Heart of the West (73 page)

She saw the shock register on Rafferty's face as he took in the boy's dark hair, tawny eyes, and single-dimpled smile. This last child of hers and Gus's had come out of the womb looking so much like the man standing before her that she had hardly been able to bear looking at him at first. Now she loved him so fiercely she had to take extra pains not to favor him over the other two.

She rested a hand on his head, trying to still him for a moment. "Zach, this is your daddy's brother, your uncle... Rafferty."

"His brother? Honest to gosh?" The boy looked up, wonder brightening his face. "Did you know my daddy when he was little?"

Rafferty squatted on his haunches, so that they were eye to eye. "Howdy, button," he said. "And, yeah, I knew your daddy when he was little." He flashed a look up at her, one she couldn't read. Then his gaze fell back to the boy, searching. "Looks like the fish were really biting this evenin'."

"Naw, I'm just good at catching them."

Rafferty laughed and stood up, but he kept his face averted from her.

"Gus died before this one was born," she said, "but he'd always said the next we had he wanted to name after you. I don't know what would've happened if he'd turned out a girl." Somehow she had made her voice sound sweet and easy, and she got her mouth into a smile. She was tough now herself. Montana tough. "I guess there'll be fresh trout for supper... If you're aiming to stay, that is."

He smiled back at her, a smile that reached all the way to his eyes. "Well now, Boston, maybe I'd better think on that a moment," he said, his voice rough, the way it always got when he was teasing. "You gotten any better at cookin?"

She could feel the heat of a blush on her cheeks. That teasing of his—she didn't think she'd ever gotten used to it. Yet it brought a rush of hope welling in her chest. This was the Zach Rafferty she had once known and loved.

But then his smile faded and his eyes emptied, and he was a stranger to her once again. "You got a place for me to pass the night?" he said.

She wiped her hands on her skirt, feeling suddenly more awkward and nervous than she'd ever been with Gus at seventeen. "We had us a hired hand for a while after you left. Gus turned part of the barn into a bunk room for him. You can bed down there."

"I'll show 'im where it is, Ma!" The boy ran for the door, swinging his fish and splattering slime on her kitchen wall.

Clementine herded her son in the direction of the yard pump. "You go on and get those fish cleaned up. And clean yourself up while you're at it."

The boy stuck out his lower lip. "Well, hell."

"And quit your cussing, Zach McQueen, or I'll be scrubbing your mouth out with soap."

Beside her, Rafferty made a soft huffing sound that might have been laughter or a sigh of sympathy. But when she looked over at him his face was empty. Even his eyes seemed empty now.

"He's a fine-lookin' boy," he said after a moment.

"He looks like you."

He said nothing to that, and she went on, merely talking to fill the silence as they crossed the yard to the barn. "My other two will be home from school soon. There's Daniel—he's five. And Sarah, of course. Wait until you meet her. Gus used to say there wasn't a man born she wouldn't scare to death. She's going to be tall, like her father... and you. You won't believe how near to being a woman grown she is. Why, she was still just a babe in arms the spring you... left."

She remembered suddenly that very first summer of her marriage. Rafferty had bedded down in the barn that summer, too, in an empty stall, leaving the old buffalo hunter's cabin to her and Gus. He'd gone out of his way to avoid her in those early days, and she'd been glad of it. For he'd frightened her, and she was sure she hated him. She'd been too young and foolish to understand what she was really feeling for him, her husband's brother.

Now here she was, sending him back out to sleep in the barn. It seemed they had come full circle, to. start over at the beginning. But of course that wasn't so. Time had passed, years of it. He had left, and she had grown up and borne children and suffered and laughed and lived and dreamed. And Gus had died.

She led the way into the barn. The room was in the back, where tack used to be stored. It didn't actually have a door, only an old moth-eaten buffalo robe hanging from the lintel. She held the robe aside for him. He passed by her so close his sleeve brushed her chest.

"No one's been back here in a while," she said. "I'm afraid it's a bit dusty." It was more than dusty. It was like a dead place, desolate and lonely.

His eyes flicked once at her and then around the room. "It'll do."

A small stove stood at one end, a plain iron bedstead at the other. There wasn't much else to the place beyond a wolfskin on the bare plank floor next to the bunk. The bedding had long ago been stripped, but for tonight he could spread his soogan out on top the straw mattress. Maybe tomorrow she would give him sheets and a blanket... if he stayed beyond tomorrow.

He tossed his bedroll and saddlebags onto the bunk, then thrust his hands into his rear pockets. His dark face looked drawn and fiercely beautiful in the room's muted light. It was so quiet she could hear her own wild heartbeat and the wind rushing thickly through the cottonwoods. Moaning, sighing, whispering.

Such a gut panic gripped her chest that for a moment she couldn't breathe. Seven years was too long. Long enough for a man to forget a woman, long enough for feelings to wither and die. So many days, so many nights, she had heard his voice in the wind blowing through the cottonwoods. But he could have stopped whispering her name a long time ago.

"Well!" she said and the word came out of her like a gasp. "I mean, I expect you're just thirsting for that coffee."

She fled that small and lonely room, almost running for the sanctuary of her kitchen. Running from him and all that he made her feel.

"It never used to be like this," Hannah Yorke said as she tipped a bottle of Rosebud whiskey over three barroom tumblers. "Why, that year I first came to the RainDance country the air was so clear and crisp you could practically drink it like water."

Clementine looked out Hannah's gingham-curtained kitchen window at a sky that was the faded sepia of an old photograph. Her boy Zach and Samuel Woo were playing among the aspens, trying to shoot at squirrels with slingshots. The day was so thick and heavy that even the silver-backed leaves weren't stirring. The world outside looked blurry, as if she were seeing it through a piece of gauze.

"It's that damn heap roasting pit," Clementine said, shocking even herself, for she rarely used profanity. The heaviness of the day was making her edgy, she supposed. And Zach Rafferty had come home.

She opened the door so they could keep an eye on the boys, before joining Erlan at the kitchen table. Hannah had prettied it up with a lace cloth and put a cranberry-glass bowl in the center. Hannah had always had nice things.

"Aiya," Erlan said, wrinkling her nose. "It stinks out there worse than three-day-old fish."

Hannah set a plate of sponge cake and bread spread with oleo on the table. "It's that damn pit," she said, echoing Clementine. She slid into an empty chair, plucked a match from the safe, and lit up a machine-rolled cigarette. Clementine thought it made her look delightfully wicked. "I swear it's gotten worse since the Four Jacks fired up that new heap last week."

Next to the big mines over in Butte, the Four Jacks produced more copper than any other place in the country. And the cheapest, most common method of refining the red metal was heap roasting, where alternate layers of logs and copper ore were burned off day and night in a giant open-hearth smelter. The trouble was, heap roasting like that poured funnels of sludgy brown arsenic-laced smoke into the air.

Clementine sipped at her whiskey. It went down smooth and burned when it hit bottom. She wondered what Rafferty would say about their whiskey parties. But then, he would never come to know of them if he didn't stay.

She looked at Hannah and Erlan... dear familiar faces. It was this fear that he would leave her again, she supposed, that was keeping her from telling them that the man she'd loved all her life had come back into it again. It made her feel strange, as if she were keeping a secret from herself.

Though it was midday, it was dark enough indoors that Hannah had to light a lamp. Its flame glinted off the pressed-tin ceiling and the green enamel tiles on the stove. Lampshine highlighted the valentines that Hannah had framed and hung on her wall. Fringed, embossed, pearled, laced, and beribboned valentines. One for every year that Marshal Scully had been her lover.

"The smoke is so bad some days my laundry comes off the line gray and sooty as an old stovepipe," Erlan was saying. "And Samuel had the croup all of last winter because of it."

"We ought to do something about that pit," Clementine said.

Hannah widened her eyes and looked behind her, as if checking to be sure there wasn't someone else in the room. "Who, us?"

"There's no reason why the Four Jacks can't build a proper smelter."

"Money's one reason I can think of without even breakin' into a sweat."

"But the smoke is poison," Erlan said. "It makes us all sick."

Hannah finished off her whiskey in one swallow. "Copper's made Rainbow Springs into a boomtown. Folk don't mind putting up with any amount of dirty smoke long as they're getting rich. Especially the men who run things around here..." She gave Clementine a penetrating look. "Like Jack McQueen. Why don't you have a little chat with him about it and see how far you get? He's your kin, after all—even if the two of you ain't exchanged more'n a howdy since Gus died."

"It's the miners themselves we should be talking to," Clementine said. "If they refuse to dig up any more copper until the heap pit is buried and a new smelter is built, then the men who run things won't have any other choice. And if the miners won't do anything about it, we can go to their wives."

Hannah snorted. "As if the good ladies of Rainbow Springs would listen to the likes of us... Well, me, anyway."

"Their wash hangs on the line and gets gray from the smoke, as Erlan said. Their babies get the croup from it. Why shouldn't they listen?"

Hannah sighed. "Lordy, why am I always letting you chouse me into trouble like this?" She scraped back her chair and stood up. "But I reckon if we're gonna come up with a plan to take on the Four Jacks, we'll need a second round of whiskey to see us through it."

As she straightened up, a surprised look crossed her face and her legs wobbled and collapsed beneath her. She grabbed wildly for the table, snatching at the cloth and sending glasses and plates crashing down on top of her.

"Hannah!"

Clementine and Erlan scrambled onto the floor, kneeling on either side of her. Erlan lifted her hand and patted it. "She only fainted, I think."

"I'll get some vinegar water," Clementine said, but Hannah was already stirring.

Her eyelids fluttered and opened. She still wore that surprised look. "I reckon it was all that smoke in the air made me dizzy all of a sudden," she said, her voice thick. She sat up gingerly, pressing a shaking hand to her stomach. "Land, my belly's all a-queasy."

"We must do something about that pit," Erlan said.

Clementine sat cross-legged in the muddy yard beside the softly bleating calf, so newborn it was still steaming.

The mother was licking her baby, which she would do sometimes for hours, until it stumbled to its feet for its first taste of milk. Clementine was content just to sit and savor the sweet joy she'd felt as she watched the life come into that calf.

The mud she sat in was cool, and goopy enough to stir with a stick. The yard smelled of blood and manure. Smiling, Clementine leaned over and patted the heifer's white face. "You did fine, lady. Just fine." The mother cow licked and huffed and blinked her long white eyelashes.

A prairie chicken came whirring across the yard, clucking madly. The heifer didn't stop her licking, but Clementine looked up to see Rafferty riding across the hay meadow. Her chest tightened with the bittersweet ache that it did every time she saw him.

In the three days he'd been back, he'd kept mostly to himself, settling into old patterns. She knew he'd been riding all over the ranch, as if he had to see for himself how she'd been managing on her own, and it angered her to be judged by him.

And it worried her some to think he might be totaling up the worth of his half with the intention of selling out, to an East Coast syndicate, maybe, or to some English baronet in search of a Wild West adventure.

He reined up beside her and swung down from the saddle. She pushed herself to her feet, shaking the mud off her skirt. For a moment they simply stared at each other, saying nothing. They were finding it hard to stir up words between them, she thought. It seemed too soon to talk about anything that really mattered. Maybe they would never be able to talk about what mattered.

The calf, as if he'd only been waiting for the man's arrival, lurched up onto its tiny hooves, bleating and nudging at its mother's red belly. The cow, pleased with herself, tossed her head and let out a low bawl.

"I wonder what possessed that heifer to come in off the range and into the yard to calve," Rafferty said.

Clementine looked down at the spindly-legged creature, busily suckling his mother's milk. "I suppose to her it seemed like a safe place to have a baby."

"That one looks a mite ganted. But then, most of the younglings I seen out on the range today looked poorly."

"Cows that pasture in timberland that has been logged, they eat the pine needles from off the downed treetops, and it makes for sickly calves."

"So, since when have you been logging?"

She brushed the loose hair out of her eyes with the back of a hand that she suddenly noticed was stained with blood. She walked away from him, heading for the yard pump.

He fell into step beside her, leading his horse. "Clementine—"

"You can't come waltzing back here after all this time, Mr. Zach Rafferty, and expect things not to have changed."