Heart of the West (69 page)

Gus's eyes narrowed on the paper. "You were so sure I'd want to sell out that you had this all written up ahead of time?"

Jack McQueen shook his head, huffing a melodramatic sigh. "That suspicious mind of yours must truly be a burden to you at times. I had two different documents drawn up, Gustavus. One if you decided to sell, another for full partnership in the newly formed Four Jacks Copper Mine. It's not too late to change your mind."

"Sure, change my mind and give you that two thousand dollars I don't have and that I'm just pure anxious to throw away into your pocket." Gus took the bill of sale from his father and read it over three times before he rested it on the hay bale and scratched his signature across the bottom.

"I have this niggling little feeling you will regret this someday," said Jack McQueen with a sad smile. "And then inevitably you will blame me for it. You'll twist it all around inside that righteous head of yours until I come out the villain, just so you won't come out the fool. Here's the money, all in treasury notes, no greenbacks. I expect you'll want to count it."

"Damn right."

Gus carefully examined every note. He even held one up to the lantern light as if he suspected it of being counterfeit. His father made a show of leaving slowly, as if he didn't want them to think he was in hurry to get away.

"I'm durned if I can see it, Clem," Gus said as they stood together in the barn and watched One-Eyed Jack's sleigh cut through the yard. "But I know somehow he's hornswoggled us good."

"At least we have some ready money now, when we need it most. And you're free of him."

He slipped an arm around her waist, and she turned her head to look up at him. His face was hard, almost bitter. And his eyes were dark with an emotion she couldn't read. Not fear, exactly, or anger. He looked almost haunted.

"Gus?"

His arm tightened around her, pulling her close. "I don't know if I can ever be free of him, girl. He's in my blood."

The next morning Gus showed her a newspaper that had come out of Deer Lodge only last week. A sodbuster was selling hay—at a dear price, but as he told her, they had money now and matters were desperate. As in other years, they'd only put up enough of their own hay to see their saddle horses through the snow months. This winter they needed more,

"I can get there and back in two days if I push it," he said. "The beeves just aren't making it on what little range grass they can find. If I can hand-feed 'em during the worst of these storms, enough of them just might make it."

Clementine slipped the newspaper out of his hands to take a closer look at it. "How scandalous!" she said with a little sniff.

"What's so scandalous about hay?"

"Not hay. This." She tapped the paper with a mock-indignant finger. Her lips worked hard to keep from smiling. "An advertisement for red flannel drawers for ladies. And they come all the way from Paris. Imagine that."

Gus widened his eyes and twisted his mouth into a lustful leer. "I'm imagining it."

Laughter bubbled up out of her. She tried to stop it with her hands and he stopped it with his mouth. They clung to each other a moment before separating.

She made sure he dressed warmly, fussing over him as if he were one of the children. Everything wool and fur from the skin out. Wool longhandles and three pairs of wool socks. A red-checked woolen shirt and California pants and a sheepskin jacket, and over all that a buffalo coat. Knee-high buffalo boots worn with the hair on the inside and fastened with leather snaps and brass buttons. A sealskin cap and sealskin mittens lined with wool.

He went into the kitchen, where Saphronie was boiling the week's laundry and the children were playing within the circle of warmth cast by the stove. "Daddy!" Sarah shrieked as he bent to kiss her good-bye. "You look like a bear!"

"If he isn't careful," Clementine teased as she put on her own sheepskin coat, "he's liable to stampede the cattle."

Sarah gave her mother a disgusted look. "You are silly, Mama."

Clementine and Gus were laughing together as they left the kitchen and went out into the yard. Last month, when the snow got deep, Gus had put the ash-hub runners on the hay wagon, turning it into a sled. Now she helped him add the hayrack. The air shimmied with the cold, and a fresh snowstorm brewed darkly against the mountains. The clouds were heavy and murky, the color of wet slate.

"At least it isn't snowing yet," she said. He'd finished hitching up the team and was rolling the wagon-turned-sled out into the frozen yard.

"Don't hex the weather." He shook his finger at her, laughing, and she thought suddenly that they had been doing that a lot lately—laughing. Laughing and being in love—so in love they were almost giddy with it.

He climbed into the sled and wrapped the leather reins around his mittened hands. He looked down at her and she saw the flash of his teeth beneath the tawny brush of his mustache. "If I get a chance while I'm in Deer Lodge," he said, "I'll buy you a pair of them scandalous red flannel drawers... Gee-up!"

The horses jerked into motion, harness chains jangling, the runners crunching over the snow. She watched, shivering in her baggy sheepskin coat, until he disappeared over the crest of the rise. A lone magpie flapped across the sallow sky. Her breath smoked, wreathing her face.

She told herself she was being foolish, but suddenly she felt very much alone. And scared.

He'd been gone only an hour when it started to snow.

It snowed fitfully, lacy flakes sifting out of the cloud-swollen sky. By noon, it had grown so dusky the lamps had to be lit.

And it was cold. Cold enough, Saphronie said in Montana lingo, to make a polar bear unpack his longhandles.

Clementine hung asafetida sacks around the necks of the children and slathered goose grease on them to ward off the grippe. She bundled them up into so much wool and fur they could barely move. Sarah didn't like this restriction on her freedom one bit. She stomped around the house like a martinet, trailing scarves, her little body lumpy with fur wraps, determined to show that no winter storm was going to cramp her style.

At such times Clementine would look at her daughter and wonder how she had ever managed to produce such a child. Opinionated and outspoken, demanding and bossy, insatiably curious and brave enough to face down a grizzly. So at ease in her own skin, so sure of herself that she insisted on trying to impose that certainty onto others. "I don't want to" or "I don't care" was her answer to any demand that went contrary to her own will. She never said it defiantly, only matter-of-factly. She truly didn't care. Sarah McQueen pleased only herself.

She is all that I once had it in me to be, Clementine often thought, before my father and life beat it out of me. And she worried for her little girl's future. She wished she could wrap Sarah up against the pain that was coming as easily as she had bundled her up against the cold. For as sure as night ended even the sunniest of days, life would try to break her daughter's spirit. The world was cruel to little girls who didn't want to please, and to grown-up women who bravely spoke out and went their own way.

And she worried about Daniel as well. His was such a gentle, dreamy spirit, not at all like Charlie, who had been pure cowboy from the minute he drew his first breath. This was a country that demanded hardness from a man, a tough body and a tough heart. Men broke horses with spurs and whips, and pressed hot irons into the hides of little calves. Men hanged other men from cottonwood trees. Looking at her son now, she couldn't imagine him growing up to do these things, these tough-man things. His health alone would brand him a weakling in the western code.

At least he didn't seem to suffer as much from the lung spasms during these cold months. Right now he lay before the stove content to be wrapped up like a silkworm in a cocoon. He babbled nonsense sounds to himself, although every now and then Clementine caught the word "bear." It was the only one he knew, besides Mama and Dada, and she couldn't imagine how he'd come to learn it when they'd had no trouble with bears around the ranch since he'd been born.

Clementine wished she could wrap herself up into a cocoon. She could use another pair of drawers, no matter what their color, although she already had three pairs on, so that she waddled when she walked. But cold air billowed up from the floor as if the earth were breathing ice. She finally put all female modesty aside and followed Saphronie's example, putting on a pair of Gus's trousers under her skirts. With the trousers, the three pairs of shimmies, two wool petticoats, a wool skirt, Gus's socks, which were as thick as saddle blankets, and a belly swelling with baby, she no longer waddled when she walked; she rolled like a log in water.

Sarah and Saphronie came back just then from a trip upstairs to the water closet. Their breath wreathed white around their faces even here in the kitchen, which was always the warmest room in the house. Clementine began to worry about what they would do if it got much colder. The fire crackled in the wood cookstove, but it didn't seem to put out enough heat to beat back the frigid air that poured right through the walls. She and Saphronie had to keep stoking the stove, and they all stood before the open door, turning themselves like chickens on a spit. Earlier Saphronie had gotten too close, and her skirt had caught fire. They'd all had a fine laugh over that... once the flames were safely put out.

Because it had grown dark so early that afternoon, Clementine set about making a supper of bachelor fare: a stew made of canned beef and camas root and seasoned with sage. And Saratoga chips, dried apricots, and sourdough bread to go with the stew. She rattled the pots and pans and shouted "Grub pile!" just like a roundup cook, and they pretended they were out on a cattle drive.

When the children had been put to bed, huddled beneath fur robes on the hooked rug in front of the kitchen stove, Clementine took out the bottle of whiskey she kept in her remedy chest for medicinal purposes and spiked the coffee with it. She and Saphronie pushed the sofa from the parlor into the kitchen and huddled on it side by side beneath a mackinaw blanket, drinking the whiskey-spiked coffee and talking in hushed tones of past winters, both good and sad.

"Of all the winter holidays, I think everyone loved New Year's best when I was a girl," Clementine said. "It was one time when a gentleman could safely go calling on a lady without arousing talk, you know, of whether he was seriously courting her. He would pay his call between two and four. And he always took off his hat and overcoat, but left his gloves on. He partook of a refreshment of tea and cakes. No intoxicating drinks, of course. And he stayed only fifteen minutes, not a second longer."

Saphronie looked up from the sock she was trying to darn in the dim firelight while at the same time keeping her hands warm beneath the blanket. Her forehead pleated in puzzlement. "What's the point of going visiting when you don't stay above fifteen minutes? And what kind of feed is that to offer a guest—tea and cakes? A man can't properly fill up his belly on tea and cakes."

Clementine thought about trying to explain the rules of Beacon Hill society to someone who lived in a country where your nearest neighbor could be a two-hour ride away and your larder was always open wide, along with your front door. She wasn't sure she understood all those strict and strained rules of etiquette herself anymore. "That's just the way it's done," she finally said.

Saphronie sniffed and thrust her needle into an apple-shaped pincushion. "Well, it seems a waste of time and effort to me. To get all dressed up to go a-calling and not even get fed a decent supper for your pains."

"Silly," Sarah declared from beneath the mound of furs. The two women exchanged smiles; they had thought she was asleep, although they should have known better.

"I don't remember much of when I was a little girl, before I was captured," Saphronie said. "But I do have this, like... picture in my mind of my mama lying down in the snow and making an angel, waving her arms and legs like little kids do, and my daddy looking at her and laughing—"

A rattling thump on the kitchen window cut her off in mid-sentence.

"Maybe it's someone lost in the storm," Clementine said after a frozen moment of breathless quiet.

"They'd knock on the door."

"Maybe they can't find the door. But they would see the light leaking out of the window."

She got up slowly and went to the window, with Saphronie hovering over her shoulder. Earlier she had tacked a blanket over the glass to cut down on the draft, and now, trying to be as silent as possible, she pulled it free.

For a moment she saw nothing but the reflection of her own face and the root crystals of ice that webbed the glass. Then her eyes focused on a movement beyond the window, and an image took shape—tawny fur, whiskers, pointed ears. A mouth opened wide, showing off big pointed yellow canine teeth. It let out a loud wail, its breath fogging the glass.

Saphronie shrieked so loud she woke up Daniel and started him crying. She went dashing into the parlor for the rifle that hung on the wall above the hearth. Clementine would've screamed herself if she hadn't been ruthlessly trained from the earliest age to suppress all emotion, even fear.

Sarah hadn't had such training, but hers was a different sort of backbone. She flung off the furs, got up, and marched over to the window. She crossed her arms over her chest and thrust out her chin. "Mama, I want you to shoot that painter."

Saphronie thrust the gun at Clementine, who was by far the better shot, then snatched up Daniel, hugging him so tight that he cried even louder.

"It was only attracted by the light, sweetheart," Clementine said, having to raise her voice above Daniel's wails. "It's probably cold and hungry because of the storm, but it can't get inside. Don't be frightened."

Sarah's chin went up another notch. "I'm not." She glared at the window where the cougar had been. "I want my daddy."

Clementine exchanged a look with Saphronie. She wanted Sarah's daddy, too. But even more, she wanted him safe. The window had shown her more than a cold and hungry cougar. It was snowing harder than ever now. The Lord willing Gus would be in Deer Lodge, snuggled inside a hotel bed. Tomorrow morning he'd buy the hay and load it up and start for home. But only if the weather didn't look bad. She hoped he would use his common sense and stay put if it was kicking up a blizzard come morning.