Heart of the West (59 page)

"It is an old Chinese expression."

"And a daft one, if you ask me." He set the pagoda carefully down on the counter and took a step toward her, his eyes intent on her face, his own face as hard as the granite he mined. "You've a lovely mouth, Lily," he said, and his voice was like incense, rich and heady. "Even when it goes all tight and stubborn like 'tes doin' now. I want to kiss your mouth..."

"No!" She nearly fell over the barrel of brooms again in her effort to get away from him. "What you suggest is shameful, dishonorable. If you persist in this behavior I shall take extra pains to ensure that our paths never cross."

"You already do."

"I shall be even more vigilant." She meant it. She thrust her chin into the air to show him that she meant it.

He studied her face for an intent moment, then gave a sharp nod. "All right, then, I'll not speak again of kissing you," he said, and she almost snorted aloud in disbelief. What fool would wager a single
cash
on that?

She looked up at him, at his mouth. His lips were too full and soft-looking to belong to a man. She wondered what it would feel like to kiss them. And would the hair on his face be stiff or soft?

A pounding on the door startled them both. Relief flooded through Erlan as she hurried to answer it. Surely in another moment she would have allowed him to kiss her mouth.

"Huan yin!"
she exclaimed with false cheer as she pulled open the door, and then a genuine smile brightened her face. "Hannah! Welcome. Be pleased to enter. I will put a pot of tea on to brew." She stopped as the lantern light fell full on Hannah's face. "What is it? What has happened?"

Hannah pushed back the sable-lined hood of her cloak. Her hands were shaking, her eyes shiny with fear. "Cle-Clementine's time has come, and that fool of a doctor's out on circuit till the end of the week."

Erlan gave a low half-worded cry as she whirled and hurried to the shelves behind the counter, where the mercantile's medicinal items were stored. "I have some herbs that might help," she said as she opened drawers. She filled small paper packets with the herbs and tucked them into her chang-fu.

She glanced up and caught the barbarian giant's eyes on her. It was strange, she thought, that she could feel his gaze when he looked at her. Feel it burning and tingling, like swallowing whiskey. "Mr. Scully... would you be so kind as to mind the mercantile until my husband returns?"

"'Twould be my pleasure, Lily," he said softly, and for a moment she became lost in his warm and gentle smile.

She heard Hannah's step behind her and she turned her head, breaking the spell. "I've tarragon salve, feverfew leaves, ginseng, and Siberian wort," she said.

"Do you know what to do with them?"

"Oh, yes. My father has many younger brothers, each of whom has several wives and concubines. I have been present at many births,"

"Thank God," Hannah said with a sigh of relief. "I tried some of the other woman—Mrs. Martin, the minister's wife, and Mrs. O'Flarraty, whose man used to superintend at the Four Jacks. They wouldn't come with me because Clementine's in my house." She uttered a harsh, broken laugh. "As if they think they could catch some sort of loathsome disease merely by crossing my threshold."

Sleet poured out of the night sky, glazing the streets and boardwalks. Wind drove icy needles into their faces like tacks as they plowed through the ragged trenches of rimed slush. It twisted their skirts around their legs and slapped their hair against their cheeks. It set the signboards to creaking and swinging wildly, and drowned out the piano and banjo music spilling from the saloons.

They entered the warmth and peace of the house on a gust of wind. Lifting her chang-fu, Erlan hurried up the stairs after Hannah and entered a bedroom that reeked of vinegar water.

The tattooed woman was bent over the bed, sponging off Clementine's naked breasts and belly. She straightened and turned to them. Tears streaked her face. "I've drawn some warm water from the reservoir and put some more on to boil," she said. "I'll fetch it up directly."

The woman on the bed was laboring hard, her breathing whipping through the room louder than the wind outside. Sweat ran off her in rivulets. The contractions were coming hard and fast, her belly shuddering, her legs trembling, yet it seemed she was barely aware of them. Clementine, the essence of her, lay in dreadful stillness, as if remote from the woman's body that was struggling to give birth. Her face was as pale as old wax.

"Merciful Kwan, Yin," Erlan said. "She is dying."

To Erlan's shock, Hannah bent over and grasped the woman's shoulders, shaking her so hard her head lolled. "What's the matter with you, Clementine McQueen? Are you too much of a starched-up lady to fight? You always talked so big about Montana being like a man and how we couldn't let him get the better of us. So are you gonna let him win, Clementine? You gonna let him beat you?"

Clementine's eyes fluttered open. They were as dark as bruises, and empty. "Leave me alone, Hannah."

Hannah shook her again. "Fight, damn you. Fight!"

The butchered buffalo desecrated the pristine whiteness of the snow, the bloody meat glistening with the strychnined lard they'd rubbed in it the week before. The carcasses of half a dozen wolves lay scattered around it.

Gus toiled up the trail ahead of him like a slow-footed bear, wrapped up in a robe made from a winter-killed buffalo calf, his head swathed in otter fur. He pulled a lizard sled that was already piled with stiff gray skins. They plowed through a fine, hard powder snow, knee-deep and glittery white, what the old-timers called cold smoke.

The air was grainy with the wind-swirled ice powder, which was as sharp as crushed glass to breathe. The sting of cold made his eyes water and rasped at his lungs. A half-hearted sun had just come up. The wind thundered past them like buffalo in a stampede, and tasted of more snow. It was cold as brass.

"Not as many as yesterday," Gus said, his breath puffing white. "Maybe they're getting wise."

And maybe we killed them all, Rafferty thought. Maybe we've managed to skin every goddamn wolf there is in the world.

He picketed his horse to a tough little juniper. He loosened the cinch and put a stirrup over the horn to remind himself the saddle was loose. He brushed the frost off the animal's back with his fur-mittened hand. The horse snorted, blowing smoke. Icicles tinkled on his mane and tail.

They had laid the bait out beneath a bluff, to protect them from the worst of the wind while they skinned. The bluff was now crowned with a heavy crest of ice-snow. It thrust into the sky above their heads like the curl of a giant, frozen wave.

The white plain stretched before him, wide as forever. A hawk flew straight into the deep winter-blue sky. Always the thought of her was with him, like a steady, constant hum.
Clementine...
He let her name form in his mind and he shuddered. The shudder was more from the longing than from the cold. The cruel and sweet longing for her that was so familiar, as much a part of him as breathing.

He shuffled over to one of the wolves, the snow squeaking under his boots. He worked at breathing through his mouth; even in a cold this biting, the buffalo bait stank of corruption. He heard the wolves' howls now even in his dreams.

He skinned his three, slitting-belly and legs. Knife snicking through frozen hide. The ripping sound of hair pulling off flesh. His hands stiff with the bone-ache of cold.

As he tossed the last of the hides onto the sled, the wind blew a whisper of snow off the crest overhead. He pulled a whiskey bottle out of his pocket and popped the cork. He took a powerful drink. The red-eye worked deep and hot within him.

He lowered his head to catch his brother staring at him, disapproval lines cut deep around his mouth.

He saw that mouth open and the breath come out of it like a puff from a pipe. "You know what Clementine said to me the day we left? She said to try and keep you off the whiskey, and yet I swear you've been pretty much pickled since we got here. What do you do it for?"

"I do it just for what-the-hell, brother." Rafferty presented him with the nastiest smile he owned. "You wanna see if you can make me stop?"

Gus stood deep under the overhang of snow-laden rock, looking like some great hairy beast in his buffalo coat. Vapor shot out of his nostrils as they flared with each angry breath. He and his brother had been circling each other for days now, like dogs spoiling for a fight, bristling and tight-muscled.

Gus knocked the ice off his mustache. Long curling plumes of snow whipped off the ledge above his head. "She's been through seven kinds of hell and all you can think about is adding to her worries."

Rafferty squinted against the glare of sun on ice, and he stared at his brother like a man sighting down a rifle. "Since I ain't married to her, why should I give a good goddamn?"

The sharp-edged wind lashed snow into a fury of whirling ice clouds. Rafferty blinked the powder from his eyes and thought he saw the ledge of snow above Gus's head tremble.

"Gus," he said, his voice quiet.

"And what about Hannah?" Gus shouted, whipping at his anger. "Do you think that woman deserves the way you've treated her—"

"You don't know shit from gold dust about what Hannah wants."

"I don't reckon she particularly wanted to be used as your whore for four years."

"Jesus's suffering ass! Can't a man have a lay without you moralizing about it six ways from Sunday?"

"You're just like him, aren't you? Pa's son clean on through. Whiskey and whores. You're just a new, improved version of Jack McQueen."

Rafferty snarled, his breath coming ragged and hard, as the tightly leashed rage burst free within him. "God
damn
you!" he bellowed, and took a lunging step at his brother.

Gus reared back. His boot slid on a frozen patch of blood. He flailed his arms at the air as he started to go down. The wind gusted, swirling ice powder around them like a blizzard under the blue sky. Then the wind-sculpted crest of snow broke free of the bluff with a crack like a rifle shot.

It slid in thick slabs through the air, knocking them to their knees. The snow hit the ground with a roar and billowed into the air in a giant cloud. For a moment Rafferty was buried beneath the weight of the snow, and he thrust upward, hard, with his legs and arms, until he broke free. He dug the wet, smothering powder out of his mouth and eyes as he struggled to his feet.

Where Gus had been, closer to the overhang, there was nothing but white powder and silence.

The thought entered his head:
Just leave him lying there. Get on your horse and ride on home to her, and you'll have it all then—everything you've ever wanted.

He fell to his knees and began clawing frantically at the snow with frozen hands.

CHAPTER 25

"Lie still, ye young bastard, don't bother me so. Your father's off bucking another bronco..."

Hannah Yorke jiggled the fussing bundle of baby girl in her arms as she sang in a smoky contralto. But her voice trailed off, and the jiggling stopped at the tinkle of laughter that came from the woman seated in her horsehair rocker.

"That," Clementine said, with another soft gurgle, "is the strangest lullaby I've ever heard."

The sound of Clementine's laughter, so rarely heard these days, plucked at Hannah's soul and brought a wide smile to her own mouth. "But fitting, don't you think, for a babe born of cow folk in the Montana Territory?"

She laid the baby down carefully in an empty champagne crate that had been padded with pieces of quilting. Saphronie and Erlan immediately gathered around the makeshift cradle, making faces and little cooing noises, which young Sarah McQueen ignored, choosing to fall asleep instead.

She had almost killed herself and her mother coming into the world, Hannah thought, but little Sarah sure enough seemed determined to stay now that she was here. She suckled lots and often and had filled out so much over the last four months that she was starting to look like a link of fresh sausage, pink and fat.

And she was turning into a spoiled little mite, too, what with three mothers—Clementine, Hannah, and Saphronie—to fuss over her all day long. And Erlan, too, who frequently came by early in the morning to share a cup of coffee. This morning, the first morning of spring, she had arrived with her hands over her ears, claiming she could hear the baby's wails all the way over in the mercantile. Little Sarah had been awake all night with a colicky belly, and she'd wanted the rest of the world to keep her company.

Hannah hooked her bustled hip onto the edge of her black lacquer writing desk and picked up her cup, blowing on the coffee to cool it down. "We better hope that putting little Sarah to sleep in a champagne crate don't give her champagne tastes. What was it you used for your last blessed event, Clementine— a cracker box, wasn't it? Next time you really oughta—"

"Next time!" Clementine protested. She was sitting in the rocking chair she used to nurse Sarah, and she gave a little push with her foot now, making the slats slap the floor to emphasize her point. "I should hope I won't be having to face another
blessed event
for a good long while yet."

"If ever a man even once had to endure childbirth," Saphronie said in all seriousness, "I reckon there'd soon enough be an act of Congress passed against it."

Erlan smothered a laugh with her hand. "In China the day of a daughter's birth is forever after remembered as the anniversary of her mother's suffering."

"Hunh," Hannah snorted. She sucked in a scalding sip of the coffee, which was strong enough to float a kingbolt. "Don't Chinese women suffer having their boys as well?"

"Of course. But boys are wished for; girls are not."

A chorus of female voices rose up in protest against this, and Erlan laughed out loud.

A cottonwood log popped in the hearth, releasing a woodsy smell into the room. A pang of sweet contentment pierced Hannah's breast, so intense it left her almost dizzy. She looked from one dear friend to another. Saphronie, in her satin whore's dress, with her tears inked permanently on her face for all the world to see and shudder over. Erlan, in her blue quilted Oriental robe and English croquet sandals, with her homesick eyes. And Clementine... Clementine, looking so very Bostonian in a plain black muslin mourning dress with a high, stiff cleric collar, looking so very sad.

How different we all are, Hannah thought. And yet how much the same, in all our woman's sorrows and fears and vulnerabilities. In all our woman's strengths, to have endured what we have.

Saphronie, who'd gone to look out the window, spun away from it suddenly, her hand flattened tight across her chin to cover the tattoos. "The men," she said. "They're back."

Their horses' hooves made sucking, squelching noises as they plowed through the spring mud and pulled up at her fence. The men were all hair: matted brown buffalo coats and thick beards and scalps that hadn't seen a barber in five months, and evidently not an Indian either.

The yard gate opened with a whine. Hannah crossed her arms over her breasts and watched from the gallery as they came up her path.

Gus stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at her. Rafferty stood in the shadow cast by his brother's back so that she couldn't see his face.

"Howdy, Hannah," Gus said. His gaze shifted away from her. He stroked his mustache and swallowed. "Where's my wife?"

She was tempted to tell the man that his wife was dead. She figured he deserved the few moments' suffering that lie would bring him, since he'd been spared the agony of a sleet-sheeted November night, a doctor who was out riding circuit, a baby that was a hard time coming, and a game, tough little woman who'd gone from wanting to die to fighting so hard to live that it had nearly killed her.

"You got yourself a baby daughter," she said and turned her back, going inside the house and leaving them to follow.

They brought with them the pungent smell of Montana mud and buffalo coats. Their boots clumped and their spurs clinked on the stairs. Gus shouted his wife's name, his booming voice bouncing off the walls, filling Hannah's house with noise and life.

By the time she made it back up to the bedroom, Gus already had his baby girl in his big hands. He stood with his feet spread wide, a huge grin unbalancing his mouth. "Isn't she just about the prettiest thing you ever did see?" he said. And his laughter flooded the room like warm sunshine.

Clementine sat in the horsehair rocker, her hands folded in her lap, staring with wide, still eyes up at her husband. She wasn't smiling, but she looked pleased to have him home. There was a lightness about her, as if a burden had been lifted. "I named her Sarah," she said. "I hope you don't mind."

"He'd have the devil of a nerve minding," Hannah snapped, "since he was so proud to be there at the begetting of it and so careful to be gone entirely for the birthing of it." She would never forgive Clementine's men for not having been here when she needed them.

Hannah cut an angry glance over to Rafferty, who stood with one shoulder propped against the doorframe, a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. He looked tough and ornery with his dark beard and shaggy hair, sharp and edgy as a new penknife.

Their eyes met. She saw shadows in those hard, brassy eyes that she had never seen before. A haunted quality, as if something had happened to him out there on the plains that had frightened him to the depths of his soul.

Slowly his gaze left her and went to Clementine. And Clementine, feeling the touch of his eyes, turned her head and looked at him, and the air between them suddenly became as charged as a lightning field on a hot summer night.

"I should go put the horses up," he said, peeling himself away from the door frame and disappearing down the hall.

He left a hard silence behind him. The fire popped, a log shifted and then fell with a muted
thunk.
After that you could have heard a leaf drop in a forest.

"Well!" Hannah exclaimed on a big push of breath. "I reckon I'll go on over and open up the Best in the West early today. 'Pears like if spring is really here there oughta be quite a crowd coming in wanting to toast its arrival."

Her throat was tight, her eyes stinging, as she walked slowly down the stairs, fumbling her way along the banister as if blind. She felt a deep, hollow sense of loss, as if someone had died. There was nothing to keep Clementine here now, with her men back and spring coming, a ranch to work and a new little baby to raise.

Hannah picked up her French beaver bonnet from the sideboard and placed it at a jaunty angle on her scarlet head, anchoring it in place with a jet-studded pin. She leaned closer to the mirror, and smoothed back the corners of her eyes, pinched her cheeks, and rubbed some color into her lips.

She lifted her sable-lined cloak off the bentwood coat tree, threw it over her shoulders, and stepped out into the first day of spring.

There was no sadder sight, Hannah thought, than a saloon in the harsh light of a morning.

The sun poured through the fancy sheet-glass window she'd had installed last year and picked out every stain, every scar, every sin. All the wet stains and cigar burns on the green felt gaming tables. The crack in the diamond-dust mirror, put there last December by a fist that had missed the head it was aiming for. The greasy finger marks on the decanters, cigar vases, and jars of brandied fruit that stood in a row behind the bar. The place smelled of last night's beer and whiskey and of a winter's worth of mud and sweat. It was empty now, but soon the same old faces would be back in here drinking, smoking, chewing, spitting, and cursing around the potbellied stove.

Through the sheet-glass window she could see Rafferty crossing the street from the livery, the mud squeezing out from under his boots. By the time he came through the door, she was behind the fortress of the bar. He left his coat on, which meant he wasn't staying long. And he left his hat on as a shield for his eyes.

Hannah swiped at the bar with a towel. "You look about as cheerful as a hell's-fire preacher," she said. She poured four fingers of whiskey into a glass and pushed it at him. "How 'bout something to cut the mud?"

He turned the glass in his fingers, studying the brown liquid, as if it were a crystal ball and he had a future that he cared about. He emptied the glass in two quick swallows.

"Come here, Hannah," he said, his voice roughened by the booze.

She came, though she didn't know why.

He turned, bracing his back against the bar, and pulled her into his arms. The buffalo hide beneath her cheek was soft and smelled faintly raw. She tilted her head and leaned back, the better to look at him. A flush of heat touched his cheeks and his mouth curved into a faint smile, and she felt an echo of an old desire. He lowered his mouth to hers.

She pushed him away. "You can't just blow in here, Zach Rafferty, and take things up as if nothin' happened."

"I always could before. So what're you gonna tell me, Hannah, that you're not feelin' well? That you've got the monthly curse or you imbibed a little too much hell brew last night? I reckon about the only thing left between us that we haven't done is lie."

"You oughta know me better than that, cowboy. And you know something else about me, too. Except for those years when I was whoring, i only sleep with one man at a time."

He gave her a long, deep look. "So that's the way of it, then."

"That's the way of it."

She flushed beneath his steady gaze and started to turn away. He caught her chin with two fingers and turned her head back to face him. "You happy, Hannah?"

She nodded, then shook her head. A short huff of hollow laughter pushed out of her chest along with a sigh. "I'm plumb scared spitless. I love him so much, Rafferty. Too much."

He let go of her chin and picked up his empty whiskey glass. He tilted it at her and lifted one corner of his mouth in a smile that was both sad and mocking, of her and of himself. "I reckon you and I are two of the same kinda fool. Falling hard for the wrong person. It's too bad we couldn't have fallen for each other." He set the glass back down on the bar with a clink that sounded too loud in the empty saloon.

She covered his hand with hers. "We did in a way."

"Yeah." He turned his head and gave her a warm, sweet smile. "We did."

She leaned into him, to kiss him on the cheek, and found his mouth instead. Desire echoed again within her. The kiss deepened, turning exquisitely soft and tender, and lingered on her lips as they parted.

"So long, darlin'," he said, giving her a quick, light brush on the cheek with the tips of his fingers.

It was, Hannah knew, the closest a cowboy ever got to saying good-bye.

One day in late April the men rode out to catch some mustangs.

Clementine went with them. She wasn't sure why she did so. She hated the ranch; she didn't care if they kept or lost it. With Charlie gone, she didn't care much about anything anymore, except Sarah. And even with Sarah she was careful. Her heart was still near to bursting with bitter pain. She felt as if grief had crushed her like a great weight of stones until there was nothing left of her.

The morning they went after the mustangs, she carried Sarah Indian-fashion on her back in a cradleboard. The way the men captured the wild horses was to walk them down, not allowing them time to graze or drink at their favorite watering holes, until they were tired and docile enough to be easily herded. Gus had ridden ahead, to chouse the mustangs toward a valley to the south of them, and he left Clementine to ride there with his brother.

It was the first time they'd been alone together, she and Rafferty, in so long. Yet she could find no words to say to him. There was love in her heart for him, but no longer any tenderness.

They rode through a wood of larch, fir, and yellow pine. Just as she could feel the warmth of the sun and the caress of the grass-sweetened wind, so she could feel his gaze touching her averted face. She thought perhaps he was disappointed in her. He had called her useless once, a liability, like a dogie not worth the slaughtering, and she had proved him right. She wasn't cut out for this country. She had tried to show them all that they were wrong, but Montana had beaten her—walked her down and worn her out, just as they were doing to the mustangs.

Although it was early morning, the birds were awake and noisy, flying in circles and cawing. A creek, flowing high from the winter runoff, rushed over tumbled boulders with a lion's roar. But their horses' hooves made no sound on the damp and matted pine needles, just as they, too, were silent.

They came out of the woods onto a high ridge that overlooked a narrow grassy valley. Sunshine shimmered and glimmered off the snow on the surrounding peaks, making the sharp, jagged rocks look as if they were dusted with gold.