Heart of the West (37 page)

He got up and stood before her. He rested his hand against her face, tilting her head back until she could see his eyes. Then he let her go. "I'm not as drunk as I was behavin' earlier," he said. Her skin had been as soft against his hand as the down of a newborn chick. "I was just acting like that to rile you."

"I know."

His mouth pulled into a crooked smile. "And even if I'd been dead drunk, the sight of you messin' all over my floor like that would've been enough to sober up a peach-orchard sow."

She started to laugh but caught it with her hand. "How drunk do peach-orchard sows get?"

He laughed with her, feeling his heart grow warm. "Drunker'n boiled owls."

The laughter spilled out around her fingers.

"Drunker than a goose at a rooster fight," he said. "Drunker than the devil on a hot night in hell."

"You're making those up," she accused, laughing openly now. And stopping suddenly as pain twisted her face and her whole body contorted.

He gripped her arms as she swayed into him. The contraction was sharp and violent, and he felt it against his own stomach. And the intimacy of it was almost more than he could bear.

He looked down at her bent head, at the whiteness of the part in her pale yellow hair. An overwhelming feeling of tenderness rose and caught in his throat. "It's true I've pulled a lot of calves and foals," he said, his voice rough. "Enough to know it can't be done blind. It's going to be messy and painful, and there won't be any place for modesty or... delicacy."

She raised her head and looked at him with wide, serious eyes. "I know, Rafferty, and on this night, at least, I'm not afraid of you. Or of myself."

"Easy now, sweetheart." He poured the sweet oil over her belly, rubbing it in with his palms. Beneath his hands her muscles quivered and contorted. "Take it easy, darlin'. You're gonna be fine, just fine..."

Clementine clung to the rails of the iron bedstead until her knuckles turned white. Panting, she raised her head and stared at him out of bloodshot eyes. "Mr. Rafferty, you are speaking to me as if I were a dumb bronco you were trying to break. I am not, I beg to remind you, a horse."

"Yeah? You coulda fooled me, big as you are." He waited until she was done grunting and gasping and panting through another pain. They came so hard and so close together now that she was barely able to catch her breath between them. "I thought some sweet talk might help things along here. You're taking your own sweet time about having this baby. Like you was tryin' to make it last as long as an all-day sucker."

She shot him a murderous glare and gritted her teeth. "You, sir, can go straight to hell in a handbasket."

"You're getting the words down real fine now, Boston, but not the tune. There's still too much starch in your voice."

She grunted and huffed and did some more glaring, and he flashed a damn-the-world smile back at her. But inside, he was sick with fear.

She had been laboring hard like this for over sixteen hours now. Her chest pumped so violently with the effort of it that he feared her heart would give out. She was drenched with sweat. She had long ago undressed to her shift, and now it was soaked through and rucked up around her waist. Her legs were bent and spread wide and trembling from exhaustion. She was gutsy and beautiful, and he loved her beyond lust or even liking and into a realm of emotion too vast for words, too deep to understand.

And if she didn't give birth soon she would die.

He wet her dry, cracked lips with snow and mopped her forehead with a cool, damp cloth.
Please, God,
he prayed over and over, like a litany.
Please, please, please...

He'd never begged anything of God before, but he was begging now. He was, in his heart at least, on his knees with his hands clasped in an agony of pleading. But the God he knew, the spirit of the prairie and the wind and the mountains, was an indifferent deity who believed in letting the nature of his creation take its course. So he prayed to Clementine's God instead, the God locked up in her green Bible with the gold clasp. Such a God, who proscribed and punished, must also, he thought, show mercy on occasion. So he prayed for mercy, for her sake and his brother's, and he was careful to leave his own name out of the negotiations.

Her back arched and her belly contracted violently. She gripped the bed rails until the corded muscles of her throat stood out like white ropes. Her teeth clenched together and her lips curled back in a rictus of pain.

Please, God, please, please...
She grunted and heaved again, and a great ripping sound tore out of her chest, like a blunt saw being pulled through wet wood. He tossed the wet cloth on the floor and moved between her thighs, and he saw the top of the baby's head. His throat tightened and tears stung his eyes.
Please, God, sweet God...
"It's coming, Boston. I can see the top of its head," he shouted, relief welling in his chest to choke the words. Her stomach contracted and her back arched, her heels digging deep into the mattress. "I can see more of it. Jesus Lord. Push, sweetheart. That's it, darlin', push some more now..."

In the middle of all the panting and grunting and heaving she was doing, she had somehow pushed herself up on her elbows and was trying to see for herself. "What does it look like?"

"Like a baby." He took her hand, guiding her fingers between her spread legs to the soft honey-colored crown of hair. "Here, feel."

She grinned at him, breathing hard. "Oh, my."

"Yeah..." He turned his head and pressed his lips to her knee, tasting the salt of her sweat and his tears. "Oh, my."

She fell back, grunting and pushing and convulsing. Slowly more of the head emerged and then part of one shoulder. The loop of the navel cord was wrapped around the baby's neck, but before he even thought to panic he had hooked a finger under the cord and gently worked it over the small head. Suddenly the baby slid, slick and wet, into his waiting hands.

Rafferty's heart squeezed up into an area just below his throat. And where his heart used to be there was an aching sense of awe.

He wiped the mucus off its tiny face with his fingers, laughing at its loud, squawking cry. He laid Clementine's son on her belly. The babe was wrinkled and scrawny and so tiny. He wailed and thrashed his legs, indignant, Rafferty thought, maybe frightened, too, to be wrenched out of his mother's warm, soft womb. "Look at him," he said, his throat thick, as love for his brother's child swelled in his chest, swift and fierce and heart-soaring. "Look at your son, Boston."

She tried to struggle up on her elbows again and he supported her back with his arm. She was laughing, too, and he heard joy and relief and awe in her voice. "Oh, Rafferty... have you ever seen anything more wonderful?"

He turned his head to look at her. Her hair was plastered to her cheek in wet, sticky strands. Her face was pale and drawn, her lips cracked and chewed bloody in places. He could see himself reflected in the wide, black pupils of her eyes. "No," he said. "I have never seen anything more wonderful."

He cut the navel cord, and when the afterbirth came, he put it in a zinc bucket to be buried later. Using the water he'd been keeping hot on the stove for hours, he bathed the baby and he bathed Clementine. He touched her naked body, her breasts and between her legs. Every time he looked up, it was to find her eyes on him, wide and dark and filled with some raw emotion he couldn't name.

He didn't have anything proper to wrap the baby in. He finally settled on one of his soft chambray shirts. It curtailed the kid's thrashing some, but not his squawking, which was loud enough to peel the bark off trees.

He put the squirming bundle into Clementine's waiting arms and sat beside her on the bed. They looked down together at the red face, with its tiny wailing mouth and eyes clenched into tight, angry slits. "I don't think he likes me," she said in a small voice.

"Maybe he's just hungry."

She wet her cracked and swollen lip with her tongue. "I'm not sure I know how to feed him."

He dragged in an aching breath. He had to make fists with his hands to keep from taking hold of her face and kissing her poor ravaged mouth. "I reckon if you aim him in the right direction, he'll figure the rest of it out for himself."

Clementine unbuttoned his shirt, which he had put on her in place of her sweat-drenched shift, and put the baby's face to her breast. The light pouring in through the window turned her skin creamy and golden, like freshly churned butter. Dawn had come and with it the sun. It had stopped snowing, and the world outside looked white and pure and born anew.

He watched her nipple tighten and harden, and the baby's mouth turned toward it, latching on. "Oh!" she exclaimed softly. "He sucks hard."

Rafferty stared in wonder at his brother's son. The transparent eyelids, no bigger than the nails on his little fingers. The little fists thrown back on either side of his head. The pink mouth sucking greedily.

"I wish he was mine," he said. The words slipped out without thought, but there was no taking them back.

She looked up at him, and he allowed his face to be naked before her. She looked at him forever, and the days flowed into nights, snow melted into spring. Then forever ended and began anew when she took his hand.

She turned her face away, and he saw the raw anguish pull at her mouth and darken her eyes. "I love Gus," she said.

Please, God, sweet God...
Her hand on his was like sunshine on shadow. He was afraid if he so much as breathed, she and the world and the touch of her hand would disappear.

"I love Gus," she said, cutting him deep, deep. "Not only is he my husband, but he is honorable and noble and good, and I vowed before God that I would love him." She made a harsh tearing sound in her throat. "When I saw him that day, when he knocked me over with his bicycle, he was like something out of a dream, my dream." She looked at him, and her eyes glittered like shards of glass. "Oh, God, God, how could I have known, how could I have known? Up until that moment, you see, he was the closest thing I'd found to you."

She swallowed hard, her throat straining as if it hurt. Her hand moved, gripping his. "From the beginning of time it was you, Rafferty. Always it was supposed to be you. You are the fire in my heart."

He looked at their hands, his dark and large, hers white and small. Her flesh pressed against his, and it seemed as if her blood flowed into him, as if he could feel her heart beating in his own breast, as if she had taken his soul. The moment was more carnal than in all his dreams, when he'd laid her down on his bed and driven into her.

She let go of his hand, and her touch became a memory that swelled and seeped into a pain that went bone deep. Soul deep. The world had never been so empty.

"Clementine—"

"No." She pressed her fingers against his lips, a moment and no more. "We can't be held to account for the things we don't say, remember? So you musn't say it. One of us must always be careful not to say it. This time it has to be you."

And so he said nothing. A man couldn't speak anyway of a thing that didn't exist. The flesh-and-blood woman on the bed would never be his. All he had was a yearning, and words that were never really spoken and then were denied.

He adjusted the pillows beneath her back, smoothed the damp hair from her face, and for her sake tried to make his mouth smile. "You ought to try to get some sleep now."

"Will you be here when I wake up?"

"I'm not leavin' you, Clementine."

He sat beside her on the bed, his gaze never leaving her face. When he was sure she slept, he leaned over and pressed his lips to hers. He said her name, letting his breath wash over her mouth.

But she was still his brother's wife.

Clementine opened her eyes onto his face. For a long time they simply looked at each other; then she said, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Rafferty."

They shared a smile. And then together they watched the baby sleeping in the crook of her arm, and their smiles widened to include the world.

She stared at her son's face. It was round and red and wrinkled like a gnome's, and yet it was the most beautiful face she had ever seen. The love she felt for him was so intense it was an ache in her chest. He felt so fragile in her arm, as light and ephemeral as sunshine. He was so incredibly tiny, so vulnerable and helpless, and a terror gripped her heart.

"Oh, what am I going to do?" she said, the fear gushing out of her in words. "I don't know how to be a mother. I didn't even know how to feed him."

Rafferty's hand drifted toward her and she thought he might touch her, but he stroked the baby's cheek with his curled finger instead. Then he looked up and touched her with his eyes. "I reckon you can do whatever you set your mind to, Boston. You made it to the first snowfall. To the first snowfall and beyond."

Bellows and shouts bounced off the clear winter air. He went to the window. "It's Gus," he said. "With the doctor." He lifted the sash and halloed, his breath wafting white smoke, waving Gus on down.

Clementine turned her head. She watched out the window as her husband and the doctor rode across the hay meadow from the new ranch house to the buffalo hunter's cabin. The doctor resembled an enormous canary with ruffled feathers, dressed as he was in a yellow plaid coat. A watch chain hung with gold seals stretched across a belly that filled his saddle from cantle to horn. On his head perched one of those English hunting caps with a bill both in the front and behind.

"A hat like that," Rafferty said, "you can't tell whether a fella's coming or going."

Clementine looked at his dark, taut profile and she felt a raw ache take root in her soul that she knew would be with her forever. Between them everything had changed. And nothing had changed.

She willed him to look at her again. She wanted him to turn his head so that she could look in his eyes one last time and see the heartfire.

"I am my beloved's and his desire is toward me."

But he didn't turn his head and look at her, for his brother had come home.

Gus bounded into the cabin in a whirlwind of cold air and excitement. He stared down at his son nestled on his wife's chest and his face lit up brighter than a thousand candles. "Well, hell," he said, his laugh rattling the window. "Well, hell."