Heart of the West (5 page)

She decided to play a little game with herself. She would walk along the fence to the Egyptian-style gateway that led into the cemetery, and when she turned around, he would be there—

"Miss Kennicutt!"

A black rattletrap gig pulled up beside her with a protesting creak of its wheels, and she looked up into a man's sun- browned, smiling face that was shaded by the broad brim of a big gray hat.

"You're here," he said. "I wasn't sure you would be."

"I wasn't sure you would be either."

Laughing, he leaped down and helped her into the gig. "Sorry about the shabbiness of this conveyance, ma'am," he said as he climbed back onto the seat beside her. "My uncle has five sons, and there's always a shortage of vehicles in the family stables—Get up, there!" he yelled to the horse, and they pulled out into the street at such a spanking pace she instinctively gripped her hat. The motion jostled her so that she fell against him. He was solid and surprisingly warm. She stiffened, scooting away from him as far as she could, until her arm and hip were pressed into the iron railing that wrapped around the seat.

His eyes smiled at her. "I probably don't want to know this, but just how old are you, Miss Kennicutt?"

Her gaze fell to the gloved hands she had clasped so tightly in her lap. She thought about lying, but he had said he was a man of his word and she wanted to be worthy of his regard. "I am seventeen."

"Seventeen... Oh, Lord, help me."

She looked behind her, into the empty space where the gig's hood would have been folded, if it'd had one. "Where is your ordinary?"

"I left my cousin to rope and saddle it. I figure if he wants me to race, he can supply the mount."

"You do make me smile, sir—the way you talk."

"Uh-uh. So far I've only managed to do it twice. But I aim to keep on trying until..." He was staring at her mouth so intently she had to bite her lower lip to stop its trembling. "Until I can get you to smile at me again."

She jerked her gaze away from his. But a moment later she was trying to look at him out the corner of her eye.

Today he was dressed more properly for cycling, in blue knee breeches, yellow gaiters, and a seal-brown corduroy reefer jacket. The thin velvet breeches fit tight across the muscles of his thighs, which looked strong from busting broncos and trailing cattle. She thought that riding an ordinary probably seemed tame stuff to such a man.

There were so many things she wanted to say to him; so many questions crowded her mouth. But the one that fell out made her flush with the stupidity of it. "Is it true what they say about Montana, that a person can ride from one end to the other of it without crossing a fence?"

He laughed, as she had known he would. But she didn't mind, for she liked his laugh. "I suppose you might come upon a drift fence or two here and there," he said. "And there are some mighty big mountains that'll give you pause."

She had read about such mountains, but she had never been able to draw a picture of them in her mind. She had known only the low bluffs and drumlins that rose above the salt marshes around Boston.

They had reached one of the busiest thoroughfares, and he gave his attention to the traffic now, so she was able to study him. He was so large he seemed to fill all of the gig's seat. There was a joyous shine to him, like a brand-new copper penny. "What brings you all this way to Boston, Mr. McQueen?"

He turned his head and his gaze met hers. She had forgotten that his eyes were such a deep, clear blue. The Montana sky would be that blue, she thought.

"My mother was a long time dying," he said. "She asked to see me before she went, and so I came. I'll be leaving again, though, come the end of the week."

"I'm sorry," she said, and then added hastily, lest he misunderstand her, "Sorry, I mean, about your mother's death."

A shadow crossed his face, like clouds scudding across the sun. "I left her and Boston when I was seventeen, the same age as you, and I wasn't always very good about writing."

"Did you run away?"

He cast a glance at her, then made a clicking noise in his mouth, urging the horse around an ice wagon that had rolled into their path. "In a manner of speaking, yeah, I guess I did. I wanted to see the elephant." At her quizzical look, he laughed. "I wanted to see the marvels of the great Wild West. Indians and buffalo and grizzly bears and rivers of gold."

How she yearned to see such marvels herself. Yet it all seemed so far beyond her reach and doomed forever to remain so. "And was he as wonderful as you thought he would be— your elephant?"

She watched him as he took a moment to think about it; there was an excitement about him, a shining, that stirred something deep within her.

"There's a bigness about Montana that tends to frighten a lot of people. But it's not so big you can't find what you're looking for, if you know what that something is." His eyes met hers, and the stirring within her quickened. "Sometimes, Miss Kennicutt, all a body needs is a place to run to."

She didn't know what she was looking for. The missing things, she supposed, but she couldn't have defined them, even to herself. She only knew that in this one moment she felt alive. The wind was stiff with the bite of salt in it, and late winter sunlight dappled the shop awnings and made the windows shimmer, and she was going to see a bicycle race in the company of a man, a cowboy.

He pulled the horse to a halt in the middle of the street, ignoring the shouts that came from the carriages and wagons stalled behind them. He turned to her, and although his eyes were still wreathed with laugh lines, his mouth was set serious. "Yesterday I told you one of my dreams. Now how about sharing one of yours. What do you dream of, Miss Kennicutt?"

She felt suddenly breathless, as if she'd just sprinted to the top of one of his big Montana mountains. "I don't know," she said, but of course she did know. She dreamed of him. She'd been dreaming of him all her life.

"I'm twenty-five years old," he said, his gaze probing hers, pulling at her, "and I've done a fair amount of wandering in my time. When a man's seen as much of the world as I have, he gets to knowing right off what he wants when he comes across it." His thumb stroked the bone of her jaw, and the smile his mouth made did something more to her breath. "Or
runs over
it, as the case may be. You and me, girl, we're a fit. I could take my time at courting you, showing you how we're meant to be together, but either you see it now—this rightness of us—or you don't. And no flower bouquets and serenades are going to change what is already the truth."

She marveled at him, that he could speak of dreams in one breath and of certainties in the next. She had never been on a horse in her life, but in that moment she felt as if she were riding one of his cayuses that could run all day and turn on a nickel and was all wild.

She turned her head away, her heart pounding so hard she wondered that he couldn't hear it. "I can't think about this yet," she said.

His words came to her, riding on the salty wind. "You're already thinking about it, Miss Kennicutt. Shoot, you're halfway to Montana already."

CHAPTER 2

Gus McQueen's young bride stood on the grassy levee and looked over the straggling line of weather-rotten buildings and jerry-built shacks that passed for the town of Fort Benton, Montana. She wasn't going to let herself be disappointed. She had never seen a real elephant before, either, but she supposed that up close they all must be smelly, dirty beasts.

No sooner had the steamboat deposited them and their baggage onto the levee than Gus informed her he would have to check immediately for a freight wagon leaving in the direction of the RainDance country, for it was not a route often traveled. "Wait for me right here, Clementine," he said to her, pointing to the ground as if he thought she was too dense to understand what "here" meant. "Don't move from this spot."

She opened her mouth to ask if she could at least do her waiting out of the sun, but he was already striding away from her. Her gaze followed him as he crossed the road and disappeared into the yawning doors of a livery barn. Gus McQueen. Her husband. Sometimes, for no reason, looking at him made her chest ache. It was the tall, strong, splendid sight of him, she supposed.

A departing steamboat held her interest for a while as she watched clouds of inky smoke billow from its double stacks. The giant paddles of its stern wheel churned the coffee-colored water, splashing the bank and stirring up a stink of dead fish and rotting weeds. The boat pulled out into the river with a bleat of its whistle and a hiss of steam, and she turned her attention back across the dusty road. They had been traveling six weeks to reach this nothing place.

A few of the ramshackle buildings sported rough signs. She was able to identify a mercantile, a hotel with a sagging porch, and a saddle and harness shop. The mercantile's tall false front provided the only dab of shade on this side of the river.

She was surprised to notice a number of women strolling up and down the boardwalk. Some walked alone, but most were in pairs, arm in arm, laughing and chatting. Many were dressed quite finely in hats trimmed with ostrich plumes and silk flowers and dresses with long pleated and ruched trains of bright rainbow colors. Clementine watched the pleasant scene with wistful longing. Her black sarcenet parasol seemed to draw the unusually warm spring sun down upon her head. Trickles of sweat rolled down her sides and between her breasts. In her cambric chemise, long flannel drawers, steel busk corset, quilted eiderdown petticoat with two flounces, nainsook camisole, and oatmeal serge traveling suit with velvet-trimmed waistcoat, she was stifling.

She looked toward the livery for a sign of Gus. She didn't see him, nor did she see Indians or bank robbers or any other obvious perils. With so many other women about, she could hardly be in any danger. She couldn't see what harm it would do to cross over to the mercantile for a few moments of blessed relief in the shade. Especially if she was careful to keep an eye on their baggage.

She had to lift her skirts high in order to pick her way around the horse apples and bull pies that littered the wide and wagon-rutted street. As she stepped onto the boardwalk she looked up and saw that a man lounging on the hotel porch in a willow rocker was staring rudely at her legs. She lowered her skirt, even though the warped boards were stained with dried mud and tobacco spit. At least her traveling suit had only a modest train.

She had started toward the shade of the mercantile when she noticed that next door was a saloon. Curious, she peered over the top of the slatted swinging doors. Through a haze of tobacco smoke she saw a garish oil painting of a woman who was as plump as a corn-fed chicken and quite naked. Men were lined up along a counter facing the naked woman, standing slightly bent over and hipshot, like horses at a hitching rack. The saloon was filled with a kaleidoscope of men who looked as if they could have stepped right out of a drawing in one of Shona's Wild West novels. Soldiers in blue, miners in their rough clothes, professional gamblers in black suits and ruffled white shirts. The air that wafted out the slatted doors reeked of spilled whiskey and unwashed bodies. A clink of glass against glass was followed by a roar of laughter and an explosion of pungent profanity. Clementine realized with a start that even in Montana it probably wasn't quite the proper thing for a lady to allow her eyes and ears to linger on such a sight.

As she turned away, she felt a tug on her skirt. She looked down to discover the rowel of a spur hooked in her train. Her gaze followed the length of the man from his glossy boot up to his face. It was the man from the hotel porch.

He must surely be an army scout, she thought, with his long blond hair and fringed buckskin shirt, and his knife sheath decorated with brass studs. But tobacco juice stained his yellow goatee, and his hands, she noticed as he raised his hat to her, were dirty. "Howdy do, ma'am," he said.

"How do you do," she said, nodding politely. Of course they hadn't been properly introduced, but Gus had already explained to her how westerners were freer in their ways. She gave a slight pull on the train of her traveling suit. "I fear, sir, that your spur has become entangled with my skirt."

He looked down, opening his eyes wide in exaggerated surprise. "Why, so it is. I do beg your pardon."

He bent over and unhooked her train off the sharp rowel, lifting her skirt indecently high to do so. When he straightened up, he was grinning. "You appear to be a mite hot, ma'am, if you don't mind my sayin' so." He slipped his hand beneath her elbow. "How 'bout if I buy you something cool and wet to put out the fire in them pretty li'l cheeks—"

"Take your hand off her!"

Clementine swung her head around to see her husband striding down the walk so fast the rotting boards groaned beneath his weight. "I said, let her go, damn you." Gus planted himself before the man. His hands hung loose at his sides, but the rest of him had drawn up tall and taut, and his eyes glittered with a coldness she had never seen before. He was also wearing a gun she had never seen before, its holster hanging heavily from a gun belt strapped around his waist.

She tried to pull her arm from the man's grasp, but he tightened his grip. He hawked and shot a wad of tobacco onto the toe of Gus's boot. "You're rustling on my territory here, cowboy," he said, and his voice, which had been so friendly before, now turned mean. "I found the lady first."

"The
lady
is my wife."

The men stared at each other and the moment lengthened, grew tight, and there was the danger of impending violence in the air that could be smelled, sharp as gunpowder.

The man's gaze flickered away from Gus's. "My mistake," he said. He released her and stepped back, his hands spread wide in an attitude of surrender.

Gus seized her arm and hauled her down into the street so abruptly her teeth cracked together. "I told you to stay put, girl. Did you think I was talking just to exercise my tongue?"

She dug in her heels and jerked her arm out of his grasp, forcing him to turn and face her. A spring wagon clipped past, its wheels sending a cloud of dust drifting over them. "You flung an order at my head, Mr. McQueen, and walked off. If you had exercised your tongue a little more and given me a reason—"

He leaned over to shout at her. "You want a reason? Because it's the middle of the afternoon, when the chippies go on parade. Any woman who walks along Front Street during this time of day is likely to be taken for one of their kind. Is that what you want everyone to think, Clementine—that you're a chippy?"

His hands had clenched into fists, and she took a deep breath. She would not fear him the way she feared her father.

"You still haven't explained yourself adequately, sir. What is a chippy?"

For a moment he simply stared at her, breathing heavily; then the anger collapsed within him. He reached out and pulled her to his chest, rubbing her back with his big hands. "Aw, Clementine, you're such a sweet innocent. A chippy is a soiled dove. A fancy woman who sells her body to a man for his pleasure."

She felt small tremors rippling through him, and she realized suddenly that he had been more frightened than angry. The thought disturbed her—that he could be frightened. "I didn't know of this western custom, this chippy parade."

"Clementine." He gripped her arms and set her away from him. "You mustn't use that word, not even with me."

"What am I to call them, then?"

"Nothing. You're not supposed to know about them."

"But it was because I didn't know about them that I got us into trouble. Surely you must see that ignorance does not help in this sort of situation. I'm not a child; I am a woman grown."

He was becoming angry with her again. She could see it in the flush of color on his cheeks and the pulse pounding hard and fast in his neck. "I'm not going to stand here in the middle of the street and discuss the conduct of lewd women with you. Come along." He spun around and stalked away from her. "I got a room for us at the hotel."

They carried their baggage into the hotel with its sagging front porch. No sooner were they settled in their room than he told her he had to leave again to track down a mule skinner who was rumored to be heading west in the morning. He tugged his hat tighter on his head, picked up the key, and headed for the door.

"You can't be meaning to lock me in," she said. The words weren't loud, but they were as sharp as a scream.

He swung back around. There was a tautness about him that had nothing to do with what had happened down in the street.

Or not only to do with that, for she felt it within herself as well. Like a length of silk thread being stretched so tight it was in danger of snapping. He wasn't a wild-riding cowboy come to life off a souvenir card. He was a man, her man now, and yet she suddenly realized she didn't know him at all. Looking up into his sun-browned face, into those vivid Montana-sky eyes, she thought how she so wanted to come to know him.

His breath left him in a soft sound that was like a sigh. He tossed the key back on the table; it made a loud clatter in the dense silence. "I wasn't going to lock the door to keep you in, only to keep the scalawags out. There aren't a lot of decent women out here, and some men forget how to behave."

His gaze came back to hers and then settled hard and long on her mouth. Her lips felt as if they were burning. It was all she could do not to wet them with her tongue or to cover them with her fingers.
Hold me,
she suddenly wanted to say to him.
Kiss me.

"Why don't you go ahead and wash up?" he said, and an instant later the door shut behind him.

She curled her hand into a fist and pressed it to her mouth.

The room was the size of a horse stall, part of a larger room that had been broken up with calico partitions. One of the partitions went up to the middle of the room's only window, and there was a three-inch gap between the deep-set sashed panes and the calico wall. She could hear men moving about and talking on the other side of the thin cloth, which had once been red but was now faded to a dusty rose. She saw the flash of a brown flannel sleeve through the gap when one of the men came up to the window.

Through the dust-streaked glass Clementine could look down on the chippies she must pretend did not exist as they strolled like pretty birds along the boardwalk in their bright plumes and niched trains. Soiled doves, Gus had called them, these women who sold themselves for a man's pleasure outside the sanctity of the marriage bed.

The marriage bed.

She stared at the jack bed built into the corner, with its moth-eaten gray army blanket and lumpy straw ticking. There were intimacies between husband and wife that went beyond kissing and a man holding his woman in his arms. To share his bed, to lie with him, to become one flesh.
"I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me."
Words—sly, whispered words, the sacred, solemn words of Scripture—words were all she knew of the physical act of loving. She was Gus McQueen's wife, but there had been no marriage bed for them as yet.

They had passed the train ride from Boston to Saint Louis on hard wooden benches, pressed knee to knee with a family of German immigrants. The swaying, smoking kerosene lamps and the reek of sausage and sauerkraut had Clementine passing the hours in a haze of nausea. The one night they'd spent in a hotel in Saint Louis had been in separate rooms, for they hadn't yet become husband and wife. The next morning they'd been married by a judge, and they'd gone from the courthouse straight to the levee and boarded the steamboat that would take them up the Missouri River to Fort Benton.

The steamer was making its first run of the year, over a month earlier than usual because of a light winter. They were only a day out of Saint Louis when the captain spotted the smoke of a rival boat, and it became a race to see who could navigate the tricky waters of the river faster. They dodged ice floes and uprooted trees in the rough current. They stopped rarely, only to wood up, even traveling at night and sounding the channel by lantern light.

She had seen buffalo once, an enormous herd that was a black smudge on the horizon. Once they'd been fired upon by hostile Indians that Gus said were the same Sioux who'd massacred General Custer at the Little Big Horn only three years before. But they'd been too far away for her to see so much as a feather on their war bonnets, and their shots had fallen harmlessly in the water, sounding like a string of firecrackers.

To Clementine, safe on the riverboat, it had all been so exciting, like living an adventure out of one of Shona's novels. Gus had been less a husband to her than a companion in that adventure, the wood-wise scout to her intrepid explorer. Their nights they'd spent sleeping in the common room of some woodyard with the steamer's roustabouts. Or in cots on the second deck with only a canvas tarp to shelter them and no privacy at all—

"I thought you were going to wash up."

She swung around, startled, for she hadn't heard the door open. Gus shut it with the heel of his boot. He came right up to her until only a handspan separated them, and she had never been more aware of him as a man, of his man's great size and his man's hard strength. She thought of the jack bed waiting in the corner, her marriage bed. She tried to swallow and couldn't; her mouth was as dry as the dusty road outside the window.