Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  An infinity of grass. She would never have believed it without seeing it for herself. This endless vista of riffling yellow and green, always being stirred by the wind and smelling of the sage. She lifted her gaze to the looming mountains, black and gray and peaked with snow. There was such a great vastness to this country. What Gus called elbow room for the heart. But all this land and sky—there was a raw emptiness to it that sometimes touched her soul with fear.

  The rawhide whip snapped twice through the air, crackling like gunfire over the head of a mule lagging in harness, breaking her reverie. "Gee, Annabel!" the skinner bellowed. "Gee, you twice-damned daughter of a whoring bitch!"

  Clementine had to struggle to hide another smile, although she thought she could almost feel her ears burning. The mule skinner was not at all genteel. Indeed, Nickel Annie was proud of her leather lungs and her salty mouth, which she liked to boast could cuss the hide off her mules slicker than any whip.

  The skinner pulled a twist of tobacco out of her boot and tore off a hunk with her mulelike teeth. She worked her jaw awhile, then tongued home the chaw. Clementine tensed as a brown stream whizzed past her face to land on the wagon tongue with a splat. But for the first time that week she didn't flinch.

  "You was sayin' yesterday," Annie began in a voice gentle enough to lull a baby to sleep, "that your daddy is preacher to some temple back in Boston?"

  An old tumbleweed tore loose from a rock and bounced away, startling a sage chicken. The bird made a strange whirring noise as it took to the air, but Clementine's gaze did not follow its flight. She knew the skinner was setting her up like a wooden duck at a county fair, only to shoot something outrageous out of her mouth that would bring a blush to Clementine's cheeks.

  "Tremont Temple, yes. Perhaps you've been there?" she said with a Beacon Hill parlor smile. She was determined to hold her own against the vexing woman.

  The skinner's lips pulled back from her teeth in a tobacco-stained grin. "Well, Gus's daddy is a Bible banger, too, but you

  probably already knew that. A circuit-ridin' preacher is Gus's daddy. Not like yourn, who does his sermonizing in a proper church. A temple, even.... Now, there's a funny thing I've noticed about preachers' sons over the years," she added as if the thought had just occurred to her. "They're either hell-bent boys or they're all lassoed up tight in their own righteousness like your Gus. No betwixes and no betweens."

  Clementine watched the wagon ruts unwind before her like ribbons across the prairie. Gus hadn't told her that his father was a servant of God. Odd that they had this in common, yet he hadn't seen fit to mention it. "Mr. McQueen is a good man," she said aloud, then wished she hadn't, for it sounded too much as if she was trying to convince herself that Gus was nothing like her righteous father.

  Annie let out a liquid chuckle. "Oh, a regular saint is your husband Gus. Just like 'a hell-bent boy' do sure enough describe your brother-in-law."

  She cast a smirking look at Clementine's wind-chaffed face. "Surely your Gus must've told you about his brother. They're partners in the Rocking R, each owning half and each tryin' to run it like he owned the whole shebang. Bets are on in Rainbow Springs as to how long it's going to last. Nope, there ain't two more different snowflakes than Gus McQueen and Zach Rafferty."

  Not a word of it. He hadn't told her a word of this. Only yesterday he had accused her of having a jaw as tight as a beaver trap because she found it so hard to share her thoughts and feelings. But he had been keeping secrets of his own. So many times he had described his ranch in dream words—the meadows of sweet grass and wildflowers ringed by surging buttes and tall, timbered ridges. Not once had he mentioned that he shared the ownership of all that with a brother.

  So many wonderings arose within her: whether this brother was younger or older than Gus, and why they didn't share the same name. But it was her husband's place to tell her these things. To discuss him and his brother behind his back was a disloyal thing, what her mother would call perfidious gossip. She decided not to say another word and let Nickel Annie stew in the silence.

  The wagon's big hickory axle creaked; the iron tires crunched over the rocky ground; the wind whirled. Clementine cleared her throat. "In what way are the brothers different?"

  Nickel Annie's grin pleated her leathery face. She sent another brown stream splatting onto the wagon tongue and settled her shoulders for a long gab. "To begin with, Gus spent his boyhood with his ma, getting an East Coast shine on him, while Rafferty was rawhiding around rough country, growing up wild as a corncrib rat. I suppose you could say Gus's been tamed and Rafferty ain't.

  "And then there's Rafferty's sinnin' ways, which Gus can't abide. The drinkin' and the gamblin' and the whoring—especially the whoring. 'Course that might've just been jealousy workin' through Gus's guts. Mebbe it explains why he up and married you, him bein' a man for all his righteous ways, and men always do tend to end up thinking with their tallywhackers. And genu-ine ladies like you are as scarce out here as sunflowers in January."

  Clementine supposed she was being complimented. Or maybe not. People out here, she was learning, took a perverse pride in their rough edges, flaunting them like medals. "Thank you," she said, a bit stiffly.

  "You're welcome. Out here, you see, women're either whores or they're like me, thinking that all men are snakes and seein' no sense in bedding down with a snake. Which is why all the cowpunchers and sheep-coddlers, all the wolvers and dirt-grubbers—hell, you name it, they're all gonna come riding from miles around just to eyeball you, you bein' such a rarity. There ain't a man out here who wouldn't give his left ballock to be gettin' the cook, housekeeper, laundress, and all-round slave that you're gonna be to your man. Yup, slave and broodmare and bedmate all done up in the starchy trappings of an honest-to-God lady—Christ, the wonder of it stretches the mind." She hooted a laugh. "Dearie, you ain't only a rarity, you're a damned luxury!"

  Annie paused, and the whining wind immediately rose up to fill the silence. One of the mules flapped its ears and let out a snort, but Clementine held herself still. I will not let her provoke me, she vowed. There was grit in her heart and she would prove it.

  "Nope," the skinner went on with an exaggerated sigh. "Rafferty sure ain't gonna like findin' out his brother brought hisself back a wife with notions to go and civilize things. But Gus is the one comin' in for the real surprise."

  "What do you mean?" Clementine asked in spite of herself.

  Nickel Annie leaned so close that the stink of her tobacco breath washed over Clementine's face. "You, Mrs. McQueen. Ye're the surprise. 'Cause underneath that goody-goody shy-and-sweet air you wear on the skin side is a hot-blooded woman just waitin' for an excuse to bust out. Only Gus, he don't see it. Yet."

  "I cannot imagine what you are talking about," Clementine said, her mouth tightening around the lie. Somehow the mule skinner had seen the wildness in her, the wickedness. Just as her father had. As Gus had not, and never would if she could help it.

  "I am not like that. Like what you said." She smoothed her nubby wool skirt over her lap. She ensured that the pins were still in place in the thick Roman knot of hair at the back of her head. She felt disheveled... hot-blooded. "And as for Mr. Rafferty, he'll just have to accept the fact that his brother is married, and that is that."

  "That is that, hunh?" Nickel Annie brayed a laugh. "Hell, with Rafferty that ain't never that."

  They made camp that night on the side of the road beneath a lightning-scarred box elder tree. Nickel Annie fixed a supper of sowbelly beans and canned corn and showed Clementine how to bake biscuits in a frypan.

  Clementine ate her meal sitting on the wagon tongue, apart from Annie and Gus and a smelly fire of sagebrush and buffalo dung. She swung her dangling feet back and forth, back and forth, watching the toes of her high-buttoned black kid shoes make parallel ruts, like miniature wagon tracks, through the tall prairie grass. But these marks, she knew, would be only temporary. The land was so empty, so vast it could swallow a hundred Clemen
tines and leave not a trace.

  The loneliness of the thought disturbed her, frightened her even. She set her empty plate aside, stood and stretched, reaching up with her hands as if to grab a piece of the sky. She sighed, breathing deeply the stink of burning buffalo chips and sweaty mules.

  She turned to catch Gus watching her. He sat on a log, his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. With the steam wreathing his face and the brim of his hat shading his eyes, she couldn't read his thoughts. Her husband's moods could take a brooding turn, Clementine had discovered, when he wasn't smiling and laughing and spinning dreams with words. He hadn't opened his mouth in hours, and Nickel Annie, after that morning's loquaciousness, had also fallen silent.

  It was that quiet time of the day anyway, when the earth seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to go from daylight to darkness. The thick white clouds had acquired black streaks along the edges, like bands of mourning crepe, and the wind had died. There would be no stars tonight.

  Clementine settled onto the log beside Gus, not an easy maneuver in her narrow, looped skirt and the long-waisted, stoutly boned cuirass bodice that fit so tightly over her hips. She wished she could capture with her camera the way the box elder's black twisted branches clawed at the blanched sky. But she would have needed to set up a dark tent in order to develop the wet plate immediately after exposure—though she could have done that, for she had such a tent in her trunk. No, the truth was, she feared what Gus would say. She needed to accustom him gradually to the thought that his wife pursued an avocation most would call unconventional, even unseemly, for a woman.

  "I owe it to myself!" Nickel Annie said out of nowhere and so loudly that Clementine jumped. "By damn, I owe it to myself, and I ain't never been a woman to welsh on a debt."

  The skinner lurched to her feet and lumbered over to the wagon. Standing one-footed on the wheel hub, she hefted a barrel out of the bed. She rolled the barrel back over to the fire with the toe of her boot. She set the barrel upright, then hunkered down before it.

  Out of the cavernous pockets of her oilskin duster, she took a chisel and a nail. She pried one of the hoops out of place with the chisel, then bored a little hole in a stave with the nail. A tiny stream of brown liquid spurted out the hole and Clementine caught the tangy whiff of whiskey. Annie picked up her coffee cup, tossed out the dregs, then set the cup below the hole to catch the stream. The whiskey rang as it hit the tin.

  She slanted a broad wink over her shoulder at Clementine and Gus. "This here is what us folk in the freighting business call eee-vaporation."

  "That's what decent folk would call stealing," Gus said.

  "Guess that means you won't be wantin' any, then, you bein' so temp'rate and of the decent sort. And Mrs. McQueen, bein' such a la-di-da lady and the daughter of a preacher an' all—she sure ain't gonna want to stain her saintly lips with the devil's brew."

  Annie cast Clementine one of her sly looks. "Yup, a real starched-up wife you got yerself there, Gus McQueen." The whiskey had reached the cup brim and was now overflowing. "Just as well," she said, as she plugged the hole with a broken matchstick and pounded the hoop back into place, "the laws of nature only allowin' for so much eee-vaporation."

  She took a long, deep swallow. She shuddered dramatically and smacked her lips together with the pleasure of it. Gus watched her antics with a sour mouth, as if he wanted to say something more and only the distaste of the words was stopping him. In that moment Clementine thought he did seem all lassoed up tight in his own righteousness. Not at all the man with the laughing eyes who had come flying into her life on a big-wheeled ordinary.

  There was a tetchiness now to the silence that came over the camp. "I think I would like some of that coffee after all," Clementine said for the sake of making noise. She hadn't yet acquired a taste for the brew that westerners insisted had to be thick enough to float a horseshoe.

  Gus's hand fell on her shoulder, holding her down. "I'll get it."

  She watched him pour from the giant blackened pot. As he put the cup into her hands, their fingers brushed and she felt a soothing warmth from the coffee and from touching him. She gave him one of her rare smiles. "Thank you, Mr. McQueen."

  "You could try putting your tongue around my given name, Clementine."

  The smile faded. "I will. I promise. Just give me a little more time."

  He said nothing. But he picked up a stick and punched it deep into the fire. She didn't understand this stubbornness in herself. She yearned for the intimacy of his touch, yet she couldn't bring herself to the intimacy of calling him by his given name. It was as if it was a way of keeping one small part of her newfound woman's self to herself and apart from him for a while longer.

  She turned the cup around in her hands, staring into the coffee, dark and oily as ink. Her father's pulpit voice echoed in her head: "Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord." All of her life she had spent in battle with her father; she didn't want to fight her husband as well, and yet she was doing it. Already.

  "The first night at our place, that's when I'm going to make you mine," Gus had said. They were the words of a man planning to take possession. Soon they would be at his ranch, and he would take from her body the sort of pleasure the chippies sold. To think about it made her ache deep inside as she had one rainy day when she'd sneaked outside and taken off her shoes and stockings to play barefoot in the garden. When she had stood in mud that was as soft and slippery as buttered silk and squeezed her toes and felt the wet mud ooze up between them, and the pleasure of it had pierced her so that she had to set her teeth. Not to stop herself from laughing but to stop a scream.

  She stole a glance at this man, her husband. He sat with his forearms braced on his thighs, staring into the fire. She wondered if he too thought of that first night. The first night of the rest of her life in the RainDance country, and the first night that he would make her his.

  She sighed silently, deep within herself, and drew her steamer cloak tighter around her throat. The air had gone still and heavy, and there was an odd smell to it, like cold metal.

  A wet drop struck her wrist; another glanced off her cheek. Sparkling pinwheels fell into the flames with a gentle hiss. She flung her head back, staring into a sky of swirling cottony flakes. "Oh, look!" she exclaimed. "It's snowing!"

  Gus held out his open palm and laughed. "Darned if it isn't. Fat, wet snow, too. What we cowmen call a grass bringer."

  Nickel Annie belched and gestured with her half-empty cup of whiskey evaporation. "Hell, we're liable to get two or three more blizzards before spring honestly arrives, and even then you ain't safe. That's Montana for you, dearie. Hot as hell one day and snowing to beat the band the next. Why, it snowed just last year on the Fourth of July. Goddamn perverse bitch, is Montana."

  The snow came down heavy and lumpy, like wet oatmeal. Clementine turned her face, flushed and warm from the fire, up to the sky. She stuck out her tongue and laughed as the snow fell cold and wet into her mouth.

  "Clementine..." She turned to find Gus staring at her. There was that tenseness about him, a tautness around his mouth. It wasn't anger; she knew what it was. "Let's go to bed," he said.

  Away from the fire their breath trailed in little white ribbons from their mouths. The snow fell around them in a cloaking silence. Gus hung a lantern from the wagon tongue and unrolled the thick, closely woven quilts called soogans that he had bought before leaving Fort Benton.

  He knelt on the ground, arranging the soogans beneath the wagon's high bed. She looked at his bent back, so strong and wide. "That was wonderful what you did today," she said, "scooping that nickel up off the ground from out of the saddle and without even having to slow down your horse."

  He was quiet a moment, resting his elbow on his bent knee, staring at the ground. He rubbed a hand over his face and looked up at her. "That wasn't the same nickel; that was another one I fetched out of my pocket." In the lantern's feeble light she could see he was smiling. He stood up and
wrapped his arms around her waist. "How did you think I was going to spot a thing as small as a nickel in the middle of all that grass and rocks?"

  She leaned back within the circle of his arms and stared up at him. "I guess I think you can do anything."

  He pressed her head against his chest. "Don't... don't ever think that."

  Clementine shivered. She hadn't liked those words or the timbre of worry she heard in his voice. He wasn't supposed to have doubts, only certainties. He was supposed to have enough certainties for both of them.

  Gus blew out the lantern, and they took off their boots and shoes and crawled fully dressed into the soogans. When they had burrowed into the quilted warmth, he enfolded her in his arms, surrounding her with his hard man's body. His breath stirred her hair, blowing hot on her throat; then his lips brushed her cheek, seeking her mouth. His lips slanted back and forth across hers, gently at first, then with more urgency. An odd tenseness began to burn inside her, low in her belly. She squirmed, pressing harder against him.

  His fist gripped her hair, pulling their mouths apart. "Clementine, don't."

  He said it harshly, yet his arms tightened around her, crushing her to his chest. Her cheek rubbed against the rough wool of his coat. It smelled of prairie dust and woodsmoke, and she could feel a trembling deep within him, within the hardness of him.

  He released her, breathing heavily. He turned her around within the circle of his arms so that they lay back to front. He took her hands, rubbing his thumbs over the ridges of scars. "When are you going to tell me how you got these?"

  It was a question he'd asked her at least a dozen times since he'd first seen them. But to tell him about the caning seemed as intimate a thing as standing naked in front of him, and she hadn't done that yet, either.

  She felt his sigh warm against the back of her neck. "How can I get to know you, girl, if you won't talk to me?"