"You haven't told him? Oh, Hannah, you must. Truly I believe he'll want to marry you and be a father to that baby, to make a family with you. And if you love him, as I know you do, then you must give him a chance to prove he loves you."
Hannah shook her head hard. "He could've asked me to marry him anytime in these last seven years. I reckon the fact that he hasn't done so says something."
"Perhaps he hasn't asked the question because he's been unsure of the answer. Why, how often have I heard you say we'd never see Hannah Yorke hitched to the post alongside of any man?" She'd drawled the last words, and Hannah could feel her smile coming soft out of the night. "You can't blame Marshal Scully for behaving like a man and believing that tired old lie of yours. We women might always look for the lie in what they say to us, but a man would rather believe a woman's lies than risk hearing the truth, and if you can make sense out of what I just said, you're doing better than I am."
Hannah choked down a laugh, rubbing hard at the tears that had dampened her cheeks. She tried to make out Clementine's face in the murky dark. She'd heard that edge to Clementine's voice, talking of the lies men and women told one another. She wondered if now would be the time to bring up the touchy subject of Zach Rafferty's homecoming. But then she knew Clementine. That girl never talked about a thing until she was damned good and ready to, and even then she put up fences you didn't dare cross.
"Lord, I don't know what to think anymore," Hannah said instead. "Maybe it's this wretched weather along with that wretched heap pit that's making me edgy as well as giving Daniel spasms. Those clouds've just been hanging there for days over our heads doing nothing. If only it would rain."
"Or the wind would come up."
Hannah laughed. "Heavens, did you ever think to see the day? Imagine a Montana woman asking for the wind to blow."
The next day dawned dark. The clouds were a liverish purple, dense and heavy, holding the heap smoke in the valley like a blanket over a campfire.
"It's black enough to blind a bat out there," Hannah said to Clementine over morning coffee. It was only a slight exaggeration.
Even indoors with the windows shut up tight, the air was close and raw. The smoke floated listlessly over the town in slow brown drifts, thicker than fog. It was like trying to breathe through dirty flannel.
"An old woman died of it during the night. Choked so hard on the heap smoke, so her folks're claiming, that her heart gave out."
The coffee cups lay scattered on her kitchen table. Saphronie had brought the children downstairs for breakfast and was now sitting between Daniel and Zach, who were having a running fight over something. Sarah was ladling hominy into Hannah's best Spode bowls.
"Mrs. Wilkins, the baker's wife—it was her mother," Hannah went on. "But there must be about a dozen others confined to their beds with chest pains and raw throats, so the doc said. I know our plan was to wait awhile, give the men a chance to digest what you fed em yesterday, but I reckon none of us figured on the new heap being this bad. I say we do it now."
Sarah's spoon knocked against her bowl as she laid it down. "I'm coming with you."
Clementine looked into the face of her daughter, nut brown from never wearing her bonnet. As stubborn, her father would have said, as a rat-tailed cayuse. "I need you to stay here with Daniel and Zach."
"They're coming, too." Sarah gave her mother a penetrating look. "Daniel needs to come."
Hannah reached out to pat Clementine's hand and wound up gripping it tightly. They sat like that a moment, then their fingers fell apart and Hannah pushed back her chair and stood up. "We'll split up; that way we can cover more territory faster. I'll start by telling Erlan, and she can rouse the other Chinese women."
It began with the four of them—Clementine, Hannah, Saphronie, and Erlan—going from door to door. But before long they were joined by other women, until it was like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up mass and power. They spoke of Mrs. Wilkins's mother and of the others who had fallen ill during the night, but they really didn't need to say much. The rank smoke draping over the town, the jays and meadowlarks falling dead out of the sky, and their own tearing eyes and raw throats were persuasion enough.
Some of the women, expecting trouble, strapped on their husbands' revolvers or carried rifles. They all brought shovels and other dirt-breaking tools, and many brought their children with them as well.
Pogey and Nash watched all this to-ing and fro-ing from their bench on the veranda of the Yorke House. "Lot of women scurrying about this morning," Nash observed. "All looking busy as one-armed monkeys at a flea farm."
"Busier'n tumbleweeds in a stampede," Pogey agreed. He gave his ear a good tug. "What do you figure they're gonna do with all them shovels and muck sticks?"
Nash studied the situation carefully, sucking on his store-bought teeth. "Bury somebody, I reckon," he finally surmised.
Pogey considered the suggestion for a while, then nodded. "Let's hope he's dead first."
"Maybe it ain't a body they're gonna bury; maybe it's a thing."
"Have to be a big thing, to need all them shovels."
"Bigger'n a red barn, I reckon."
"Bigger'n a twenty-mule freight wagon."
"Bigger'n a politician's lie."
"Bigger than..." But the rest of Pogey's simile was drowned out by the ascending wail of the Four Jacks' big whistle that normally shrieked out a shift change or a disaster in the shafts.
"Whatever's going on around here," Pogey said when the whistle finally petered out, "with all them women riled like that, I reckon it spells trouble for whatever man is fool enough to put his head in the way of them shovels."
Nash watched his partner pull a twist of tobacco out of his boot and tear off a chaw. "I say the smart man is the one who sits pat and hears all about the excitement afterward."
"And I say that for once in a lifetime of flappin' your lips, compadre, you finally done said something that makes a particle of sense."
The women marched out into the prairie where the heap roasting pit spewed its foul smoke in brown funnels that rose up to be snagged by the low flat-bottomed clouds. "March" was the word for what they were doing, Clementine thought. Like soldiers off to a war, but armed with more shovels and muck sticks than guns. Her gaze went from face to face. Some were young and as fresh and pretty as a bouquet of wildflowers, others were as worn and seamed as the buttes. Three of those faces, Erlan's and Hannah's and Saphronie's, were as dear to her, as familiar, as the faces of the sisters she'd never had. The strength she saw in all of them, stranger and friend alike, left her awed. She looked down at her daughter, at the determination in Sarah's small pointed chin and the fierceness in her eyes, and her awe deepened into a pride.
As they walked by Snake-Eye's livery she saw a man at the hitch rack, saddling up a shaggy dun... Rafferty. She turned her face quickly away. When next she looked around again, he was coming at her with that sauntering cowboy walk, his hat shading a face that probably wouldn't have shown her anything anyway. She thought that if he tried to stop her, she would never forgive him or love him again.
He fell into step alongside of her. She wouldn't look at his face, but she could see his legs flashing in and out of her view of the muddy road. Long-shanked and lean, the muscles bunching and flowing beneath the worn cloth.
Her throat felt too raw to talk, but when he said nothing she could finally bear the silence no longer.
"I thought you'd left town," she said. She looked up at him. "Yesterday evening when I didn't see you after... I thought you'd left."
His mouth curved faintly. "What, and miss all the fun?"
His eyes were full of tears from the fumes, but she heard an edge to his voice. A ragged wildness that had always both drawn and frightened her.
The sight of some fifty women converging and marching out of town armed with a few guns and a lot of shovels had not escaped notice. Those of their men who weren't already down in the shafts began straggling after them in twos and th
rees, but with a wary, nervous air about them. Clementine would have smiled if one of them hadn't been Marshal Drew Scully, and if she hadn't seen the stark anguish come over Hannah's face as she looked at her man.
We might wish we could do without them, Clementine thought. We might even try to do without them. But we can't. Yet so often they end up leaving us. We lose them to death or to indifference or to another woman or... She looked up for one swift moment at Rafferty's hard profile, but what she saw was the dun waiting saddled back at the livery. Or to the wildness in his soul.
A murmur arose among the women when the shriek of the Four Jacks' whistle cut through the air. A few faltered, but then Mrs. Pratt, one of the miner's wives, fired a pistol into the murky clouds. "Come on down and face the medicine, Jack McQueen, you one-eyed scalawag!" she shouted, and the laughter that followed eased the women's nerves.
Mrs. Pratt soon got her wish. The mine owner arrived driving his Peerless buggy, Percivale Kyle and the Mick riding horseback on either side of him.
"I reckon there's about to be more excitement around here than in a corral at brandin' time," Hannah said into Clementine's ear. She was now carefully ignoring the marshal and wearing a tight-lipped smile.
Without even having to talk about it among themselves, the women formed a living corral in front of the heap pit. It was as if, Clementine thought, they were of one mind and one heart. As if all the cumulative moments of their women's lives, all their women's tragedies and triumphs, had come down to this single, suspended moment in the middle of a Montana prairie.
And it seemed as if all the earth had gone quiet, holding its breath. The women of the RainDance country stood shoulder to shoulder, their children interspersed among them. The fumes stung their eyes and scratched their throats, but they held their heads high.
The men had stopped when there was still a good bit of red Montana mud between them and their women. They stared in wonderment at the shovels and weapons in the women's hands. But to Clementine's surprise not one demanded to know what they doing, not one ordered his wife home. It was as if they sensed that, perhaps for the first times in their lives, they wouldn't be obeyed.
Jack McQueen pulled his buggy up within twenty yards of the women and the heap roasting pit at their backs. He looked the situation over, his lips pursed in smirking amusement. "Aren't you ladies out roaming a little far from your kitchens this morning?" he drawled. The Mick and Percivale Kyle both laughed. "Who's minding the stove and doing your chores?"
"Don't listen to the one-eyed son of a turtle's whore," Erlan said, loud enough for him to hear her.
Jack McQueen dismissed her insult with a laugh. He pointed the butt of his whip at Clementine, his mouth still smiling. "I don't need to guess that you're the cause of this latest trouble, daughter-in-law. I'll be durned if you aren't taking on the nature of being a sore trial to me. Just what do you aim to do with this congregation you've assembled?"
Clementine took a step toward him, her chin leading the way. "We aim to bury this pit."
Jack McQueen poked his tongue in his cheek and looked around him in exaggerated wonder. "Do you, now? And do you figure to shut down the mine whilst you're about it?"
The miners all stirred at this, making a low rumbling noise. The Mick's hand settled on the butt of his gun. Percivale Kyle was still trying to look smugly bored, and not succeeding all that well, what with the tears streaming down his pale cheeks from the fumy smoke.
Jack McQueen waved his whip at the empty space on the seat beside him. "Why don't you climb on up here, Mrs. McQueen, and I'll take you on back into town and we'll talk this over all reasonable-like."
She didn't trust him. He was all wily smiles and pleasant, reasonable words that would melt like mist once he got her away from here. She could feel the women standing solid behind her, feel their steadiness and their courage.
She raised her shovel into the air like a standard. "We're burying this pit now."
Jack McQueen leaned forward, gathering up the reins. "I don't think so—"
"Haw!"
A twenty-mule freight wagon rolled out of the smoke-filled prairie. Nickel Annie stood on the lazy board, snapping her rawhide whip through the air. "Haw, you whoring bitches and whoreson bastards. Haw!"
She pulled up at the edge of the smoldering heap and cackled a laugh. "Mornin', One-Eyed Jack," she said into the sudden, quivering silence. "Wish I could say 'twere a pleasant mornin', but it ain't—not with this heap smoke chokin' the life out of folk."
Jack McQueen's mouth pulled back into his conjureman's smile. "Annie honey, I thought you'd be wanting to line up on my side. How many years is it you've been hauling freight for the Four Jacks?"
"Too damn many. Now, I got me a hundred pounds of giant powder connected to a mighty short fuse in this here wagon of mine." Her cheeks were stuffed with chewing tobacco, and she paused a moment to unload some juice. "I figure to set her alight and drive her right at you and your boys, Jack honey. So the way I see it, y'all've got two choices: either stand yer ground and meet yer Maker, or run like the snake-belly cowards I figure you to be, and leave us women to do what we've set out to do, and that's bury this gol-damned pit."
Nickel Annie brayed another laugh as she broke a kitchen match off a block and scratched it alight on the knee of her leather britches.
Hannah gripped Clementine's arm. "Oh, Lord have mercy. This wasn't in the plan. Tell me it wasn't in the plan."
Clementine shook her head. "She can't blow up her wagon and Mr. McQueen without hurting her mules, and Annie would never do that. They're her babies."
"But the revver don't know that, does he?" Rafferty said from beside her, startling her so that she jumped. She thought he had joined the men, but he was here, he was with her, and the laughter was wild and dangerous and seductive in his voice.
Jack McQueen's eye had taken on a sleepy cast as he contemplated the mule skinner. He smiled. "Better men than you have failed to run a bluff past me, skinner. Let's see what you got in those britches of yours."
Nickel Annie's face split into a wide grin. "I was hopin' you'd say that." She put the burning match to the fuse. The wick sputtered and flared and began to burn.
The Mick's hand tightened around his gun, pulling it half out of its holster. "Uh, boss..."
"Gee-up, you devil-damned offspring of whores and pimps!" Annie bellowed. The deep-bed wagon lurched forward. "Haw!" She swung the team into a wide left-handed circle, picking up speed. The left rear wheel hit a deep hole; the wagon dipped wildly and almost toppled.
Hannah flapped her hand in front of her face. "Oooh, my... I feel faint."
Annie's whip cracked. Her curses snapped through the smoke-choked air. The cask of dynamite rattled around in the big empty bed like a marble in a bucket. The wagon swayed and groaned, mud squeezing out from under its large red iron-rimmed wheels. It bore down on One-Eyed Jack and his men, with Nickel Annie's hands firm on the reins and her lips pulled back from her brown teeth in a maniacal smile.
The smile was melting off Jack McQueen's face faster than snow in a chinook. "Well, hell, Annie... Well, all right then... God damn it, stop?'
The bull-throated roar carried through the thick, bitter smoke. Annie hauled hard on the reins, and the wagon's back wheels slithered and slewed in the mud.
The mule skinner stared, grinning at the man, for an interminable second while the fuse continued to burn. Then she shot two thick, gloppy, and well-aimed streams of tobacco juice at the sputtering cord. It fizzled and went out.
Jack McQueen's face was wine-red, and his chest pumped as he sucked at the rotten air. He was half standing in the buggy, as if he'd been about to leap out of it in a panic. The Mick, either too stupid or too scared to move, sat stiff-legged in the saddle, wide-eyed, his mouth hanging open. Percivale Kyle was already halfway back to Rainbow Springs, going at a dead gallop.
Nickel Annie threw back her head and let out a great bray of laughter. "I reckon I had you pegged proper, One-Eyed Jack. You
still had a whole five seconds to spare when you started yellin' chicken. A real man—and not one with a yellow stripe down his back—would've stuck with calling my bluff and took his chances on meetin' me in hell."
Jack McQueen eased back into his seat. He puffed an obsequious laugh. "All right, you've had your fun, Annie. Now why don't you go on home? Why don't all you good ladies go on back to your homes now and leave us men to settle things here?"
Hannah startled Clementine by hooting a laugh of her own. "Like every fool man I've ever known, Jack McQueen," she shouted, "there comes a day when durned if you don't wear out your welcome." She thrust her shovel into the ground, leaned on it with her foot, and scooped up a bladeful of Montana gumbo. "Ladies... we got work to do." And she swung around, flinging the mud into the smoking heap pit.
Clementine had half turned when from beside her Rafferty erupted into a blur of movement. A whacking crack split the dense air. She spun around in time to see the tam-o'-shanter go sailing as the Mick's whole body jerked hard and he flopped rag-doll loose off the back end of his horse, a red stain blossoming in his chest. His hand still gripped the vulcanite butt of his drawn gun.
For a moment no one moved, except Rafferty, who trained the smoking muzzle of his Colt on his father's chest.
"Don't make me kill you," he said, but so low Clementine wondered if the man even heard him. It didn't matter, for suddenly a dozen or more guns were being cocked, making a noise like crickets in July, as those women with weapons all pointed them at One-Eyed Jack McQueen.
The breath left him in a whine through his teeth. Slowly he eased his hand out of his pocket, bringing with it a white square of embroidered linen. "'He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it,'" he said with a bold attempt at his old beguiling smile. "I was only going for my handkerchief, ladies."
For a moment longer the women of Rainbow Springs stood with their weapons trained on the mine owner. Then, as one, they understood the danger had passed and they put their guns up. Those with shovels and muck sticks started pushing mud into the burning pit. They worked in silence, sure and united in their purpose.
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