Heart of the West (2 page)

Yet that summer held its magic anyway, for Mama smiled a lot and began to get a big belly like Grandfather Patterson's. Cook said her mother was growing a baby, but Clementine didn't believe it until the day Mama took her hand and let her feel the baby's foot kicking against the tautly stretched yellow dimity of her mother's morning dress.

She laughed at the wonder of it. "But how could a baby get inside you?"

"Hush," her mother scolded. "Never ask such naughty questions." Yet they laughed together when the baby kicked again.

She always smiled when she remembered how she and Mama had laughed together. But thoughts have a way of flowing one into the other, and the laughter could become screams and footsteps pounding down the hall in the middle of the night, and a pair of servants whispering outside her nursery door, that the Mrs. Reverend was surely dying and little Clementine would be a poor motherless child come morning.

Clementine had lain stiff in her bed that night, listening to her mother's screams. She watched the shadows melt and sunshine filter through the sawtoothed leaves of the elms in the park. She heard the chirp of sparrows and the rattle and clatter of the milk wagon.

And then she heard the screaming stop.

By morning, the whispers had said. By morning her mother would be dead and she would be a motherless child.

The sun had been up for hours before the Reverend Mr. Kennicutt came to her. Although he frightened her at times, Clementine loved the way her father looked. He was so tall it seemed his head must surely touch the top of the sky. His beard was long and thick, parting and curling up on the ends like a pair of milk jug handles. It was the same color as his hair—the shiny black of spilled ink. His eyes shone, too, especially on the evenings he came to pray with her. He made words with his deep voice that were like the songs the wind made in the trees. She didn't understand all the words, but she loved the sound of them. He told her how God judged the righteous and was angry with the wicked every day, and she thought he must be God, for he was so large and so splendid, and she longed to please him.

"Please, Father," she'd said that day, careful to keep her eyes humbly downcast, although her chest felt pinched for air. She wasn't sure what dying meant. "Am I a poor motherless child?"

"Your mother lies near death," he said, "and all you can think of is yourself. There is a sinfulness in you, daughter. Such a wildness and a willfulness that at times I do fear for your immortal soul. 'If thy eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.' "

Clementine flung her head up and clenched her fists. "But I've been good. I
have
been good!" Her chest hitched as she stared up into his face. "And my eyes have been good, too, Father. Truly they have."

He heaved a deep, sad sigh. "You must remember our Lord sees everything, Clementine. Not only all we do, but what is in our thoughts and in our hearts. Come now, we must pray." He led her into the middle of the room and pressed her onto her knees. He lifted his big, heavy hand and laid it on her head, on the plain rough cotton cap that always covered her hair to keep her from vanity. "Dear Lord, when in thine infinite mercy, thou..." His voice trailed off. His daughter's head was not bent in prayer. His fingers tightened their grip, but he said gently, "Your baby sister has passed on, Clementine. She has gone to the glory of heaven."

She cocked her head beneath his hand as she considered the meaning of his words. She had never been able to picture heaven very well, but she thought of what Mamma had said about the bleachery and the cauldrons of hell, and she smiled. "Oh, I do hope not, Father. I hope she went to hell instead."

The reverend's hand jerked off his daughter's head. "What manner of child
are
you?"

"I am Clementine," she had said.

Clementine was forbidden to leave the nursery that day. In the hour before bed, her father came again and read to her from the Bible about a lake of fire and brimstone, and a righteous anger that would show no mercy when she died. Even the angels who had sinned had not been spared, the Reverend told her, but had been cast down into hell to suffer for all eternity.

Her father came again and again over the next two days, morning, noon, and evening, to read more to her of hell. But it was the upstairs maid who told her that her mother would live.

On the morning of the funeral all the mirrors and windows of the house were draped in black crepe, and flowers filled the hall, choking the air with their smell. A hearse pulled by horses sporting curling black plumes carried the tiny casket to the Old Granary Burying Ground. The wind stung cold on Clementine's face and slapped dead leaves against the gravestones. She knew all about hell now, and it was nothing like her grandfather's bleachery.

Sometimes the thoughts would flow on to that Easter when Aunt Etta and the twins came for a visit. These boy cousins, who were seven years older than Clementine, had just returned from a trip to Paris, where they had acquired a miniature guillotine. Clementine was excited to see this marvel, for she was allowed few toys of her own to distract her from her lessons and prayers.

The boys had offered to show her how the guillotine worked. And she, so pleased with the attention they were paying her, had smiled at the wonder of it. And was smiling still... until they set it up on the table where she took her morning porridge and milk, and they cut off the head of her only doll.

"Please, stop," she said, careful to be polite and careful not to cry as she watched the porcelain head bouncing bloodless across the white painted surface. "You're hurting her." But her cousins only laughed, the tin blade fell with a shriek, and a pink dimpled arm went rolling onto the floor.

Clementine didn't hurry, for she was forbidden to run. She didn't cry. Stiff in her starched pinafore and cap, she walked soundlessly through the big house in search of someone to stop the slaughter, while her little chest shuddered, and her eyes stared wide and unblinking.

Lilting laughter floated out the open doors of the morning room. She stopped at the threshold, so enthralled she forgot about the murder of her doll. Mama and Aunt Etta sat knee to knee in white rattan chairs, heads bent over teacups. Aunt Etta had brought Easter lilies, and their thick sweet smell mixed with the melody of laughter and chatter. Sunlight poured through the tall windows, gilding her mother's hair.

Julia leaned forward and gripped her sister's arm. "Then Dr. Osgood said in that gruff-kind voice of his. 'If you want to go on living, madam, you are not to try to have any more babies. I've told Mr. Kennicutt that if he cannot reconcile his conscience to birth control, then he must reconcile himself to abstinence. To behave otherwise is tantamount to murder, and I have told him that as well.' Oh, Etta, the good doctor broke this news as if it were a tragedy. How could he know the utter, utter
relief!
felt?" Julia laughed, then her shoulders hunched. Aunt Etta gathered her into her arms. "The utter relief," she sobbed into Aunt Etta's plump bosom. "The utter, utter relief."

"Hush, Jule, hush. At least from now on, you'll be spared his bed."

Clementine hadn't understood the words they spoke, but she so had wished she could be Aunt Etta. She wanted fiercely to be able to wrap her arms around her mother and make her smile. But she wanted to be Mama too, to be stroked and held and comforted, to feel safe and loved. She wanted, wanted, wanted... Yet she had no words to describe the things she wanted.

That was the first time she could remember feeling them, those yearnings that were to come to her more often as she grew older. She felt and wanted things, but she didn't know what they were. At times she would be almost choked with a tumult of feelings, of wantings, she couldn't name.

She was nine when she first learned about the cowboys.

It came about when Cook hired a new scullery maid. Shona MacDonald was her name, and she had hair the bright red of a fire wagon and a smile that beamed from her face like the summer sun.

The first time they met, Shona knelt and pulled Clementine to her breast in a crushing hug. The smell of lavender water filled Clementine's nose almost making her sneeze, and rough, work-chapped hands rubbed circles on her shoulders. Then Shona gripped her arms and leaned back, smiling. "My, what a bonnie lassie ye be," she said. "Never have I seen such eyes. Like a loch at dusk, they are. All stormy green and brooding, and filled with secrets and mysteries."

Clementine stared at her, mesmerized by the lilting words and the brightness of her smile. No one had ever hugged her before; she wished the girl would do it again. She tried a smile of her own. "What is a loch?"

"Why, a loch is a... a gret big puddle of water, ye ken?"

Shona laughed. The sound was like rose petals, sweet and soft. Clementine studied the shiny black toes of her shoes, afraid to look, almost afraid to ask. "Do you think you could be my friend?" she said.

Shona's strong, bony arms enveloped her again. "Och, ye puir wee thing. Of course I'll be yer friend." And Clementine was almost giddy from the happiness that came from these words.

Sunday afternoon was Cook's time off. It was a quiet time in the house, between church services, and Clementine was supposed to spend the hours at prayer. Instead she spent them in the kitchen with her friend.
My friend.
How she loved the sound of those words. She would say them to herself as she crept down the servants' stairs:
My friend, my friend... I am going to visit my friend.

Shona had a passion for yellowback novels, and she spent most of her meager salary on weekly editions of the Five Cent Wide Awake Library's Wild West series. The books were a treasure trove of dreams, and she didn't mind sharing them on those secret Sunday afternoons.

Clementine would sit on top the flour bin, swinging her legs, reading aloud these tales filled with gun-toting cowboys and wild mustangs, wicked cattle rustlers and scalping Indians. Shona would scrub the copper pans with a paste of lemon juice and salt, stopping to peer at the pictures and interject comments in her Scottish burr. "And who cares whether that cowboy was caught red-handed thievin' them horses? The man is too bonnie to hang. A guid woman is what he needs. A wife to love him and turn him away from the pathways of sin."

"I think I should like to marry a cowboy when I grow up," Clementine said, almost shivering with the wonder of the idea.

"Och, wouldna we all, Miss Clementine? But cowboys, they're like wild horses, them mustangs. They love their roamin' ways too much. There's no harm in dreamin' about lassoin' such a man, though, no harm t'all."

The odor of the lemon paste would mix with the other kitchen smells, of yeast and coffee beans and salted cod. But Clementine's nose wouldn't be in Boston. It would be on the prairie and filled with the smell of sagebrush and buffalo hides and woodsmoke carried on the western wind.

One Sunday Shona was given the day off to be with her family, who lived a ferry ride across the Charles River. Clementine spent the precious hours that they normally shared by herself in the kitchen. She sat at the block table, her elbows on the knife-scarred wood, her cheeks on her fists, poring over Sho-na's collection of souvenir cards of famous bandits and cowboys. And dreaming.

She didn't know her father had come into the room until his shadow fell across the table. She tried to hide the cards beneath a pile of freshly laundered towels. He said nothing, simply snapped his fingers and held out his hand until she put the cards into it.

She stared at the tabletop while her father slowly assessed her crime, shuffling through the souvenir cards one by one.

"I trusted you to be at your prayers, and instead I find you here, looking at this... this..." His fists crushed the cards, and the stiff pasteboard cracked and popped. "Where did you get these? Who dared to give you this lurid filth?"

She lifted her head. "Nobody. I found them."

The air began to shiver as if a wind had stolen into the sun-bright kitchen. "Recite Proverbs Twelve: Thirteen, daughter."

" 'The wicked is snared by the transgression of his lips.' "

"Proverbs Twelve: Twenty-two."

" 'Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.' But I found them. Father. Truly I did. On the back stoop. Maybe the ragman left them there. He's always looking at lurid filth."

He said nothing more, only pointed up the back stairs. She walked past his outstretched arm. "I found them," she said, not caring if the lie would damn her soul forever to the lake of fire and brimstone.

In her room Clementine knelt on the seat before her window and watched the gulls dip and soar among the elms and over the gray slate rooftops. Slowly the sunshine was washed from the day. A lamplighter walked down the street with his long pole, and small points of light began to appear behind him one after the other, like a string of dancing fireflies. She heard the sound of a door opening and closing below and heels clicking on the granite steps of the servants' entrance. The frayed crown of a straw hat topped the wrought-iron railing below, followed by a fat red braid bouncing against the back of a faded Indian shawl. A cheap straw suitcase dangled from a work-chapped hand.

"Shona!" Clementine threw open the window, shouting at the green and blue plaid shawl as it disappeared into the dusk. "Shona!" She leaned so far out that the edge of the wooden sill bit into her stomach. "I didn't tell him. Shona, wait—I didn't tell!"

Shona picked up her pace, almost running, and the straw suitcase bounced against her legs. Although Clementine continued to scream her name, she didn't once look back.

"Clementine."

She spun around, almost falling off the window seat. Her father stood over her and he had his cane with him. "Stand up and hold out your hands, daughter."

It was the punishment he meted out for the direst transgressions. Three lashes across the palms of her hands with his ma-lacca cane. It hurt terribly, but she had borne it before and she thought that this time she would not cry. She wouldn't cry because this time she wasn't sorry.