Heart of the West (48 page)

Rafferty looked at his brother's face, at the sky-blue eyes that were their father's, and the tawny hair that was their mother's, and the smile that was uniquely his.
What did you have to go and marry her for, brother? We were getting along fine just the two of us.
Except they hadn't been getting along well at all. They were too different. It was as if they looked at life through opposite ends of a telescope. Like most of Gus's dreams, the idea of the ranch and the two of them making up a family was too grandiose and beautiful to be real.

The old disquiet filled him again, gripping his chest like an actual pain. The yearning was keen within him to get on his horse and ride out of here, ride away from this ranch that wasn't really his and never would be. It would hurt to give up the dream, but he was tough enough to stand it. He was supposed to be tough enough to stand anything.

But he wasn't so tough that he could leave her. At least not yet.

Gus pushed out a sigh to fill the silence. "Well, at least stick around until after the Fourth of July. The town's fixing to put on some big doings this year."

Charlie banged out through the kitchen door again, the zinc bucket clasped to his chest. It was his sixth trip to the trough with the bucket. Whatever Clementine was fixing for supper, it was generating a lot of slops.

One of the pigs rammed hard against the logs of its box and squealed loudly. Charlie dropped the bucket and ran shrieking to Gus. "Papa, that pig got angry!"

The pigs were making a lot of noise, too much noise. Gus swung the boy up on his shoulders, and they ambled over for a look at the sty.

The pigs, a sow and a boar, were pink with black spots, bristly backbones, rotund bellies, and big lop ears. The boar stood in the middle of the pen with his feet splayed and his eyeballs rolling in his head like balls in a roulette wheel, and squealing so loud his snout flapped. The sow was trying to stand up. She would get on her two front feet and try to hoist herself up on the back two, whereupon the front two would slide wide apart like a kid learning how to ice skate, and she'd collapse snout-first into the straw.

Gus gripped his son's squirming body to anchor him on his shoulders as he leaned over the fence. "They look..."

"Drunk," Rafferty said, and laughter welled up and out of him in great whoops that felt good. Good and cleansing.

"They're hungry!" Charlie bellowed in his father's ear. "Feed 'em again!"

The noise had brought Clementine running out of the house, although she slowed some when she saw that Charlie was safe in her man's arms. She too leaned over the fence for a better look at the distressed pigs.

The sow had finally gotten all four legs underneath her, but she swayed from side to side like a weathercock in a storm. The smell of beer, heady and yeasty, seeped up from the trough.

Clementine's fists landed on her hips, her nose went into the air, and she swung an accusing gaze over to Rafferty.

Laughing still, he flung up his hands as if she were all set to spit bullets. "Hey, don't look at me. You were the one kept putting all them buckets of home brew into Charlie's innocent little hands."

Her mouth pulled and puckered. She covered it with her palm, but sounds escaped, giggles and gentle snuffles. "He kept saying, 'More, more. They want more, more.' I thought you two were out here tying on a big one."

Charlie shrieked and pulled at his father's hair.

"I reckon they'll live," Gus said around his own laughter. "But they're going to have one hell of a head come morning."

The boar lifted his snout in the air and trumpeted like a moose, then fell on his face in the dirt, and they all laughed some more. "I need to dig up some carrots for tonight's supper," Clementine said a moment later. Her gaze met Rafferty's for an instant, then skittered away. "To go along with the chicken we're having so unexpectedly. You'll share it with us, won't you?"

He flashed a careless smile at her. "I reckon my stomach can just about handle your cooking after six months of practice on stagecoach fare."

"Oh, you!" She laughed like a young girl and punched him lightly on arm. And even that touch, innocent, done only in fun and without thought, brought the hunger bludgeoning through him with such force he shuddered.

Clementine whipped the spoon so vigorously through the cream it thudded against the wooden bowl. The motion stirred her skirts until they swayed around her small hips. The setting sun lanced through the kitchen window, tinting her cheeks. The smell of the fresh-baked apple pie they were having for dessert was sweet in the air, but underneath it he could still detect her own special scent: wild rose and warm woman. The breathy gusts of a late afternoon wind and the thud of the spoon were the only sounds to disturb the silence.

Rafferty didn't want to be here. It was too easy to pretend this was his kitchen, his wife. A hard, hollow ball of longing built and got stuck in his throat. He tipped a whiskey bottle over his empty coffee cup and poured it full. He drained the cup, trying to wash the longing back down with the booze. He ignored his brother's disapproving frown. Sometimes there just wasn't anything else to do but drink against the great loneliness that filled a man.

Rafferty sat sprawled in his chair, one arm hooked over the back. Gus sat across the table from him, hunched forward, his hands pressed together over his coffee cup as if in prayer. Clementine stood between them, beating at the cream to pour over the pie. The kitchen was definitely too quiet now without the boy's constant chatter. Charlie, exhausted from his busy day and the excitement over his uncle's homecoming, had fallen asleep during supper and been put to bed. The collection of arrowheads he'd been playing with lay scattered over the white oilcloth, the chipped obsidian glittering in the fading light.

She paused a moment in the whipping of her cream and smoothed her apron over the soft swell of her belly. The thought of her pregnant again left Rafferty feeling as if he'd been gutted. Barely a year ago she had nearly died from a stillbirth and here she was expecting again. Three babies in four years. What the hell was Gus—a rutting beast? A ruefulness twisted Rafferty's mouth. As if he would be able to leave Clementine alone if she shared his bed.

If she shared his bed... God, just once. If he could have her just once. There was a lot of what was noble and pure in what he felt for her, but it just wasn't in him to love a woman chastely. He wanted to feel her underneath him, he wanted to taste her skin, her mouth...

"Did you stop off and see Hannah on your way?" Gus said into the silence.

The spoon stopped in mid-beat. "I saw her," Rafferty said.

He toyed with the handle of his coffee cup. He knew that if he looked up he would see pain in Clementine's eyes. Hannah was her dearest friend, but he sensed she had a hard time bearing the thought of him touching any other woman, loving any other woman. Good, he thought sourly. I hope it hurts you to think of me in bed with her. Because it sure as hell hurts me to think of you in bed with my brother.

He drank more whiskey to wash away the thought. It made it seem as if he was only using Hannah to punish Clementine, and that wasn't true. Even he wasn't that much of a son of a bitch. He was fond of Hannah—loved her, maybe—and he'd always tried to be as good to her as it was in his nature to be.

A frown was pulling at Gus's mouth, putting a crease between his brows. "You ought to marry her, Zach. It isn't right, your... your visiting her regular like you do and for all these years. She won't ever be thought of as respectable as long as you won't marry her."

"Hannah's not the marryin' sort. And neither am I."
And it ain't none of your business, brother,
he told Gus with his eyes. Gus's mouth tightened, though he said nothing more.

Rafferty thought of last night. They were both so damned afraid of being alone, he and Hannah, and so they clung to each other. In the beginning the loving had been so good between them, and there'd been plenty of easy laughter. But somewhere along the way the good loving and the easy laughter had stopped being enough.

He thought of that boy, that rock-buster, and he wondered if the boy would be the one to take Hannah away from him.

And thoughts of the boy led him to thoughts of the mine, and he said, "There was an accident at the FourJacks last night. Cable on the hoisting car broke and a young nipper was killed."

Clementine gasped, the spoon clattering against the bowl.

Gus frowned, shrugging. "We got no say in how the consortium runs the mine, Zach. You know that."

"Oh, Gus," Clementine said. "I told you we should sell those shares."

His hand slammed down hard on the table, rattling the dishes. "And I told you, girl, not to concern yourself with it!"

A dark band of color stained her cheeks and her fingers gripped the spoon so tight her knuckles whitened.

Rafferty had to squeeze his coffee cup with both hands to keep them from curling into fists. A primal rage coursed through him that someone would speak so to his woman. It didn't matter that he had no claim to her, that the man who'd spoken was her husband. On a level that went deeper than what was right or real, she was
his.

Gus and his wife shared a long, hard, angry look. "I want us to sell those shares," she said. She turned to Rafferty. "Tell him to sell."

"Sell," Rafferty said.

Gus swung his riled eyes onto his brother. "You got no say in it."

Rafferty drew in a deep breath and let it out in a silent sigh. He knew his brother's anger was born of his frustration at having seen so little money from the mine. Pogey and Nash— and Gus with his twenty percent share—were supposed to get half the profits on all the ore that yielded at least twenty-five percent silver, but the consortium was always careful to mix enough worthless rock in with the ore so that the books rarely showed a yield of over twenty-five percent.

Gus still dreamed of getting rich, though, and living the high life off silver ore. It probably didn't set well with these dreams to learn that a fifteen-year-old boy had died in the shafts he technically owned.

"With the money we are making off that mine," Gus said, "we can buy us some more thoroughbred bulls come fall."

"You got big plans, do you, brother?" Rafferty said. "There was talk in town about you looking to get elected to the Territorial Assembly."

The color came up hard in Gus's face, but he shook his head. "Naw, that's just talk, is all. I don't know about you, Zach, but I want to make my fortune whilst I'm young so's I can calf around in my old age. What are you going to do when you're too gimpy to bust broncs and rope cattle?"

"Shoot myself, I reckon."

He looked over at Clementine. She had set down the spoon, and now her hand lay on the table. He wanted to press his own hand hard on hers until they became one flesh.

He scraped back his chair, plucking up the half-empty whiskey bottle. "I think I'll turn in early. We all've got a busy week ahead of us if we're ever going to get that hay put up."

"Don't you want any pie?" Gus said.

Rafferty tilted the bottle at his brother's face and smiled, doing it just to irritate the man. "Whiskey makes a better dessert."

"Zach..." Gus stretched to his feet. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at the toes of his boots. "It's true, what I told you earlier. I didn't just stumble across you, I went looking. Serious looking... It took me over four years to find you."

Rafferty turned startled eyes on his brother. Clementine wiped her hands on her apron, not looking at either of them.

Gus raised his head and Rafferty saw real feeling there. Love, maybe. Probably. "It's good to have you home again," Gus said thickly. "Maybe now you'll think about staying this time."

"It's good to be home," he said, promising nothing, but even so, the words tasted like alkali dust in his mouth.

Rafferty left his brother's house and crossed the hay meadow to the old buffalo hunter's cabin. When he got within the shadows of the cottonwoods he looked back. They had come out onto the porch to watch him on his way. Gus stood behind Clementine, his chin on her head, his arms wrapped around her just below her breasts. This far away it was hard to tell whether she welcomed her husband's embrace. But of course she welcomed it. She loved Gus. She'd told him that the one and only time she'd ever spoken of loving him.

Rafferty went into the cabin, shut the door, and leaned against it. It was dark inside, with only the one window and the sun having fallen behind the hills. The place smelled musty, unlived-in.

He poured what was left of the whiskey down his throat.

CHAPTER 20

Clementine McQueen's fair brows drew together in a frown as she studied the fizzling brown liquid in her glass. Erlan saw the face she was making and eyed her own glass with trepidation. Because they were guests in the fire woman's house, good manners compelled them to drink this... this whatever-it-was down to the last drop and then smack their lips with pleasure.

Erlan took a surreptitious sniff of the drink. It smelled of the lily plant, so perhaps it didn't taste too terrible. But it was hissing like a serpent.

"What on earth is this foul brew?" Clementine said.

Erlan bit her lip to hide a smile. She had just caught the glint of laughter in the other woman's eyes.

Hannah Yorke's eyes were dancing as well. She planted a fist on her hip. "You know darn well that's sarsaparilla, Clementine—a la-di-da lady's drink. So don't go wrinkling your Boston nose at it."

"Yeah, but what I wanna know is why you're trying to choke me with this teetotal stuff," Clementine said in a gravelly voice that sounded as if she were speaking with a mouthful of beans. Erlan had to cover her own mouth with her hand to keep from giggling. "Break out the Rosebud, woman, and let's get pie-eyed."

Laughing, Hannah went to a lacquered bureau and took out a brown bottle. She fetched three fresh glasses and into each she poured two fingers' width of the fon-kwei drink called whiskey.

Erlan took a cautious sip. It tasted bitter, but it left a tingling in her belly more potent than rice wine. She took two bigger sips. A most pleasant drink. She took a generous swallow. Her lips nearly pulled back from her teeth and her belly buzzed. A most relaxing drink.

She cast a covert glance at the two women who sat across from her on the gold brocade sofa. The merchant Woo had warned her that she would never be accepted in this demon land, that they would call her insulting names and laugh at her lily feet. He had seemed surprised, and perhaps secretly pleased, when Hannah Yorke had invited his new wife into her home. But then, as the merchant Woo had explained, Mrs. Yorke had once been a joy girl and thus was an outcast herself.

Erlan bowed her head to her hostess. "I am honored," she said, "that you would invite me for a visit."

Hannah's smile put deep dimples on each cheek. "Well, Clementine and I did get to thinking you must be feeling awful lonely for some female company 'round about now, what with being newly married and all."

Clementine smiled as well and took a swallow from her glass. Erlan was pleased that good manners dictate she follow suit. This whiskey was a most pleasant drink.

Hannah was looking at Clementine with exaggerated round-eyed wonder. "Lord, girl, I don't know what's come over you. Sitting on my sofa cool as you please and drinking hell brew like a fish... Imagine what Gus would say—"

"The man can't suffer over what he doesn't know." She shook a finger in Hannah's face. "And don't you dare go blathering to Rafferty, either."

"I won't. I promise." Hannah licked a finger and drew an X over her heart.

Erlan watched with interest. It must be the fon-kwei way of fooling the ears of their listening gods. She would have to remember this ritual.

Hannah poured more whiskey into their glasses. Erlan took another deep swallow. "The merchant Woo shall also remain ignorant," she said. "I promise." She licked her finger and crossed her heart.

A breeze blew in the open window, stirring the fringed scarf on the piecrust table and the fronds of the fern on its stand. Although it was not what she was used to, Erlan liked this house. In this Rainbow Springs where all was in disharmony, where even the roads were dangerously straight, this house was like a lotus growing in a pond of choked weeds. Perhaps it was because a woman dwelled alone here, and so the atmosphere was overwhelmingly yin. She wondered what it was like to be Hannah Yorke and have only oneself to please, only oneself to serve. The thought was unsettling, and she put it away.

Clementine set her glass on the tea table in front of her. "Oh, dear, Erlan. I almost forgot." She picked up a square parcel off the sofa beside her. "It's the photograph I made of you and Sam on your wedding day." The stiff brown paper crackled as she unwrapped it. "Hannah supplied the frame."

Erlan took the gift and bowed low. "A thousand times a thousand thank-yous. It is a thing truly worthy of an empress."

She stared with wonder at the photograph in its silver frame. There she was in her wedding robe with the flying cranes, her features as stiff as an opera mask, and there the merchant Woo in his barbarian coat with the swallowlike tail. He looked pleased with his bride, but then, that was before she had put the cleaver to her neck.

"You know, Clementine," Hannah was saying, "you ought to do that more often—take people's likenesses at weddings, and for other occasions, too, like birthdays and such. Then you could sell them. Imagine all the little extras you could treat yourself to with a bit of money of your own."

Clementine folded the brown paper into a perfect square and laid it with care on the table beside her empty glass. "Gus's pride would never stand such a thing—his wife working to give herself luxuries he thinks he should be providing."

Hannah sniffed. "Most times I don't even see him providing you with the bare necessities, and I don't notice his pride sparing you from all the drudge work you do out on that ranch."

Clementine gave her friend a hard look. "Don't start, Hannah. Gus is good to me. You know he is."

A silence came between them then. A silence Erlan could feel, for it was thick with words that had never been spoken, with secrets too dangerous to share.

Hannah shrugged, lifting her chin, as if, Erlan thought, she could draw her pride around her like a tattered straw cloak. She raised her glass in the air. "I want to propose a toast. To something I'll always admire and never be—a true lady."

"Oh, Hannah." Clementine flushed, shaking her head. "You are foolish sometimes."

Now the two women shared a smile, calming whatever deep currents had been stirred between them. "If you like the photograph, Erlan," Hannah said, "Clementine can make you another to send home to your folks in China."

Erlan could not bear to look at the women now. If she wished to become a friend to them—and, oh, she did so wish it—then they would have to know her shame and come to accept her in spite of it.

"I thank you for your kind offer, but there is no family left to me. My mother is dead, and my father has cast me off." Erlan laid her palms on her thighs. She made herself lift her head, made herself meet their eyes. "He sold me to the Foochow slave trader for one hundred taels of silver."

"Oh, whyever would he do such a thing?" Clementine was suddenly in the chair beside hers, gripping her hand. Erlan felt the woman's yang strength, her warrior's spirit, and took comfort from it.

"My mother wore the green skirt of the concubine, and still the patriarch honored her by not sending her away when she bore him only a worthless daughter. But instead of repaying this kindness with veneration and absolute obedience, she dishonored the House of Po and heaped shame upon the ancestors by lying with a... with another. And then when she was given the scarlet noose, she soiled the purity of her own spirit by cravenly not making use of it. The patriarch was forced to nail her into her coffin alive. Her shame has become my shame. Her dishonor, my dishonor."

Hannah sucked in a sharp breath, shuddering. "My God. That is the most barbaric thing I've ever heard of."

Aiya, this whiskey did something to the tongue. She had meant to reveal some but not all. Erlan looked down at her hand, still held tightly by Clementine's slender white fingers. Their two hands seemed like bare wisps of things, boneless. Yet she could feel the strength of the other woman's grip.

Hannah had come over to stand beside her chair. She laid a gentle hand on Erlan's shoulder. This custom of touching was not such a disagreeable thing after all. "Did you leave behind a beau in China?" Hannah asked softly.

"A beau?"

"A young man you fancied. Someone you hoped to marry someday."

"In China there is no such thing as a beau. Marriages are arranged by Tai-Tai—First Wife. A girl does not see her husband until the day they are wed, when he lifts her red veil."

Hannah huffed a laugh. "I bet that makes for some mighty interesting wedding nights."

Erlan caught a smile with her hand. "Of course we say we wish only for a husband of good heart, but in truth no girl wants to find beneath the silk covers of her marriage bed an aged and withered root that not even a tai-fung could stir to life. Rather, she looks forward eagerly to one that is long and thick and quivering with excitement like a divining rod."

Erlan's smile faded as she noticed the startled looks on the faces of the two women. Embarrassment burned in her chest. It was like being a tightrope dancer, trying to maneuver her way through this demon land's strange customs and ways.

"I have given offense," she said.

Hannah snorted and choked as if she was trying to hold back a laugh. And then the laughter did burst out of her in great loud whoops, and she was joined by Clementine. The two women looked at each other and laughed harder.

Hannah clutched at her belly. "Oh, oh, Clem, just imagine! Quivering like a divining rod!"

When she had caught her breath, Hannah asked, "But what if a girl isn't ready to be married?"

Erlan was pleased that she had not made a fool of herself after all. "Getting married and birthing children are a woman's happiness. Of course a husband is not found for every girl. If there are many daughters and the clan is poor, the younger ones often are sold as concubines or to houses of leisure to be daughters of joy."

"Lord knows, being a whore ain't an easy life," Hannah said. "And I 'spect it's no different in China. But I reckon I'd rather be a—what did you call them?—a daughter of joy than be married off to some man I've never set eyes on before. Why, what if he turned out to be a beast, or a tyrant?"

"Even the lowliest peasant acts like a warlord beneath his own roof. It is the way of men. To be a woman is to be like the brown larks my father keeps as pets. We only exchange one sort of cage for another."

The two women fell silent, and Erlan wondered again if she had given offense. She raised her head and met Clementine's eyes. Sea eyes, frothing, shifting, restless. And Erlan had a strange thought: she understands; she understands all there is of me. In another life we might have been sisters.

"Don't mind Hannah," Clementine said. "She's always going on about single blessedness, but someday she'll find a man who needs her to take care of him and she'll go willing into the cage, just like the rest of us."

Hannah laughed. "Me, take care of a man? Hunh. That'll be the day." She made a soft clucking noise in the back of her throat and ran a finger along the curve of Erlan's cheek. "Look how chapped your poor cheeks have gotten already. With this wind and the alkali dust, if you don't have a care your skin'll get as dry as a sand bed. I'll make you a batch of complexion salve. I'll make some up for you, too, Clementine. You can get it when you come back for the Fourth of July frolic."

Hannah continued to stroke Erlan's cheek. A strange mixture of excitement and sweet contentment settled within her. It made her tingle inside, like the fon-kwei whiskey. She looked up and smiled. "What is this Fourth of July everyone is talking about?"

The first thing a body did on a Fourth of July morning in the RainDance country was to step outside and sniff the weather.

The old-timers swore up and down that it had been known to snow on the Fourth. 'Most everyone else, though, being new to the place, hadn't seen this particular phenomenon and didn't care to. But Montana weather had other tricks up its sleeve that could spoil a day. Howling wind and slashing rain and battering hail as big as hens' eggs, to name but a few.

So on that Independence Day morning of 1883, the RainDance folk poked wary noses out their doors and found to their relief a light, sage-scented breeze and butter-yellow sunshine. It was going to be a fine afternoon for the festivities.

Rainbow Springs, Montana Territory, had changed from the bobtailed town it had been four years ago. Why, just last winter it had been incorporated, and in the words of that old prospector, Pogey, "she was struttin' regular city airs like a two-bit whore in a French silk gown." There had even been talk lately about putting up streetlights. Nash, Pogey's partner in mischief, predicted that within the first five minutes of a Saturday night any streetlight worth going by the name "would get itself shot deader'n a beaver hat just for being there and handy."

It was silver that had changed Rainbow Springs. The Four Jacks had proved to be a solid, steady little mine. It had brought people to what was once nothing more than a burp in a road heading west. High-toned, high-handed people like the managers and engineers who ran the workings. Hard-fisted, hard-drinking people like the miners who blasted the rock and mucked the silver ore, and the mule skinners who hauled it to the smelter over in Butte. Church-going, root-putting people like butchers, bakers, and saddlemakers.

Many were foreigners, people with thick accents and odd customs and a hunger to take advantage of the opportunities the West claimed to offer. They were mostly Irish and Cornish and Welsh, who hired on at the mine and lived within its shadow in the shacks and boardinghouses nicknamed Dublin Patch. And the Chinese, who worked the old gold placers and the tailings of silver ore waste the Four Jacks Consortium didn't care to mess with. The Chinese put up their shacks on the outskirts of town, across the river, where a circle of bare earth still scarred the grass from a long-gone tipi.

There was an air of permanence about Rainbow Springs that the town had never had before. Most of the buildings were still made of roughhewn logs, but a few, like the Miner's Union Bank, had been constructed of milled lumber. The haphazard grid of streets that had sprung up willynilly around RainDance Butte had been named and their names put up on wooden signs for those folk savvy enough to read them. In Luke's Barber Shop a man could keep his very own shaving mug on a shelf, an act of faith that he would be there tomorrow and the next week and the week after that to use it.