Heart of the West (81 page)

Erlan made shushing, shooing motions at the golden needle man and then rudely shut the door in his face. "Oh, it is only another Chinese celebration, like New Year's," she said, trying to make her voice as bright and joyous as a firecracker. "With lots of happy shouting and noise. The... Festival of the Joyous Rice Planting. Yes, that is it. It is to celebrate the day rice is first planted in the spring."

She thought her voice sounded hollow, but he didn't challenge her lies. Even though this was the first such festival ever held in Rainbow Springs, and even though no rice would ever be planted in Montana.

He stared at her—she always thought of him as staring when he did this, turning his face toward her and concentrating hard with all his other senses, so that his forehead furrowed and a muscle ticked along his jaw. He smiled, a brilliant smile that flared and was gone.

"I-I thought I would take Samuel and watch the festivities for a little while," she said. "Do you mind this?"

"Nay, of course not, m'sweet. And if there's any of those little moon cake things being passed about, why don't you bring me back some?"

"Yes, yes, I will. I will bring you many moon cakes." A smile trembled on her mouth.
Oh, my love, I would bring you the moon itself if I could. I would make all your wishes come true, for I know your first wish would be for me to stay. And then we would both have our hearts' desires.

"Samuel!" she said loudly, startling the boy, who had quietly been putting a picture puzzle together on the table. "If you wish to fly your kite at the Festival of the Joyous Rice Planting, then we must hurry. For I've a dozen more shirts to boil and press before the day is done." She bustled about, chattering to Samuel like a berserk magpie as she tied his straw hat on his head and shoved wooden pattens on his feet, while Jere stared at her in that way of his, a tense, silent presence in the doorway.

With him there, she couldn't go into the back room and collect their clothes and personal things. It didn't matter anyway, for all she really needed was the oilskin bag of American dollars hidden beneath the starch vat. She was glad now she hadn't put her hard-earned money in the Miners Union Bank, as Hannah had so often urged her to do. Those water-buffalo farts probably would be finding a reason not to give it back to her now, she thought, and then where would she be—penniless again and without even a demon-cursed laundry to earn passage back to China.

She lifted her chang-fu and tied the bag of money to her waist with a rope. She was grateful for once for her love's blindness, since he couldn't see what she was doing. He wouldn't try to stop her leaving, though, for he no longer thought himself worthy of her. And, oh, he was wrong, wrong, for he was worthy of an emperor's daughter.

She made herself go to him with a light step. She pulled his head down to her mouth and kissed him, not as she wanted to, but in the way of a cheerful wife who was off to do a bit of haggling with the shopkeepers and would be coming back to her lord in an hour or two.

His big hands spanned her hips, and he drew her tighter to him. "Lily...?" She waited for his question with her heart choking her throat. "Have I told you yet today that I love you?"

She laughed too loud in her relief. "Indeed you have, twice already. And have I told you?"

He touched her lips with his fingertips so that he could feel her smile. "Only once."

"Then I will say it again, so that we might be even. I love you, Jere Scully."

She kissed him hard this time, as if she could brand the taste of him, the feel of him, onto her heart forever. Samuel, sensing something wrong, clung to Jere's legs and began to whimper. The man swung the boy up into his arms, laughing and teasing him back into giggles and smiles. A wrenching pain clutched at Erlan's heart as she realized she was tearing her son away from the only father he had ever known.

No, no... His destiny, like her own, was not in this place. He wasn't Yankee Doodle Dandy. He was Samuel, son of the merchant Sam Woo, grandson of Lung-Kwong, patriarch to the great House of Po. Her son's duty was to return to the land of his ancestors and do honor to them there.

She took the boy out of her lover's arms. "Come along now, Samuel. We must hurry. The sooner gone, the sooner back, yes?" She touched Jere lightly on his bearded cheek. "Perhaps you can peel some potatoes for supper?" He smiled and nodded, turning his head so that his lips brushed her hand. She often gave him chores to do, for it pleased him to be of use to her.

She paused at the door, one hand on the latch, the other holding Samuel. "Good-bye, my love," she said, putting a smile into her voice. "I will see you soon."

Only not in this life. Never again in this life, my
anjing juren.

For a while after the door had closed behind her, Jere stood where he was and listened. The rain pattered hard on the tin roof, but he could hear other sounds coming at him from the road outside, rising and falling in volume like the rush and suck of the tide. Frightened cries and shouts, the rumble and splash of wagon wheels. A horse's panicked whinny.

Fear rose up like a black cloud in his mind. He lunged across the room, not concentrating, so that he knocked into a chair and banged his hip into the corner of the table. He groped for the latch, found it, and flung the door open so hard it banged against the wall. The cries and shouts, mostly in Chinese, beat at him like waves now. Running feet, hoofbeats, the screech of wheels and ungreased axles... horses and wagons going somewhere in a hurry.

He stepped out onto the stoop. Wind-driven rain splashed into his face. His boot crunched on a piece of stiff paper. He bent over, feeling along the wet, splintery boards until he found it. But of course he couldn't read it, damn it all to bloody, bloody hell...

"Hey!" He stepped out into the road, waving the paper in the air. Something slammed into him. He grabbed wildly, clutching at the sleeve of a wool cloth coat. A coat that covered the scrawny arm of a wriggling boy.

"Who are you?" he shouted, knowing his big size and the scars on his face were probably terrifying the child. But the panic he felt was now shrieking like a runaway train through the black tunnel that was his world.

A boy's trembling voice came up at him from out of the darkness. "R-Ross Trenowith... sir."

"Can you read, lad? Tell me what this says." He kept one hand heavy on the boy's shoulder and thrust the paper down where he thought a face ought to be, his fist accidentally clipping the boy's head.

The boy took the paper from his shaking hand. "It's in Chink writing—nothin' but squiggles and lines and dots. But I reckon I can guess what it says. The town council had a meeting yesterday, after Paddy O'Rourke got hisself hatcheted to death by that Chink. They decided all the Chinese gotta get theirselves outta town. So that's what they're doing. They're all gettin'."

A terrible liquid feeling clutched at Jere's guts. "How? How are they leaving?"

The boy's shoulder rose and fell beneath his hand in a shrug. "They're just walking. Since there ain't no stage due till Friday and the train's done come and gone already, I reckon they ain't got no choice but to walk. Less'n they got a horse."

The bony shoulder slipped out from underneath his hand. "Wait!" Jere cried, but the boy was long gone.

Jere stood alone, trembling in the terrible darkness. He flung back his head and shouted up into the rain that fell out of the forever damning blackness. "Lily!"

Find her... He would find her...

Rough hands shoved him, sending him reeling into the iron-banded side of a wagon. Pain stabbed at his ribs, cutting off his breath. He spun around, his bootheel slipping in a mushy pile of... a stink rose up at him—horse dung.

He lurched and staggered like a Saturday-night drunk, his hands groping wildly at the air. His thighs slammed into a hitching rack, and he fell over it, his head landing hard on the edge of the boardwalk.

He lay there, his raucous breathing drowning out all the screams and neighs and the squealing wagon wheels. He could feel his heart thundering like fury in his chest.

"Lily. Oh, God, Lily..."

He pressed his cheek into the weather-roughened board of the walk. If he had eyes... If he had eyes he would be weeping now. She couldn't leave him. If she left, then there would be only the darkness.

He made himself get up. He pushed against the air with his palms until he hit the log wall of a building. He felt along it, using it as a guide, going from one building to another. The great soughing darkness lay before him, familiar now even in its terror.

And out of the dark came the whistle of the 12:07 pulling out of the Rainbow Springs railway station.

The boy was wrong—the train hadn't already left. It was leaving now.

God, God, what if she was on that train? He'd never catch up with her, never find her out there in that vast and empty ocean of blackness.

"Lily!"

She pulled the fringed shade down over the window, shutting off her last sight of Rainbow Springs as the train blew steam and huffed its way out of the station.

A big ball of tears was wadded up like a wet rag in the back of her throat, but she was determined not to let herself cry. It had been her choice, after all, her last gift to him. In spite of what she had promised that night they'd made wild, abandoned love on a poker table in her back room...

In spite of her promise, and in spite of that night, she was leaving him.

She sat stiffly on the train's uncomfortable slat-board seat, dressed in widow's weeds. A black grosgrain silk dress that made her skin look positively sallow. Not that anyone could see her complexion, with a mesh veil draped in front her face. The widow's weeds were appropriate, she supposed, if one had a macabre sense of humor. But then, if she was mourning the death of one life, she was also celebrating the birth of another.

She'd bought a ticket all the way through to the end of the line, but she wasn't going there. Even she didn't know for sure where she would be getting off. And where she did get off, she wouldn't stay longer than it took to get on a stagecoach heading any direction, as long as it wasn't east. She wasn't sure what sort of place she was looking for. Only that she would know it when she found it.

She had always thought that when this moment came she would be sad, and sad she was. The bone-ache kind of sadness that made a person realize just how lonely and empty a place this old world could be. But underneath all the misery of leaving him, an excitement hummed. The one thing she'd wanted all her life, even when she hadn't been able to put a name to it, was now within her reach. A family. They'd make a family, she and the baby. Well, a small one, but a family nonetheless.

She figured she could easily lose herself in a place like San Francisco, but she was too used to the wide-open spaces to settle happily in a big city. So it would be a small town, this place she would pick to settle. Oh, the townsfolk would probably guess she was only a grass widow—anyone could buy herself a black dress and a gold ring, after all. In the beginning they might have their suspicions, but they'd be too polite to voice them aloud and to her face. And once her lawyer sold off all her businesses in Rainbow Springs she'd have enough money to buy herself all the respectability she would ever need. Why, she might even invent a whole history for herself and the baby, like something out of a storybook. There was no reason for the kid ever to know his ma had once lived the sporting life, or that his family tree was no more than a shrub.

She shut her eyes, swaying with the rocking-chair motion of the train, listening to the click of the wheels, and she let herself imagine how it would be.

Like in one of those parlor photographs Clementine took when she traveled the circuit in her portable photographic studio... Herself, Mrs. Hannah Yorke, sitting in a plush green velvet chair in a room all done up genteelly like one of those you see drawn up in a mail-order wish book. Her little boy—for some reason her child was always a boy in her imaginings— would be sitting astride a wooden horse that had a red saddle and real horsehair for the mane and tail. And he would be laughing. Always in her imaginings he was laughing. And he had dark hair and gray eyes, and she would raise him up to be a wild one, just like...

Suddenly a man's face appeared, surprising her, cropping up in her parlor and hovering there like some ghost. She ripped him out of it, as if tearing the photograph in two. She had to make herself forget him.

She would make herself forget him.

She clutched at the leather Gladstone traveling bag in her lap. She would think of the baby. Good ol' Hannah Yorke, sportin' gal and fancy gal, every man's gal and no man's gal... Hannah Yorke was going to have someone who would care about what happened to her, who would care when she was hurt or if she was happy or scared or feeling blue.

Hannah Yorke was going to have someone all her very own to love.

She leaned forward and flipped up the shade. Montana rushed by, all grass and mountains and sky. The grass was flattened, made soggy by the rain, and the mountains were murky with the low-lying clouds. It was a wet, dreary day, and the skies were dark. But Hannah smiled.

Every once in a great big beautiful while someone really did get ahold of the gold ring.

Samuel was too big and heavy to carry in her arms, but the press of fleeing people, horses, wagons, and carts was too dangerous for one no higher than a wheel hub. He was crying, great whooping cries, as if he knew she was taking him away from the only home he'd ever known.

It rained harder now, the water splashing against her face, running in streams off the round brim of her straw hat. Erlan slogged through the thick mud, her feet already aching as if they, too, knew what bitterness she had in store for them. The road stretched straight and wide and forever before her, out into the prairie and beyond, to the raw and black jagged mountains.

In China scholars spoke of a place where the sacred mountains held up the heavens. Surely these must be such mountains, she thought, for no others could be so awesome and majestic. So wild and frightening and beautiful.