Heart of the West (52 page)

"They are growing stronger."

He grunted again and shrugged. He emptied the smoked tobacco out of his pipe, took a fresh pinch from his tobacco box, and poked it into the bowl. He sucked deeply on the tube. The gurgling, bubbling sounds and the ripe tobacco smell brought back bittersweet memories of her father.

"I want to make"—she struggled to find the American word—"a deal. I want to make a deal with you."

He lifted his head and looked up at her out of eyes that were narrowed against the swirl of smoke from his pipe. "Ha. You are going to cut my throat now instead of your own. Instead of being shamed, I will be dead."

She nearly smiled. He was old enough to be her father and not handsome, but she was vain and shallow to let a such a thing matter. The truth was, she rather liked him.

She knelt before him on the grass and sat back on her heels. They faced each other, eye to eye, knees almost touching. "This is my deal: you will pay me one dollar a day to work in the mercantile, to cook the meals and keep our rooms clean."

She was pleased with this part of her deal. She could see herself bringing harmony to the merchant's life. Right now all was chaos, which frequently happened when the yang spirit assumed ascendancy. Sam Woo was the sort never to toss out an old broom, never to waste a single grain of rice. She would take inventory of the store and arrange things according to their purpose in life. She would sweep the dust balls out from beneath the bed and scrub the kitchen from top to bottom. She would try very hard not to make lumpy rice, and she would set dishes of that rice before the kitchen god every day, a duty that had been shamefully neglected, doubtless bringing much bad joss.

"I shall work and you will pay me," she said. "One dollar American a day."

The merchant Woo was pretending to weigh her words, stroking his bristly chin whiskers, but she suspected he was secretly laughing at her. "And what do I get for this deal, eh?" he said. "Besides a bellyache and empty pockets?"

She sucked on her lip to hide another smile and modestly lowered her gaze. "My shortcomings are indeed grave, my husband." She smoothed the lap of her chang-fu, plucked at a blade of grass, and tossed it away. She did not look at him. "It will bring me great joy to give you a son."

There, the words were out, and they had not tasted so bitter on her tongue. At least, she thought, she would have the dignity of being a mother to a man's son—that was, after all, the reason she had been born a woman. She would give the merchant Woo a son, and through their son she would be honored.

She had expected her husband to be pleased with this portion of her deal, for without descendants a man was doomed to roam like a vagabond in the shadow world. But beyond going utterly still, he did and said nothing.

In the distance she could hear the strange discordant noise made by the fon-kwei's brass horns. Firecrackers popped and, nearer to them, a Chinese cursed the gods and the fan-tan beans. "And what will you do with all this money I pay you?" he said at last.

"Put it in a box beneath our bed, where the gourd ought to be protecting us from ghosts. And when I have enough, I will give you back my bride-price and buy passage on a ship to the Flowery Land." The ship's passage would cost six hundred American dollars, Sam Woo had paid eight hundred more for her bride-price. It would take many days to earn so much money. And many nights.

He carefully wound the tube of his water pipe around the bowl. They both watched the movement of his fingers, which were brown and wrinkled with age. He looked up at her, his eyes unblinking behind the thick, round spectacles.

He jerked his gaze away, and his chest expanded on a deep breath. "I know what you think of me, a garlic-eater from Canton," and he spoke now in the rough accent of that place. "And you..." He waved a hand at her. "Aiya, you are so proud, so high and haughty with your Mandarin ways. You were born to red satin and silver chopsticks; I was born to hemp and wood in a hut with mud walls and a straw-thatched roof. My mother whelped me, the fourth son, on an old rice mat in the morning and was back digging in the field that afternoon. Ha, I say it was a field, though it wasn't even a square mou of land."

He laughed suddenly, a sharp, bitter sound she'd never heard from him before. "Just one of your golden hairpins would have fed my family for a year—we who had but a single bowl of watery rice gruel a day, or a millet cake, if fortune smiled. I cannot remember a time as a boy when my belly wasn't bloated like a dead fish from hunger." His gaze came back to hers, and the bitterness she'd heard in his voice now darkened his eyes. "You yearn for what you have lost. Me, I care not if I ever see the yellow earth of China again."

She swallowed around a strange lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. He was asking something of her, but she didn't know what it was. It didn't matter anyway; she had nothing to give. "I cannot alter what I hope for," she said. "But I can and I shall repay my debt of honor. I will give you a son."

He leaned forward until she could smell his breath—not garlic, but tobacco and American beer. She could see the pits in his skin where the stiff whiskers grew, but she could see as well the brackets around his mouth that came from his smile. "You would make the cloud and the rain with me?" he asked.

"I..." Erlan felt like an acrobat trying to walk a bamboo pole. For a moment she was overwhelmed by dark thoughts of wet mouths and probing fingers, of a thrusting hardness pushing up between her thighs, tearing into her... She shut her eyes, trying to stop the terror that lashed through her, trying to stop the scream from building in her throat.

All wives do it, she thought. I won't die from it, or even want to anymore. The merchant Woo was a man of good heart. If she asked him, he would try to be kind. It wouldn't be so bad, not like the others.

She forced her eyes to open, and the shuddering ceased. She plucked at the grass again with restless fingers. "There is something you must know. After my father sold me, I... I was forced to suffer indignities."

She had expected him to be dismayed or disappointed to hear that he had purchased damaged goods. Instead he merely patted her arm as if her confession had been of no import at all.

"This is no big surprise," he said, once more in English. "You have been like a beaten dog, cringing at the sight of a stick." He stroked her cheek lightly with the tips of his fingers, and he smiled. "I will not hurt you, Lily."

She searched his eyes, seeing the hunger that frightened her still. And an innate kindness that she took comfort from. She lowered her gaze and rose up on her knees, bowing and touching her head three times to the ground. Showing him with this gesture the obedience and loyalty she would give him, as his wife, as the mother of his son, from now until the day she left him to return to her lao chia.

He could have stopped her. She thought he would stop her, for it was not an American thing, a wife kowtowing to her husband. But he didn't.

The trestle table that had been put up on the wooden platform groaned with the weight of the cakes. Apple and cinnamon cakes, macaroon cakes, walnut cakes, fancy ribbon cakes, and sour cream cakes. It was the same platform where Drew Scully had gotten a mangled hand earlier that afternoon, although someone had had the sense to scatter sawdust over the bloodstains.

The cakes were about to be auctioned off by the Ladies Social Club of Rainbow Springs. A man who bought himself a cake got—besides a confection for his sweet tooth—the company of the lady who'd baked it for the duration of the fireworks display later that evening. The money raised went to the school, to buy textbooks and primers and desks, and to pay Miss Luly Maine's salary of twenty-five dollars a month. All the good ladies of Rainbow Springs had, of course, baked cakes for such a worthy cause.

And that, thought Hannah Yorke, was where she was being a fool. She wasn't either good or a lady, and she never would be.

She had arisen well before dawn to bake her own contribution, a molasses cake with stoned raisins. It was the only kind of cake she knew how to make, the kind a coal miner's wife whipped up when there was no money for sugar or candied fruit. Now, seeing all these fancy confections the other women had brought, Hannah figured a molasses and stoned raisin cake—lumpy and lopsided and fallen in upon itself in the middle—fit in about as well as a rattlesnake at a roping contest.

And the fallen woman who had baked it fit in even less.

Hannah's white-laced gloved hands gripped her eggshell china cake plate so hard it was a wonder it didn't snap in two. She felt almost sick from the sweet smell of all those cakes. All the ladies of Rainbow Springs, those
good
ladies all buttoned up to their chins in stiff disapproval, stood between her and that platform.

But before Hannah had taken more than a step forward, Zach Rafferty blocked her path.

He had a half empty bucket of beer in one hand and a surly look on his face. "I heard tell your new beau just won himself twenty dollars," he said. "Do you reckon I'm gonna have to rob the bank now if I want to buy me a piece of your... cake?"

A guilty flush burned her cheeks. "Mr. Scully ain't my beau. He's only... he's nothing to me."

"Uh-huh."

His mouth was set mean, but she could see a hurting in his eyes. She thought his jealousy ought to ease the aching tumult in her own heart, but it didn't. And the words slipped out before she could stop them. "Oh, Rafferty... do you ever wonder if maybe being in love shouldn't feel so sad?"

He looked away from her, toward the river and the cottonwoods. "Is that how you're feeling, Hannah? Sad?"

She bit her lip, shaking her head.

"There's never been anything stopping you from leaving," he said.

"No. And that's the trouble, isn't it? There's never been anything stopping either one of us from leaving."

They were leaving each other, she thought, and they both knew it. Only neither one of them was ready to face it just yet.

Lord, she couldn't even bear to think of losing him, of being alone again. Alone and unloved.

She leaned into him and put on her sultriest smile. A smile that had never failed to stir him before. "Aw, honey, what are we talkin' like this for? Maybe we're both a little edgy because of the heat and the crowd, huh? What do you say to you and me taking this cake and goin' on home and puttin' on a fireworks show of our own?"

He tipped his hat to her, and the smile he gave back to her was mostly just a wincing twist of his mouth. "No, thank you, darlin'. Suddenly I ain't in the mood for something sweet."

Hot tears blurred her eyes as she watched him walk away from her. All she'd really done was a little harmless flirting, but right off he'd jumped to the conclusion that she'd be having that boy in her bed before the night was through. Just like all the rest of the world, Zach Rafferty probably figured that if a woman had ever once been a whore, she had lost her scruples along with her virtue.

Just like all the rest of the world... She realized that the ladies gathered around the platform had at last noticed her. One by one their heads had swiveled her way and their bright chatter had died. Hannah made herself lift her head and walk toward them.

Suddenly she was possessed with the urge to do something truly wicked. Such as bare her bosom so that all their husbands, who'd only been speculating before, could look their fill; or hold a contest to see who could come up with the most obscene word for a man's tally-whacker; or explain to all these
good
ladies just what it was a man really wanted when he asked for it done the French way. Hunh, maybe then they would learn a little something that would put their tongues to a better use than all the gossiping and the snide remarks they were now aiming her way.
Good
ladies, Hannah thought with a sniff and a thrust of her chin into the air, always seemed to bring out the outlaw in her.

It wasn't that she had anything to be ashamed of anymore. She was one of the richest people in town; her hotel and flophouses and the Best in the West were making money like a mint. But you didn't see any of the men who owned the other saloons getting snubbed for what they did to earn a living.

They still called her the town harlot, even though she'd never been a harlot in this town. But she had allowed a man into her bed without a ring on her finger to make it respectable, and in the eyes of Rainbow Springs, that made Hannah Yorke a fallen woman. And once a girl fell off the pedestal of virtuous womanhood, there she stayed, because shinnying back up was like trying to climb a greased pole.

She had almost reached Clementine's side when a woman with a round mottled face thrust herself between them. The woman gave Hannah a quelling glare and then turned to Clementine. "I do certainly hope, Mrs. McQueen, that you did not invite this jezebel to partake in our cake social."

Clementine said nothing, merely lifted a brow in haughty surprise that someone would dare to question her good judgment, and Hannah almost smiled.

Another woman joined their intimate little circle. This one was as withered and pinch-mouthed as one of last year's prunes. "When it was first suggested to us, Mrs. McQueen, that we invite you to join our society, there were some who voiced loud objection because of your acquaintanceship with the strumpet. We were persuaded to overlook this lapse of morality on your part, in view of Mr. McQueen's standing in the community and your own Boston connections. However—"

"If you persist in this folly," Mrs. Martin chimed back in, "we very much fear we will be forced not only to remove you as president but to expel you from the society entirely."

Clementine looked down the length of her fine Boston nose with some of the sweetest disdain Hannah had ever seen. "You must do what you think best, Mrs. Martin, Mrs. O'Flarraty, and I must do the same. Now, if you will excuse me, please." And she turned her back on the women, cutting them dead.

"I reckon I ain't gonna be invited to none of their tea parties or church bazaars," Hannah said to her with a weak smile. She had seen Miss Luly Maine, too, hovering within hearing distance. Luly had a saffron cake—a Cornish specialty—in her hands and a look of smug triumph on her face. "Maybe you won't be invited either now, thanks to me."