Heart of the West (47 page)

The hens ran squawking across the yard, their wings cocked, heads bobbing. Rafferty placed his hand beneath Charlie's upraised arm, adding his man's strength to the boy's, teaching him the rhythm of the swinging rope. The miniature lasso twirled above the bright gold head.

A fat bantam hen broke away from the flock, and Rafferty guided the boy's aim. "Okay, now let her fly."

The rope floated through the air and landed in the dirt with a splat and a puff of dust. The hen flapped madly, and the air rained red feathers.

"Oh, shit," Rafferty muttered under his breath. The damn bird was molting in her fright. She'd probably never lay another egg as long as she lived.

"I missed." Charlie's lower lip pouched out in a pout. "I always miss."

"It only takes practice, is all. Come on, reel in the rope. Let me see you build a loop and then we'll try again."

The boy watched the man gather up the short reata. He kept his eyes on the man's every move, mimicking his saunter and the way he cocked his hip, the way he tugged at his hat brim and squinted into the sun, the way he simply
was,
for he was pure cowboy.

Rafferty heard the crunch of footsteps behind him and he turned. Clementine came toward them from the house, walking with such purpose her heels kicked up her skirt. The sun gilded her hair, and she was as slim and graceful as the willows that shaded the river. The sight of her hurt so much he flinched.

"Just what do you two think you are doing?" she called out, an odd tightness in her voice.

"Watch me, Mama!"

Charlie let fly with the reata on his own and by some incredible chance the lasso snagged the fat, and now partly bald, bantam hen as she raced across the yard. Her neck snapped with a loud crack.

The other hens stopped their squawking and flapping all at once, as if shock had frozen their wings and wattles. Rafferty and the boy stared at the bird lying suddenly dead in the dirt among corn feed and red feathers.

"Oh, shit!" Charlie said, his voice piping loud in the silence.

Clementine's gaze flew up to Rafferty. The tightness he'd heard in her voice was reflected in her eyes, which were wide and dark, like a mountain lake beneath a stormy sky.

He grinned at her and shrugged. "I forgot how little pitchers got big ears."

"You forgot..." She planted her hands on her hips and stuck her nose in the air. She breathed out a thick sigh, puffing her lips, and Rafferty's gaze settled hard on her mouth. "You're back home less than an hour and already you have turned my son into a cocky, strutting, foulmouthed...
cowboy."

"You ain't gonna raise him up to be no tight-assed Boston gentleman out here, Clementine."

"Nor will I raise him up to be a barbarian, Mr. Rafferty."

His eyes narrowed at her. He really didn't like her much when she put on Boston airs, but that hadn't yet stopped him from loving her, wanting her.

Charlie tugged at his pant leg. "Mama's angry."

Rafferty's hand rested on the boy's head. His hair was down-soft, a darker shade of yellow than hers. "Not angry with you, button. With me."

"Were you a naughty boy?"

"Yeah, I was naughty." His lips curled into a smile that held just a tinge of meanness. He spoke to the boy, but his eyes were on her face. "But I'll let you in on a little secret: she likes me that way."

They stared at each other, he and Clementine, and he was reminded of the way a prairie fire could start up in the heat of summer—one spark and the world turned into a raging conflagration. When the hunger was like this between them, at the flash point, they could strike sparks off each other with just a look.

"Hey, little brother!" Gus shouted. He came toward them from the direction of the barn, where he'd gone to put up the sorrel team. A bright smile creased his face.

Clementine flushed and made a sudden jerking movement like a hooked trout. She snatched up the dead hen. She spoke softly, to Rafferty alone, and her voice sounded clogged with suppressed tears. "He's going to seduce my son away from me, isn't he? Damn Montana. He won't let me have even the smallest part of you, and now he's going to take my son as well."

"Who? Gus? What the hell are you talking about?" Rafferty said, but her heels were kicking up her skirts again as she took long strides back to the house.

Gus watched her go, wagging his head as if at a joke. "You two going at it again already? You're like two cats in a sack. Aren't you ever going to see your way toward getting along?"

Rafferty turned his face away from his brother. He saw where Clementine had tried to plant a vegetable garden on this side of the snake fence—carrots and some beans and squash. But most of it had been beaten to pieces by the wind, and what was left was wilting in the burning sun. Grasshoppers rasped in the encroaching weeds. Only featherlike wisps of clouds drifted overhead, offering no relief in the thin blue air.

He thought sometimes that Gus was so stupid blind he couldn't track a fat sow through a snowdrift. He wanted to grab his brother by the scruff of his neck and shout into his face:
You big, dumb son of a bitch. I want to fuck your wife. I eat, breathe, sleep, and fuck thoughts of fucking your wife, and if you weren't such a big, dumb son of a bitch you'd see it.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Christ, he hated himself for even thinking like that. It dirtied what he felt for her. He loved her with an emotion that was to him akin to worship. He wanted to make love to her, not fuck her. There was a difference even in his own saloon-and-spittoon-dirty mind.

A small, grimy hand took hold of his. "Raff'ty, are we gonna throw the rope some more?"

He looked down into a pale, delicate-boned face with wide-spaced, slightly protruding eyes the shadowy green of a pine in winter. Her face, her eyes. The boy was all Clementine's.

Rafferty continued to avoid looking at his brother as he collected the reata and pointed Clementine's son toward the house. "Practice swinging it at the hitching post," he said, his voice a hoarse rasp. "You don't want to go killing any more of your mama's chickens."

Rafferty walked off then with no particular destination in mind, but Gus followed after him so that they wound up standing side by side with their forearms planted on the top rail of the snake fence and looking out over their land. Red-and-white cattle dotted the buff hills, the prints of the branding iron still showing fresh on the young hides of the calves. His brother smelled of hard-work sweat and sickle oil. It blended with the other scents of June, of sweet clover and mown hay.

"You're home just in time to help mow, buck, stack, and fence that hay," Gus said into the taut silence.

Rafferty made a face, and his brother laughed, too loud. Home... He was seized by the sick restlessness he'd felt so often as a boy. He remembered how he had felt it most sharply when he walked down country lanes and the sun-baked streets of southern towns, peering in the windows of the farmhouses and shanties that weren't his. They'd been mostly poor houses, poor families, but not in his memories. In his memories velvet-draped windows framed a father sitting in a wing chair before a fire, a pipe clenched between his teeth, the evening newspaper rustling in his hands, and a boy sitting cross-legged at the father's feet, chewing on the end of a pen as he puzzled over his lessons. In his memories a woman came into the room and trailed a loving hand across the man's shoulders and bent over to ruffle the boy's hair, and Zach would think that he had never been touched like that. And then the yearning to possess everything in that room, from the lush fern on its stand to the feel of a mother's hand in his hair, would become so powerful he could taste it, and it was bittersweet, like a lemon dusted with sugar.

Rafferty pulled himself back to the moment with a wrench that was physical. He turned his back on the cattle-grazed hills and on memories that were not even real memories, only memories of dreams. He leaned against the fence and looked at another house that wasn't his. The sun struck the tin roof, blinding him, and he blinked.

Clementine's son swung the rope at the hitching post and missed. There would come a day though, Rafferty thought, when the boy would never miss, and he felt the restlessness deepen into pain because he knew he would likely never see it.

And as if to pile on the agony, she came back outside. She'd put on an apron and filled the pockets with cornmeal, and now she was tossing it to the flock of laying hens he and her boy had tried their damnedest to scare to death a moment ago. The wind unfurled strands of her loosely upswept hair and pressed her skirts to her legs. The love he felt for her burned so hot and fast that his eyes blurred. She was beautiful. Beautiful in that fragile way that made a man wonder if such a thing was meant to last. If such a thing was ever meant to be.

Home. Everything he wanted was right here, and all of it belonged to his brother.

Beside him Gus pushed off the fence rail, gripping it hard with his big hands. Rafferty could feel his brother's eyes on him. He didn't have to look to know they were filled with a pained bewilderment. Gus sensed that things were wrong between them, but he was unable to understand what they were. And Rafferty vowed for the thousandth time to do all in his power to ensure that Gus would never understand.

She went back inside the house, taking the boy with her. Rafferty tried to clear the gritty feeling out of his throat and sought words to bridge the distance between him and his brother. "The snowpack was gone already from the mountains when I passed through," he said.

"And the hay is thin," Gus said, seizing the topic eagerly. "Could be there's a drought in the making."

"It's already been hot enough this summer to put hell out of business," Rafferty said.

"And only to get worse, I reckon."

"Speakin' of worse, I heard a rumor in Rainbow Springs that the old man is back in town."

"Well, hell." Gus frowned so hard his mustache quivered, and Rafferty smiled to himself. Jack McQueen had finally worn out his welcome in the RainDance country about two years ago, and they hadn't seen hide nor hair nor patch of him since. Until now. Their father did have a way of rubbing and pinching at Gus like a too-small boot, and it gave Rafferty a mean satisfaction to know his brother was going to have that aggravation back in his life.

Charlie banged back out the kitchen door just then, carrying a bucket of slops to the pigsty, a new addition to the ranch since Rafferty had left. The boy had to stand on tiptoe to empty the bucket of swill down the chute into the feeding trough. The pigs squealed, and Charlie laughed.

"I bought us a couple weaners while you were gone," Gus said.

Rafferty cocked a smile in his brother's direction. "Yeah, so I can hear."

He waited for her to come back outside and ached when she didn't. The hunger was constant within him, to be with her and look at her and talk to her, whether half a hay meadow separated them or a thousand miles. Yet it was torture to be with her and not touch her, and so when he could bear it no longer, he took himself away.

And when he could no longer bear being alone, he brought himself back.

The fence rail was rough against Rafferty's back, the wind warm on his face. The grass beneath his boots was springy soft, and it was his. At least his name was on the deed.

He cast a sideways look at his brother's profile. Not for the first time he wondered at the capriciousness of a fate that had brought him and his brother back together seven years ago.

"You ever ponder the strangeness of it, Gus," he said aloud, "that you and I would come to cross paths in a country this big and empty?"

Gus's face broke into his sun-bright smile. "Not so strange, little brother. When I decided to go looking for you, a cattle drive was the first place I thought of. You had the cow fever powerfully bad the summer that... the summer Ma and I left. You used to talk all the time about running away and joining up with some outfit."

Did he? Trust Gus to latch onto a bit of idle wishing and build it into the sort of pie-in-the-sky dreams Gus had always befuddled his own mind with. No, the only dream the boy Zach McQueen had ever had he'd kept hidden deep inside himself, safe where it wouldn't get broken. Home. God, he wondered what his brother would say if he knew that all he had ever really wanted, all he'd ever dreamed about, was having a home.

"What happened to that dream, Zach?"

Rafferty started and the blood rushed to his face. Then he realized Gus's thoughts were still back on the cattle drive, and he huffed a shaky laugh. "Nothin'. I lived it. And it didn't take me long to figure out that punchin' cows ain't exactly the easiest way to make a living."

"And what about the ranch?"

He pretended to misunderstand. "You appear to be getting along just fine here without me, so I thought I'd chase up some mustangs and run them on over to the Dakotas between now and the fall roundup. I hear the army over there is buying and paying prime."

"Aw, Zach. You've only just got back." Gus paused to chew on the end of his mustache, and Rafferty thought he was probably trying to figure out a way to nudge the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go. "The dollars you bring in are welcome, but I reckon it's more a thirst for excitement and the chance to pass a good time that keeps pulling you away from us." He took off his hat and thrust his fingers through his hair. "Lord, don't you think it's about time you quit gallivanting around and grew up and settled down?"

Rafferty nearly laughed out loud. Gus thought he actually
liked
riding shotgun up on the box of a bone-jarring stagecoach, putting up with runaway teams and half-drunk drivers, getting his nose and mouth clogged with dust in the summer and freezing his ass off in the winter, catching sleep on a dirt floor, and wolfing down indigestible food.

Gus telling him to grow up and settle down.

Gus all the time thinking that his little brother was so damn tough.

Gus's hand fell on his shoulder, but he removed it when Rafferty stiffened. "Clem and I, we need you. We... need you here, with us, is all."