Heart of the West (29 page)

Clementine was looking at her with eyes that were guileless and so very, very young. "So you have had a baby?"

"I... oh, Lord a-mercy, no. I ain't never made that particular mistake," she lied. "But in my line of work I've come across plenty of whor—women who have. After all, when it comes to what goes on in a bed, and what comes out of it, men and women all got the same fixin's whether they be paupers or kings. So, when did you last have the curse, honey?" At the girl's bewildered look, she smiled gently. "When was the last time you bled?"

"Oh." A hint of fresh color rose on Clementine's cheeks. "Not since before the first time Gus and I... since I came here to Rainbow Springs."

There was no privacy in a one-room miner's shack. Hannah Yorke had grown up pure, but not ignorant. There had been nights when she'd awakened to the sound of her parents coupling behind the curtain that shielded their bed. She had helped her mother bring two stillborn babes into the world and a little brother who had died before his first year. And those times when the women all got together, for weddings and birthings and funerals, Hannah at her mother's side, helping with the endless cooking, the women's work, had listened as they talked about their men and their marriage beds, their pregnancies and the cycles of their woman's bodies.

"Well, if you ain't bled since the first time you and Gus... made love, then you'd be, let's see, about four months along." She studied the girl's slender waist. "You should be showing by now."

Clementine looked down at herself. "I have gotten
rounder."

Hannah hooted a laugh. "Honey, you're gonna get a whole lot rounder before you're done. All of you's gonna get as swolled up as a dead frog."

That ravishing smile flashed across Clementine's face. "Oh, I shouldn't mind that, for I do so want a baby. But, Mrs. Yorke... Hannah, how does one
know?"

Hannah struggled with the thickness in her throat. "Have-have you been feeling sickish in the mornings, and dizzy at unexpected moments?" She smiled at Clementine's eager nod. "And your breasts should be getting tender and your nipples turning darker, like blueberry stain, maybe."

Clementine stared down at her bodice as if she could see through the thick serge and cotton to her woman's flesh beneath. Her hand come up, hovered a moment, then touched. She smiled. "Oh, they are! They have been. I had thought it was because of what Gus—" She stopped, blushing furiously.

Hannah pursed her lips to keep from laughing. "Well, I expect you'll be experiencing other not-so-pleasant sensations soon. Why I remember how I... how this girl I knew belched and farted so much her first six months, she went around sounding like a locomotive going up a steep grade."

"Oh, my!" Clementine exclaimed, her face glowing red and yet she was laughing. And in that moment Hannah knew that for the first time in her life she'd found another woman she could love as a friend.

But Clementine McQueen was a lady, and she was... who she was.

"Tell me more," Clementine said. "Tell me everything."

Hannah's voice took on even more of a Kentucky drawl as she spoke of labor pains and water breaking and a baby's suckling. But she didn't talk about the whore she knew who'd died after drinking bluing to induce an abortion, or the opium addict who had given birth to a spastic child. Or the cones of cocoa butter and boric acid sitting on top of her own dresser, which she used to keep a baby from ever getting started. Or of her mother's stillborn babies, and her own little boy who'd been born when she was so alone and so scared. Whose first view of the world had been a room in a brothel.

Afterward, when Hannah thought about that afternoon, it was to marvel at how strange it would have seemed to anyone listening—a Montana whore imparting the facts of childbirth to a Boston blue blood. And when she was done, Clementine

McQueen had stood up and thanked her with those polished, impeccable manners as if Hannah had simply been giving her the recipe for dried-apple pie.

They went outside, onto the gallery. The photograph as it came off the printing frame was a solid purple square with no image to be seen. But Clementine draped herself in the dark tent again, and when she emerged, the likeness of Saphronie's daughter was there in the sepia tones that Hannah was used to. It smelled of strange chemicals and varnish.

Clementine mounted the photograph on a stiff card with a pretty floral border. She held it in her hands, and Hannah looked at it over her shoulder. The sunshine gilded it like the light of her own memory.

"She was a beautiful little girl," Clementine said.

"Yes. Yes, she was..." Her own child's face, his dear little face, was only a blurred image in her mind, but she could vividly remember his smell. That baby smell of milk and talcum and soft, moist flesh. "I reckon surely Saphronie will let us put the poor thing in the ground now."

They looked up together at the clatter of wheels on the road. Clementine's husband pulled up to the front gate in the buck-board. He wrapped the reins around the brake handle, jumped down, opened the gate, and came toward them with long, purposeful strides.

Hannah watched him come, thinking she'd been wrong about him. Gus McQueen might have a stiff neck, but at least his head was on straight. He'd given his wife enough time to make her photographs before coming after her.

He stood at the bottom of the steps, his hands on his hips, and looked up at them. There was anger on his face, but there was something else there as well, Hannah thought. An uncertainty, perhaps. A dawning comprehension that his young wife was not at all as malleable and submissive as he might want her to be.

"You ready to come on home now, girl?" he said.

She looked back at him. If she was afraid of him, she didn't show it. "Yes, Mr. McQueen. I am ready."

Gus didn't help his wife pack up her camera and things. He went back to the buckboard and waited for her there, as if tlinger too close to the former parlor house was to risk being sucked down willy-nilly into the jaws of sin.

"I won't bother you again," Hannah said to the girl when she was ready to leave. "Your Gus is right. You hadn't ought to be seen around the likes of me."

The girl walked across the gallery, her back as straight as a plumb line, her head high. Skirts rustling, shoes tapping.

But at the top of the steps she turned and looked back. "Mrs. Yorke, if i wish to pay a call on you, I shall."

She eased her horse down to a walk, breathing deeply, filling her lungs with air that was said to be better than whiskey in the belly. She could feel the pinto's heart thumping beneath her legs, feel his muscles trembling with the excitement of the run. It had been like straddling thunder and riding it across the sky.

She followed an old buffalo trail that had been washed deep by the rains in all the years since the buffalo had last used it. She rode out from beneath the pines and descended into a coulee with the sun warm at her back. A bawling calf disturbed the silence, and a man's slow, melodious cursing.

The mouth of the gulch was deep in shade cast by the yellow pines and larches above. There were still patches of winter snow where the sun never reached. The miry ground gave beneath her horse's hooves.

Her husband's brother knelt at the edge of an old buffalo wallow, wiping off the face of a calf with his bandanna. He was calling it all manner of profane names, but in the gentlest voice she'd ever heard from a man. The calf must have gotten bogged down in the wallow and Rafferty had hauled it out. It was hard to tell which of them was wearing the most mud.

She thought he didn't know she was there, but he didn't act surprised when she spoke. "I've seen pigs that were dirtier, Mr. Rafferty."

He stood up slowly and turned, cuffing the worst of the mud splatters off his face. "Well, now," he said, his deep drawl making music of the words, "that's mighty cruel of you to say, Boston. I'd've thought you'd have more of a care for the tender feelin's of this here poor dogie."

She laughed aloud. Today felt wonderful.

He came at her, his gaze hot and intense in that way he had. He came right up next to her, so close the toe of her boot brushed his chest. He looked up at her and she thought he was going to smile, but then his eyes focused on the gun she wore around her waist, an old Colt that Gus had given her.

"What in hell you aimin' to do with that?"

She lifted her chin. "Protect myself."

"Uh-huh. I guess you figure if you meet up with trouble you can wave that in its face and scare it to death."

"I'll have you know that while I might not yet be able to shoot the head off a rattlesnake—"

"Lord, I bet you couldn't hit the side of a barn if you were standing inside it and had all day to aim in."

He was mean to her sometimes. Most times. And she wasn't very nice to him. But other times, like now, he'd tease her or suddenly smile in that way of his that creased his cheek and warmed his eyes, and she'd forget to be careful.

She laughed and leaned down to give the brim of his hat a playful tug. "What will you put up this time, Mr. Rafferty—your own six-shooter? You keep making wagers you're sure to lose, and come winter you'll be finding yourself left with little of not much."

"My, my, but if you aren't frisky and sassy as a clover-fed colt this mornin', Boston." His smile deepened, turned lazy and knowing. "You have anything in particular you're aiming to do with all that friskiness and sassiness? Otherwise, there's a place near here I'd like to show you."

And there were other times... other times when he was the one who forgot to be careful.

They rode in silence except for the squeak of saddle leather, the steady rush and pull of their horses' breath. They rode through a forest of cottonwoods and pines and huge larches that filtered the sun. They emerged onto a high grassy plain where the yellow sage bloomed and a hot wind blew.

She felt his eyes on her and she turned her head, met his gaze, though she knew it would not be wise. The look he gave her was like summer thunderclouds—dark, shifting, uncertain.

She looked away. At times he seemed to her a terrible man, wild and ruthless, crude and full of sin. But then he would do something so fiercely brave, so earthily decent, that the very splendor of him would make her ache inside. She longed to know how his heart and mind worked. She wanted to crawl inside his skin and see the world through his eyes. He haunted her, like the elusive memory of a dream that leaves you empty and restless when you awaken. And yearning for sleep so that you can dream it again.

It took her a moment to realize that he had pulled up, was swinging down from the saddle. He reached up and clasped her waist as she dismounted. And the feel of this hands resting on her hips, the brush of his leg against her skirt, the nearness of his face, his mouth... Though the sun beat down bright and hot on the parched prairie grass, she shivered.

An enormous larch stood isolated in the middle of the sea of grass. It had been decorated like a Christmas tree with beads and bear claws, strips of red calico, queer-shaped stones, and pieces of bone.

"This used to be a hunting ground, this plain," he said. "And that's a sacred tree. The Indians would leave gifts here to the Great Spirit, so that he would make the game plentiful and their arrows fly true."

Clementine felt the pull of the tree's majesty as she walked up to it. She stood beneath the canopy and looked up, and it was like the vaulted ceiling of her father's church—open and limitless and silent. She felt something here, a power ancient and beckoning, holy.

But some of the holiness had been defiled. A man by the name of Emory had been here in 1869 with a knife and tar bucket.

She knelt and tried to cover up the ugly black scars on the trunk with her gloved hand. "I must bring my photographic equipment up here some time," she said. "But I'll shoot it from another angle, where this can't be seen."

"Why? This tree don't belong to the Indians anymore. It's the white man's now, like the land it grows on. If you didn't show that, you'd be making a lie."

She looked up at him, startled that he would understand such a thing. She wanted to think of him only as a man of rough ignorance and lawless sinning.

The intensity on his face frightened her. Her gaze shifted down to his hand, which gripped one of the larch's low-flung branches. To those long, urgent fingers that were capable of such explosive violence. That had touched so many women.

He took her arm, to help her to her feet, and then his hand moved down her side and wound up pressing into the small of her back. She drew in a deep breath, heady with the smell of sage and sun-ripe grass.

She saw that the plain they stood on was actually the shoulder of a high bluff. About two hundred feet below them was a narrow canyon filled with knee-high grass that rippled in the wind. The canyon wound past cliffs the color of driftwood and hogback ridges of red rocks and stunted pines.

Her eyes picked out a skull first.

Like a cow's skull, only not exactly. And then she saw more bones, thousands of them, heaped in jagged weathered piles among the sere grass.

"A buffalo is pretty much a stupid critter," came Rafferty's voice from beside her. "And he don't see too good, either. Once spooked, he'll stop for nothing. When the Indians hunted here they used to stampede whole herds of them over this cliff."

"What a terrible thing." The thought saddened her. The poor dumb blind animals being driven so callously to their death.

"No more terrible than standing at the end of a railcar and shooting them down with carbine rifles like wooden ducks at a fair."

She turned her head to look up at him. "Did you do that?"

He thumbed his hat back a little. "Yeah. And it shames me to think of it, when I see how they're mostly all gone now."

There was a vulnerability in his eyes that she had never seen before. As if the tough shell he lived inside had cracked a little to reveal the meat of the man he was, behind the chaps and the Stetson and the six-shooter.

A loud snorelike grunt echoed up from the bottom of the canyon. She whipped around, clutching one-handed at her hat to peer over the cliff edge. Directly below them an enormous buffalo stood alone.