Heart of the West (30 page)

"Oh, look, Rafferty!" she exclaimed, grabbing his arm, her excitement making her forget herself. All these months out west and this was her first close look at a buffalo.

She had never seen anything at once so ugly and so majestic, with his huge head and dainty legs, his humped back and coffee-colored fur like an old matted rug. His long beard trailed in the grass. His quarter-moon horns were as thick as tree limbs. "How magnificent he is!"

"He's what you genteel Boston types would call a gentleman buffalo. These old woods buffalo, they winter up in the mountains near here. They're bigger and darker than the ones you see farther east, out on the prairie."

"Oh, I do so wish I had brought my photographic equipment." She turned her head in time to catch his disapproving frown. Because he had brought her here, she thought he understood. But he didn't after all, and her disappointment in him was sharp and keen. "You're like Gus," she said. "You think I'd do better to spend my time at the washing and the scrubbing and the cooking."

"Hell, you could waste all day crocheting them little divan tidies for all I care. I was only thinking that buffalo should be allowed to keep his dignity, instead of bein' immortalized on some piece of pasteboard for folk to gawk at. Folk who don't understand how he used to be. He ain't so magnificent anymore, Boston. He's sick and he's old. You can practically see his ribs poking through his hide. Buffalo are social critters, yet here he is roaming the canyon alone. He's the last of his herd and chances are he won't live to see next summer."

A sadness filled her, a sadness that seeped deep into the soul. It was as if she were in mourning for a friend she never knew. "My photograph would help you to remember him," she said.

"Maybe I don't want to remember him as he is now. Maybe it would hurt too much."

The sadness swelled, filling her, pressing on her chest until she couldn't breathe. She looked beyond, beyond the canyon, where flat pancake clouds skimmed along the tops of the saw-toothed mountains that reared, black and frightening, against the sky. This place, it was so big and empty. Too big and empty for the heart to bear, and too wild to love.

Standing here with Zach Rafferty beneath the big Montana sky, she felt alone and fragile. As achingly lonesome as the last buffalo.

She spoke without thought, from her heart, "All this land and sky... how like a man it is in the way that it demands a woman's surrender."

"You'll tame it, Boston. And us, too, I reckon." His lips quirked into a half smile that creased his cheek and seemed to catch her beneath the ribs. "If I don't manage to chouse you outta here first."

She shook her head. She didn't want to tame this land, but she didn't want to leave it, either. And she wouldn't surrender to it—that most of all. She turned away from him, couldn't look at him anymore, but her gaze found no relief in the wilderness that only stirred the restless, yawning achings.

"Do you believe in God, Mr. Rafferty?"

He was quiet for so long that she thought he wouldn't answer her. His gaze was focused on the immense ridges of timber and grass. But unlike her, she knew, he had no fear of them, but rather loved them fiercely.

"Looking at this," he finally said, "you can't help but feel there's something. You take it all in with your eyes and your breath and the pores of your skin, all the beauty and the wildness of it, and you can't help feeling at one with the mountains and the plains and the sky, a part of it somehow."

A flush touched his cheeks, and into his eyes there came a look of searching, of wanting. "Whoever created all this, whether you call him God or the Great Spirit, I do believe he must've had a reason."

"What?" She leaned into him, desperate to know. "What was his reason?"

She thought a smile might have touched his lips. "Love."

The word hung in the air between them.

She drew in a slow breath, trying to ease the pressure in her chest. But when he spoke again his words sent her heart slamming back up into her throat: "Do you know what it is to have a heartfire for someone?"

She wanted to clamp her hands over her ears and shriek at him that he was wrong, wrong. That this wasn't happening and that she hated him, because he was wrong. It was wrong, sinful, wicked, and it wasn't happening. She would not allow it to happen.

"Clementine—"

"No. I don't want to know," she said, backing away from him. His eyes were fierce and wild, and they called to the terrible wildness within her. She wrapped her arms around herself. She was shuddering hard from the inside out. "I don't want to speak of this. I won't speak of this."

His lips made a funny little twist that was barely a smile. "You know, for all your tender feet, Boston, you sure do have a tough head. I guess you figure you can't be held to account for the things you don't say. So you make me say them instead..."

Her whole body seemed to be straining, but whether it was reaching away from him or toward him she no longer knew. She was terrified he would do something, touch her in some way, and she would be lost.

"A heartfire, Clementine my darlin', is when you want someone, when you need her so damn bad, not only in your bed but in your life, that you're willin' to burn—"

"I am having your brother's child!"

She shouted the words so loud that they seemed to split open the air, and the echo of them drummed on the cliffs and in the canyon and against the wide and empty sky. She watched the blood slowly drain from his face, and his eyes go dark and hollow. She had chosen the one thing she knew would stop him. The thing she knew would hurt him the most.

He stared at her across the shaken-up air between them. There was a pressure pain in her chest, from not breathing and from wanting and from fearing the things she wanted. When the gunshot split the air, she thought for a moment that her heart had cracked.

Several more shots followed, spitting like a string of firecrackers. Rafferty's head snapped up; then he whirled and took off running for his horse. Hampered by her long skirts, Clementine lurched and stumbled after him.

"Stay here!" he shouted. He was already mounted and pulling his horse's head around. He slapped the broad gray rump with his hat, and Moses launched into a gallop, disappearing into the timber within seconds.

Somehow Clementine got herself up on Gayfeather and rode after him. The echoes of the gunshots had long ago faded into the buttes and hills. She clung to her mount's neck as branches whipped past her face. The pinto, wild now and out of control, plunged after Rafferty's horse.

When he pulled up to a more cautious walk, the pinto nearly plowed his nose into Moses's rump. He stumbled and then shied, and Clementine wrestled with the reins trying to calm him. Rafferty didn't look at her. He'd gone utterly still, but the air suddenly seemed to vibrate around him.

Through the trees Clementine could see shafts of sunlight that marked a clearing. A man shouted. Another answered with a short, sharp bark of laughter.

Rafferty took his rifle out of the saddle scabbard beneath his leg and laid it across his lap at half cock, his finger on the trigger. He nudged his horse toward the edge of the clearing, and she followed.

They crossed into bright sunlight that dazzled her eyes, blinding her for a instant. "Oh, dear sweet forgiving Christ," Rafferty said on a sharp expulsion of breath.

A man dangled from the thick limb of a cottonwood tree. His eyes bulged in a blood-engorged face that was the mottled purple of crushed grapes. His tongue lolled out a mouth that gaped open as if in a silent scream. Hot vomit rose in Clementine's throat and she almost choked. A dozen or so mounted men were gathered beneath the hanging man, wearing almost comic looks of shock at this unexpected arrival of guests to their necktie sociable. Clementine's horrified eyes searched their faces: Snake-Eye, Horace Graham, Weatherby the sheepherder, Pogey and Nash, and others, strangers she didn't know.

And Gus.

Smoke drifted over the clearing from a fire that bristled with branding irons. The place reeked of blood and spilled entrails. Scattered everywhere were the hides and carcasses of slaughtered cattle.

Two human bodies lay sprawled and bloody on the ground, guns clutched in their lifeless hands. Two others had been captured alive. One now hung from the end of a rope, swinging and swaying, the braided rawhide creaking in the sudden silence. The other was the Indian boy, Joe Proud Bear. He sat rigid on his horse, his hands tied behind his back, and Gus McQueen sat mounted beside him, a heavily knotted noose in his hand.

"No!" Clementine cried. She wrestled awkwardly with the gun at her waist, jerking it from the holster. "Let him go!"

CHAPTER 13

Rafferty's hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. "You gonna shoot your own husband?"

"Make them stop." His hand squeezed, just hard enough to force her to drop the gun. She held his gaze, challenging him, and there was nothing in his eyes, nothing.
"You
can make them stop. He has a wife and child. No one should have to die just for stealing a cow."

His eyes still held hers. He spoke, in a silky tone she'd never heard before, yet it carried to the posse beneath the cottonwood tree. "Let the boy go."

Although it seemed like an eternity since they'd burst into the clearing, in truth only seconds had passed. Gus and the others were frozen in a silent tableau, except for Joe Proud Bear, who must have figured a bullet in the back was a better way to die than slowly choking to death at the end of the rope. He leaned forward, kicked his moccasined heels into his horse's flanks, and bolted for the cover of the timber.

"He's gettin' away!" Horace Graham yelled and wheeled his horse, his hand falling to the revolver at his waist.

The ground in front of the cattleman erupted into a spurt of dust. The smack of the rifle shot hadn't quit bouncing through the air before Rafferty was levering another cartridge into the Winchester's chamber. Smoke from the barrel wafted across Clementine's face.

"I won't shoot y'all to kill," he said in that same cold, soft voice. "But that ain't sayin' accidents can't happen."

Joe Proud Bear had disappeared into the woods. Even the sound of his horse flailing through the brush had fallen into the well of stillness in the clearing.

Gus spurred his mount into movement. Not after the Indian boy but at his brother and his wife.

"What are you crazy, Zach?" he shouted. "We caught the bastards red-handed."

"The buffalo are gone. There's nothing left for them to hunt."

Gus's face was red and bunched up tight as a fist. He pulled up his horse to stare at his brother, his eyes wide and incredulous. "What in the blazes are you talking about?"

Rafferty shook his head. "Take your wife home. She shouldn't have to see this. I'll help your friends bury these bodies."

Slowly Gus turned his head, his gaze spearing her. And now his eyes flattened with fury.

Clementine jerked the pinto around and heeled it into a canter and rode away, away from Gus and the hanging man and the smell of gun smoke and blood.

She heard hooves pounding after her. Her whole body began to tremble. She pulled on the reins and slid from the saddle before the pinto had come to a stop. The sun blazed down, yet her hands and feet were numb with cold, and her chest was so heavy, her throat so tight, she felt as if she were choking. As if she were the one hanging at the end of a rope.

Gus rode up to her. He lifted his leg over the pommel and dismounted. "You gonna be sick?"

She shook her head.

He took off his hat, ran his hand through his hair, then jammed the hat back on his head. "Then what's the matter?"

"I..." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It tasted coppery, like blood. She had borne his weight, taken his body into hers, and he had hanged a man for stealing a cow, killed him in cold blood... hot blood. Laughing Gus McQueen of the sun-bright face and sky-blue eyes. The cowboy of her dreams. "I feel as if I don't even know you."

He blew out a sharp, angry breath. He started to turn away from her, then spun back around. He loomed over her the way her father used to, trying to make the very air shiver with his man's big size and his man's great strength.

"You just won't quit in your defiance of me, will you?" he shouted into her face, and his mustache quivered with the expulsion of each hot, angry word. "I tell you Iron Nose and his rustling are no woman's business, yet you come busting in where you don't belong and shame me in front of the entire territory." He emitted a bitter, ragged laugh. "'My husband,' you say. 'I love you.' Yet you look me right in the face and set about doing just what you want to do."

"You don't own me, Gus," she said through stiff lips.

"The hell I don't. You're my wife, girl, and—"

"And I am not a
girl.
I am a woman grown. I have a mind and thoughts and feelings that are mine"—she thumped her chest with her fist—
"mine,
and they're nothing to do with you. You cannot tell me how to live my life—"

He hit her. He did it with the palm of his hand across her cheek, but he was a big man and his frustration and anger put violence into his swing. She went sprawling against the pinto. The horse neighed and shied, and Clementine landed flat on her back, the air gusting from her lungs.

Gus stood over her. His face seemed to collapse in upon itself, to crumble. "Oh, Jesus, Clem. Lord Jesus. I'm sorry, g— I'm sorry." He reached down to help her up, but she jerked away from him, lurching to her feet. Her chest heaved as she tried to draw in a breath. The whole side of her face burned.

His hand came up as if he would touch the mark he'd left on her cheek, as if he could soothe it away. A muscle jumped at the corner of his mouth. "I never meant to hit you."

"You did hit me, though, Mr. McQueen."

She felt behind her, her fingers grasping the stirrup. She watched him, watched his hands and his eyes, watched him until she was safely back in the saddle.

"Clementine!" he shouted after her. And kept shouting, but by then she could no longer hear him over the thunder of Gay-feather's hooves and the rush of the wind.

She sat on one of the nail-keg stools, hunched over, hugging herself, pressing her elbows hard against her belly. She wasn't crying, though. She never cried.

Her face throbbed. The tears she couldn't shed burned the back of her eyes, the sobs built and subsided, built and subsided, deep in her chest. Outside, a hammer pounded rhythmically—Gus working on the house, brooding. He probably had himself convinced by now that she'd brought the punishment on herself, and perhaps she had.
"Thy desire shall he to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
But her anger with him was a hot cloud in her mind.

"Clementine?"

She straightened and turned.

Rafferty stood in the doorway. His gaze fastened onto her face, and fury leaped into his eyes, hot and bright as a grass fire.

He spun on his heel and started across the yard toward the hay meadow and the house that Gus was building for her.

"No, don't!" she shouted, running to catch up with him, clutching at his sleeve to stop him. "Stay away from him, please. Please."

He swung around. "You're carryin' his child and he puts bruises on your face, and you want me to stay away from him? I ought to kill him."

"He is my husband. I belong to him. Not to you, Zach Rafferty. Not to you!"

She saw the hurt in his eyes before he lowered his head so that his hat brim shielded his face. "A man don't ride into another man's business and take over," he said. "It goes against the grain, against what's right. Yet you asked me to take a stand against my own brother, to stop him from doin' what he felt was just and right, and I did. For you, because you asked, and that
changes
things, Clementine, whether you want them changed or not."

"Don't..." She spoke as if her throat hurt. "Don't make me choose between you. It isn't... What happened between us that day at the river, it was wrong, a sin. I am
married
to your brother. Not only is that a tie made by God that only he can sever, but Gus... is what I want."

One corner of his mouth tightened. "Hell, you haven't a fool's notion of what it is you want yet." He stared at her now, his face hard. She tried to control her breathing, to keep from trembling. It seemed she could feel the ebb and flow of her blood in every part of her. "I ain't going to make you choose between me and my brother, but that's for his sake and has nothin' to do with you. Still, someday you got to make a stand on it, Boston. Inside yourself, if nowhere else. That's what it's all about out here. Having the freedom to decide just what sort of person you're going to be, and having the guts to face up to it when you do."

He half turned, then snapped back around and pointed a stiff finger in her face. "And here's another thing. Don't you ever,
ever
again pull a gun on a man—"

"But I wasn't going to shoot anybody. I was only going to fire into the air, to stop them."

He sighed and shook his head. He brushed his thumb along her cheekbone, just above the bruise his brother had given her. "Once you pulled that gun from the holster you should've been ready to kill with it if that's what it came down to. If you pack a weapon, you got to be big enough to carry its weight. You understand what I'm sayin' to you?"

She pressed her fist to her lips and shut her eyes, nodding. He was telling her that she had been behaving like a child and that she must begin to be what she was now. A woman grown.

"You goin' to go make things up with Gus?" he said softly, still stroking her cheek.

She nodded again.

"Then go do it."

She went past him, her eyes on the ground, walking toward the new house. The hammering had stopped.

Her feet felt heavy, weighted down, as was her heart. Thunder rumbled in the air. She looked over her shoulder at the mountains. Like jealous mothers the mountains had gathered up the storm clouds, hugging them close.

She had said she belonged to Gus and she knew this had to be so. "
Wives submit yourselves... he shall rule... he shall rule..."
God demanded that it be so. But she refused to live in fear like her mother. Her poor cowed mother who unlike the mountains had never hugged her child close. Her poor furtive mother who had filled a sachet with coins, one by one, trying and failing to protect her daughter from the pain of being a woman grown.

A mother who had told her daughter to go with joy, but hadn't told her how.

She walked through what would someday be the back door of the house in which she would probably live with Gus McQueen for the rest of her life. It smelled of new wood and her man's sweat. He sat on a sawhorse, his hands pinched between his knees. At the tap of her boots on the rough floorboards, he lifted his head. His mouth twisted, and he looked away.

She knew this time would pass. She had borne his weight, taken his body into hers. He was her husband and she would come to care for him again. But at the moment there was this vast emptiness inside her. She felt nothing, nothing at all.

She crossed the space between them and laid her hand on his shoulder. Rubbed her palm over and over the soft red flannel of his shirt.

His back hunched, he wrapped his arms around her waist, crushing her. He buried his head in her breasts. His words were muffled by the stiff bone and sateen armor of her bodice. "I swear I'll never hurt you again, Clem. I love you, love you, love you..."

She looked through the kitchen wall, which was only wooden studs framing air. Rafferty stood in the yard where she had left him, and seeing him, she felt a tearing inside, as though pieces of herself were breaking off. Jagged, jigsawed pieces that settled wrong, not quite fitting together again.

Her hand hovered over her husband's head, then fell, her fingers twining in his sun-shot hair. "Sssh, it's all right," she said, comforting him. Comforting herself.

August came, and the chokecherries hung sour and black down by the river. The days were warm and still, smelling of dust and summer and dry grass. The wind had finally quit blowing.

But on this day, although the sun beat down stove-hot on the cabin's sod roof, Clementine was next door in the coolness of the stone springhouse. She was watching an owl change color, from purple to red to lilac to a golden brown.

A hum of delight fluttered her lips. Oh, she had done well, if she did say so herself. The print was sharply focused and clearly defined from edge to edge, with rich gradations of light and shadow. Using a pair of tongs she moved the print from the toning bath to a hypo fixing solution. Windowless and with troughs of spring-fed water, the springhouse made a perfect darkroom.

She heard a holler out in the yard, and she leaned over to open the door. "Gus! Come see what I've just done."

His shadow fell over her as he came to the door, ducking his head beneath the low lintel. "You shouldn't be kneeling on that wet stone floor," he said.

She cast a bright smile at him and stood up from the troughs. Her pregnant belly made her awkward, and her knees creaked like an old gate. She blew a damp strand of hair out of her eyes. "I managed to make a photograph of that big gray owl that roosts on the stump by the corral every afternoon. He just sat there, Gus, unmoving, staring at me the whole time, while I set up my equipment and made the exposure, and he didn't so much as blink."

Gus looked at the print but he said nothing. Red dust filmed his mustache and the front of his hair that fell out from beneath his hat. He smelled of the dust and of sweat and horses.

"I thought you and your... and Mr. Rafferty were going to be rounding up the mustangs this afternoon."

"And I thought you were going to finish putting up the chokecherry preserves."

Angry heat flushed her cheeks. She pressed her lips together to dam back the words she wanted to fling into his hard man's face. She kept her silence as she washed the print and hung it on a line to dry, and kept her silence as she left the springhouse. The shock of walking out of the damp, stony coolness and into the sun-drenched yard made her shiver.

Gus fell into step beside her. "I thought I'd drive on into town, and I came to see if you needed anything." She kept her silence. "Well, you got time to think on it," he said. "There's a split in the buckboard's wheel rim that needs fixing before I leave."

He turned toward the barn as she went on to the cabin. A wall of heat and the sickening, too-sweet stench of boiled chokecherries and sugar syrup struck her in the face as she stepped inside. Jars and pots and purple-stained cheesecloth littered the table, just as she'd left it when she spotted the gray owl at his roost on the stump and knew she couldn't let another day pass without trying to capture the scene with her camera's eye.