touch a child. Sweetly. It felt so good, her touching him like this, and it made him ashamed. Ashamed that he needed it so.
"How much do you need?" she said.
For a moment he misunderstood, and he almost said it aloud: I want all of you. All of you, Clementine, including— maybe most especially—the parts of you I've never had. And then he realized in the instant before the words left his lips that she was talking about money, and he let out a harsh laugh. "About all what's in the Miners Union Bank if we took a notion in our heads to rob it."
"For the taxes, then. How much do you need for the taxes?"
He rubbed a hand over his face. He was shaking, but deep inside himself, low in his belly where, thank God, she couldn't see it. "Around a hundred."
She left his side, and he almost reached out to pull her back. He heard her cross the kitchen, her heels clicking on the pine boards. There was the rattle of crockery and then the click of her heels again, and then she was setting something between his spread elbows, something that clanked when it hit the table and smelled of flour.
It had been in the flour bin, bidden in the flour bin. He felt the flour on his fingers when he picked it up, this sacklike thing that was shaped like a heart and made of some silky material, this sacklike thing that clanked and was heavy and was filled with...
He lifted his head and stared at her. She stared back at him with that wide, still gaze of hers.
His hand closed around the silk sack, so tight he bruised the flesh of his palm. "Where did this come from?" And he thought in the next instant that if she said it had come from his brother, he would kill her.
"From my mother. There was more, but I've spent some of it over time. On my photographic equipment, because you disapproved of it so, and it didn't seem right to use your money, and... and on other things—"
"Other things I disapproved of?"
She drew in her breath, her shoulders stiffening. Yet she clamped her mouth shut, as she always did rather than argue with him. He wanted to shake her, he wanted to hit her. He wanted to make her feel something, damn her.
He didn't realize he had lunged up out of the chair, his hand raised in the air, until she flinched away from him. Her eyes were wide and dark now, her fists gripping the heavy black material of her skirt.
She lifted her chin, but the fear was still wild in her eyes, and he felt a certain satisfaction in it, God help him. "Will you strike me, Gus?" she said in a small, tight voice. "Will you go back on your word and strike me again?"
His hand fell to his side, balling into a fist, and he turned away from her. "No. But I ought to. I ought to."
He tossed the sack of money onto the table and flinched himself at the loud clatter it made in the suddenly silent kitchen. All these years... she'd had it all these years, and she'd kept it hidden from him. She'd had it the year of the fire, and the winter he and Zach had gone wolfing. He flung his head back, clamping his teeth together hard to hold back a howl of pain and rage. Inside him something felt torn. "Just tell me one thing: all those times we could've used it... why didn't you give it to me before?"
When she didn't answer, he swung around. "Why, damn you?"
"Because it was mine. Mine." He watched her chest
heave as she struggled to draw in a breath, watched her trying to contain herself, this woman who never cried, never broke, never gave in. "And because Mama... she made me promise, and I owed it to her to keep my promise. She—she said no matter what sort of man I believed you to be, I should keep it as my own secret. Otherwise you would think it yours by right and take it, and then if I ever had to leave, I wouldn't... I couldn't..." She drew her lower lip between her teeth and pushed it back out again, and to his utter self-disgust he was suddenly filled with a fierce need to press his mouth to hers, to take her mouth. And he hated her for it. In that moment he truly hated her.
"And has that crossed your mind, Clementine? Are you going to leave me someday? 'Cause if you are, then you may as well get while the gettin's good, huh? You don't do me any big favor by staying, you know. I got along fine before I met you, and i reckon I'll go on living if you decide to leave."
The blood drained completely from her face, as if he'd torn open her heart. She jerked her head back and forth, once. "Oh, Gus... how can you say such a thing? You don't understand—"
"You're goddamned right I don't understand! I gave you all that I had. Everything that was mine I gave to you. Everything I had to give, from heart to guts, I let you take it all, and willingly. I'm not saying I wasn't willing. But I swear to God, girl, I feel sometimes as if I'm looking at you from the other side of a hurricane fence. Is there a heart inside you? Are there any feelings beneath all that starch and all those manners?"
She took his words like blows, almost cringing. "I don't mean to be that way. I don't mean it..."
She didn't cry; she never cried. Yet her shoulders bowed and she clutched at her belly as if he'd driven his fist in there. He'd hurt her, just as he'd meant to, and now he couldn't bear it.
"Clementine..." He reached for her, pulled her into his arms.
And she clung to him as if she were drowning. She sought his mouth, sucked frantically on his lips as if she could draw the life out of him and into herself. She arched against him, pressed her body hard to the length of his. She breathed into him, spoke into his mouth. "Love me, Gus. Please love me."
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