Heart of the West (31 page)

She stared at the mess, her hands clenched at her sides, and then she spun around on her heel and strode back outside. She crossed the yard, passing Gus, where he'd rolled the buckboard out of the barn to work on it. He called out to her, but she ignored him and began to run.

She waded all the way out into the middle of the rich buffalo grass, where it grew as dense as a fur pelt. The sun beat down on her head, thick and hot. She'd forgotten to bring her hat.

She sat in the grass and drew her knees up, curving her back. She imagined that the grass grew so tall she was lost from sight in it, that she could lose herself in the grass forever.

She sat that way for a long time, listening to the snapping of the grasshoppers. Then she stretched out her legs and leaned back on her elbows. Her head fell back and she stared up into the vast and empty blueness of the sky.

"Clementine?"

Blinking, she turned and looked up into her husband's red, sweating face. "I called after you," he said. "You didn't answer."

"Because I want to be alone." She knew the words would hurt him, but she couldn't seem to help it. Perhaps she didn't want to help it. It seemed sometimes that she deliberately tried to show him the ugliest parts of her.

She held herself stiff, waiting for him to go. Instead he sat down next to her, his hands clasped together between his legs, his spread knees pressed into the crooks of his elbows.

"I wasn't scolding you earlier, Clem. Leastways, I didn't mean to. Oh, I won't deny I minded it some at first—the time you spend gallivanting around the countryside making photographs when you oughta be at your chores. But I've tried to understand. I mean, I can see that things might get tiresome and lonely for you, by yourself in the cabin all day long and with nothing but kitchen work to occupy your thoughts."

Clementine shut her eyes. Sunspots danced behind her closed lids; an insect chirred loudly, calling for a mate. Gus stirred beside her, and she turned her head to look at him. He was staring hard at the river where the sunlight dappled the willows like lace. His hands tightened their grip on each other.

"Why is it, girl, that every time I try to get close to you, you push me away? It's not enough that we come together in bed at night. We got to come together during the day, with words and feelings."

She sat up. "I don't know what you want from me," she said.

"I want you to be a true wife to me. A soul mate and a heart mate as well as a lover."

I can't, I can't
she wanted to cry.
Because I don't know what that is.
How could she give him what he wanted when it wasn't there within her in the first place?

He pulled loose a sheaf of grass, running it through his fists. "We got to start learning how to talk to each other or this marriage won't ever be an easy one."

She felt a renewed wave of panic. What could she say to him?
Your brother unsettles me; he stirs things within me that are better left buried. But even though I don't want it to be so, even though I am trying to stop it, still there is something going on between us that you'd probably hate us for if you knew of it. And if you came to hate me I would want to die, because I need you so much. Truly I do need you, Gus. More than you can ever imagine.

He pushed himself to his feet, leaving her.

"Gus!" she cried. She looked up at him, squinting against the glare of the sun. He was so tall, as tall as the trees and the mountains. As tall as any cowboy she had ever dreamed of marrying. "In that house on Louisburg Square we never talked to one another. All we did was pray."

"I am not your father."

She pushed out a big breath, relieving some of the ache, but only a little of the fear. "No. I know." She held up her hand to him as if she would hold him, keep him from leaving. "I can't speak easily of what I feel. I try, but the words stop up in my throat as if there's a dam there."

He clasped her hand with his big one and sat back down beside her. "Clementine... all I ever wanted, all I want is for you to be happy." He'd kept hold of her hand, and he was stroking the pad of her palm with his thumb. "But I don't reckon you are... happy."

She turned her head and looked at him, at his eyes, which were as open and blue as the sky. There were moments, like this one, when she thought he was wonderful and she was a fool. "Oh, no, Gus, I am, I am. Especially now that we're going to have a baby. I want us to have lots of them—a dozen at least."

She squeezed his hand, then slipped her fingers from his. "I do admit it was hard for me at first, coming here and finding out I was going to have to live in a log cabin with a sod roof. And the mud that was everywhere." She tried for a smile, but her throat had closed up so tight it hurt. "The way it got into everything, that mud, including the cracks between your teeth, so that you could taste it when you swallowed. But still and all, Gus, I wasn't so much unhappy as scared and, well... unsettled. Things have changed—"

He gave a harsh laugh. "Sure they have. The mud's all dried up now. Now you got the dust to complain of."

"That's unfair. I wasn't complaining." She began to withdraw deep inside herself again, where he couldn't see her, couldn't hurt her. It was a mistake to have encouraged this conversation. He thought he had married someone who would be a virtuous, obedient wife. A genu-ine starched-up lady. He would never come to understand what lay beneath her silk and whalebone.

"I should never have brought you out here," he said.

She turned her head away. Maybe he would find a way to divorce her, to send her back to Boston and her father's house. No, he would never do that, for he prided himself on being a man of his word, and speaking a marriage vow was like giving your word to God. But it would never be the same for him, never be right. She would be another one of his hopeless, improbable dreams.

"You talk about being scared," he said, and his voice broke. "Well, I'm scared I can never make things good enough for you, as good as what you're used to. That I can never be what you want."

She had said that to his brother, that Gus was what she wanted, and he was. Oh, yes, truly he was.

But when she looked up into his face, to tell him this and make him believe it, something in the universe slipped and she saw wild yellow eyes that wanted her, and a hard mouth that had spoken of heartfire and once had kissed her.

She reached out and recaptured her husband's hand, seized it hard, as if she were drowning. "But you
are
what I want. I am the one who is lacking. Oh, I am young, and a tenderfoot to boot, but I've never been so foolish as to think there wouldn't be some rough times mixed in with the smooth. We vowed to stay together through better or worse. I'll take your worse along with your better, if you'll take mine."

He brought their linked hands to his mouth, turning them so that her palm was against his lips and he could kiss the scars. His mouth was warm, his mustache soft. It moved as he smiled, and she felt the brush of his breath on her skin as he spoke. "Did you mean what you said about wanting lots of babies?"

"Oh, yes, Gus. I do, I do."

His smile widened. "Well, at least so far I'm doing that right."

He brought her hand down and pressed it against the swell of her belly. The baby, as if sensing it had an audience, stirred. She laughed. "Oh! Did you feel that, Gus? He moved!"

She took his hand and placed it so that he, too, could feel their baby's life. He looked deep into her eyes, his own eyes smiling. "It's going to be good, girl," he said. "You'll see."

She smiled back at him. "Yes, Gus. It will be good."

CHAPTER 14

Hannah Yorke's dark maroon skirts rustled over the oiled floor like dry leaves. She stopped before the mirror above the mahogany sideboard in her hallway. She peered at her face and frowned, then noticed the little chicken-track wrinkles around her eyes and made her mouth relax.

Without the touch of rouge she usually wore, her skin looked sallow. She blew out a long, shaky breath. Her ribs itched beneath her tightly laced corset. The high-banded neck of her polonaise jacket seemed to be strangling her. She had splashed rosewater beneath her arms, but already she could feel nervous sweat beginning to gather in every crease of her skin and clothes.

Lord, she was more jittery than a schoolgirl stepping out with her first beau. Not that she hadn't stepped out with plenty of men in her time, and she'd charged most of them a pretty price for the privilege of her company, too. But she couldn't remember the last time she'd been invited into a respectable home.

News of the jamboree had spread over the RainDance country and beyond. The Rocking R was holding a frolic to celebrate the finishing of their new ranch house and the beginning of the fall cattle roundup that was to start next week. Folk within a hundred miles would be coming. All decent folk, though, and no saloonkeepers like her. In a weak moment she had promised to come, and now, oh, Jesus Lord, she was so damned scared.

They would snub her, she was sure of it. Those respectable sheepherders' and cattlemen's wives. Up would go their noses, down would pull their mouths, and the next thing she'd see would be their stiff backs walking away from her. And there would be men at the jamboree, too, who probably wouldn't be real excited to come upon her face to face outside of her saloon. Men she'd cut the pasteboards for and served her hell brew to, men she'd seen disappearing into her back room with one of her girls.

Her hands trembled as she lifted the black linen hat off the sideboard. She anchored it down on her head with a quartz-studded hatpin, covering her scarlet hair. She adjusted the black muslin veil over her face, so that she now looked at her mirror image through a shroud. "Hannah, you are a fool," she told the veil-draped stranger in the glass.

Before she lost her courage entirely, she left the house and went out onto the gallery. The trunks of the quaking aspens shone silvery in the late morning sunlight; their leaves shimmered gold. A triangle of wild geese harrowed the sky. It was only early September, and the days were still warm and long, but the geese were a promise of the winter to come.

She tapped her foot in time with the tinny sound of a piano coming out of the open doors of her saloon: "Oh, dem golden slippers. Oh, dem golden slippers..." She'd finally found someone who knew how to make those ivories dance, a man called Doc, of course. She knew nothing about him, not even his name, and she wasn't going to ask. He was a worn-down soul, with the haunted look of a man running from something. But then, everyone out here was either running away from something or lusting after something else.

With Shiloh playing his fiddle at the frolic, she was leaving the tonk in charge of Annie, the most reliable of all her girls. The chippy would probably skim off one dollar for every four she took in, but Hannah would just have to consider that the cost of her holiday. Oh, Lord, she really did need to get away for a time from the smell of spilled booze and tobacco slop and old sweat.

And then over a burst of laughter and the tinkle of the piano, she heard the singing of buggy wheels, the rattle of a harness.

Zach Rafferty pulled up in the pretty little plum-colored shay she often rented from Snake-Eye. He swung down with a jaunty air and tied the horse to her front fence. She watched him come up her path, walking with that tight-hipped gait of a man who spent more time in the saddle than out of it.

The sight of him this morning took her breath away. She'd never seen him looking so fine, dressed as he was in striped pants, burgundy brocade vest, and pristine white shirt with a stiff linen collar set off by a black bolo tie. But when he caught sight of her, the smile slid off his face.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps and propped his hands on his hips, which looked strangely naked without a gun belt. "What the hell've you got on?"

She lifted her chin high, though it quivered a little. "This happens to be a very proper dress."

"'Proper' ain't the word for it. Too somber for a funeral is more like it."

"You're the one forcing me to go to this shindig. You gonna tell me how to dress for it now, too?" He came up next to her on the gallery. So handsome and so much of a man, and a good one, too, for all of his wild ways. "We're going to be seeing all your family and friends, Rafferty. And there I'll be, standing beside you, my hand on your arm... I don't want to shame you."

"Hell, woman, you think people believe I'm keepin' company with you because of your virtue?"

That hurt. She looked at his handsome face through the mesh of her veil. His hard face. Tears blurred her eyes. The words came spilling up from a dark, sad corner of her heart. "That's all I am to you, isn't it? A good poke. A warm and ready quim to ease yourself with when the mood takes you."

"No, that ain't all you are to me and you damn well know it. And quit talkin' dirty like that. You sound like a—" He cut himself off, but she finished it for him.

"Whore."

He thrust his fingertips into his pockets and turned away from her, blowing an exasperated breath out between his lips. She wanted to kiss those lips. And she wanted to kiss his cheek, tan, and shaven smooth just that morning. She half expected him to up and leave her, which would serve her right and likely please the good folk of the RainDance country, who would be spared her sinful presence at the frolic.

But he didn't leave. He cast a sideways look up and down the length of her. His face might have been carved out of the granite of RainDance Butte, for all she could read of it.

"Putting on sackcloth and ashes ain't gonna change you into other folks' idea of what's respectable," he said. "You want to sell your saloon and marry me, Hannah? Move out to the ranch and into that sod-roofed shanty, make me chokecherry preserves, scrub the sweat stains out of my shirts, and watch your belly swell up every year with my babes?"

The ends of his tie danced in the breeze. The scent of bay rum wafted to her beneath the veil. "Are you proposing, cowboy? 'Cause if you are, I oughta serve you the bad scare you deserve by accepting."

Oh, there wasn't a whore breathing who hadn't dreamed of a day when some man would walk into her sordid life, sweep her off her feet, and marry her. Make her magically into a lady of respectability and virtue. To be a wife, to have babies...

But not even for a baby would she give up all she had now to go back in time and live her mother's kind of life. She certainly didn't need a man to complicate things, telling her what to do and how to be and trying to do her breathing for her. Oh, there were some things she still wished for at times. A man's face smiling up at her over a stack of flapjacks of a morning. His longhandles flapping on her line. The feel of a baby pulling on her breast, to smell that baby smell again and have those soft arms cling to her neck.

To love and be loved.

Oh, Hannah, you are such a fool. How many years and how many men is it gonna take before you learn that love lasts only as long as the bedsprings squeak?

She made another little upward nudge with her chin. "What makes you know so much about me anyways?"

"You talk in bed." His mouth curled into a naughty-boy grin. "Keep me up, you do, you and that frolicsome tongue of yours."

His wicked words startled a laugh out of her. But the hurt lingered underneath, like the smell of bay rum in the air. "Someday I'll marry you when you aren't lookin', Zach Rafferty," she said, her voice rough. "And then you really will be sorry."

His hand slipped behind her neck, tilting her head. He lifted the veil so that she could see his eyes and he could see hers.

"Whatever happens with us, Hannah, I won't ever be sorry." He lowered his head and kissed her. He spoke into her open mouth. "Now go put on your dancin' rags, darlin'."

She knew better, but she just couldn't seem to help herself. She loved him most when he called her darling.

"You got your dancing shoes on, Mrs. McQueen?"

Clementine lifted her skirts to show off her French kid shoes, shiny with fresh blacking. They pinched some, for her feet had swollen over the summer months, along with her belly. "And what about you, Mr. McQueen?" she teased, smiling just a little. "Does a bowlegged cowpoke like you even know how to dance?"

Laughing, Gus shuffled his feet like a minstrel showman, making music with the jinglebobs and heel chains on his silver spurs. If he swung his boots just right he could make the rowels spin and ring against the wooden floor.

Clementine laughed out loud when he tried to jump and click his heels together and had to make a wild grab for the end of the bed at the last minute to keep his balance. Their new bed was of white iron fancied up with acorn knots. She loved that bed and her other new things: the walnut dresser with its marble top and the matching washstand, the blue gingham curtains she had made for the window, the pink-flowered china chamber set they had sent away for from the Altman and Stern catalog. Above the bed she'd hung the dream hoop Joe Proud Bear's woman had made for her, for the good dreams to come through and sweeten their nights.

And there was her man, trying to dance and make music with his spurs.

He noticed the way she was looking at him, and he struck a rakish pose. He had on a white buckskin vest and a red silk bandanna, and his face beamed like a harvest moon. "What do you think?" he said.

"Beautiful. The house is beautiful and you're beautiful." Today even Montana was beautiful, for the wind was pretty much behaving. The sun shone like a new five-dollar gold piece and cotton-ball clouds floated across a blue, blue sky.

He came up to her and took her hand, fitting his palm to hers, entwining their fingers. "I want to make you happy."

"You have, Gus. You do."

"I only wish I could give you more. Three, four years from now, I swear I'll build you the biggest house in the territory with two stories and a double parlor." He rubbed his free hand on his canvas pants, laughing. "And a water closet, so's we won't get our feet wet every morning, running through the wet grass on the way to the privy. Would you like that, Clem?"

She brought their entwined hands up to her mouth and kissed his knuckles. He made her the happiest when he was like this, laughing and chasing after the next big dream.

A crotchety old-man's voice came bellowing at them through the open window. "Crucified Jesus! Ain't there supposed to be a frolic goin' on somewheres around here? Where in holy hell is everybody?"

This was followed by the whacking sound of a hat hitting a substantial belly. "Quit your cussing, you blasted fool. We ain't even here yet and already you're bluing up the atmosphere."

Gus winked at Clementine and put his finger to his lips. "Did you invite those two scalawags to our classy to-do, Mrs. McQueen?" he said loud enough to be heard outside.

Clementine had to suck on her cheek to keep from laughing.

"Reckon they must've invited themselves then." He heaved a mock sigh. "I guess I should go make 'em welcome anyway."

They were smiling at each other, she and Gus, as Clementine followed him into the parlor. But she paused a moment there to savor the silence of her new home before it was overrun with company. It really wasn't all that fancy a house, just a white frame box with four rooms and a tin roof. Gus fretted that it wasn't up to the civilized standards she'd been raised to, yet already she felt more at home here than she ever had in the crimson-draped gloom of the house on Louisburg Square. Her father's house had smelled of beeswax and wood oil and too much godliness. This parlor smelled of its new pine plank floor, and of hope.

She stepped into the kitchen, which was already beginning to smell of the yeasty crock of sourdough that had been brought to rest in its new place above the brand-new nickel-plate range, a range that had—blessed day!—a hot water reservoir. And next to it—even more blessed day!—was a washing machine with a hand-cranked wooden wringer.

She heard Gus calling to her that their guests were starting to arrive. A wave of shyness washed over her, and she rubbed her damp palms over the swell of her belly. She had altered her brown serge dress as best she could to try to conceal her pregnancy, but she'd had to loosen her corset to a shameless degree.

She walked out onto the porch that wrapped around three sides of the house, her pretty white porch with its spooled railing. Skeins of smoke drifted from a pit in the ground where a whole steer lay roasting, and the smell of it mingled with the smell of curing hay that came from the stacks lined up like giant bread loaves at the edge of the meadow. Squinting, Clementine looked across the yard and gasped aloud in pleased surprise.

Buggies and buckboards and men on horseback were coming down the road and over the prairie toward their little house. Most of the RainDance country would show up for any sort of jamboree, so Gus had told her, but she hadn't quite believed him. They would come riding for miles, he'd said, some getting up hours before dawn to arrive by noon, wearing their Sunday finery and bearing kettles of pea soup, legs of pork, venison chops, raspberry pie, and dried-apple duff.

There was Mrs. Graham, gripping her Horace's arm as if she feared every woman present would jump on him and ravish his body beneath her very nose. And Mrs. Weatherby, her pale face made paler by a coating of flour paste that had begun to crack in the heat like a dry gulch bed.

There was Mr. Carver, who ranched the high country above the buffalo canyon, a man who had come to Montana ten years ago and hadn't yet found the time to go back to Philadelphia and fetch his wife. And Sam Woo, who had gotten involved in a cutthroat game of poker at the Best in the West last month and lost all the money he'd been saving up to buy a Chinese girl to marry.