He gripped the sides of her head and looked down into her face, searching for the truth. Searching for her. "Please," she said.
"Let's go upstairs."
A faint flush colored her cheeks, but she nodded and pulled away from him, breathing hard. She led the way out of the kitchen and up to their bedroom.
The green shutters had been pulled closed against the glare and heat of the sun. The room was dim, quiet. From outside he could hear the faint sound of his daughter's laughter and the mad cluck of chickens and the wind that rose up late every morning, a false harbinger of afternoon storms that never came. In all the years of their marriage they had never made love in the daylight. It wasn't the sort of thing a decent man asked of his gently reared, God-fearing, preacher's daughter, virgin-when-you-married-her, and every-inch-a-lady wife. But now it struck him, looking at her in that moment, that whoever he had always thought her to be... she wasn't that woman at all.
She stood at the end of the bed, facing him, her hands at her sides. She started to lift them, to let down her hair, maybe, or to unbutton her dress, but then she let them fall again, She looked so vulnerable, so ashfair, frail, and delicate, so like the girl he had married seven years ago. He slowly let go of the breath that fought to leave his chest. "I'm sorry," he said.
"I'm not sorry, Gus." She shook her head hard, fiercely. And the fierceness was in her voice as well. "I've never been sorry."
They weren't talking about the same thing, but it didn't matter, because she had crossed the room and come into his arms, and the feel of her was so familiar and he wanted her. She was Clementine and she was in his arms.
And still, it wasn't enough.
Clementine sucked in her stomach, grunting with the effort it seemed to be taking to hook her corset. Her Dr. Jaeger's combination undergarment, made properly out of wool to absorb perspiration, was serving its purpose—already it clung to her sticky skin. Onto the corset she buttoned a crinolette petticoat, and over this she tied on a horsehair bustle. She had to sit in a chair to fasten her half boots, which still smelled faintly oily from the fresh blacking she'd rubbed on them last week. She put on a plain black alpaca skirt and a matching wasp-waist jacket bodice. She pulled her hair into a snood on the back of her neck and covered it with a black slat bonnet. In spite of the stifling heat she put on a linen duster, for she could not afford to expose her clothes to the ruinous alkali dust. And Limerick gloves to protect her hands. Hands that had been ruined long ago.
She had started to leave the room when her gaze fell on the bed. Dusty bars of light cast by the sun slanting through the shutters fell across the rumpled sheets. The smell of sex was thick in the still, heavy air.
He had been desperate in his loving, almost rough. Well, they'd both been that way, going at each other like animals. It might have been, she thought, his own feelings of failure that had pulled Gus behind her up those stairs, into bed. A need to get back his man's pride. But she knew she was the one who had failed him, was failing him.
She turned her back on the bed and all the feelings of longing and loneliness that it evoked. She went downstairs and out into the yard.
Saphronie already had the spring wagon hitched up for her, the eggs packed with straw in their baskets, the butter crocks covered with cheesecloth against the flies. A Winchester rifle angled muzzle-down next to the plank seat, although the country wasn't so dangerous anymore. The wolves and panthers and bears had been driven higher up into the mountains. Iron Nose and his band of renegades had ridden into legend.
Clementine's gaze went to the buffalo hunter's shack. She had a sudden memory of herself standing at that old sawbuck table, up to her elbows in bread dough, and Gus smiling at her, saying, "I ought to get you a milch cow so's you can have fresh milk for your coffee. And maybe a flock of laying hens, too." And her thinking then how she didn't know the first thing about milk cows or laying hens.
What a child she'd been that day, feeling disappointed because Montana and the ranch weren't what her dreams had been made of. Yet she had been happy. She was sure, remembering it now, that she had been happy.
She held her hat down against a sudden gust of wind that whipped up the dust in the yard. She tilted her head back, squinting. The sky was flat and dull as a tarnished pewter dish. High herringbone clouds wreathed the sun. There would be no rain again today.
The door banged behind her and Clementine whirled, surprised, for she thought Gus had ridden out already. He hadn't even finished dressing. His braces dangled at his hips and his shirt was unbuttoned. He wasn't wearing his hat, and his sun-shot hair was mussed where she had raked her fingers through it. His forehead, usually covered by his hat, was startlingly white next to the rest of his face, which was as brown as a hazelnut. There were white creases around his eyes, too, from when he used to laugh. It was the thing about him she'd always loved— his easy and joyous laughter.
They looked at each other for a long moment in silence. His thick mustache fell over the corners of a mouth that hadn't smiled since the rain had stopped coming, maybe not since Charlie... He no longer had that bright unbeatable look about him. She wanted to bring it back, but she didn't know how.
"It's too late to be going into town now," he said.
"I thought we needed money," she said back to him, hating herself for fighting him unfairly when she shouldn't have been fighting him at all.
His face flushed and his mouth tightened. "I reckon we won't starve between now and tomorrow, though."
Once every week or so she took her butter and eggs into town to sell. And though she had planned on going today, she could just as easily go tomorrow. But the wildness was building inside her—those frantic, frenzied soul-yearnings that threatened at times to drive her mad. She had to get away, away from Gus and the ranch, out where the sky was bottomless and with- out end in any direction, where the cloud shadows chased each other across mile after mile of grass. Out where she could surrender to the loneliness.
She drew in a slow, deep breath and fought to still the trembling that was going on inside her. "Gus..."
She wanted to tell him that all this disquiet, this restlessness, this constant yearning for things she couldn't even name had nothing to do with him. It was all her fault. What he'd said about the hurricane fence—he was right. It seemed she'd always looked at life from behind a high, broad barrier. She wanted to talk to him about all that he had given her, how he had saved her, shown her, been the cowboy of her dreams.
She climbed into the wagon, gathered up the reins.
He laid his hand on her arm. "Clementine, don't be like this. If you're angry with me for what..."
She looked down into his eyes, eyes that were blue as the noon sky but full of reproach and hurt and the residue of anger. And questions she couldn't answer for herself, let alone for him.
"My going into town has nothing to do with... with what just happened," she said. She wished she knew what had happened between them. It seemed they had brought each other release, but they hadn't soothed each other's heartache.
I love you, Gus, she thought, but not enough for me. And not enough for you. And ironically, because it wasn't enough for him, because he had that sort of pride, he made her think she could love him enough after all, if she tried hard, really tried. And if she would only stop listening to the sound the wind made as it blew through the cottonwoods, and stop thinking of what could have been.
She clicked to the team. The iron tires crunched over the hard ground. The wind drove grit into her face, and she shut her mouth against the bitter taste of it. When she turned onto the road into town, she looked back. The dust the wagon had churned up was settling down, and Gus was gone.
The wind was blowing Montana-strong now. She had to brace both feet on the dash and lean into it. The horses walked with their heads down, tails whipping. She could feel her face drawing tight, like a cowhide stretched in the sun to dry. The dust burned her nostrils and stuck to her sweat-slick skin. The sunlight was bright, hard, a
nd metallic, fading the colors of the land.
This land, this place. The fierceness, the heartbreaking emptiness. The wild loneliness of it called to what blew wild and empty and lonely within her. Perhaps, she thought, there were some spaces within a soul that could never be filled.
She stopped for a moment when she arrived at the new acreage Gus had bought. It was mostly beautiful buttes heavily timbered with yellow pine, black ash, and box elder. Running between the two biggest hills was a coulee choked with red dust and rocks and entangled with stonecrop and wild plum thickets. The coulee had been cut through the earth during the wet springs of earlier years.
Built into the slope above the coulee was an old sod house that had collapsed in upon itself. It was known around the RainDance as the madwoman's soddy because poor Mrs. Weatherby, who'd once lived there, had been driven mad by the wind. There were many such abandoned places throughout the valley. They were called "hope's skeletons." Clementine wondered if that would be said someday of the new house Gus had built for her—just another hope's skeleton. And found she could not bear the thought.
Suddenly she felt watched and she spun around on the seat. She raised her hand, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun.
She thought at first he wasn't real, a dream created out of her mind from the dust and shimmering heat ripples. A man in a dusty black Stetson, on a big gray standing still beside the fingerboard that pointed the way into Rainbow Springs.
The reins went slack in her hands. She thought she could actually feel her heart slamming in slow, painful strokes against her breast. The wind blew wild, crying her name. But it was his voice... his voice.
The man on the big gray rode at her. She wasn't sure when the hope began to die. It was the way he sat the horse or held his head or simply was. Was not.
Yet she clung to the hope still, because she couldn't bear to let it go, up until the moment when the stranger drew abreast of her and lifted his hat, saying, "Howdy, ma'am."
"Sir," she said with a small nod.
She sat trembling on the plank seat until he was well past her, until he had enough time to ride past the madwoman's soddy and then some. Then she bent over, wrapping her arms around her middle. She took a deep breath, and then another and another, until her chest began to shudder with the tears she would never let out.
Clementine pulled the team up abruptly to avoid running over a whiskified man who had come flying out of the Gandy Dancer saloon. Wagon axles squealed behind her. The air rang with whoas and curses.
Rainbow Springs had never been a pretty town, but now it was truly ugly. There were bald spots in the hills where the trees had been cut down to shore up the mine workings. The buildings were all ramshackle and weather-pitted. And over it all loomed the RainDance Butte, barren and scarred and rutted with erosion. The streets all ended in mounds of tailings and dirty slag piles. A pall of brown smoke hung listlessly overhead.
I reckon I'm seeing the elephant, Clementine thought with a sudden inward laugh, as another fighting drunk flew backward out the Gandy Dancer's slatted swinging doors. But she was no longer that girl who had grown up in luxury and suffocating godliness in that house on Louisburg Square, that girl who had yearned for grand adventures. She didn't know who she was anymore. She felt like a stranger to herself.
The air shivered with the harsh clang of metal banging on metal. Clementine looked southeast, where a pair of thin parallel silver strands ran into town from out of the prairie. A crew of Chinese toiled at laying the last few feet of track for the new spur line of the Utah and Northern Railroad. They worked barefoot, with their baggy blue pants rolled up to their knees and their queues coiled around their heads. Another Chinese gang was busy building a water tank. One man stirred a great black steaming vat of tar with a big long-handled paddle. The vat sat on a bed of glowing coals and emitted a suffocating stench. It was hot work, Clementine thought, to be doing under today's angry sun.
Just then she spotted Sam Woo crossing the vacant lot where the depot would soon be built. He carried, balanced on his shoulders, a pine pole with large covered metal containers swaying at either end. It had been Erlan's idea to go after a contract with the railroad to dispense hot tea to the Chinese workers, and it had turned out to be a real moneymaker.
At the moment, though, Sam was having trouble making his way through the north end of the lot, where a crowd had gathered around an old dray. A man stood on the empty bed, shaking his fist in the air and shouting himself red in the face. Clementine called out to Sam, but he didn't seem to hear.
"The Chinese must go!"
The words, which had come blasting as if out of a bullhorn, startled Clementine. She had assumed the man on the dray was a temperance shouter.
"The heathen Chinee is a parasite!" he bellowed. He was a muscle-knotted man in homespun britches patched with buckskin, and a head of tangled gray hair. He punctuated his speech by waving his big hands through the air. "The Chinaman spends his time eating opium and worshiping his foul gods. He takes slave wages and cheats the American man out of his honest day's labor. I say let's rid this country of the pigtailed hoards. Let's chase 'em back to China where they belong!"
The crowd stirred, rustling and shifting from foot to foot like crows on a fence. One man spotted Sam Woo and cried out, pointing. The ragged edge of the crowd surged toward the storekeeper, jostling him roughly. The tin containers tipped, sloshing steaming tea into the dirt.
"The Chinaman is no more a citizen than a coyote is a citizen, and he never can be!" the man on the dray shouted. "The Chinese must go!"
The crowd took up the chant. "The Chinese must go!"
Clementine tried to turn her wagon into the lot, but she was blocked by the crowd. She wrapped the reins around the brake handle and stood up. "Mr. Woo," she called out, "may I offer you a ride back to your mercantile?"
Sam turned toward her, puckering his shortsighted eyes. He bobbed his head, since he couldn't bow with the pole across his back, and his thick spectacles flashed in the sun. "Very kind of you, Mrs. McQueen," he shouted back, "but this Chinaman has business he must do."
"Mr. Woo, I really think you should ride along with me. Mrs. Woo would wish it."
"No can do. No sirree jingle."
Clementine unwrapped the reins and urged the team forward, feeling uneasy. But when she looked over her shoulder, she saw that Sam was all right. He had reached the railroad section gang and was already pouring out cups of hot tea.
She caught sight of a shiny black Peerless buggy parked in the shadow of the half-built water tower. The man driving the buggy was dressed fine enough to be seen in the grandest hotel in New York City. The brocade on his vest shone like gold bullion, and the studs on his shirt sparkled in the sun like diamonds. They probably were diamonds, she thought a moment later when the man turned his head and she saw the black patch that covered his eye. One-Eyed Jack McQueen, gambler and swindle artist and now primary owner of the Four Jacks silver mine, as well as numerous other lucrative business interests.
He tipped his silk hat to her, his roguish smile flashing as bright as his shirt studs. She wouldn't put it past the man to have been behind that soapbox orator and his anti-Chinese rabble-rousing. As long as she had known him, Jack McQueen had been stirring up trouble just for the pure deviltry of it.
She was damp with sweat and coated with red dust by the time she pulled up to the hitch rack at the Woo mercantile. She had one foot on the ground and the other still on the foot bracket when her stomach seemed to rise up into her throat. She bent over, drawing deep breaths as she fought the nausea down.
She straightened her back slowly, feeling chilled and clammy. The world tilted slightly and then settled. She drew in another deep breath of the dry hot air.
She took off her linen duster and shook it, and the fine red dust floated down like mist. It disturbed the flies that buzzed over the dung in the street, and they swarmed in a black cloud around her face. The nausea rose up in her throat again.
&n
bsp; The heat burned through the soles of her half boots as she walked down the boardwalk. She had to lift her skirts high above the tobacco muck that smeared the bleached planks. The Ladies Social Club had persuaded the town fathers to pass an ordinance against spitting on public pathways, but thus far it was neither obeyed nor enforced.
When she reached Hannah's white picket gate she had to stop again and fight off another wave of dizziness. She gripped the wooden slats so hard she rammed a splinter through the heel of her glove.
"Clementine!" Hannah came tripping down the path in a flash of poppy-red skirts. "I was beginning to think you weren't coming this week... Land, gal. You look like you're about to faint."
"It's just this dreadful heat."
"Ain't it awful, though." Hannah looked up at the sky, squinting. "Lord, there's not enough rain in them clouds to douse a candle. I can't promise it's much cooler inside, but at least we can get you off your feet."
Clementine looked back at her wagon and the mercantile through shimmering heat ripples. Those two old prospectors, Pogey and Nash, were roosting where they did every day now, on a spindle-backed wooden bench beneath the store's fancy new sheet-glass window. Sacks of potatoes and barrels of salted pork and mackerel were lined up with military precision on either side of the door. Since his marriage, the whole of Sam's mercantile was like that, as organized as a trail cook's wagon. Just then Erlan stepped outside, her pregnant belly leading the way. Her expectant happiness—that was what the Chinese girl called her unborn baby.
Clementine realized that Hannah was talking to her. "What?... Oh, no, I must unload my butter and eggs first, before they spoil. And today I really mustn't dawdle. I need to get home well before dark or Gus'll start to fret."
Heart of the West Page 58