Heart of the West (62 page)

Suddenly she felt watched and she spun around on the seat. She raised her hand, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun.

She thought at first he wasn't real, a dream created out of her mind from the dust and shimmering heat ripples. A man in a dusty black Stetson, on a big gray standing still beside the fingerboard that pointed the way into Rainbow Springs.

The reins went slack in her hands. She thought she could actually feel her heart slamming in slow, painful strokes against her breast. The wind blew wild, crying her name. But it was his voice... his voice.

The man on the big gray rode at her. She wasn't sure when the hope began to die. It was the way he sat the horse or held his head or simply was. Was not.

Yet she clung to the hope still, because she couldn't bear to let it go, up until the moment when the stranger drew abreast of her and lifted his hat, saying, "Howdy, ma'am."

"Sir," she said with a small nod.

She sat trembling on the plank seat until he was well past her, until he had enough time to ride past the madwoman's soddy and then some. Then she bent over, wrapping her arms around her middle. She took a deep breath, and then another and another, until her chest began to shudder with the tears she would never let out.

Clementine pulled the team up abruptly to avoid running over a whiskified man who had come flying out of the Gandy Dancer saloon. Wagon axles squealed behind her. The air rang with whoas and curses.

Rainbow Springs had never been a pretty town, but now it was truly ugly. There were bald spots in the hills where the trees had been cut down to shore up the mine workings. The buildings were all ramshackle and weather-pitted. And over it all loomed the RainDance Butte, barren and scarred and rutted with erosion. The streets all ended in mounds of tailings and dirty slag piles. A pall of brown smoke hung listlessly overhead.

I reckon I'm seeing the elephant, Clementine thought with a sudden inward laugh, as another fighting drunk flew backward out the Gandy Dancer's slatted swinging doors. But she was no longer that girl who had grown up in luxury and suffocating godliness in that house on Louisburg Square, that girl who had yearned for grand adventures. She didn't know who she was anymore. She felt like a stranger to herself.

The air shivered with the harsh clang of metal banging on metal. Clementine looked southeast, where a pair of thin parallel silver strands ran into town from out of the prairie. A crew of Chinese toiled at laying the last few feet of track for the new spur line of the Utah and Northern Railroad. They worked barefoot, with their baggy blue pants rolled up to their knees and their queues coiled around their heads. Another Chinese gang was busy building a water tank. One man stirred a great black steaming vat of tar with a big long-handled paddle. The vat sat on a bed of glowing coals and emitted a suffocating stench. It was hot work, Clementine thought, to be doing under today's angry sun.

Just then she spotted Sam Woo crossing the vacant lot where the depot would soon be built. He carried, balanced on his shoulders, a pine pole with large covered metal containers swaying at either end. It had been Erlan's idea to go after a contract with the railroad to dispense hot tea to the Chinese workers, and it had turned out to be a real moneymaker.

At the moment, though, Sam was having trouble making his way through the north end of the lot, where a crowd had gathered around an old dray. A man stood on the empty bed, shaking his fist in the air and shouting himself red in the face. Clementine called out to Sam, but he didn't seem to hear.

"The Chinese must go!"

The words, which had come blasting as if out of a bullhorn, startled Clementine. She had assumed the man on the dray was a temperance shouter.

"The heathen Chinee is a parasite!" he bellowed. He was a muscle-knotted man in homespun britches patched with buckskin, and a head of tangled gray hair. He punctuated his speech by waving his big hands through the air. "The Chinaman spends his time eating opium and worshiping his foul gods. He takes slave wages and cheats the American man out of his honest day's labor. I say let's rid this country of the pigtailed hoards. Let's chase 'em back to China where they belong!"

The crowd stirred, rustling and shifting from foot to foot like crows on a fence. One man spotted Sam Woo and cried out, pointing. The ragged edge of the crowd surged toward the storekeeper, jostling him roughly. The tin containers tipped, sloshing steaming tea into the dirt.

"The Chinaman is no more a citizen than a coyote is a citizen, and he never can be!" the man on the dray shouted. "The Chinese must go!"

The crowd took up the chant. "The Chinese must go!"

Clementine tried to turn her wagon into the lot, but she was blocked by the crowd. She wrapped the reins around the brake handle and stood up. "Mr. Woo," she called out, "may I offer you a ride back to your mercantile?"

Sam turned toward her, puckering his shortsighted eyes. He bobbed his head, since he couldn't bow with the pole across his back, and his thick spectacles flashed in the sun. "Very kind of you, Mrs. McQueen," he shouted back, "but this Chinaman has business he must do."

"Mr. Woo, I really think you should ride along with me. Mrs. Woo would wish it."

"No can do. No sirree jingle."

Clementine unwrapped the reins and urged the team forward, feeling uneasy. But when she looked over her shoulder, she saw that Sam was all right. He had reached the railroad section gang and was already pouring out cups of hot tea.

She caught sight of a shiny black Peerless buggy parked in the shadow of the half-built water tower. The man driving the buggy was dressed fine enough to be seen in the grandest hotel in New York City. The brocade on his vest shone like gold bullion, and the studs on his shirt sparkled in the sun like diamonds. They probably
were
diamonds, she thought a moment later when the man turned his head and she saw the black patch that covered his eye. One-Eyed Jack McQueen, gambler and swindle artist and now primary owner of the Four Jacks silver mine, as well as numerous other lucrative business interests.

He tipped his silk hat to her, his roguish smile flashing as bright as his shirt studs. She wouldn't put it past the man to have been behind that soapbox orator and his anti-Chinese rabble-rousing. As long as she had known him, Jack McQueen had been stirring up trouble just for the pure deviltry of it.

She was damp with sweat and coated with red dust by the time she pulled up to the hitch rack at the Woo mercantile. She had one foot on the ground and the other still on the foot bracket when her stomach seemed to rise up into her throat. She bent over, drawing deep breaths as she fought the nausea down.

She straightened her back slowly, feeling chilled and clammy. The world tilted slightly and then settled. She drew in another deep breath of the dry hot air.

She took off her linen duster and shook it, and the fine red dust floated down like mist. It disturbed the flies that buzzed over the dung in the street, and they swarmed in a black cloud around her face. The nausea rose up in her throat again.

The heat burned through the soles of her half boots as she walked down the boardwalk. She had to lift her skirts high above the tobacco muck that smeared the bleached planks. The Ladies Social Club had persuaded the town fathers to pass an ordinance against spitting on public pathways, but thus far it was neither obeyed nor enforced.

When she reached Hannah's white picket gate she had to stop again and fight off another wave of dizziness. She gripped the wooden slats so hard she rammed a splinter through the heel of her glove.

"Clementine!" Hannah came tripping down the path in a flash of poppy-red skirts. "I was beginning to think you weren't coming this week... Land, gal. You look like you're about to faint."

"It's just this dreadful heat."

"Ain't it awful, though." Hannah looked up at the sky, squinting. "Lord, there's not enough rain in them clouds to douse a candle. I can't promise it's much cooler inside, but at least we can get you off your feet."

Clementine looked back at her wagon and the mercantile through shimmering heat ripples. Those two old prospectors, Pogey and Nash, were roosting where they did every day now, on a spindle-backed wooden bench beneath the store's fancy new sheet-glass window. Sacks of potatoes and barrels of salted pork and mackerel were lined up with military precision on either side of the door. Since his marriage, the whole of Sam's mercantile was like that, as organized as a trail cook's wagon. Just then Erlan stepped outside, her pregnant belly leading the way. Her expectant happiness—that was what the Chinese girl called her unborn baby.

Clementine realized that Hannah was talking to her. "What?... Oh, no, I must unload my butter and eggs first, before they spoil. And today I really mustn't dawdle. I need to get home well before dark or Gus'll start to fret."

Yet she lingered a moment, for there was something she needed to tell Hannah, and she was afraid she wouldn't get the chance later. She could feel her cheeks burning, and she knew it wasn't only from the heat. Even with Hannah she'd never found it easy to discuss sexual matters and bodily functions.

She kept hearing her mother's voice saying, "Never ask such naughty questions."

She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Hannah... that female preventive you gave me—it appears not to have worked. I am with child again."

"Oh, honey..." Hannah slipped an arm around her waist, and Clementine turned into her, like a child seeking comfort. "Damn that Gus McQueen," Hannah said. "When's he gonna learn that he doesn't have to go mountin' you every time he gets the urge?"

Clementine stiffened and jerked away from her. "You've no call to speak so, Hannah Yorke."

The color surged high on Hannah's cheekbones, but she didn't apologize. She and Gus had always brought out the worst in each other. "I only meant to say he's wearing you to a frazzle havin' his babies."

"They are my babies as well." She bit her lip and looked away, her chest hitching. "Only I don't want this one," she said, and the words tasted like the foulest blasphemy in her mouth. Yet they were true. She was so afraid. Afraid of dying, afraid of having this baby only to lose it, to have to bury it out there beneath the cottonwoods beside Charlie. "Neither will its father want it when he comes to learn of it. He's got so many worries weighing him down, with the ranch and the drought and little Daniel being so sickly and... and all."

Her mind went back to what they'd done on that bed and the empty way it had left her feeling. The big walnut sleigh bed with its matching bonnet highboy and marble-topped dresser— all costing a pretty piece of change and bought with borrowed money because Gus had wanted to please her. And she had let him do it to please himself.

"You'll both feel different once the baby actually gets here," Hannah said. "Once winter is over and the spring rains come."

"Will we?" Clementine looked up at her friend's concerned face. Hannah's cheeks were shiny and flushed with the heat and coated with a fine layer of dust. "Will we feel different come spring?"

Hannah's mouth tightened, making her look suddenly old. "Maybe not."

Clementine felt a strange tension in her stomach. A restless fluttering, although it was still too early for her to be feeling life. Expectant happiness... She had a sudden memory of her mother sitting in a white rattan chair, surrounded by the smell of Easter lilies, laughing with relief, weeping with pain because there could be no more babies. How old had her mother been on that day? No older than she was now, surely. All those questions she had once wanted to ask of her mother, and most of them were still unanswered. That heart-shaped sachet filled with coins—her mother's only legacy. In the end she had given it up to Gus so easily, without a thought.

"Maybe you'll have another girl," Hannah said.

Clementine pressed a hand to her stomach, which was already growing round beneath the steel busks of her corset. "If she is a girl, Hannah... I will raise her to be different than we are. She will grow up strong and certain of who she is and what she wants. And she will never be afraid."

Erlan wrestled the pork barrel over the threshold and onto the boardwalk. It was not an easy task, for her pregnant belly kept getting in the way. And though her golden lilies were no longer two tiny arcs, she could still only move about in short hopping steps.

She moaned as she straightened up and pressed her fist against a sharp burning pain beneath her breastbone. She cursed the unlucky demon that had tricked her into eating those beans for lunch. They gave out wrong
chi
and caused great imbalance among her inner organs.

Oh, but it was as hot and dry as a dragon's breath today. And the dust! She frowned at the sight of the new sheet window. Only this morning she had washed it, and now you could barely read the words painted in gilt on the glass: Sam Woo's Emporium.

She wondered if it had ever been this hot or this dusty in Foochow. It was odd that she couldn't remember, for lately all her dreams had been filled with vivid images of home. But on waking she often wondered if her dreams had lied. Surely the mists had never been so white, the rice paddies so green, the sunshine so soft and golden. She wondered how it could be that her memories had grown shabbier than her dreams.

Soon, though, she would have no need for either dreams or memories. Her debt was nearly redeemed, the bargain fulfilled. In a croquet-sandal box beneath her bed were one thousand one hundred and sixty American dollars in greenbacks and silver. And growing big in her belly was a baby.

Except... except that when she had made her bargain with the merchant Woo, when she had promised to give him a son, she hadn't understood how much a part of her his son would be. How they would share the same body and the same blood, draw life from the same air. Now she wondered how she would ever be able to leave a child,
her
child, here in this alien land when it came time for her to return to her lao chia.

She thrust the thought away, unable to bear it. An expectant mother shouldn't dwell on sad thoughts anyway lest the baby be born to an unhappy life. To be with child was a lucky thing, and the gods were often spiteful toward those who had too much good joss.