Heart of the West (33 page)

Clementine stiffened, and Gus patted her shoulder. "It's for the best, girl. We'd do better to have them here underfoot, where we can keep an eye on them. Otherwise come morning half our beeves will be missing."

She would never conquer her fear of them. Capture, rape, enslavement by savages—a dread instilled in every white woman long before she ever set one dainty foot westward. But the Indians of Clementine's imagination, who crept on moccasined feet up to her bedroom window at night, hatchets and scalping knives clutched in their bloodied hands, seemed like made-up figures on souvenir cards when compared to the thin, ragged wanderers who now huddled in the middle of her hay-field. And out here, when a man and his family rode across your ranch, they were invited to stop and eat and rest up a spell. This land was too empty, too lonely, to turn anyone away.

"Yes... I can see they must be asked to stay," she said.

She felt Rafferty's eyes on her. She knew it all the time now, knew it when he looked at her. Oh, yes, she could feel it—a swift, sharp plunge of her guts that left her breathless and full of confounded, frightening feelings that had no name.

She turned her head, lifting her gaze to meet his. And though she was prepared for the fierce intensity in his yellow eyes, still she rocked a little on her feet when she was struck by the full force of it. When her mouth would let her, she said, "What's the chief's name?"

"White Hawk."

Clementine walked alone into the middle of the hayfield. The chief was a tall, bull-shouldered man with a stately dignity that matched anything she could muster. He had a seamed and rugged face, with a long blade of a nose, sharp as a tomahawk, and a wide, turned-down mouth.

"Mr. White Hawk," she said. "You and your people are welcome here."

He stared at her, his face as enigmatic as the mountains at his back. He grunted and pointed to her swollen stomach, then to the watermelon she still carried, forgotten, in her arms. And then he did the most astonishing thing—he pantomimed swallowing the melon whole and pointed to her stomach again. Color rose hot and fast on Clementine's cheeks, but laughter rose as well so that she had to press her lips together to catch it, in case the chief took offense.

She held the watermelon up to him and pointed to the knife in the sheath at his waist. "Perhaps you would like to try a swallow of it yourself."

Clementine shared her watermelon with the Indian called White Hawk. She stood in the meadow, crushing the hay stubble beneath the soles of her French kid shoes, watermelon juice running sweet and sticky through her fingers, and the September sun warm and gentle on her head. You take it all in, Rafferty had said, with your eyes and your breath and the pores of your skin. She looked from the Indian to the raw and lonesome mountains, and something opened up inside her, flowed into her and out of her, and for one trembling, exquisite moment she was White Hawk and the redolent haystacks and the music from Shiloh's fiddle.

She was Montana.

Her candy-pink-striped skirts flared like the lip of a bell as she twirled, showing off a purple petticoat and red-tasseled shoes.

Gus frowned. That woman... that woman hadn't once been allowed to catch her breath since Shiloh took up his bow. She went from one man's arms to another's, and those who hadn't taken a turn with her yet waited on the sidelines stamping their feet until their spurs jangled. But if Zach didn't mind that nearly every man in the territory was handling his whore, Gus thought sourly, then he didn't know why he should stew about it.

It was a wonder to him anyway that his calico-chasing brother had stuck all summer with one woman. At least it could now be said that Zach Rafferty was being faithful in his sinning.

Gus hooked his hip on the hitching rail and folded his arms across his chest. He cast a wistful look behind him at the open kitchen door, where Clementine had disappeared to do some more of the endless chores with the food. He wanted to ask his wife to dance, but it probably wasn't proper for a woman in her condition to do all that bouncing in public. Hannah Yorke's breasts certainly did bounce as she danced. They nearly spilled out of that scandalous dress she was wearing, like a pair of pink and dewy peaches. Large peaches.

Gus cursed beneath his breath and pushed himself upright. He straightened the kerchief at his neck and smoothed his mustache. He had to elbow his way through a crowd of cowboys, sheepherders, and prospectors to plant himself before her.

He offered her a stiff smile. "Will you try a turn with me, Hannah?"

A look of wary surprise crossed her face. But then her dimples creased with a knowing smile, and a laugh gurgled deep in her throat. "Of course, Gus," she said, and offered him her arm as Shiloh switched from the schottische he'd been playing to a waltz.

This was the first time Gus had ever touched Hannah Yorke. She felt soft and warm in his arms, and she smelled as sweet as a hothouse rose. He tried to keep his gaze off her breasts and off her mouth. Her ripe, wet mouth. Man must truly have a predilection for sin, Gus thought, because this woman stirred him. She
shouldn't,
and he didn't want her to. But, oh, Lord, she did. And he waited in embarrassed agony for the dance to end so that he could be free of her.

By the time Gus steered Hannah off the dance floor and toward his brother he was feeling more like his old self. He had looked on a woman and lusted after her in his heart, but he had triumphed over the sin and vanquished it.

A smile broke across his face when he saw that Clementine stood beside Zach. His sweet Clementine, who, unlike Hannah Yorke, was all that a woman should be. Modest and pure in her ways, gentle and submissive... well, perhaps not always submissive. But she was young yet and she would learn. As her husband, he knew it was his duty to guide her.

Clementine stood beside Zach with the hitching rail at their backs, the logs of freshly peeled pine shining white in the sun. They looked posed there as if for one of her photographs, but for all the attention she paid him they might as well have been at opposite ends of the earth. For a while it had seemed his wife and his brother had only to get within spitting distance and they behaved like a pair of alley cats fighting over the same fishbone. Now they rarely spoke, and he'd noticed lately that they couldn't even abide looking at each other anymore. It sorrowed him to realize the two people he cared most about in this world would probably always hate each other.

At least maybe the sore feelings would ease some now between him and his brother, Gus thought. It hadn't taken that much skin off his pride after all, asking Hannah Yorke to dance. And he could understand Zach's weakness for the woman better, now that he'd felt the tug of her lure.

"That Shiloh, he sure can kick up a tune..." Gus began, but his voice trailed off. Zach's eyes were focused on the road coming from town, and they shone with a bright, laughing mischief that raised the fine hair on the back of Gus's neck.

Slowly he turned and he felt his own jaw come unhinged.

"Well, glory be and hallelujah," he heard Zach say, and the words echoed back at him from wells of memory, "if it ain't One-Eyed Jack McQueen."

CHAPTER 15

Jack McQueen sat on the back of a mule the color of dirty dishwater and regarded his sons out of his one good eye. "Well, glory be and hallelujah, the Lord has seen fit to answer my prayers. My boys! I've found my long-lost boys!"

"What are you doing here?" Gus said, his voice cracking. The father of his memory was a bigger man, but the face was the same: the life-chiseled canniness of it and the slyness behind the charming smile. The sparkling blueness of his eyes... eye. Gus felt a sick twisting in his belly that he knew was shame. He was supposed to be a man now himself, but he was always going to be ashamed to be the issue of a no-account like Jack McQueen.

Apparently the man was back working the salvation bunco, for he was wearing a swallowtail coat shiny with age, rusty trousers, and Geneva bands yellowed with hard wear. Always dress shabbier than the flock you are fleecing, he'd told them many a time when they were boys. Women especially are more willing to trust their pocketbooks, and their hearts, to a poor but pious preacher man.

The poor but pious Reverend McQueen drew in a breath that expanded his chest. He looked around, taking in the cowboys and miners high-stepping arm in arm around the enormous fiddle-playing black man, and the trestle tables loaded with enough food to feed the entire Sioux nation. He fixed Gus with his one-eyed gaze, and a shrewd amusement creased his face. Gus knew that look. It was the one he always got when he was all set to make trouble and prepared to enjoy it.

"I am pleased to discover you are well, Gustavus. Lo and all these many a year," he said with the seminary-polished manner he always put on with the Geneva bands. When he peddled patent medicine, he spewed fifty-dollar words faster than any college textbook. When he sat down to a card game, he became a good ol' boy, full of bluff and bluster and oozing snake oil charm. When he sold bogus mine shares, he was a posh East Coast swell full of acumen and sincerity. "Yes, indeed, pleased and humbled and... oh, all manner of things to see you, dearest boy," he said now. "And how is my dear and faithful wife, your mother?"

"She's dead."

"Jesus reigns!" The reverend snatched the battered stovepipe hat off his head. Sunlight glinted off the oil in the long, dark hair that hung straight to his shoulders like an Indian's. Hair that hid the nub of his ear, which had been cut off for horse stealing when Jack McQueen was a boy. At least that was what the old man had told them once, but then, he made up crazy lies just to get in the practice.

"O Lord..." He lifted his eye to heaven, his face turning all gentle and weary, as if the sins of the world lay heavy on his heart. "We do pray for the soul of our dear departed, Stella McQueen. 'Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,' and a sinner, alas, in the eyes of God. Deserter of her loving husband, repudiator of the innocent child of her womb. Have mercy on her, we beg of thee, O Lord. And should she, by the miracle of your holy grace, be repentant of her sins, then welcome her as is thy wont into the bosom of thy glory, amen."

He settled the hat back on his head. A tear gleamed in his eye; a soft, sad smile lay gentle on his mouth. "Did the bitch suffer before she died?"

Anger rose in Gus's throat so hot and fast he nearly choked. "What are you doing here?"

"Well, now, Gustavus, that is a fine story in and of itself. An example of the ways in which the Lord doth provide. I was riding the circuit in Missouri—and a tightfisted lot of infidels they are in that part of the country—when I was visited with a calling to preach the Word in Deadwood. The Lord appeared to me in a dream. He spoke of a city of sin, a city of souls ripe for conversion, a city—"

"Full of saloons," a mocking voice drawled, "where they play poker with gold dust for ante."

Gus looked at his brother. Zach leaned back on the hitching rail, with his arms straight, his palms braced against the rough wood. He had a devil-damn-you light in his eyes and a crafty, hold-on-to-your-pocketbook grin, just like their old man.

The reverend didn't acknowledge his younger son by so much as a glance, but Gus saw a tic begin to pulse below the black eye patch. "As I was saying, I was in Deadwood when one day the calling guided me into a sin parlor—strictly on the Lord's business, you understand—where I fell into conversation with a Mexican boy who allowed as how he had worked spring roundup for a Montana rancher by the name of Gus McQueen. I logically presumed there couldn't be two of you, so I ambled on over for a little visit," he finished, as if it were nothing more than a jaunt to the next county and not a matter of hundreds of miles.

He shifted some on the mule's back and looked then at his other boy. His hedge of shaggy black brows drew together over his hawk nose. "I must say I didn't expect to find you here as well, Zacharias."

"Life is just plumb full of sweet surprises."

The reverend pursed his lips. "A man can raise up a son, but only the Lord can lift up a man to the glory of his righteous image. God gave you the hearing ear and the understanding heart. But when you turned away from me, you turned away from the path of righteousness."

"Amen, Revver. But then, we can't all be saved. Otherwise there wouldn't be any need for a hell."

Jack McQueen thrust a clenched fist into the air and shook it at the sky. "'God is not mocked!'" he thundered, and Gus felt Clementine jump beside him. "When you smite his tidings, you are smiting the holy hand that sends it."

He dropped his fist, and his gaze went to Hannah, who looked back up at him with both wonder and laughter on her face. His eye sparkled with manly appreciation, and she smiled. His gaze moved to Clementine.

"That greaser boy, he said you had married, Gustavus. Yea, a merciful Providence has carried me through many a danger so that I may greet your fair wife, my daughter in grace."

He slid off the mule, a tall man with long, lanky bones and an air about him that inspired fascination. Gus watched his wife carefully, to see if she was fascinated. His father's smile was full of flashing teeth and dazzling charm. He lifted her hand and brought it to his lips. "'Who can find a virtuous woman?'" he said in the deep raspy voice that had separated so many women from their virtue. "'For her price is far above rubies.'"

Clementine regarded him with that wide, intent gaze that could lay a man open to the bone. Slowly she pulled her hand from his grasp and turned to Gus, a look of utter disbelief on her face. "Is this man truly your father, Mr. McQueen?"

"Lord, we are all poor worms in the dust, struggling for life and happiness."

"We are, we are! Praise God, we are!"

"Help us poor sinners. Help us, O Lord, to take the religion of Jesus into our hearts."

"Blessed Jesus! Blessed Jesus!"

The jamboree had been uplifted—or had deteriorated, depending on your point of view—into a revival meeting. Shiloh's fiddle had been silenced, and voices were now being raised in praise of the Lord. The Reverend Jack McQueen stood atop a wagon box and preached in a bull-throated voice fit to rouse amens from the angels. Gus paced at the back of the crowd, not wanting to be where he was, not daring to be anywhere else.

His father's only competition came from the barrel of whiskey-fortified cider that Gus wasn't supposed to know about. It was doing a roadhouse business with those few who were ir- redeemable, like Pogey and Nash and Gus's hard-drinking, hell-bound little brother.

"The Lord shall deliver us from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear."

"Praise Him! Praise the Lord!"

Oh, he was so good, Gus thought. He had always been so good. His description of hell could make a brave sinner feel faint. His rendering of the glory of the Word could redeem Satan himself.

Gus's gaze searched out his wife and found her. She had distanced herself from it all and was standing on the porch of their new house to watch the preaching. No doubt comparing the Reverend Jack to her own illustrious Boston Brahmin father, who delivered decorous sermons from a white-painted pulpit in a granite church.

A hand fell on his shoulder, turning him around. It startled him so that he stumbled and his brother had to steady him. "Kinda takes you back, don't it?" Zach said, the whiskey burning wild in his eyes. "The old man up there, playing the revver better than Jesus Christ himself could do it, whipping and softening them up for salvation. I keep thinking I should be fanning pockets, looking for something to steal."

The tension gusted out of Gus in a sigh. "What is he
doing
here?"

His brother cocked an ear toward the wagon box. "Sounds like he's giving us the latest authentic news from hell."

"He
is the latest authentic news from hell. You know what will happen, don't you? He'll try to seduce the wife of every man in the valley. He'll get caught cheating at cards in the Best in the West, and Hannah will shoot at him with that boob gun of hers." He emitted a ragged laugh, then added a little maliciously, "Unless he's screwing her to the mattress by then, of course. And if there's a widow somewhere living on a pension, he'll find her and chisel the money out of her—"

"But he'll show her one hell of a good time while he's at it," Zach said, with a grin that was so much like their old man's that Gus almost shuddered.

"We got to get him back on that mule and pointed south or west or any direction so long as it's away from here." The stove-pipe hat was being passed around now. Even from where they stood in the back, they could hear the clink and rattle of coins. "Those are our friends and neighbors," Gus said. "He's taking money from our friends."

Zach lifted his shoulders in a lazy shrug as he fired up a cigarette. "Short of bushwhacking him, I don't know what we can do about it. Besides, soon as he gets wind you want him gone, he'll stick around just to rile you." He squinted at Gus through a haze of smoke. "He's probably got some swampland to sell us, or a silver mine just ripe for investing. He'll tell us how, since we're his kin, he's going to offer us the deal of a lifetime. But once he realizes the old dog's pups are wise to his tricks, he'll move on to easier pickings."

"Please God," Gus said.

The preaching had reached a fiery conclusion. Shiloh's deep voice began to sing, the sweet notes lingering in the hot afternoon air: "Amazing Grace, how sweet it is..." Gus patted the pocket of his white buckskin vest, looking for his watch. "We should start the bronco-busting now," he said, "before he passes the damn hat again." He searched his hip pockets. He was sure he had—

Zach pulled a nickel hunting-case watch from his own vest and flipped open the cover. "Three o'clock," he said.

Gus looked at the watch dangling from his brother's quick and clever fingers. He knew he should laugh, or at least smile, but all he could feel was sick. "He's going to sour things for us here. I can see it happening already."

His brother's mouth curved into a smile meant to be easy. He tucked the watch back into Gus's pocket where it belonged. "I only wanted to see if I could still do it."

"What are you wanted for?"

Rafferty looked his father in the eye and lied. "Why, nothing, Revver. I'm as straight as a Puritan's backbone."

"Of course you are, dear boy. And I still have cherry balls." He squinted up at Rafferty, his mouth twisted with a foxy smile. "Is there a man with a grudge looking for you, perhaps? If not, whyever are you hiding out in this pathetic backwater under a handle I've never heard of?"

"Maybe I just don't want anybody confusing me with you."

"You should be so lucky, my dear, dear boy."

Amusement tugged at Rafferty's mouth as he leaned over the fence rail. A white-socked chestnut danced around the corral, dodging the rope of the cowboy who was trying to hobble it. Gus had finally gotten the bronc-busting going, once the praying had run out of steam. They had caught the wild mustangs out on the range last week—the ones they would use for the fall roundup. A few had been broken already, but they all needed the pitch taken out of them and some of the men were making a contest out of it.

His father settled next to Rafferty at the fence. If Jack McQueen wanted to look his younger son in the eye now he had to tilt back his head to do it. When they had parted company, Rafferty was still a gangly boy, three inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than the man who had raised him.

"Are there many tin badges in these parts?" the reverend said.

Rafferty considered the question from every angle while he watched the cowboy in the corral try to slap a saddle on a moving target. The horse neighed and kicked at anything it could see, including shadows. The warm breeze carried with it the smell of churned-up dust and sweating horsehide. Rafferty decided that his dear father, being such a doting parent, was probably trying to find out if there was any money to be made by turning him in to the law.

"I got caught passing boodle in New Orleans," he said. "It was a piddling-ass crime, so I don't reckon there's much of a price on my head, but you're welcome to try for it." The story in itself was true enough, and he enjoyed playing the game of lying to his father with the truth.

Jack McQueen rubbed a hand over his jaw. "No, I hardly think so. Even if I were to take you in—and I'm not saying I couldn't, mind you—I wouldn't want certain individuals getting too close a look at my own face, if you get my drift."

"Yeah? Maybe
I
ought to take
you
in."

The preacher's lips pulled back from his teeth. "You could try." He made a small huffing noise in the back of his throat, shaking his head. "Passing boodle—oh, really, Zacharias. Nobody gets caught passing boodle. Why, I imagine those bills were so amateur they wouldn't have passed for ass-wipe in a crap house."

Rafferty would never admit that he was only seventeen when it happened and that someone he thought of as a friend, someone he trusted, had used him to pass the counterfeit. He'd always been ashamed of that one lapse in judgment. Any boy with Jack McQueen for a father learned young not to let himself get used by anybody.

In the corral, the cowboy had finally gotten the saddle on the chestnut, and now the horse was buck-jumping around in a wheel in a vain effort to be rid of it. Rafferty noticed that Gus was standing on the other side of the corral with White Hawk and his braves, pretending to watch the horse, but watching their old man instead.