Heart of the West (55 page)

But wild and ricocheting bullets weren't known for their discrimination. It was Nash who was laid out beneath the shattered front window, a dark red stain spreading over the lighter, faded red of his shirt. Pogey knelt over him, a look of disbelief on his face.

Gus slopped through gushing streams of whiskey to get there just as Pogey gripped his partner by the arms and shook him. "Nash, Nash, damn you, say something. God almighty, but if this ain't the one time in yore life when yore jaw ain't a-flappin', and I'd give my left nut just to hear you grunt."

Nash stirred, grunting loudly. "Pogey?" He started to sit up and then looked down and saw the blood leaking out of a hole in his chest, and his eyes opened wide. "Pogey, them sons of bitches went and kilt me."

Pogey rocked back on his heels. He scrubbed at the wetness on his face, which was about half and half tears and whiskey. "Your timin' stinks, ya know that, compadre? You go an' get yerself kilt on the day it decides to rain bug juice."

By this time Doc Corbett had made his way through the rivers of whiskey and the men who were trying to drink it up fast before it evaporated or got soaked up by the sawdust or ran down into the cracks between the floorboards. He hunkered down next to the gunshot man and peeled back the striped suspenders and blood-soaked shirt. He tsked and shook his head, and Pogey choked down a sob.

"He's not going to die," the doc said. "You're not going to die."

Nash creaked his head up, the better to aim his glare at the doc. "What d'you know about it? I'm gushing blood like a Yellowstone geyser and I hurt worse'n a blue bitch. If anybody oughta know when a feller's dyin', it oughta be the feller what's dyin'."

Just then someone with a bit of sense must have figured out that alcohol, burning coal oil, and flying bullets were a dangerous combination, for suddenly the lamps went out.

Nash's head fell back and he moaned. "It's growing dark. Give me your hand, Pogey." His own hand groped along the whiskey-sodden floor. "I'm fadin', fadin' fast now. I can't hardly see a thing—" This last word ended on a cough and he moaned again. "The death rattle, Pogey... she's a-buildin' in my chest. It won't be long now."

Doc Corbett looked up at Gus and grinned as he pulled at one end of his waxed handlebar mustache. "The bullet's lodged against the collarbone. Soon as I fetch my instruments I'll have it out quicker and slicker than a greased pig."

A tenor broke into a song about smiling Irish eyes and was soon joined by a bass and a baritone.

"I hear angels singin'!" Nash exclaimed.

Pogey snatched off his hat and whacked him on the leg with it. "Will you quit it, you larruping ol' fool? The doc says you ain't dyin'."

Nash, who'd had his eyes squeezed shut in anticipation of the glories of heaven, popped one open and then the other. "I ain't? Well, hellfire, what for are you dripping all over me like a wet blanket, Pogey? Push me on over beneath that there barrel. Time and whiskey's a-wastin'!"

Rapt faces turned toward the heavens, and mouths fell open in breathy oohs and ahs as the rockets burst into noisy rainbow blossoms in the deep blue well of darkness that was a Montana night.

Gus picked his way through the shadowy figures sitting on the grass. He reeked of whiskey, and he wondered how he was going to explain it to Clementine. She had expected him back in time for the fireworks, but he'd figured the least he could do was see Pogey through the trauma of having a bullet dug out of his collarbone—not only because the man was his friend but because it was his father who had cleaned out the poor old prospector's pockets just minutes before he was shot.

He found her sitting on a blanket with his brother. Charlie lay between them, so worn out he was sleeping through the noise. Zach leaned against the trunk of a cottonwood, one leg bent, his wrist resting on his knee. Clementine was leaning back on her braced hands, her face turned toward his brother's. They weren't talking, though. All they appeared to be doing was looking at each other.

"There you are, Gus," she said as he came up to them, and a sweet smile softened her face. She looked beautiful, her hair shining and her eyes sparkling with the bursts of colored fire.

Gus sat down and slipped his arm around her waist. A ball of fire streaked across the sky with a shrieking whistle and an exploding hail of sparks. Light rippled across the blanket in intermittent flashes of red, white, and blue. His brother turned his head and their eyes met, and Zach's face lit up with a splendid smile that was brighter than any rocket.

And yet, and yet... A thought came to Gus, came more as a feeling, as a tight ache in his chest. A thought that there had been something in the air between them, between his brother and his wife. Something he had shattered when he stepped into the circle made by the blanket they shared. Like taking a mallet to a sheet of the thinnest ice.

But the thought slipped away and was forgotten as Clementine put her hand on his knee and leaned into him, and he breathed deeply of the wild rose smell of her, and he felt the warmth of her body.

"Look at our Charlie," she said. "Sleeping like a little angel while the sky rains fire." And she laughed her laugh that was as soft and pure as a fresh snowfall. Together they looked at their son, and together they smiled.

CHAPTER 22

Their Charlie died on a day in late August when the chokecherries hung fat and black on the trees. The sky was so deep a blue, the air so clear, the mountains had that sharp, transparent look, and the river caught the sunlight, reflecting it back to the heavens. And the grass was long and soft, and the color of his hair.

In the days that followed, Clementine held the moment of it in her mind and lived it over and over, and the memory of it was like the loop of a lasso, twirling, twirling, twirling through her head. It always began with her standing at the kitchen window and the men in the corral mating a stud horse to a mare.

The kitchen smelled of the oatmeal she had fixed for breakfast that morning. The day was warm and the cottonwoods were turning their leaves up to the sun. Thieving jays were raiding the chicken feed scattered over the yard, and Charlie was pretending to shoot at them from between the porch rails with his wooden gun. "Bang!" he would shriek. "You're dead! Bang! Bang!"

The men had brought the stud into the corral. The mare stood with her hind legs spread, her tail raised to one side, winking her female opening. The stud pranced and strutted and whistled, for he had done this before. He advanced on the mare, his organ large and proud. He mounted her and bit her neck, and she screamed.

Caught up in her memory loop, sometimes Clementine would watch this happen, but not always. Sometimes she would turn away from the kitchen window, because she always hated how, afterwards, after the stud was done covering the mare, he danced away and curled his lip as if with disdain.

But whether she was looking out the window or had turned away, it is always the sound of Charlie's shrill laughter she heard next. And she realized he was no longer shooting jays from the porch. He was running, running toward the corral, where the stud was rearing and screaming and tearing at the air with scythe-like hooves. He was running and shouting something, and laughing, laughing, laughing.

And she was running as well, although it always seemed her legs were pumping through air as thick as sorghum syrup, and the world exploded into shouts and a horse's wild neighs, and the dust swirled up to veil the sun.

Then the dust cleared and Gus was on his knees in the corral. Terrible sounds were coming out of his chest, and a scolding jay was flitting from fence post to fence post, and the wind was crying wild through the cottonwoods, and Charlie wasn't laughing anymore.

And she was running, running until she hit the solid wall of her love's chest. His hands wrapped hard around her arms, holding her, and his face was the gray of the dust that still floated through the air.

"Let me go to him. I must see him," she said, and there was this coldness inside of her.

Her love tried to press her head to his chest, tried to shield her eyes with his heart. "No, darlin', it'd do no good. He's gone."

A part of her had already lived a thousand years into a future where there was no Charlie, where there was nothing but this moment, and if the memory of it had to begin with her standing at the kitchen window, then it also had to have an ending, a slip-knot in the loop. She had to see her Charlie dead to know that it was so.

So she pulled away from her love and walked slowly toward the corral. Gus had Charlie in his arms and he was rocking and howling at the sky. There was no blood, except for a small drop at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were open, but there was no light in them. There was no light in all the world, because his chest was caved in, and he was dead.

Clementine sat in a bentwood rocker and stared out her bedroom window. The cane seat creaked as she rocked, and the curved slats rasped on the rough pine floor. The world outside was bathed in harsh sunlight, but she pulled the pretty hand-pieced quilt that Hannah had given her tightly around her. For her there was no light in all the world, and she was cold.

It had been a summer of hot sun and little rain, and now it was a dry and bitter fall. The days had grown shorter and the shadows of the mountains fell hard across the buffalo grass. The larch needles had turned color and were falling, slashing and cutting through the air like thin gold daggers. The wild geese honked as they flew low overhead, and a chicken hawk drew lassos of memory in the sky, and she thought how Charlie would never learn to fly now, how all the things she had wanted for him he would never grow up to have.

And so she rocked, and at night the moon came up big and white and hard. Her eyes followed it as it floated through the thick blackness of the night, and the coyotes mourned, wailing and howling for her, since she could not. Hour after hour she rocked and looked out the window at the brutal mountains and the sun-seared, wind-flattened grass. And at the empty, empty sky.

She rocked, and from her window she could see the buffalo hunter's cabin, the fat, flat silver ribbon of the river, and the haystacks in the shade of the giant cottonwoods. And Charlie's grave. It had been two months since they buried him. On the day they buried him she had sat in this rocker and listened to the sounds of death: the grating of saw and hammer making the coffin, the clang and ring of the shovels digging the grave... her husband's sobs. But not her own. She wouldn't cry. She never cried.

She had stood by the open grave and smelled the raw pine of his coffin and the freshly dug earth, and each breath she took was an abomination. The world was dark, the world was in a shroud, the world was being put into a hole in the ground. The world was dark, but she could hear. She could hear the creak of the rope as it lowered the coffin into the grave and a soft thud as Charlie's body shifted within it. She could hear the wind crying through the cottonwoods, and rock and dirt falling on wood, and her husband's sobs.

She rocked and looked out the window, and she hugged to her breast a photograph album with a white lace cover. She never opened it. She didn't want to look at these Charlies made from light, when the world was all darkness. When the world lay sealed in a pine coffin in a hole in the ground.

She rocked and watched the leaves drift from the cottonwoods into the river. She watched them being carried away to the sea. She was dead inside like the leaves, dry and brittle. She wanted to fall into the river and be taken far, far away from the mountains and the wind and the endless empty miles of grass.

Once, she had taken the heart-shaped sachet of coins out of its hideyhole. She had clutched it in her hand, intrigued by its weight, by the solid feel of it. She spilled some of the coins into her lap. Many were gold, like the cottonwood leaves. And she wondered... if she threw them in the river, would they be carried out to sea? Could she go with them?

She rocked, and the baby thrust against her belly. Her breasts felt heavy and swollen. She tried to think of this child being born, the sweet ache of it suckling and pulling the life-giving milk from her nipples. But all she could think of was its dying, of its being put in the ground alongside Charlie and the other she had lost when she was in her eighth month.

She rocked and looked out the window. Gus was across the yard, chopping wood. The ax flashed through the air and landed with a
whunk,
and the wood blasted apart and pieces of it spun away like shrapnel through the air. She thought how dangerous chopping wood was, how she must be careful to keep Charlie away from his father while he did it. And then she remembered. Charlie was dead.

They lived on, she and Gus, they ate and slept and did the chores that filled a day, but there was nothing between them anymore. They made words sometimes, but the words couldn't bridge the chasm, and she could not bear to have Gus touch her.

She rocked, and she watched her husband chop wood, and she heard the rasp of her love's spurs on the floor behind her. She could always tell when he entered a room; even now she could tell. He was still her love. He would always be her love. But she never spoke to him or looked at him, because she wanted to stop loving him, even though that was impossible.

He came up to her, so close she could see his jean-clad leg and dusty black boot, though she would not look at him. "I was wondering if you wanted to go for an easy ride up to the buffalo canyon," he said.

She focused her gaze on the swing of the ax and said nothing.

"You need to get out. You need to feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. If not for yourself, then for that babe you're carryin'."

"In that hole where you put my Charlie there is no sun, no wind to blow in his hair. There is nothing but cold and dark."

She heard his sharp intake of breath and then the long, sad sigh as he let it out. The words had surprised her as they came out her own mouth. She hadn't wanted to say them. Words were useless, meaningless things anyway. Like his name— Charlie. She said his name over and over, but it only hung there in the empty air.

"Clementine..." He laid his hand on her shoulder. His fingers were strong and urgent as they pressed into her flesh. "You got to let it out. Cry, maybe. Or swear, or scream. But you got to—"

Anger surged up her throat, burning and bitter, and it drove her out of the chair with such force the rockers skidded and screeched across the bare pine floor, and the photograph album fell with a heavy thud. "How
dare
you tell me how to mourn! I carried him in my womb for nine months and fed him from my own breast. He was my baby. My
baby."

He gripped her arms and gave her a small, hard shake. "Damn you, woman. You're killing Gus." She tried to twist free of him and he opened his hands wide, letting her go, taking a step back. "You are killing my brother."

She felt her lips peel back from her teeth in a dreadful rictus of a smile. "Do you think I don't wish him in that grave?" She pointed a stiff, shaking finger out the window. "That I don't wish you both in there in place of my son?"

He was silent for a moment, only stared at her with those uncomfortable brassy eyes. He shook his head. "You don't mean that."

She could see it in his eyes. A part of her could see the pain and devastation that was as bitter and terrible as her own. But she didn't care. He could go to hell. Yes, she wished him in hell, with her. She wanted everyone in the world to suffer as she was suffering. To feel this pain that was in her bones and her flesh, in her blood. And this vast, vast emptiness inside her.

She closed her eyes against the suffering she saw in his face and made a small helpless sound. "Leave me alone. I want to be left alone."

"Ah, Clementine." She felt something brush her cheek, and she recoiled violently away from him.

"Don't touch me. I can't bear it."

"What do you want from us?" He turned half away from her, his hands gripping the back of the rocker so hard his knuckles whitened and his shoulders hunched. "We loved him, too. We're hurtin' too. Just what the hell do you want?"

She laughed, a harsh, brittle sound, like shattering glass. "What do I want? I want my son back. I want him
back
I want to hold him in my arms again and watch him grow to be a man, I want to hear him laugh, I want to watch him smear choke-cherry jam all over his face and get it in his hair, I want to kiss him to sleep at night and bury my face in the smell of him—" Her throat caught as the terrible, choking grief welled up inside her. "I want my Charlie alive and back with me where he belongs."

"He's gone, and we can't change that. Nobody can."

She tried to laugh again, but it got caught up with the hard ball of pain in her throat and came out as a sick, mewling sound. "Oh, no, you can't change that, certainly not you men. You men who can do everything except keep a stud horse from kicking a little boy in the chest."

She turned her back on him and waited to hear him leave. For a long time he didn't go, and she held herself stiff and clenched her jaw so that she wouldn't weaken, and then after he did leave she wanted to call after him, but she couldn't get the words past that choking ball of grief that clogged her chest and throat.

She stared out the window, at the river and the cottonwoods and the haystacks, and Charlie's grave. And then suddenly she was out in the yard, her shoes crunching on the chicken feed, walking across the yard, and Gus shouted something at her, but she didn't see him because she was looking at Charlie's grave, walking toward Charlie's grave.

The hot wind battered her and she staggered once, but she kept walking. The wind howled and shrieked in grief, and the grief tore through her, ripping off pieces deep inside her that bled and bled, ran in rivers of blood to the earth, to Charlie's grave, and then she was at Charlie's grave, scattering the wildflowers Gus had put there that morning, throwing them away in rage and hate and bitter, bitter grief, and she was tearing at the earth with her hands, and the pain drove into her like a fist, and the tears came gushing out of her, rolling and surging and swelling, great ocean waves of tears. She made a noise like a rag tearing and then a high, keening sound that was ripped away by the wind. She hugged her pregnant belly and rocked back and forth on Charlie's grave as the sobs came one after the other in crescendoing, wrenching, soul-searing grief.

Clementine had fallen to one side and was clutching at her belly, trying to curl up into a tight ball. Her sobs were thin and reedy now, like a gopher's whistle, and Gus's whole body shuddered as if those sobs were being torn from his own heart. Rafferty couldn't bear to look at her; he wondered how he was going to stand it.

"She blames me for what happened," Gus said.

Rafferty took the ax from his brother's limp hand and wedged it into the chopping block. "She blames everyone and everything, including herself and God."

"At least she's having her cry." Gus turned a desperate face to his brother. His eyes were red-rimmed and bruised. "It's a good sign, isn't it? That she's crying."

Rafferty gripped his brother's shoulder and pushed him in the direction of his wife. She was rolling on the fresh-turned earth of Charlie's grave now, and her cries were no longer human. "Go hold her. Go on, even if she fights you, but, dammit, hold her."
Go on, brother, before I do, because if I do, you ain't ever gettin' her back.