Bone River (10 page)

“Puppy,” I said, too angry myself to soften it.

To my surprise, he only nodded and reached for his whiskey. “The Indian’s like a father to you, isn’t he?”

Warily, I said, “Yes.”

“How lucky you are. Two fathers, when some of us don’t even get the one. Why, when you add your husband in, it’s almost like three, isn’t it?”

“Lord Tom is right,” I snapped. “You don’t know anything.”

His gaze was as sharp as I felt mine to be. “I have eyes, you know. I can see what’s in front of my face.”

His glance angled up, to behind me. Junius was back, and Lord Tom, carrying bowls of chowder that spilled over the sides onto their fingers. Junius leaned over me, setting the bowls down, pulling bent spoons from his pocket. “Eat up,” he said, taking his seat as Lord Tom put down the others. “There’s a dance tonight. I’d just as soon go home, but I guess you want to go.” He looked at me.

There was always a dance after the schooner came in, and I could never decide if I loved them or hated them. I liked being among people after the isolation of home. I liked to laugh, and there was always plenty of that here. I liked to dance—a little too well, perhaps. But the women of town would be there too, and I was much less comfortable with them. I preferred the company of men—it was what I was used to. Papa had been my only friend throughout my childhood—I hadn’t needed others, and we moved so often I’d never learned the habit of making friends. And I soon learned that my strange education, my passion for relics and study, meant I could not be what other women expected of me. Perhaps if I’d had children...but I hadn’t. But tonight it seemed preferable to going home, to being locked in silence and resentment, and it was late enough that I wouldn’t get a chance to study the mummy anyway. So I said, “Yes. Please.”

Junius nodded shortly. “Well, you’re lucky to escape the hard work today, boy, but it won’t always be this way.”

“I’d rather the work,” Daniel said stonily, and I did not miss the implication, that work was better than socializing with us.

Junius laughed and bent over his bowl. “I’ll remember you said that when you’re complaining about the cold and wet.”

“How nice to know that there are some things you can remember,” Daniel said.

Junius’s face went hard. We finished the rest of the meal in silence.

T
HE ENTIRE TOWN
seemed to be on the muddy streets tonight, despite the darkening clouds that had moved in with twilight, promising rain. Even the children rushed to the dance, dashing to and fro about the street, shouting and chasing each other, their boots, pants, and skirts muddy, their faces alight with excitement, so it made me smile to see them while at the same time I could not keep at bay my sadness that none of them were mine. My melancholy was always stronger here in town, and with it came the realization that Daniel’s presence would raise questions I did not want to answer. I wished now I hadn’t agreed to come.

As we made our way up the street, dodging potholes and wallows, I heard the music coming from the open door and windows of McBride’s Hotel. It was already full by the time we got there, people spilling onto the porch and out the back door, the windows lining the south side all open to cold and wet air growing colder and wetter with encroaching night. There were no streetlamps, but the oil lamps in the windows cast their light onto the mud all around. Through the windows, I saw whirling and dodging, men and women red-faced from dancing. I heard
music and talk and laughter, the clop of heavy soled oyster boots on a dusty wood floor.

Lord Tom stayed outside on the porch where there were some other Indians. It wasn’t that they were unwelcome inside, at least not overtly, but as the night progressed and the whiskey flowed, it was safer for them to stay out of the way. By then, of course, they’d be drunk themselves, and just as easily provoked as white men, and Tom was no different when it came to that. He rarely drank at home, but tonight we’d have to carry him to the boat.

There were few strangers here, so even if the place hadn’t been almost too full to move, we would have been slowed by greetings. With introductions it was worse, but at least Daniel was polite and charming, and Junius managed a smile or two as he introduced his son. I saw the way the women noted and admired Daniel, and he had a ready smile for them—I was reminded again how handsome he was and how easy he was with it. It was vaguely disconcerting to see him smiling and flirtatious; there was no hint of the sharp and angry young man I’d known the last hours.

I heard the expressions of surprise, “A son? Why, Russell, I didn’t know you had a son. And such a fine looking man too!” And I saw the way they looked at me, those quick, puzzled glances as they tried to work it out in their minds. I felt their unspoken questions:
What son is this? Did Leonie know about him? Where did he come from?
We were so isolated here, we all felt we knew everything about everyone, but the truth was that most people here were single men moving wherever there was money to be made, and secrets were the coin of the realm. I wondered that people were so surprised to find that Junius had kept them as well.

In the common room there was a large table with bottles of whiskey and a keg of beer, and other women had brought cakes and pies. I felt a moment’s guilt—as I always did—for not thinking to bring anything, but these women hadn’t been culling
oysters that morning, either. One more thing we didn’t have in common. I saw them now at the other end of the room, a group of wives talking and laughing, and I knew I should join them.

But then the Jansen brothers began to fiddle a lively polka, and my foot was tapping before I knew it, and I was closing my eyes and swaying with the rhythm. I wanted to give in to it, to give in to the woman who was not Leonie Russell, ethnologist, but someone else, a woman only, who didn’t think of relics and study but only of swirling and stomping and tossing her hair and laughing for the sheer pleasure of doing so.

But that was a Leonie that both my father and Junius had discouraged, so I harnessed her when I saw my husband cross the room toward me. He said, “A dance, sweetheart?” and I smiled and nodded as he took me into his arms. When I danced with Junius, it was easier to remember restraint; he made sure of it with the subtle press of his hands, with every look. With other men, without Junius’s constant watch, I often forgot and let the other Leonie loose, something Junius hated.

I thought suddenly of the saloon, of Daniel’s words:
An old man with a young and pretty wife can’t want her enjoying herself too well, can he?

No, I dared not let her loose tonight, not with Junius’s son watching and judging. I did not want to give him more ammunition with which to wound his father.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Junius teased when it was over. He pulled me to the side tables, where he grabbed a cup of beer. I followed his glance across the room, to where we’d left his son. I watched Daniel tip his hat to Eliza Brookner, who cocked her head and gave him a pretty smile.

“People take to him,” Junius said thoughtfully. “He’s like his mother that way. She was like honey to ants. I never saw a woman like that.”

I knew he’d married me at my father’s urging. To protect me. He hadn’t loved me then, just as I hadn’t loved him. But to hear

such words about another wife after twenty years...I couldn’t help the pricking of my vanity or my pride, or the little stab of jealousy I felt. “Is that so?”

Junius put his arm around my waist. “Until I met you, of course.”

I pulled away. “You don’t have to say that.”

He jerked me close again. “It was a long time ago, Lea. Mary was nothing compared to you.”

“You shouldn’t say that either. She was the mother of your son.” I glanced to Daniel again. He had thrown off his hat, and his deep gold hair fell into his face as he danced with Eliza Brookner, and he was laughing, obviously enjoying himself.

Junius said quietly, “Don’t get too attached to him, Leonie. He won’t stay.”

“I’m hardly attached to him. I don’t even like him much. But neither do I blame him for being angry. He has a right. And you should at least make an effort to appease him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s your son.”

He sighed. His hand tightened on my waist. “Very well. But only because you wish it, sweetheart. I think it’s a mistake. Just...be careful of him, will you? And...I think it’s best if we never leave him alone with the mummy.”

I looked at him in surprise. “Why?”

Junius shrugged. “Just an instinct. Perhaps it’s nothing. But let’s not assume he’s trustworthy until he proves it. I told you—he wants something from me, and he’s not being honest about what it is.”

“The story, he said.”

“Hmmm. Perhaps.” Junius eyed Daniel thoughtfully. “But I doubt it. It’s only blood that links us, Lea. Nothing more. I don’t know anything about him and neither do you.”

“I know he has a fiancée,” I said.

Junius looked at me in surprise. “How do you know that?”

“He told me. He can’t be all bad if someone loves him enough to marry him.”

“That proves nothing. You don’t know that love has anything to do with it. Look at him. Like I said, he’s his mother all over. Ants to honey.”

“You say it as if it’s a crime,” I said.

“Just an observation,” Junius said.

The music ended amid clapping, and Daniel and Eliza Brookner were off the floor. Eliza was snapped up by her husband—I didn’t actually blame him for how possessively he did so. Before the fiddlers started up again, Sarah Estes was stepping shyly up to him. The boy was well able to fend for himself, I thought wryly.

Junius said, with a little nudge, “You planning on avoiding the sewing circle all night?”

I followed his glance to the wives. I could hear their laughter from where we stood.

Another nudge. “You should go say hello at least. Be sociable or they’ll think you’re snubbing them.”

Which was true, I knew. It was also true that I didn’t want them thinking it, that in spite of the fact that I’d been avoiding them they had always been kind enough. And it made Junius happy to see me with them. I knew he worried about the fact that I had no close women friends.

“I’ve nothing in common with them, June,” I reminded him.

“You could try harder,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to come into town every other week or so for coffee and a little gossip.”

“There’s no time.”

“Go on,” he said with a smile. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

I felt a little surge of panic. Suddenly I wanted to be home, listening to Lord Tom’s stories or drawing relics. I thought of her in that trunk, the lid closed, and I couldn’t breathe; I felt suffocated and alone and it was a moment before I realized that I wasn’t the
mummy, that I was alive, and there was no reason to feel trapped or alone, not here. These women were nothing to fear.

As I approached, Jane Mannering looked up with a friendly and welcoming smile that warmed me. Junius was right; it wouldn’t hurt me to try harder. “Leonie! How nice to see you. And here with Junius’s son too. What a surprise
that
was.”

There were questions in every word, though she was too polite to just ask for the story.

I rewarded her with at least a part of it. “He lives in San Francisco. It was nice that he decided to pay a visit.”

“What a handsome young man,” Elizabeth Jansen said.

I nodded. “He takes after his father.”

Elizabeth laughed. “Oh, he does indeed. And he’s as charming as Junius too. Don’t you think so, Mattie?”

“Oh yes,” Mattie Jansen—Elizabeth’s sister-in-law—said.

Elizabeth said, “I remember the first time I danced with June. He was so sweet. I was blushing and he teased me, but he knew how to flatter.”

Jane laughed. “I remember. He could have charmed the skin off a rattlesnake.”

“Well, his son looks to be no different,” Mattie said. “Junius must be proud. And the boy’s mother, of course.”

Whoever she is. Not you.
I thought I saw pity in her expression, and all I could do was pretend not to see it.

“Unfortunately, Daniel’s mother has passed,” I said.

They all tsked in sympathy. Then Jane said, “You’ll be going to Charlotte Thomas’s tea for the minister, won’t you, Leonie? In Oysterville, remember? At the church?”

I thought of what Junius had said, and knew I should say yes. There was no reason not to say yes, and I had opened my mouth to say it when Mattie said suddenly, “Oh! There goes Johnny again in the beer—” and dashed off after her young son.

Jane laughed. “I do grieve for Mattie. That boy will be the death of her.”

“If she can keep him alive that long,” Elizabeth agreed. “He’s not afraid of anything. Honestly, he could give a bit of that fearlessness to Sarah. She stammers at her own shadow.”

“I just read of a cure for that,” Jane said, and they were off, talking about their children and every latest trouble with them. Lost stockings and playing in mud puddles and eating too much pie and whether the teacher was lax with discipline. The talk I’d dreaded, the talk that kept me an outcast, though I knew they didn’t mean to hurt me. It was just that I was something unnatural, a woman without children, and one more interested in dirty Indian relics than in ministers or teas or schools. We had nothing in common, as I’d told Junius, and I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between us, or even if I should. How could I bear being around women whose whole lives revolved around their children? That melancholy I’d pushed away eased back, their laughter and confidences only feeding it, and desperately I glanced around, looking for relief—