Heart of the West (78 page)

Men! thought Hannah with a wrenching smile that came mostly from sadness. You had to love them. But she knew what he was feeling, because she had those same feelings herself whenever she thought of Drew and the baby. Wonderings if whether you can ever really change, whether you even want to anymore. Worryings that you'll settle back into bad old habits, that you'll wind up failing the one you love, wind up failing yourself. Again. Wonderings if maybe that other person just isn't better off without you in his life.

A lot of years of living apart had passed between Rafferty and the woman he loved, a whole lot of denied feelings and tamped-down urges. And if there was one thing the tumble-weed life taught you, it was that for all the roads there were on this earth, very few of them ever really brought you home.

The game was hopelessly lost. She shuffled the cards into a haphazard pile and pushed herself to her feet. She looked down at his bent head and thought that she did love him still, and more than just a little bit.

She touched his head once, lightly. "Lord, Rafferty, you always were a hard case." She walked away from him, feeling shaky inside.

Two years ago she had bought a melodeon for the front room and moved the old piano back here. A long time ago one of the many Docs she'd had working for her had taught her how to pluck out a single tune. She went to the piano now and began to play it with one finger. The notes jangled in the silence, sounding obscene.

"Hannah." She looked up. He stood close beside her, his hat back on, and his face all shut up tight again. "It must have been rough on her after Gus died," he said, "and I expect you did some watching out for her. So if I can't... if we can't work things out between us..."

She couldn't bear to look at him. She ached so for him, for Clementine. And maybe for herself. Maybe a lot for herself. "You know her," she said, her voice breaking. "She's always been able to take care of herself just fine."

She plucked out more notes, putting words to the tune. "My love is a rider, wild broncos he breaks..." Her finger stilled on the keys and her voice trailed off. She looked up at him, her vision blurring. "You quit being stupid about things, Zach Rafferty, and beg that girl to marry you, even if you got to do it on your knees. Maybe you don't think you're good enough for her, but a good woman can make a man good."

Smiling sweetly, she laid her hands on his shoulders. "Besides, you forget how well I know you, cowboy. There's a part of you that's always wanted taming." And she rose up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his.

A movement flashed in the corner of her eye and she jerked back. "Drew!"

Rafferty swung around, his hand going for his gun, as if he was used to reaching for it first and looking later to see who had come up behind him. Hannah grabbed his arm, but he had already relaxed when he recognized the marshal.

Drew Scully's attention, though, was focused only on his woman. Hannah held her breath as the two men exchanged bristling looks. Then Rafferty stepped away from her, pulling free of the hand she still had on his arm.

He tipped his hat at her. "See you around, Hannah."

Rafferty walked straight through the doorway without acknowledging the marshal, and Drew Scully remained planted in the middle of it. Neither man gave ground, and so they wound up knocking shoulders as Rafferty passed.

Hannah listened to the receding footsteps and the front door slamming shut. She said his name again on a sharp expulsion of breath, and the sound of it in the aching, stretched-out silence made her jump.

He advanced on her, his stride long and rangy, his breath ragged and hard.

She cleared her throat, licking her lips. "We were only talking..."

"Uh-huh. And what were you telling him with that kiss, Hannah?"

"Nothing. It was for old times' sake, is all. Howdy and goodbye."

She watched the anger and the wildness leap into his eyes and she fed off it. Excitement and fear pulsed through her blood, so whip-quick it made her dizzy. Tremors were shimmying through him. She could see in his face, in his eyes, the eruptive violence that she'd always known was in him. And she knew that at last she had done it; she had pushed him too far.

She pulled her little boob gun out of her pocket and pointed it at him. But for once her hand trembled wildly and her voice trembled even more. "If you lift so much as a little finger with the idea of hurting me, Drew Scully, so help me God, I'll kill you first."

He kept coming until only scant inches of charged air separated them. He dipped his head and rubbed his open mouth, his hard and beautiful mouth, against the muzzle of the gun. "Do it, then, Hannah. Kill me. You might as well, if you've decided to be leaving me and taking back up with him."

The gun fell from her stiff fingers, clattering as it struck the pine floor. "I won't leave you, Drew. I love you—"

His mouth closed over hers, kissing her hard, and her hip crashed into the piano in a jangle of discordant notes. "I love you," she said again, or tried to say. He wouldn't let go of her mouth.

He took her there on a green felt-covered table, among a deck of playing cards and with the smell of spilled whiskey in the air. Or she took him.

Afterward she decided it was she who had taken him.

The bore of the Colt pressed hard against the scar of One-Eyed Jack McQueen's missing ear. His arm jerked, knocking over an inkwell. And his knee jerked, banging hard into the big African mahogany desk that sat in the study of the gaudy fifteen-room mansion he had built with copper money at the edge of Rainbow Springs.

He watched the ink puddle soaking into the green blotter. Even with the gun pressed against his mauled ear he heard the hammer cock.

"Jesus fucking Christ," he said.

"Amen, Revver."

He turned his head and looked into a pair of cold yellow eyes. Even when he was still in petticoats, the boy had had eyes like that. Inhuman. Jack McQueen held little faith in the God he'd so often used to his advantage. But looking into his son's eyes, he had no trouble believing in the devil.

"For heaven's sake, Zacharias," he said. "Why can't you come calling through the front door like everybody else?" The boy said nothing. The smell of the spilled ink was sharp in the room. The drape on the fireplace mantel stirred, and Jack dared to move his head another inch. His gaze fell on the open window and the smears of red mud on the blue floral wall carpet. "And see if you didn't go and track gumbo in here. Have you no respect for another man's property?"

"Nope."

Father and son exchanged knowing smiles. Jack waited for the gun to be moved away from his face, but it stayed right where it was, pointing at his nose. His son gave him a slow once-over. His smile turned mean, and his eyes glinted like a cat's in the gaslight. With his other finger, the one that wasn't wrapped around the trigger, he poked Jack in the belly. "You've gotten a bit fleshy, old man."

An embarrassing noise popped out of Jack's throat, a high-pitched grunt, like a startled hog. "And you look hard-used, dear boy. These last years haven't been so good to you, have they?"

"Been good to you, though." His son looked around the octagonal room, pretending to be impressed with the chandeliers and their milk-glass globes, with the ornately framed paintings and the Venetian mirror, with the walnut bookcases filled with leather-bound books and with the copper casework on the walls, with the stained glass between the windows fashioned in the pattern of a jack of diamonds.

"About the only place I ever seen fancier than this was a whorehouse in St. Louie. And look at you," he drawled the words, loading them with mockery. "All slicked up like a tenderfoot dandy. Almost as dazzling and miraculous as a traveling salvation show."

The remark stung, but Jack McQueen was much too experienced to let it show. He produced his flashiest smile. "I'm not complaining... So what has you in such a pucker that you come sneaking in here to shove a gun in what's left of my ear?"

His son's smile didn't lose its mean edge, and his voice didn't lose its mocking drawl. "I told you if you ever caused her any misery I would kill you for it."

Jack pushed out a slow breath, trying to push out the uneasy fear he was feeling along with it. He'd always hated these nasty confrontations. Except for one bloody and violent night, he'd always been able to talk his way out of trouble.

"The Four Jacks has offered her better than a fair price for that timberland, and this is in spite of the fact that there's some dispute as to who actually possesses title to it. And as for that unfortunate incident this afternoon, the man who provoked it has been disciplined. Good Lord, Zacharias"—he tried to turn his head and bumped his nose into the gun barrel—"do you think I like it that my own dear grandson, my own flesh and blood, had a crease put in his head?"

He paused to swallow and draw breath. The damned gun pointing in his face was making him cross-eyed, if such a thing was possible with only one eye. "I've offered her a fair price for that land, dammit. Ask anybody. Hell, ask her."

"Like the fair price you paid for Gus's share of the Four Jacks?"

Jack heaved a louder, more exaggerated sigh. "I just knew the blame for Gustavus's stubborn foolishness would wind up falling on my head. Why, I even said as much to him at the time." He sucked his lower lip into his mouth. There was a gun in the desk drawer, but he didn't even think of going for it. He had no doubt Zacharias was capable of shooting him in the heat of a moment, or after cold calculation, for that matter. After all, he was the one who'd raised the boy up not to be weakened by any sort of sentiment.

"I gave Gustavus every chance to invest in this venture," he said, and he even let a hint of petulance creep into his voice, playing on it. "But he wouldn't hear of anything but selling out. All right, so maybe I didn't try real hard to convince him to do otherwise, but the fact was, I didn't want him and his twenty percent in there messing up my game. Hell, even you got to admit, my dear boy, that when it came to the game, that pretty-pious brother of yours was always so useless he couldn't fish floaters out of a swill barrel, for all that I tried my damnedest to teach him better."

"He wasn't useless. He was just born without a mean streak, and nothin' you ever taught him was able to take the good out and put the mean in." His son's voice had gone very soft and very dangerous. "Now, me, I'm a whole different story. I reckon I'm your boy clean through. And any true son of yours can stomach doing just about anything." He rubbed the Colt's barrel along the hanging fat of his father's cheek. "Let her alone, my dear Pa, or when I'm through with you there won't be enough left to bait a trap."

Jack could feel his face go slack. The tic beneath his eye patch picked up its beat. "'Be sure your sin will find you out.' You kill me and you'll swing for it."

The gun barrel moved along the bridge of Jack McQueen's nose, across his cheekbone, and up until it was centered on his one good eye, so close he couldn't have blinked without catching his lashes in the target sight.

"There are some things worth dying for," his son said in that same silky voice. "I reckon sticking you like a hog on a slab might be one of 'em."

Blood-soaked images came at Jack McQueen from the dank recesses of memory. A knife slashing at his face, moonlight leaping along the blade like a stream of fire. A boy's screams and then a man's, and a rank smell, like butchered meat. And, years later, Zacharias's voice saying, "Tell that to the man who took your eye." He could feel the tic beneath his patch thrumming now.

His lips pulled away from his teeth. "You don't booger me, boy."

The hammer fell on an empty chamber with a loud click. Jack jumped, the breath coming out his clenched teeth in a whistle.

His son smiled. "Leave her alone," he said. "Or hell is gonna hear you holler."

Jack McQueen had never seen the sense in shouting fire after the blaze was out. He waited until his son had left the way he came, through the window, and then he went in search of Percivale Kyle. But the man wasn't where he expected to find him, in the butler's quarters in the back of the house.

The night was pretty much shot anyway, so Jack walked over to the Gandy Dancer, where he had two whiskeys and listened to the mining gossip, which was flowing especially thick tonight because of the free booze, and which was always a revelation, but even more so tonight.

Once again he felt the urgent need to talk to Percivale Kyle. This time he took the trouble to track the super down at Rosalie's parlor house, and he had no compunction about rousing the man out of bed.

"Write these names down," he said to Kyle, who was struggling to button his trousers over his unfinished business and blinking like a fish in the sudden harsh light. "Zach Rafferty and Zacharias McQueen. Tomorrow morning I want you to start sending out telegrams. Find out if he's wanted for anything, even if it's only for farting in church. Then when you're done with that, I want you to find out just what it is those two old-timers, Pogey and Nash, intend to have assayed over in Helena and where it came from."

He fixed the super with his crafty one-eyed stare. "And in the meantime, thanks to my daughter-in-law and her crusade on behalf of nature and all of God's little creatures, we need to take the town's mind off that heap roasting pit. Do you have any suggestions?"

Kyle stroked the point of his beard and smiled, and Jack smiled back at him. "The Chinese are always good for rubbing up a sore."

CHAPTER 32

The boy gasped, clawing at the air. His chest heaved and jerked, and his neck arched, the tendons drawing taut. A tight, shrieking silence filled the room as they waited, waited, waited for him to breathe, waited while his face turned red and then purple and his whole body strained, reaching, reaching for the air he couldn't take in.

He choked—a strangled, desperate sound. And then he wheezed and his lungs filled, and Hannah let out the breath she'd been holding, unable to breathe herself until Daniel did.

"Oh, God, Clem... maybe we ought to send for the doc," she said.

Clementine set a fresh cone of saltpeter-soaked blotting paper alight, waving it in front of her son's red and sweating face. "There's nothing he can do. We just have to see Daniel through the attack and hope..."

Her voice trailed off, but Hannah finished the thought for her:
hope for the best.
Hannah marveled at her calmness. If Daniel were her boy she'd be hysterical by now, in need of the saltpeter paper herself. But then, little Daniel had suffered from these lung spasms all his young life. She supposed Clementine had taught herself to remain strong like this, to keep from transmitting her fear to the boy, and to keep from going mad with it herself.

"It's that new heap roasting pit," Hannah said. She felt hot, her chest tight with anger at the Four Jacks and at the stubbornness of men who saw only profits and progress. "That pit has made the air so foul it's a wonder we all don't have spasms."

Even with the room closed up tight they could smell the raw fumes, could feel a scratchiness at the backs of their throats, a burning in their noses. Hannah knew that if she went to the window and pulled the drapes aside, she'd be able to see the fires of the heap glowing like a giant bed of coals against the night sky.

Clementine lit another saltpeter cone and waved it slowly like a fan beneath her son's nose. The lung spasms seemed to have passed as quickly as they had struck and he had fallen off into an exhausted slumber.

Hannah watched the paper curl and burn in Clementine's fingers. "I heard somewheres," she said, "that others who suffer with their breathing as Daniel does have taken to wearing muskrat skin over their lungs."

"I tried that muskrat cure. It didn't seem to work worth beans. Besides, it itched him so, he couldn't bear it. And the other children teased him unmercifully about his furry chest when they saw it. Children can be so cruel."

People
can be cruel, Hannah thought. She felt a sharp and sudden fear for the life she carried. Would he be born healthy, not only with all his fingers and toes, but sound in his mind as well? She remembered back home in Kentucky there was a boy who'd been what they'd called a little tetched in the head. One day some of the bigger boys had doused him with coal oil and set him alight. They'd been sorry afterward, claimed it was just teasing that had gotten out of hand, but that poor boy had died... And folk had always said that tetched boy was a late-life baby, born of a woman who was already a grandmother.

Her first baby was a man grown now, could even be married and with a child of his own. Lord, she could be a grandmother and not even know it. In her mind's eye she could see a young man sitting in a velvet-draped parlor, bouncing a little curly- haired girl on his knee and singing "Ride a Cock Horse" just like her daddy had done with her. She wondered if he ever thought of her, her boy. But no, he surely didn't even know she existed. He'd grown up thinking that banker's wife was his mother. Any kids he had now would be calling that woman Gram.

Which was just as well for him. What a terrible mother good ol' Hannah Yorke, the calico queen, would have made. And just what sort of mother did she think she was going to make this time around? She imagined the other boys teasing her son for having a saloonkeeper for a ma, claiming maybe their own fathers had
known
her back in Deadwood. And if the baby turned out to be a girl... when she grew old enough to have gentleman callers, wouldn't they think: Like the mare so goes the filly?

And where did Drew fit into all these imaginings?

She pressed her tightly laced fingers against her belly. It was flat now, but it wouldn't be for much longer. Nowhere, she told herself. Drew fit in nowhere at all.

"Hannah, are you all right?"

Hannah started, grateful for the darkness that hid her face. "Sure, I'm fine," she said. And then her face crumbled in upon itself as a sob burst up out of some empty, aching place in her chest. "No, I ain't. I'm going to have a baby."

"Oh, Hannah, are you really? Oh, I'm so happy for you!" Clementine laid aside the remnants of the saltpeter cone and hugged Hannah tightly, squeezing her arms. "You're happy for yourself, aren't you?"

Hannah's throat spasmed. She nodded, pressing her cheek into Clementine's. For a moment they just clung to each other in the dark. She had known Clementine would understand, that she'd see the baby as a good thing, even if it would have to come into the world a bastard.

Hannah made a funny little gurgling sound in her throat, as if she'd swallowed wrong. "It's like I've been given a second chance, you know. To make up for what I did the last time, selling my other poor boy like he was a crop of cotton or something." She pulled away, wiping at the wetness in the corners of her eyes with her fingers. "Only I'm scared as spit about it, too. Imagine having another baby at this late date in my life. And then there's the problem of what I'm going to do about telling Drew—who had a whole lot to do with the cause, even if he might not want nothin' do with the result."

"You haven't told him? Oh, Hannah, you must. Truly I believe he'll want to marry you and be a father to that baby, to make a family with you. And if you love him, as I know you do, then you must give him a chance to prove he loves you."

Hannah shook her head hard. "He could've asked me to marry him anytime in these last seven years. I reckon the fact that he hasn't done so says something."

"Perhaps he hasn't asked the question because he's been unsure of the answer. Why, how often have I heard you say we'd never see Hannah Yorke hitched to the post alongside of any man?" She'd drawled the last words, and Hannah could feel her smile coming soft out of the night. "You can't blame Marshal Scully for behaving like a man and believing that tired old lie of yours. We women might always look for the lie in what they say to us, but a man would rather believe a woman's lies than risk hearing the truth, and if you can make sense out of what I just said, you're doing better than I am."

Hannah choked down a laugh, rubbing hard at the tears that had dampened her cheeks. She tried to make out Clementine's face in the murky dark. She'd heard that edge to Clementine's voice, talking of the lies men and women told one another. She wondered if now would be the time to bring up the touchy subject of Zach Rafferty's homecoming. But then she knew Clementine. That girl never talked about a thing until she was damned good and ready to, and even then she put up fences you didn't dare cross.

"Lord, I don't know what to think anymore," Hannah said instead. "Maybe it's this wretched weather along with that wretched heap pit that's making me edgy as well as giving Daniel spasms. Those clouds've just been hanging there for days over our heads doing nothing. If only it would rain."

"Or the wind would come up."

Hannah laughed. "Heavens, did you ever think to see the day? Imagine a Montana woman
asking
for the wind to blow."

The next day dawned dark. The clouds were a liverish purple, dense and heavy, holding the heap smoke in the valley like a blanket over a campfire.

"It's black enough to blind a bat out there," Hannah said to Clementine over morning coffee. It was only a slight exaggeration.

Even indoors with the windows shut up tight, the air was close and raw. The smoke floated listlessly over the town in slow brown drifts, thicker than fog. It was like trying to breathe through dirty flannel.

"An old woman died of it during the night. Choked so hard on the heap smoke, so her folks're claiming, that her heart gave out."

The coffee cups lay scattered on her kitchen table. Saphronie had brought the children downstairs for breakfast and was now sitting between Daniel and Zach, who were having a running fight over something. Sarah was ladling hominy into Hannah's best Spode bowls.

"Mrs. Wilkins, the baker's wife—it was her mother," Hannah went on. "But there must be about a dozen others confined to their beds with chest pains and raw throats, so the doc said. I know our plan was to wait awhile, give the men a chance to digest what you fed em yesterday, but I reckon none of us figured on the new heap being this bad. I say we do it now."

Sarah's spoon knocked against her bowl as she laid it down. "I'm coming with you."

Clementine looked into the face of her daughter, nut brown from never wearing her bonnet. As stubborn, her father would have said, as a rat-tailed cayuse. "I need you to stay here with Daniel and Zach."

"They're coming, too." Sarah gave her mother a penetrating look. "Daniel
needs
to come."

Hannah reached out to pat Clementine's hand and wound up gripping it tightly. They sat like that a moment, then their fingers fell apart and Hannah pushed back her chair and stood up. "We'll split up; that way we can cover more territory faster. I'll start by telling Erlan, and she can rouse the other Chinese women."

It began with the four of them—Clementine, Hannah, Saphronie, and Erlan—going from door to door. But before long they were joined by other women, until it was like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up mass and power. They spoke of Mrs. Wilkins's mother and of the others who had fallen ill during the night, but they really didn't need to say much. The rank smoke draping over the town, the jays and meadowlarks falling dead out of the sky, and their own tearing eyes and raw throats were persuasion enough.

Some of the women, expecting trouble, strapped on their husbands' revolvers or carried rifles. They all brought shovels and other dirt-breaking tools, and many brought their children with them as well.

Pogey and Nash watched all this to-ing and fro-ing from their bench on the veranda of the Yorke House. "Lot of women scurrying about this morning," Nash observed. "All looking busy as one-armed monkeys at a flea farm."

"Busier'n tumbleweeds in a stampede," Pogey agreed. He gave his ear a good tug. "What do you figure they're gonna do with all them shovels and muck sticks?"

Nash studied the situation carefully, sucking on his store-bought teeth. "Bury somebody, I reckon," he finally surmised.

Pogey considered the suggestion for a while, then nodded. "Let's hope he's dead first."

"Maybe it ain't a body they're gonna bury; maybe it's a thing."

"Have to be a
big
thing, to need all them shovels."

"Bigger'n a red barn, I reckon."

"Bigger'n a twenty-mule freight wagon."

"Bigger'n a politician's lie."

"Bigger than..." But the rest of Pogey's simile was drowned out by the ascending wail of the Four Jacks' big whistle that normally shrieked out a shift change or a disaster in the shafts.

"Whatever's going on around here," Pogey said when the whistle finally petered out, "with all them women riled like that, I reckon it spells trouble for whatever man is fool enough to put his head in the way of them shovels."

Nash watched his partner pull a twist of tobacco out of his boot and tear off a chaw. "I say the smart man is the one who sits pat and hears all about the excitement afterward."

"And I say that for once in a lifetime of flappin' your lips, compadre, you finally done said something that makes a particle of sense."

The women marched out into the prairie where the heap roasting pit spewed its foul smoke in brown funnels that rose up to be snagged by the low flat-bottomed clouds. "March" was the word for what they were doing, Clementine thought. Like soldiers off to a war, but armed with more shovels and muck sticks than guns. Her gaze went from face to face. Some were young and as fresh and pretty as a bouquet of wildflowers, others were as worn and seamed as the buttes. Three of those faces, Erlan's and Hannah's and Saphronie's, were as dear to her, as familiar, as the faces of the sisters she'd never had. The strength she saw in all of them, stranger and friend alike, left her awed. She looked down at her daughter, at the determination in Sarah's small pointed chin and the fierceness in her eyes, and her awe deepened into a pride.

As they walked by Snake-Eye's livery she saw a man at the hitch rack, saddling up a shaggy dun... Rafferty. She turned her face quickly away. When next she looked around again, he was coming at her with that sauntering cowboy walk, his hat shading a face that probably wouldn't have shown her anything anyway. She thought that if he tried to stop her, she would never forgive him or love him again.

He fell into step alongside of her. She wouldn't look at his face, but she could see his legs flashing in and out of her view of the muddy road. Long-shanked and lean, the muscles bunching and flowing beneath the worn cloth.

Her throat felt too raw to talk, but when he said nothing she could finally bear the silence no longer.

"I thought you'd left town," she said. She looked up at him. "Yesterday evening when I didn't see you after... I thought you'd left."

His mouth curved faintly. "What, and miss all the fun?"

His eyes were full of tears from the fumes, but she heard an edge to his voice. A ragged wildness that had always both drawn and frightened her.

The sight of some fifty women converging and marching out of town armed with a few guns and a lot of shovels had not escaped notice. Those of their men who weren't already down in the shafts began straggling after them in twos and threes, but with a wary, nervous air about them. Clementine would have smiled if one of them hadn't been Marshal Drew Scully, and if she hadn't seen the stark anguish come over Hannah's face as she looked at her man.

We might wish we could do without them,
Clementine thought.
We might even try to do without them. But we can't. Yet so often they end up leaving us. We lose them to death or to indifference or to another woman or...
She looked up for one swift moment at Rafferty's hard profile, but what she saw was the dun waiting saddled back at the livery.
Or to the wildness in his soul.