Heart of the West (60 page)

Rafferty eased his horse up next to hers, so close that their stirrups knocked. Moses clicked his teeth on the bit and jerked his head, jingling the bridle's rings and chains. Clementine kept her gaze rigidly focused on the fiery mountains.

"The first white men to see Montana called it Land of the Shining Mountains."

Clementine said nothing. It was very beautiful and she hated it, hated it.

"The old-timers who named this land also had a saying about it: Sometimes a body's gotta lean into the wind in order to stand up straight.'" He nudged his horse closer, until their knees touched. "Clementine, darlin'... Montana didn't kill Charlie."

She swung around to face him, so fast and with such fury that he flinched a little. "I hate you. I hate everything about this place, and I hate you most of all."

She tried to urge her horse into a trot, but his hand lashed out, grabbing the reins. Her horse snorted, his hindquarters dancing sideways. "Why do you hate me, Boston? Because I can't give you a certified guarantee that there'll be no more pain, no more losses? Or do you hate me because you can't keep the whole damned world locked out of your heart no matter how much you might want to?"

She met his challenging look with a wordless, rigid pride. He let go of her reins, and she yanked her horse's head around, heeling him into a canter.

She didn't go far. She went to the shoulder of the ridge, pulled up, and slid out of the saddle. She threw the reins over her horse's head and let them trail. She slipped the cradleboard off her shoulders and wedged it up into the roots of an ancient giant larch. She stooped over and kissed Sarah's plump cheek, but the baby didn't awaken. She walked to the edge of the bluff, stirring up a nest of ground larks with the kick of her skirts.

Below her a mist lay in a gray scarf along the valley of sweet-grass meadows and gently rolling hills. In the shadow of the mountains the land was all tans and blues and purples.

Her horse lifted its head, his nose quivering, and then she saw them—the wild ones. A band of mustang ponies crossed the valley, wheeling in a half-moon arc, kicking up mud, shying and snorting and ripping up the tender spring grass with their hooves. They were small and sinewy and mottled-looking, for they were shedding their rough winter coats. But their manes and tails were long and flowing like spun flax. And they were all the colors of Montana in summer: dun and buckskin, chestnut and sorrel and bay.

The lead horse, a stallion, stopped and began to graze, and so the others followed. Gus had told her once there was always only one stallion to a band of wild ones. The stallion ruled with the help of a wise old mare. Sometimes geldings or mules who'd escaped from captivity were allowed to join the band, but never another stallion.

Just then this stallion jerked his head up, and though she was too far away to see, Clementine could imagine his nostrils flaring as he scented the wind. At the north end of the valley she could just make out the small figure on horseback that was Gus, approaching the band slowly so as not to alarm them into an all-out stampede. The stallion whinnied and broke into a gallop, and his mares followed, and within seconds it seemed the valley was empty again. But the mustangs' escape was only an illusion. In the end the men would have their way—the wild ones would be worn down, captured, and broken to the saddle and the spur.

An immense sadness pierced Clementine's soul. Suddenly the great wilderness that was so beautiful seemed too huge and lonely to be borne. She stared at the dazzling, deserted land and sky, and the sight made her dizzy. She tried to breathe, her chest pressing hard against her corset ribs. Something within her wanted to shriek.

In the blue canopy of sky overhead, a big golden eagle glided low, casting his shadow on the ground. The eagle screamed, and Clementine thought for a moment that the sound had been torn from her own throat.

She tilted back her head to the sky, letting the sun drench her in light and warmth, letting it seduce her. The wind gusted, stopping her mouth as if with a kiss, stealing her breath. She felt ravished by the wind.

There was no going back to the Clementine she had been before that summer day of dust and flying hooves, and the end of Charlie's laughter. Charlie was gone, and she was so afraid that in losing him she had lost the only thing she would ever be any good at: loving Charlie and being loved by him.

Yet somewhere deep inside her she could feel a stirring, like a tender green shoot just pushing its way through the thick, rich earth. She could feel herself coming back into the rhythms of life. Montana, hated and beloved, claimed her and it always would.

"Clementine..."

She turned, her skirts flapping in the wind. He came toward her, her love. The sunlight was in his eyes, narrowing them, turning them into chips of fierce, clear amber, and everything inside her seemed to give way. A huge hard mass of sorrow rose up in her chest and broke loose, dissolving, shedding off of her like a chrysalis.

She didn't know the tears were coming until she felt them on her eyelids.

He touched her face with his fingers.

That was all he had meant to do.

He had seen her standing at the edge of the bluff. And it was like this sometimes with her: he would look at her and his heart would catch. She seemed so fierce, with her head held high on her slender neck and her shoulders drawn back, erect and proud. She was so brave, his darlin'. Too brave for her own good. He had known a fox to gnaw off its own leg to escape a trap—such a fierce, snarling courage was Clementine's.

She must have heard him, or sensed his coming, for she turned just then, and the sight of her crying was like a kick to his heart.

And so he had touched her face with his fingers. To catch her tears, maybe, or to wipe them away. That was all he had meant to do.

But somehow his arms were around her and he was pulling her body flush up against his. Her hair was thick and silky under his lips. Her wild rose scent clung to her skin, to the air, to his senses. He breathed her in.

He was going to pull away from her, to let her go, and then he made the mistake of looking down at her face and seeing the passion flood her eyes. Her mouth opened beneath his, her breath gusting out of her in a helpless moan. She tasted hot, of tears and hunger. His hand slid to her waist and slipped down to grip her bottom, molding her closer. He kissed her deep, tongue to tongue, their breath mingling, and she made little wordless sounds and rubbed against him as...

Sarah let out a loud, impatient wail.

She jerked away from him as if they'd just been doused with icy water. For a moment he couldn't breathe, and then it came out of him in a rush, along with a wrenching shudder. "Clementine," he whispered.

With a sharp cry, she whirled and hurried over to Sarah, who was now turning the air blue with her hollering.

The leather of his saddle squeaked as he put his weight into the stirrup. He swung up onto his horse and rode away from her without looking back.

Clementine looked down at the top of her husband's head. There was some silver mixed in with the tawny gold, and it made her sad to think of it, to think of time passing, of days that were being lived and could never be lived over.

Gus sat on a nail-keg stool outside the door of the buffalo hunter's cabin, his hands sandwiched between his knees, his brooding gaze dissecting the ground.

"Sarah's down for her nap," she said.

He raised his head to look at her. "You going to talk to him?" he asked. Clementine said nothing. "You won't talk him out of it," he said.

"I won't try to talk him out of it."

As she crossed the yard she looked back once, not at Gus but at the cabin. The phlox was blooming on the roof, a promise of summer days to come. Around her the burned-off meadows were spotted green in places with new grass, new life.

The wild plum thickets were in bloom along the river, filling the air with their thick, sweet fragrance. The willows were swollen and sticky with brilliant red buds. Larks sang, frogs croaked, and the river made its own music, deep and rich, like a man's laugh.

She spotted the sleeve of his hickory shirt among the trees. He was fishing. At least he had a pole in his hands and a line in the water, but there was about him a sense of restless waiting, as if he knew she would be coming. She stopped farther than an arm's length away from him, for she didn't dare get close enough to touch. She wasn't afraid of him; she was afraid of herself.

He stared at her hard with those cold, uncomfortable eyes. "I reckon Gus told you I'm leaving in the mornin'."

She tried to say his name, but she couldn't.

"This time I ain't comin' back."

She had known this day would come. Ever since she had awakened, after the mad wolf had bitten her, to see the raw need in his eyes and the wondering look of a man in love... she had known he would have to leave her.

He set the pole down and rose to his feet. She stiffened, but he didn't take a step toward her. He only looked at her, and that was nearly more than she could bear.

"I'm going to say this once. I shouldn't say it at all, but I'm not tough enough to ride out of here and leave it unsaid. I love you, Clementine. But it's not the noble, chaste sort of love you seem to want from me. I want to take you, to make you my woman and only mine. I want to feel your hair slide across my naked belly. I want to know the taste of your tongue in my mouth. I want to have you beneath me, to spill myself long and deep inside you."

Oh, God, I am not worth all this... this passion, she thought. I was never worth it, and you make me so afraid. You have always made me so afraid.

"Clementine..." He looked up the river, squinting against the glare of sun on water. Then he pinned her with his yellow eyes. "Come with me."

She went absolutely still. Even her heart stopped beating. The silence stretched long and taut between them. She watched his face tighten, harden. She watched his eyes turn the brassy cold of winter suns.

"I love you, Zach Rafferty," she said. They were the first words she'd spoken to him since he had kissed her.

He pushed out a breath that caught and broke. "I know."

"I love you," she said again. And as on that day when they had captured the mustangs, she had the feeling of having burst free. She loved him so much. Sometimes you had to dare to grasp the lightning. And sometimes you had to dare to let it go. "Will you write?"

"No."

"To Gus. You could write to Gus."

He shook his head. And he broke then. She saw it in his eyes first, and then the anguish poured over his face. He turned his head, but she could see the cords in his throat working to keep back the tears.

"You will think of me." She said it as a command. He must think of her, for she was his. She would always be his.

"Clementine," he said, and her name came out of him broken and mangled. "My love for you won't stop with my leaving. Come an evenin' over the years, when you step outside your door and hear the wind blowing through the cottonwoods, that'll be me, thinking of you, whispering your name, and loving you."

She stared into his eyes, absorbing his pain, enduring it with him. Knowing it would be the last thing they would ever share.

Slowly, her gaze still on his ravaged face, she unclasped the cameo brooch at her throat. She didn't put it into his hands, for she couldn't bear to come that close to him. She laid it on the rock where he'd been sitting, and then she walked away from him without looking back.

Gus sat on the nail-keg stool and watched his wife come back to him. She went right into the house, without a word, without looking at him. But he had seen her eyes.

Gus sat with his stomach quaking and his leg muscles tense. He wanted to go down to the river and see Zach, see if the same look of longing and loss that he'd discovered in his wife's eyes was there in his brother's. Instead he sat on the old nail-keg stool and watched the sun set.

He sat there through the night. Just as the dark was beginning to soften into dawn, Zach came back from the river, or from wherever he'd disappeared to. He looked right at Gus and there was nothing in his eyes, and there was nothing said between them. And then he went into the barn.

A half hour later he came out again, leading his saddled gray.

Tears filled Gus's eyes. He blinked hard, trying to will them away before his brother saw them. For he knew to his shame they were tears of relief.

Clementine pushed aside the curtain she had made long ago of bleached flour sacks and embroidered with little yellow finches. He was in the yard, her love, sitting on his horse, and Gus stood beside him, looking up at him and saying good-bye.

Gus would always be the cowboy of her dreams, but Rafferty was her life's passion. The man she was put on this earth to love with her every breath, every heartbeat.

She closed her eyes. She imagined herself going out the door and crossing the yard, holding out her hand to him so that he could pull her up behind him in the saddle. She imagined herself riding away with him, being with him, loving him forever.

She imagined herself going out the door and crossing the yard, but when she opened her eyes again he was no longer there, and all she could hear was the beat of his horse's hooves as he rode away.

Part Three: 1886

CHAPTER 26

Gus McQueen looked up into a hard morning sky that had already been bled white by a relentless sun. He cuffed the sweat off his face and whacked his hat against his thigh, raising a cloud of dust off his chaps.

"God damn," he said. The word tasted foul, but he said it again, trying to ease the weight off his chest, which was heavy with failure. "God damn it all to hell."

He squatted on his haunches beside the river and scooped up a handful of water, splashing it over his face. The water tasted foul, too, so alkaline it was almost thick enough to chew. It was no relief against the heat.

The sun seemed to melt and pour out of the sky, shriveling the grass and beating relentlessly at the air, and drying up the once muddy riverbank so that it curled and cracked like old paper. In all the years he'd ranched in this valley, he'd never seen the Rainbow running this low. Hell, it didn't even run now, it trickled. If it didn't rain soon he would go bust. But then, with cattle prices so low it didn't pay to ship the beeves to market, he'd probably go bust even if the sky suddenly started gushing water.

He stood up slowly, feeling old, his bones creaking. He unwrapped his horse's reins from around a chokecherry tree that had borne no fruit during this summer of drought, and headed toward home. His mare plodded along, her head hanging so low her nose nearly scraped the parched ground. It was too hot and dry to do anything but suffer.

As he emerged from the shadows of the cottonwoods, he disturbed a black-tailed doe that was grazing off the withered grass beside the salt block. The doe lifted her head and bounded away, her ribs showing through her hide plain enough to count. But her coat was long and shaggy. Yesterday Gus had caught sight of a white Arctic owl sitting on the snake fence. The wild geese and ducks and songbirds were already flying south, and lately the stars had been flashing and glimmering brighter at night. Even his own beard was growing faster. These were all signs that a bad winter was coming—although he didn't know how he knew this. Maybe Zach had once told him.

Zach. A sigh stretched across his chest, leaving behind an ache. He couldn't think of his brother without feeling this ache that was a convoluted mixture of love and hate, jealousy and longing.

Sometimes he would awaken in the stillness of the night and he would be haunted by images of his brother: Zach astride a bronc, his hand reaching for the sky; Zach cradling a bloody newborn calf in his arms; Zach dancing with Hannah on a summer's night, their laughter floating up into a star-filled sky... Zach left alone on the Natchez wharf, his head held high in rigid pride as the steamboat's paddles began to churn. And in the stillness of the night Gus would look at his wife's face and want to touch her, and he would be afraid to.

In the stillness of the night, when he had nothing to listen to but his own thoughts, a man couldn't hide from the truth of what he thought about himself. Down deep in the guts of him, in that secret, vulnerable place where a man lived, Gus thought he would never be the man his brother was.

He stopped now to look up at the big house through the shimmering heat ripples. They called it the big house not because it was big—though it was of a good size, with two stories and four bedrooms, even a water closet with a patent toilet— but to distinguish it from the buffalo hunter's sod-roofed cabin, which still stood in the shade of the cottonwoods along the river. The house had green-painted shutters, a double gallery wrapped all around it, and a shake roof with a pair of gables. He had at last given his wife some of the luxuries he'd promised her, even if he was already on the verge of losing it all again.

The new boards of the gallery steps squeaked beneath his boots. He entered by way of the front door, his nostrils pinching at the thick smell of burned niter papers and ginseng steam. He paused a moment, his heart clenched, as he listened for the wheezing sounds that meant the boy was having another attack. And let out a sigh of weary relief when the house gave back nothing but silence.

Their baby son, Daniel, born just last New Year's Day, suffered from what the doc called spasms of the lungs. Burning niter papers helped a little, and Lily Woo had shown them a Chinese remedy that involved inhaling the steam from boiling water heavily laced with ginseng. This soothed the spasms sometimes, but not always. Sometimes the baby's lips turned blue and his chest heaved with the frantic beating of his heart, and his arms waved wildly as if he were trying to pull the air into his wheezing lungs with his little hands. In those moments the helpless terror they felt was almost unendurable. Gus didn't think Clementine could survive having to bury another child. He didn't think he could survive it.

He took off his hat and ran a finger around the inside leather, wiping out the sweat. He hung the hat on a steer-horn rack just as a murmur of voices floated out from the kitchen—one shrill and petulant, the other soothing and patient: Saphronie trying to coax his two-year-old daughter, whose middle name was Stubborn, into finishing her stirabout.

A year ago if someone had told Gus that he would allow a harlot, even a reformed one, into his house to tend to his children, he probably would have called them a liar and spat in their eye. But Daniel's birth had been hard on Clementine, and with her stuck out here alone on the ranch, with the one baby barely weaned and the new one being so sickly, and then Hannah arriving that day with the tattooed whore in tow and acting mad enough to hiss fire, and...

And she had gone at it with him nose to nose. "You so impressed with what you got in your britches, Gus McQueen, that you can't keep 'em buttoned long enough for your woman to get over the last babe before you're planting another one in her belly? I 'spect you go easier on your broodmares than you do on your wife."

Angry words had built up in Gus's mouth to be stopped by a rigid-jawed shame. He lusted after his wife, he always had, and he couldn't keep himself from taking her. It was a weakness in him that he admitted to and didn't even bother to try to over- come. In his selfish desire to satisfy his carnal urgings he was his father's son. His brother's brother.

"You're just damn lucky, mister," Hannah had gone on, "that Saphronie here has agreed to do the heavy work and help care for your two babies and all for only board and a dollar a week. So damn lucky that you're gonna keep your mouth shut and let it happen."

And so he had done just that.

But he had never gotten used to the sight of her ravaged face—those dark blue teardrops running silently and forever down her chin. This mousy, morose woman bore the marks of cold, rough handling on her mind and body. Although he'd occasionally come upon her laughing and chatting with Clementine, and the children obviously adored her, she was always sullen around him, drawn deep inside herself. Perhaps it was because she sensed his thoughts, which Gus had to admit weren't charitable. But he just couldn't help feeling that somehow she should have found a way to stop the savages from taking her. A decent woman, it was said, always saved the last bullet for herself.

Gus came into the kitchen just as Sarah bellowed, "No more stir 'bout!" and turned her bowl upside down on the table. The milk-thinned oatmeal mush splattered over the table and made a fine mess. Sarah looked at what she'd done and grinned. It probably wasn't good for his daughter's character, but Gus couldn't help grinning along with her.

Gus's gaze went to his son. The boy'd had another lung spasm attack last night, but now he seemed fine. He sat on Saphronie's lap, chanting nonsense sounds to himself and waving a spoon through the air.

Saphronie had cast a swift covert glance up at Gus when he entered the room, and now she lurched awkwardly to her feet while holding Daniel tightly to her chest. "I'll put him down for his sleep now," she said to Clementine, who stood at the ironing board, pressing the flounces on one of her petticoats.

"No sleep!" Sarah declared.

Clementine's eyes were on Gus, watching him intently, even as she sprinkled water on the wrinkled cloth and the smell of lavender filled the kitchen. "You may help Miss Saphronie gather eggs," she said to their daughter.

Sarah climbed off the chair herself and marched from the room, her back straight, her arms swinging like a little general's, making Gus smile. Already she had the world figured out, and she was in charge.

Saphronie, with Daniel in her arms, followed her. The woman definitely had some strange quirks, Gus thought. Today she wore yellow-striped knickerbockers that reached to her boot tops.

Gus wondered if Saphronie would leave if he told her he could no longer afford to pay her a dollar a week. Somehow he doubted it. And besides, it was Clementine's butter-and-egg money that paid Saphronie's salary. His wife churned butter, which she sold for twelve cents a pound, and raised hens, whose eggs she sold for five cents the dozen. It was Clementine's butter-and-egg money that had kept the ranch afloat this summer, and he hated having to admit that, even to himself. It was supposed to be the man's place to provide.

Clementine turned to the hob on the range and clamped a handle around a hot iron. She lifted it, and he saw the fragile bones and sinews of her hand stand out against the chapped and reddened skin. A fine sheen of sweat coated her face, and yet there was that stillness about her that had always come from deep within her and had always shut him out. Sometimes he hated the strength he saw in her.

Sometimes he thought he was married to a woman he didn't know, and didn't like.

"Isn't it a mite hot to be doing that sort of work?" he said.

"It's got to get done, no matter what the weather," she answered, causing his jaw to tighten. She made him feel responsible for the heat and the drought, responsible for the whole miserable, sorry state of the world.

She set the iron on a trivet and lifted her head in time to catch the look on his face. "Gus? Is something the matter?"

"Why, heavens no, Mrs. McQueen," he said, mimicking her Boston reserve and high-blown manners that she could use like a shield to force people to keep their distance. "Everything's just as fine as frog hair. I got cattle out there dying on their feet, and it looks to be another wonderful day of a hundred degrees in the shade and hot winds that shrivel up the grass and dry up what's left of the water holes. Why, I don't reckon I remember when things've ever been this good."

He stopped to catch his breath and glare at her. "Why don't you just go ahead and say it. Go on, God damn you, say it!"

He shouldn't have cussed at her. He never cussed at her. But he saw no condemnation in her eyes, only concern.

"What do you want me to say, Gus?"

"That I should've seen the beef-market glut coming, should've known a drought was on the way when it didn't snow more than a few flurries last winter. That I shouldn't've run amok and overstocked the range just because we had one good boom year. That I shouldn't've borrowed to buy that timberland I wanted just because it'd come up for sale. Or mortgaged my soul to build an eastern house for my eastern wife out in the middle of a godforsaken Montana prairie where droughts and bad winters and hard winds and grass fires are as common as weeds in June..."

His eastern wife was looking at him, saying nothing. Whatever she was feeling she had under control, buttoned up tight like her stiff collar. The only times he'd ever known Clementine to let herself go were in bed, in his arms, and that one time at Charlie's grave when she'd screamed her guts out in rage and pain. He wished she would let go now, rant and rail at him, maybe even cry. Hell, what kind of woman was it who never cried? He wanted her to act scared so that he could play the man and comfort her.

She took a step toward him, and he backed away from her, horrified at the sudden tide of feelings that surged in his chest. He was the one who wanted to rant and rail and cry. He was the one who needed comforting.

"Gus, what is it? What's wrong?"

His hip knocked into a chair, and he sat down in it. He went to bury his head in his hands and planted one of his elbows in a glob of Sarah's mush. "Well, hell," he said and started to laugh, but the sound that came out his mouth was a sob. He pressed his fist hard against his lips.

A hot wetness burned the backs of his eyes and he squeezed them shut. When he opened them again she was standing beside him. He couldn't lift his head, couldn't let her see his face, not with the stinging heat filming his eyes again. Her hand came up and touched the fist he still had pressed tightly to his mouth, and it was like pulling a bung out of a barrel.

The words spewed out of him, harsh and grating. "Oh, God, Clem... we're stone-broke, the taxes are coming due, and the whole blamed ranch is mortgaged from root cellar to chimney. The cattle aren't just thirsty anymore, they're dying, and what's still living are pure scrubs. I borrowed against the land to build this house, and I'm so blasted..."
Scared.
But he couldn't tell her that. He couldn't tell her how scared he was. He was the man. He was the one who was supposed to take care of her. He was the one who'd always been so full of big talk about giving her back all the things she'd given up when he talked her into running off with him, full of such big plans about how he was going to make the Rocking R into the best spread north of Texas.

Somehow her hand had wound up on his head and she was smoothing his hair over and over the way a mother would touch a child. Sweetly. It felt so good, her touching him like this, and it made him ashamed. Ashamed that he needed it so.

"How much do you need?" she said.

For a moment he misunderstood, and he almost said it aloud: I
want all of you. All of you, Clementine, including— maybe most especially—the parts of you I've never had.
And then he realized in the instant before the words left his lips that she was talking about money, and he let out a harsh laugh. "About all what's in the Miners Union Bank if we took a notion in our heads to rob it."

"For the taxes, then. How much do you need for the taxes?"

He rubbed a hand over his face. He was shaking, but deep inside himself, low in his belly where, thank God, she couldn't see it. "Around a hundred."