by Lauran Paine
They stopped in a tiny clearing where clumps of creek grass grew like toadstools, making shaggy hummocks. He sank down, her beside him, and looked into the dark-lashed eyes. “I wish I could tell you how it is with me, Ann,” he said. “I wish I could tell someone.”
The black watchfulness of her stare, the utter stillness of her face troubled him. He started to get to his feet.
“Lee?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me. I’ll listen.”
“I guess not, Ann. I guess it’s foolish the way I feel. The old man thinks it is … so does Zeke.”
“Then I’ll tell you something,” she said with sudden force. “Of the three Gormans you’re the least likely to be foolish.”
He let himself fully down again and blinked at her, tried not to notice the way she sat on one of the hummocks with her skirt drawn tightly around the curve of hip.
“You’re different, Lee. You think … your paw and big Zeke don’t.”
“Yes, they do,” he answered loyally. “We think different is all. Paw’s a fighter … been fighting all his life. Zeke … he fights, too.”
“Fights what?”
“Oh, things inside him. Things he feels. I know. I know Zeke pretty well.” He watched her profile. It was stoically unchanged and unchanging. “You don’t understand me, do you?”
“I understand,” she said in a low and bitter way. “Lots of folks understand, Lee. Zeke’s a man fighter. Just a man fighter.”
“I guess I’m the one that doesn’t understand, Ann.”
“Don’t you? Your paw … he’s got Zeke wrapped around his finger. He won’t fight it and he can’t break it. That’s what I mean. Folks notice those things, Lee. They talk about them. Not just the cowmen but the squatters, too. They see how things are.” She turned her head so she could see his damp face in the drawn-out light of willow shadows. “Maybe you don’t know these things. I reckon you don’t. You don’t look like you do.”
“I know them,” he said heavily, and let it die there.
She sat there gazing at him a moment before she spoke again. “What were you going to tell me, Lee?”
“Nothing.”
There was something hard and unpleasant in the glade with them now. The mellowness was gone. He looked straight ahead.
She bent forward, touched his bare neck with her fingers. “I want to hear it. I want you to tell me, Lee.”
At her touch fresh sweat burst out between his shoulder blades. “I wish I could,” he said hoarsely. “I’d like to tell somebody sometime … just to get it out of me.”
The fingers worked his damp flesh, kneading it like bread dough until he had to move out of her reach and her hand fell back to her side. Then words came out of him with a big burst of breath.
“I want to leave, Ann. That’s all …” He looked at her face. There was no change in it. She remained impassive, dark eyes still and bottomless. The wide swell of her mouth closed without pressure, full and shiny.
“Go on,” she said, low.
“Get some land somewhere and grow things.”
“Yes.”
“Make an orchard, build a house, get some sheep and cows and pigs, and grow things. Be neighborly with folks. I don’t want to be fighting all the time … be hated and full of hate.”
“Your paw’d shoot you if he heard this,” she said.
“Well, that’s how it is, anyway. I don’t like to go to Bethel or Union City. I know what folks think … especially the ranchers. Ann, I don’t hate them.”
“A stone house near a creek, Lee?”
He nodded, blood running under his cheeks. “About like that.”
“With a root cellar and a place to put down salt meat and apples, and eggs in a crock … and a woman?”
His color flooded beet red.
“To lie with …?”
He jumped up sweating. “Ann, you shouldn’t talk like that!”
She jumped up just as swiftly, her back very straight, cheeks white, and eyes blazing with candor. “You got rams with your ewes … we got bulls with our cows. How’ll you have young ones without a woman, Lee? They go with the house and the creek and the root cellar and all. You know that.”
“But you shouldn’t talk about it, though.”
“Why not, it’s natural, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer; he just looked at her and swallowed hard.
“Lee?”
“Yes, Ann.”
“When’re you going to do it … go away?”
“I don’t know. It’s what I want to do. I haven’t any plans though. Not yet.”
She swung away, then back again, and he was surprised at the strange, urgent expression she wore now. There was something secretive in her face—something cunning—like she was smoothing out an idea, perfecting it as she stared at him.
“Do you know what Zeke and Emily Potter did the night of the Fourth of July dance, Lee?”
He didn’t know, so he said nothing.
“I reckon that wasn’t wrong, was it?”
“You’re talking strange,” he husked. “I never heard you talk like this before.”
“No, you haven’t. But you only ride over when your paw sends you after rock salt.” She looked past him at the sluggish moving water. “People got to grow up sometime, don’t they? Learn to see things different. Not good or bad but like they really are.”
“Well,” he stammered in the face of her strangeness, her sudden vitality. “Anyway, I feel better for telling you how it is with me, Ann …” He was trying to get things back the way they had been but the black fire in her stare blinded him. His words trailed off into nothing.
She was very close to him, so close the rise and fall of her blouse swayed against his shirt front. There was a challenge in her face as clear as day, as inviting as a cool spring.
“I want to get away, too, Lee. Far away … even out of Wyoming.” She spoke almost fiercely.
“You … do?”
“Clean away. And have things of my own. A stone house by a creek. I’ve pictured it in my mind for a long time. With critters around and young ones.”
She took his hand and pressed it in the valley of her breasts and leaned up against him like that, with the tall thin shadows mottling them and the curse of unhappiness a deep physical pain in them both.
Lee made no move to retreat; he was rooted. A spiral of warmth uncoiled in him, thrust upward and upward and he finally forgot what, exactly, he was doing in the glade and thought only of the agonizing want that was there in the silence with them, beside the muddling creek. He touched her hair with his free hand. Let it wind through the blackness, fingers like brown worms groping without sight. Then he dropped the hand lower, to her neck, to her shoulder, and let it hang there, sweat-slippery and trembling.
She was as still as stone but the hard thrust when she breathed burst against him and he knew there was more than just his own fever between them. He kept his hand upon her shoulder, afraid, almost sick with fear, with knees that trembled and with sweat that ran and nearly blinded him.
She bit her lip and it hurt. Not enough to make her cry but she cried anyway, softly. Racking deep but softly, and, when he moved back a little, she sank down limply on the grass hummock and covered her face with her hands and just cried.
“Ann …?”
He was miserable. Everything else was forgotten—the ripening bodies under the tarp in the wagon, the sheepmen riding to XIH with Uriah, the perils of Union City. He was long-faced, as white as a sheet with his mouth hanging slack, heavy lids half covering his eyes.
“Lee … are you ashamed?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not!”
She wiped her face. It felt hot. She pressed both palms against her cheeks and looked up at him. Her eyes were twice as black as he’d ever see
n them. There was a hot luster to them from shed tears.
“You cried …”
“I don’t know why, Lee. Maybe because when you want something a lot and it comes close you can’t stand it.”
“Want what?”
“That stone house by the creek and the man who’ll make it for me.”
He stared down at her.
“That’s why I cried. Lee? Don’t stare at me. Lee? Will you kiss me? I want you to kiss me.”
When he didn’t move, she reached up, caught his hands, and pulled him down upon the grass, got close to him, put both hands on his head, and kissed him on the mouth, on the lips, pulled back six inches, and looked at him and smiled, then kissed him again.
He couldn’t remember ever having seen Ann Foster smile before although he had seen her smile because he’d known her since they’d come to the flint hills country. He just hadn’t noticed, particularly, before.
Finally she drew off a little and said: “I’ve got some jerky in my saddlebags. Shall I get it?”
“I couldn’t eat it,” he said honestly.
Her head bent forward again. She murmured—“This is food.”—and kissed him again, pressing wide lips over his mouth, holding him in a velvet grip so that he couldn’t have torn free if his life had depended upon it. Then she lay her head against him and the furry quiver of her breath touched his cheek, and he felt with his hands, locking them around her.
“I know how a bird feels when you hold it in your hand,” she said softly. “Now I know exactly how it feels.” She took one of his hands free. “Do you feel my heart?”
“Yes.”
She put her head upon his chest. “And yours …”
“I don’t feel right, Ann.”
“Scared?”
“More’n just scared. Like this is wrong.”
She made a hard short shake of her head and the lash of her hair made his skin prickle. “No it isn’t, Lee. I thought so, too, for a while, but now I know it’s not wrong. We’ve got a right to fight for what we want. That’s not wrong.”
“Well, no,” he said. “That isn’t … but this might be.”
“No, not even this. Your paw, my paw, Zeke, my sister, the folks in Union City and Bethel … they don’t exist right now, Lee. There’s no one in the world this minute but you and me, and what we do with each other is right. That’s what I knew when I kissed you. What you and I do together is right.” She raised up and plucked at his shirt where it lay soggily over his chest. “You’re sweating like a stud horse.”
“I have reason.”
She stiffened the length of her, drew back, got to her feet, and reached forward to tug him up off the ground. “Come along. Down here a ways.”
The creek slapped torpidly against some gray sand. Sunshine exploded off shiny pebbles and the ground underfoot was resilient.
“Lie down there. No, take your shirt off first.”
“What for?”
But he removed it and the breadth of his chest was immense, swelling upward and outward from lean flanks corded and thick from labor, but paler than his wrists and face where the sun had left its shades.
“Now lie down there … on your stomach.”
She scooped up water in her hands and washed his back with slow, circling motions. Bent over him and leaned with her upper body swaying until his head, lying over his arms, grew limp and began to sway, too.
It was wonderful. It was relaxing and blissful. He let his body run loose against the earth its full length. Neither of them spoke for a long time. Until the shadows had moved a little south and west. Then she kissed him between the shoulder blades, up along the neck, and he rolled over to reach for her with all the fright gone. Touched her with the tremors stilled, the doubts and quaking forgotten, and she smiled tenderly at him.
“Lee … didn’t you ever guess?”
He heard through a redness and didn’t care what she said, what anyone said, even his paw. Nothing existed for him but the bigness of her eyes, growing bigger until she closed them.
Chapter Three
He left her when the marching shadows were lengthening easterly, drove the full distance to Union City and left the corpses of Lester Evans and Carter Buell lying in the dust beside the plank walk and drove the long way back, arriving at the foot of the plateau after midnight with a stained circlet of silver riding high overhead.
From far out he had seen the shifting tongue of orange flame, larger than a cooking fire, at their camp. It meant, of course, that there were others on the plateau as well as his father and brother.
It was hard to force his mind back to Uriah and Uriah’s way. For the first time since he could remember, Uriah and Zeke were not uppermost in his thoughts.
Even while he had been arranging the corpses in the dust of Union City’s roadway, saying nothing nor looking up at the ring of white, shocked faces, he had not thought of his peril there.
The team braced to the collar. Chain tugs clanked and the wagon started upward. Above, someone called sharply. Lee heard but did not heed. When he topped out and drew up, there was a small mob of armed men standing ready and looking at him. Uriah pushed through, trailing his rifle. Beyond, the fire burned wickedly, darkly, throwing out shadows that jerked and panted.
“You all right, boy?”
He looped the lines. “I’m all right.”
Pedro Amaya looked in the bed of the wagon under the canvas. “They’re gone,” he said flatly.
“Didn’t no one offer to stop you?” someone asked on a rising note.
Lee got down. “No. I drove into town, put them out in the roadway before the marshal’s office, and drove out again. I don’t recollect anyone saying anything.”
Zeke was moving up slowly, puzzled looking and straining to see his brother’s face. When Uriah would have spoken, Zeke brushed past him, leading Lee toward the big fire. Behind them Pedro Amaya was caring for his horses and the others were murmuring together.
There was rye whiskey and black coffee and fried mutton. Lee ate steadily. Zeke drank from a tin cup. His face was freshly washed but the strain still showed.
“What’s the matter with you?” the elder brother asked over the rim of the cup.
Lee drank deeply and his head cleared. “Tired,” he said. “Feel like I been drawed through a knothole … What happened at XIH?”
Zeke put his cup down carefully and looked into it. “Nothing. Not a blamed thing. We rode out there and the place was as deserted as an empty gut. Pete picked up the sign and we tracked ’em to the glass rock this side of Simpson’s C-Bar-S. There Pete lost the sign, but that made no difference. They were all at the Simpson place. From a hill we could see the rigs in the yard. Looked like every cowman in the country was there.” Zeke raised his big head. Firelight flickered redly and sooty shadows lay in the hollows under his eyes. “You know what that powwow means, don’t you?”
“War,” Lee said succinctly.
“Yeah.” Zeke picked up the cup, drained it, and tossed it aside. “That’s what we been setting around here for. That, and wondering what had happened to you. Paw’s been egging them to saddle up with him and ride to Union City to find you. He was sure they’d gotten you.”
“No,” Lee replied thickly, slowly. “I took my time. It was hot …”
Zeke, watching his face, saw something there, something he could not define. He had seen it back by the wagon, too, but his big body ached and his soul had been drained dry by the day’s excitement. He was too weary to be curious.
“What’s he going to do now?” Lee asked idly, sinking lower against the earth with a delicious sense of languor stealing over him, feeling detached from Zeke and Uriah and the others.
“We’re going back tonight and be in position by sunup.”
“At XIH?”
Zeke nodded, firelight making his face sweat shin
y. In a thick voice he added: “They want a fight, don’t they?”
Dark ghostly shadows approached the fire. Pete Amaya lifted the jug of rye whiskey and drank, cursed softly in Spanish, and handed the jug around. A few laced their coffee with the stuff but not all. They all looked as gray-faced as big Zeke, with shifting, reddened eyes and wet mouths. Uriah’s beard, russet in the firelight, was more unkempt than usual; his uncombed white thatch stood stiffly with sweat and dust. Where he squatted, rifle against his legs, lay a square-hewn trembling shadow.
“We figured they might’ve got you,” he said to his youngest.
“It was hot. I drove slow.”
“See any riders?”
“Not a one, Paw.”
“You eaten?”
“Yes.”
“Then fetch your musket from the wagon, saddle your horse, and let’s go.”
“Paw …”
Uriah was on his feet, moving away from the fire with the others, his voice rumbling at them. Zeke, across the fire, looked steadily at his brother, then he arose, also, and moved off after the others. Lee lay there, twisted from the waist, watching them. Then he got up and went toward the wagon.
Uriah led them down off the plateau and out along the mottled roadway. There was very little talk until they cut through a wild, timbered region westerly, leaving the wagon ruts behind. Then voices rose, some uneasy, some needlessly loud and hollow sounding. They came to another roadway, raw-cut and fresh with newness. It was a bad narrow brace of ruts with holes a foot deep in places, and jutting big rocks on either side, but it was well shielded by night and tall trees. It was the XIH’s own lane. Uriah rode ahead, rifle balanced against his saddle swells, bony shoulders sharply pointed in the pale gloom, head up and moving constantly from side to side. After a long spell he drew up. The others halted behind him; their voices dwindled. Silence came. The deep, abiding silence of late night. Then Uriah left the road, pushed as far as an erosion slash, and swung down.
“We’ll wait here for sunup,” he said, and off-saddled.
There was a creeping iciness in the gully. In an hour, when the whiskey wore off, they would all be shivering from the cold. Lee wrapped a sweat-stiff saddle blanket around his shoulders and sat, cross-legged, his mind miles away under the vivid hot sun of the creek bottom.
