Heart of the West (6 page)

"Would you do something for me, girl?"

She nodded dumbly, unable even to breathe. A man hawked and spat in the room next door, and the other man cursed foully, and then there was a thump, like a boot hitting a far wall, and another curse.

"Would you let down your hair for me?"

Her hands trembled once as she lifted them to take off her felt bonnet, plain and black and without any plumes. He took the hat from her and tossed it onto the bed, his gaze not leaving her face. One by one, she pulled the pins out of her hair, and it began to fall in thick hanks over her shoulders. She shook her head, and it settled heavily on her back, falling to her waist.

He ran his hands through it, lifting it and letting it fall, watching it slide through his fingers. "You got hair like molded butter, Clem, and just as soft. All of you is so soft. So soft and fine."

He lowered his head and she thought: He is going to kiss me. He had kissed her before, but she knew this kiss would be different; it would lead to a thing that would change her forever, mark her, like a brand.

"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine."
Oh, how she wanted this. She wanted him.

"Clementine."

She tried to make her mouth smile, to stop the shaking in her legs. "Please..." But there were no words within her experience to tell him what she wanted.

He tightened his grip on her hair, as he mistook her trembling and her pleas for resistance. "You're my legal wife, girl. I'm entitled."

"I know, I know." Her eyes fluttered closed.
"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth... Let him kiss me..."

One of the men next door began to relieve himself into a tin chamber pot, clattering, splattering, and then he let out a rude noise suitable only for the privy house. Clementine jerked back, and hot color flooded her face as the appalling noises went on and on, echoing like a Boston Bay foghorn.

"Well, hell," Gus said when the room next door at last fell silent. He smiled, a shining, laughing Gus McQueen smile. He lowered his head again, but he only rubbed the tip of her nose with his.

"A man can't marry himself a lady and then make love to her for the first time in a place like this, where you can practically spit through the walls. I want it to be good for you, good and decently done, as it should be between man and wife."

He slid his hands through her hair and lifted it to his mouth as if he would drink of it. Her breath caught, and she trembled.

"I know you're scared, girl, but then, a man doesn't expect a wife who's been gently reared the way you have to be easy about the goings-on that take place in the bedroom. I reckon if I've waited my whole life for you, I can wait awhile longer. I don't suppose it would kill me to court you a little more first."

He was breathing heavily, as she was. Trembling deep inside himself, as she was. It was Clementine's thought that he could court her just as easily in bed as out of it, but she held it back. She was a lady, gently reared and innocent of the goings-on that took place in a bedroom.

"Christ, Jeb," a gruff voice bellowed next door. "You got it smellin' like the back end of a cow in here."

Gus's head fell forward, nearly bumping with hers. He was laughing. She did so love his laugh. "I reckon this here is more parts of the elephant you ever thought or hoped to make the acquaintance of," he said, and his laughter caused his breath to flutter soft and warm against her neck.

"I don't mind," she said. His breath on her neck was making her shiver and tighten up inside, tighter and tighter, so that she had to bite her lip to keep from moaning.

"Of course you mind. But things'll get better, you'll see. More what you're used to." His hand, gentle, so very gentle, stroked down the length of her neck to her shoulders. "The first night at our place, that's when I'm going to make you mine."

"Put a nickel twixt his ears, boy," the mule skinner said. "And quit grinnin' like a jackass eatin' cactus."

Gus McQueen kept a tight line on his mouth, but his eyes creased with laughter as he fingered a coin out of his vest pocket. He ambled his horse to the head of the team and, leaning over, placed the nickel between the floppy ears of the lead mule. The mules, all sixteen of them, stood gray and still as corpses in the middle of the Montana prairie.

His bride watched, perched beside the mule skinner on the wagon's plank seat. The skinner was a woman, although one wouldn't have known it to look at her. Her face was as brown and weathered as saddle leather. She wore man-sized boots and britches so caked with grease they crackled when she sat. Her cropped hair was covered with a battered slouch hat, its brim pinned up in the front with thorns. It was the filthiest hat Clementine had ever seen.

The skinner made a show of taking off her oilskin duster and rolling up the sleeves of her homespun shirt. Her arms were like a man's, knotty and thick as pine logs. She peeled the buckskin gauntlets off her hand and spat into bear-paw palms. Slowly she lifted the heavy braided rawhide out of the whip socket.

Nickel Annie claimed she was a rarity, being the only female in Montana to skin a mule train. Her wagon, built for heavy loads and rough terrain, was piled high with mining machinery, furniture, barrels, a bundle of buffalo hides that gave off a sour smell, and a piano bound for the only honky-tonk in Rainbow Springs, which was the only town in the RainDance country. Annie called her eight yoke of mules her babies. But she drove them the way a man would, by filling their ears with curses and cracking a whip over their heads.

The skinner gripped the whip's lead-filled hickory stock with both hands. She shifted the cud of tobacco in her mouth from one cheek to the other and grinned at Clementine. "You folk ready for this?"

"Ready?" Gus McQueen said. "I've been ready so long I've grown moss on my head."

Clementine pursed her lips to keep from laughing. A hawk hung in the air, the drone of the wind filled her ears. Suddenly the skinner's arm went back and forward in a blur. Twenty-five feet of braided rawhide unfurled and popped like a Fourth of July firecracker. The nickel went spinning up, up, up until it winked like a raindrop in the sun. Gus tried to snatch it out of the air and missed. The mules stood, not a tail flickering, not a hair stirring.

"And that," the mule skinner said with another brown-toothed grin that split her face in two, "is why they call me Nickel Annie."

"Well, shucks. And here all this time I thought it was 'cause you're so cheap," Gus drawled, and Clementine covered a smile with her hand.

"A nickel nurser—ha!" The skinner flung back her head and let out a bray of laughter. "A nickel nurser!" She shot a glob of tobacco juice out the corner of her mouth and gathered up the jerk line. The wagon lurched, and Clementine gripped the seat to keep from tumbling headfirst into rocks and ironweed and prairie grass. Gus nudged his horse into a walk beside them.

"Fetch me back my nickel, boy," Annie said after a couple of minutes had passed in silence.

"That's my nickel."

"Not any more it ain't. I earned it off you fair 'n' square. 'Sides, it don't seem right to leave a nickel a-lyin' there in the middle of the range where just any innocent might come acrost it. Why, a jackrabbit could swaller it, mistakin' it for a thistle, and give hisself a bellyache. Or an Injun could find it, spend it getting hisself all liquored up, and go on a scalpin' rampage and we'd all wind up dead as General Custer. Why, the more I think on it, boy, you owe it to man and animalkind to fetch me back my nickel."

Clementine looked behind them at the ruts that passed for a road. The wind tattered the worm of dust left by their passing. There was nothing to mark the place where the nickel had landed.

Gus heaved a put-upon sigh and pulled his horse around. He pushed his hat down on his head, thrust his boots deep into the stirrups, and shortened the reins. Without warning, it seemed, for she had seen no signal pass between the man and his mount, the horse broke into a wild gallop back down the trail.

Gus leaned far over sideways out of the saddle. His hand dug into the tall grass, his fingers scraping the ground. He was barely upright again before he had reined into a turn so tight the horse did it on its haunches. He laughed as he galloped back toward them, passing the wagon and tossing the nickel at the mule skinner on the fly. Annie pawed the coin out of the air, bit it, and stuffed it into the pocket of her leather britches. Gus kept going, disappearing over a hill of dusty sage.

Clementine watched him with her heart in her eyes. He rode by the seat of his pants and the tips of his spurs, and her chest wanted to swell with pride for him. Her man. Her cowboy.

She wasn't sure she liked it, though, when he rode ahead of them, leaving her alone in Nickel Annie's rawboned company. She had the feeling the mule skinner kept testing her and thus far had found her sadly wanting. "It takes a gritty heart to come out to this country and meet it on its own terms," Nickel Annie had once said, implying that Clementine's heart wasn't near gritty enough.

Normally the skinner drove her team by riding on the back of the left wheel mule. But today she'd chosen to ride with Clementine up on the seat, which wasn't anything more than a rough plank nailed between the wagon's tall slat-board sides.

Clementine clung to the splintery board eight feet in the air with a white-knuckled grip. The ground was pocked and rutted, and the wagon swayed and lurched over it like a rowboat in a heavy swell. She could see why these wagons were called spine-pounders. She felt the jar of every mile deep in her bones.

Miles. There had been an endless number of them in the week since they had left the steamboat and Fort Benton. Flat miles of olive sage and wind-ruffled grass. But today the buttes, which had been but blurred humps in the distance, were now suddenly upon them. It was like the quickening swell of an ocean wave, the way the plains rolled into ridges studded with yellow pines and dipped into coulees choked with brush and old snowdrifts.

A gust of wind buffeted her and drove stinging dirt into her face. The day was raw, the sun hidden behind clouds as thick and woolly as a horse blanket. Yesterday that same sun had been brittle and hot. Clementine had never sweated before in her life, but she could feel the residue of yesterday's sweat on her skin, gritty and sticky. She thought she probably stank, but she couldn't smell herself over the rank odor emanating from the green buffalo hides and Nickel Annie, who probably hadn't bathed since Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

At the road ranch where they'd spent last night, there had certainly been little opportunity to get clean. The place had been nothing more than a sod shack. When Clementine went to wash up before a dinner of boiled potatoes and canned corn, she found only an inch of wet scum in the wash trough and a sliver of soap the size of a thumbnail in an empty sardine can. The tow towel on the roller had been as black as the bottom of a coal scuttle. Their beds that night had been just as horrid: rough bunks lined with coarse ticking stuffed with prairie grass—what Gus had laughingly called Montana feathers. The wall next to the bunks had been smeared with smashed bedbugs.

Clementine shuddered now at the memory. A lick of wind tore at the ground and sent more dust swirling into her face. She wiped her cheeks and forehead with a grimy handkerchief and licked the prairie off her teeth. Already she knew she would come to hate this about her husband's country, this inability to keep clean.

Her husband. She could see him riding through a line of cottonwoods in the distance, sitting tall and loose in the saddle on the dun-colored mare he had bought in Fort Benton. She felt a sweet warmth when she looked at him. He was such a flamboyant man, with his ready smile and big laugh. As if he'd been dipped in gold with his suntanned face and tawny hair, and his melodious voice.

"An infinity of grass, Clementine," he had said, with that shining look he got on his face whenever he talked of his dream: to build his Rocking R into a cattle ranch the likes of which the world had yet to see. "Montana is an infinity of grass, and it's all there practically free for the taking." When he talked about the RainDance country, about its wild beauty and the miles of open range, she would feel something like music humming in her blood.

An infinity of grass.
She would never have believed it without seeing it for herself. This endless vista of riffling yellow and green, always being stirred by the wind and smelling of the sage. She lifted her gaze to the looming mountains, black and gray and peaked with snow. There was such a great vastness to this country. What Gus called elbow room for the heart. But all this land and sky—there was a raw emptiness to it that sometimes touched her soul with fear.

The rawhide whip snapped twice through the air, crackling like gunfire over the head of a mule lagging in harness, breaking her reverie. "Gee, Annabel!" the skinner bellowed. "Gee, you twice-damned daughter of a whoring bitch!"

Clementine had to struggle to hide another smile, although she thought she could almost feel her ears burning. The mule skinner was not at all genteel. Indeed, Nickel Annie was proud of her leather lungs and her salty mouth, which she liked to boast could cuss the hide off her mules slicker than any whip.

The skinner pulled a twist of tobacco out of her boot and tore off a hunk with her mulelike teeth. She worked her jaw awhile, then tongued home the chaw. Clementine tensed as a brown stream whizzed past her face to land on the wagon tongue with a splat. But for the first time that week she didn't flinch.

"You was sayin' yesterday," Annie began in a voice gentle enough to lull a baby to sleep, "that your daddy is preacher to some temple back in Boston?"

An old tumbleweed tore loose from a rock and bounced away, startling a sage chicken. The bird made a strange whirring noise as it took to the air, but Clementine's gaze did not follow its flight. She knew the skinner was setting her up like a wooden duck at a county fair, only to shoot something outrageous out of her mouth that would bring a blush to Clementine's cheeks.