Heart of the West (71 page)

Clementine took the lantern from Saphronie's stiff hand and gave her the rifle. "Take this and go inside by the children." Saphronie turned a frightened face to her, and Clementine gave her a little shove. "For mercy's sake, we can't turn them away."

She stepped farther out onto the snow-smothered gallery, holding up the lantern to give them light while the half-breed woman unbundled her children from the travois. One was small enough to rest on her hip. The taller one had to be the little girl Clementine had last seen sitting outside a tipi beside the Rainbow River over seven years ago.

Joe Proud Bear took the youngest child from its mother's arms and started for the door. Iron Nose melted back into the biting wind and ripping snow, a hulking figure draped in a buffalo robe.

"What about... him?" Clementine said. She felt a macabre curiosity, an urge to see the man's face, to see if he truly had an iron nose. And to discover, perhaps, if he was as horrible as the monster who had once haunted her nightmares.

Joe Proud Bear's woman looked to the place where the old Indian had disappeared into the wild night. She shrugged. "He has chosen to live off his pride."

Clementine swallowed around the fear lodged in her throat. "There is an old cabin down by the river..." Her voice quavered into silence. If the stories were true, Iron Nose knew already of the cabin and of the buffalo hunter who had died there... tomahawked into so many pieces, it was said, they'd had to gather him up in a bucket to bury him.

They plowed into the kitchen, bringing with them drifts of snow that turned into puddles as it struck the warmer air. Clementine had to wrestle with the door to close it against the force of the wind.

Saphronie sat on the sofa with the rifle gripped tightly in her hands. Daniel, wrapped up in his cocoon of blankets, lay on one side of her. Sarah sat on the other, self-contained and fearless, her wide eyes taking it all in, her stern little mouth for once offering no opinion.

Joe Proud Bear turned in a slow circle as he looked around him, his gaze stopping a moment on Saphronie and the rifle. His lips pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Where is your man?"

Clementine's gaze flashed around the room as if she could suddenly will Gus's presence into existence, along with a troop of U.S. Cavalry.

The half-breed's dark eyes narrowed on her frightened face, and he laughed.

His wife stepped between them. "I would cut out his heart before I let him harm you," she said, and shot her husband such a harsh glare that color flooded his face and his gaze dropped to the floor. Clementine suspected it had been a while since Joe Proud Bear had dared to rope his woman.

For a moment they all stared at one another, and then Clementine jerked into movement. She served them bowls of stew from the pot she'd kept going on the stove. The Indian children, swaddled in faded scarlet trade blankets and pieces of buffalo hide, ate as if half starved. Joe Proud Bear helped himself to a chair and braced his booted feet on the fender of the range. He kept his eyes fastened on Clementine as he shoveled the stew into his mouth.

"Lot of dead whoa-haws out there," he said. "Maybe your man's dead too."

His wife pried the empty bowl from his hands and handed it to Clementine along with her own. "Don't listen to him. Like the naughty dog who steals the meat and then growls to hide his crime, he is ashamed. Already he owes you his life, and now he comes begging for it again." She said something to him in harsh guttural syllables; then she turned back to Clementine and smiled. "I tell him that some white people are good. Maybe as good as Indians."

Clementine tried to find a smile of her own, but she was still too ill at ease. No, "scared" was the word. She was plain scared.

She busied herself pouring them some of the hot black coffee. Too late she remembered the whiskey in it, and she backed away from them until her hip struck the kitchen table. She'd heard gruesome stories of what Indians did when they were drunk.

She wondered if they carried weapons. Surely they did— hatchets and knives if nothing else. She thought about asking them to toss their weapons out the door, but it seemed such an inhospitable thing to do. She nearly laughed out loud at what a fool she was being, worrying about good manners at a time like this.

They all jumped when the youngest Indian child suddenly began screaming and pulling at his fox fur cap.

To Clementine's surprise Joe Proud Bear was the one who went to the child. He removed the cap with gentle fingers, then turned to Clementine with eyes that shone with worry. "My son... the cold has bitten his ears."

"I—I have some glycerin in my remedy chest," she said.

She warmed the glycerin in a pot on the stove, then applied drops of it to the boy's ears with a turkey feather. She filled a shallow washpan from the hot reservoir and prepared a mustard bath. Together she and Joe Proud Bear's woman knelt and unwrapped the strips of woolen blanket from around the little boy's moccasined feet and then the girl's. The Indian children smelled of goose grease, just as Clementine's children did, and of smoke from long dead campfires. Their dark eyes watched her, shining like shoe buttons in the lantern light. The only sounds in the room were the drip and splash of water in the pan and the wail of the blue norther beyond the walls.

"To be out in a storm like this," Clementine said when she could bear the silence no longer. "It's God's miracle you're still alive."

Joe Proud Bear's woman turned her head and the light shone off her wide cheekbones. "We had been sleeping with the dogs, but then the dogs died."

Where had they been sleeping with dogs? Clementine wondered. Where had they been hiding all these years? Up in the foothills, no doubt, and they'd probably been helping themselves to Rocking R cattle all this time. Heavens, Gus would be furious if he knew. For some reason—hysteria, probably—the thought made her want to laugh.

It was, Clementine decided later, the strangest night she ever spent. She and her family on one side of the kitchen, Joe Proud Bear and his family on the other, with the heat and crackle of the fire and the howling, snow-laden wind outside the only things they shared. Only the children slept.

Near dawn it stopped blowing. She went to the window and pulled aside the blanket to look out. The sky had cleared and the moon cast a cold blue light over the frozen land. Now that the wind had ceased, she could hear the cottonwoods snapping and crackling. And the yapping of the coyotes, a lonely and beautiful sound. She couldn't see Iron Nose. She wondered if he was still out there somewhere; if he was alive, or if he had escaped being hanged from the limb of a cottonwood tree, only to die in a blizzard because his pride wouldn't allow him to accept an enemy's charity. She remembered her first year here, how frightened she had been by tales of that renegade Indian, by the very idea of red painted savages and their gruesome atrocities. But now those fears were dim and ragged, scarcely more than echoes of fears. Other horrors had come to take their place in her mind.

She heard a rustle of movement behind her and she turned. Joe Proud Bear's eyes glittered at her, bitter and black as choke- cherries. The hard will of him showed in his chiseled cheeks and chin, his hawk's nose that caught a reflection of the stove's light. She didn't fear him now, but she wondered if in another time and place he would be capable of killing her, even though she had twice saved his life. If his hatred ran that deep.

"I've been wondering." he said, as if he'd read her thoughts, yet he spoke softly so as not to wake his children, "why it is that your yellow hair isn't decorating some brave's war club long by now."

She lifted her chin. "And I have been wondering, Mr. Joe Proud Bear, why it is you weren't hanged years ago for a cattle thief."

His smile flashed white in his dark face. And his next words surprised her, and pleased her as well. "The years have changed you, white woman. Once, I think, you had the heart of a straw squaw put among the corn to frighten away bears. Now you are the bear."

The sun came up in a sky that was hazy with frost. The air shimmered so with the cold that it was like looking at the world through a sheet of oiled glass.

"We go now," Joe Proud Bear said, and they did. They disappeared back into the white wilderness whence they had come. Clementine did not see Iron Nose rejoin them, and she wondered if he had ever existed. If she hadn't dreamed it all.

But when she went back inside she found, lying on her kitchen table, a pair of white gloves decorated in the Blackfeet fashion with beads and bits of colored glass and dyed porcupine quills. Each glove was beautiful and distinct from the other, yet somehow they belonged together.

"Well, land!" Saphronie said as she rubbed a finger over the intricately embroidered design on one of the gloves. "There's something to be said for Boston ways. I was never so glad to see company go in my life."

Clementine pressed her lips together to keep from laughing and snorted instead. Saphronie giggled, which made Clementine snort again, and soon they were laughing so hard they woke the children.

"You two are being silly," Sarah said.

"Bear!" Daniel shrieked. "Bear!"

Which set them to laughing again, laughing until their sides ached and the kitchen rang with it.

They almost didn't hear the rasp and crunch of the sled runners, maybe wouldn't have heard it at all if Clementine hadn't left the door open a crack to let some fresh air into the kitchen despite the cold.

She saw the horses first, their coats caked with snow and foot-long icicles hanging from their bits, and behind them a sled that appeared to be filled with a mountainous pile of snow and ice. Beside it stumbled a creature that looked like the sculpture of a bear carved of ice and come to life.

"Gus!" she screamed, flying out the door. The brightness of sunlight on snow stabbed at her eyes. Bulky and clumsy with all the clothes she was wearing, she nearly foundered in the drifts, her feet getting tangled with each other. "You fool of a man—what possessed you to set off for home in the middle of a blizzard? You could've been lost or frozen or... You could have died, Gus. You could have died..."

He looked at her with eyes narrowed against the snow glare and glittering with fever. "Couldn't die on you, Clem," he said. "Wasn't gonna die on you."

He tried to smile, and the icicles that dripped from his mustache quivered. "Die," he said, and sagged to his knees at her feet, then fell face first into the snow.

Gus was wrenched back into consciousness by the fiery sting of a hot mustard-and-linseed poultice being slapped onto his bare chest.

He opened his eyes. Two female faces hovered above him. One belonged to his wife. She was frowning. The other belonged to his daughter, and a tiny crimp of concentration marked her forehead between her straight little brows.

He saw his daughter's mouth open and heard her voice as if it came up at him from the bottom of a well. "Daddy, your nose looks funny."

"Sarah, go play bears-in-a-cave with your brother, please— see if you can get him to hibernate. Help keep him quiet and let me tend to your father."

His daughter's face disappeared, and in its place was his wife's hand, wielding a dripping feather. His eyes crossed trying see what she was doing to him. He opened his mouth to talk, surprised the words didn't come out right away, and that when they did they were so raspy. "What's wrong with my nose?"

"It's frozen solid as a brass knob, you idiot man," his wife said, and he almost smiled, knowing that Clementine only scolded him when she cared. "A well-aimed punch would probably break that nose right off your face. Of course, Snake-Eye can always fashion you a new one out of iron."

He drew a breath to speak, and a harsh cough shook his chest. "Sounds like you want to be the first one to take a swing at me... Reckon you must be mighty glad to see me home."

"Oh, Gus..."

Another racking cough exploded out of him, this time with such force it wrenched his chest and bent his belly double. He tried to draw in a breath and coughed again, his lungs gurgling.

He sagged back and realized he was lying, not upstairs in his bed as he'd thought, but in the kitchen. On the parlor sofa. He wondered what the parlor sofa was doing in the kitchen. And the kitchen itself looked strange, with pieces of old canvas nailed all over the walls and blankets over the windows. A fresh spasm of coughing bent and wrenched him, and when he could finally breathe again he was gasping.

Clementine leaned over him. She brushed back his sweat-damp hair and laid a wet cloth reeking of vinegar on his forehead. To his surprise her eyes brimmed with unshed tears. "God damn you, Gus McQueen, you could have died out there."

He lifted his hand, surprised at how heavy it felt. He brushed her cheek, catching the lone tear that had managed to escape in spite of all her best efforts. "But I didn't... And since when did you take up cussing?"

"Since you started running such a fever I could fry an egg on your forehead. I've sent Saphronie for the doctor."

"Aw, Clem, what'd you want to do that for? It's only the grippe. Weather like this she's liable to come back sicker than I am."

She disappeared for a moment and was back with a cup of something steaming. "Drink this. It's onion syrup."

He struggled to push himself up onto his elbows, hacking and coughing. "The horses..."

"Saphronie saw to them before she left. Gus,
please.
Drink this or I shall pour it down your throat."

He made a face, but he drank it, and then the cough took him again, rumbling and gurgling through his chest. "Well, hell," he said. He pulled in deep drafts of air to keep from coughing again and tried to sit up... and fell back down.

His eyes burned. His whole face felt strange, sunken and collapsed in upon itself, his joints all loose and floppy as if his bones were tied together with baling twine. Out there, fighting the blizzard, he had thought even the fires of hell would never make him warm again. Now he felt so hot he wanted to run outside and jump in the snow buck naked.

Out there... It must, he thought, have been the good Lord that had led him through it. Because he'd lost the damn river, lost sight of everything but his own two feet, slogging through a black night of wind-whipped snow, slogging, slogging, slogging... And then the wind had died and the snow had stopped and when the sun came up, there he'd been, still following the river and less than a mile from home, and only the good Lord could've managed that. A miracle. He wanted to laugh. A son of the Reverend One-Eyed Jack McQueen had been the beneficiary of a genuine miracle.