Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  She didn't want him to get to know her, for she seemed to have brought all her failings along with her into this marriage. Unlike her, Gus McQueen had never pretended to be other than what he was: a good man, a decent man, one who would provide for her and keep her safe. He believed he had married a proper young miss, someone who would always be a virtuous, obedient wife. A starched wife. A genu-ine lady. He knew nothing of what she really was.

  "Clementine—"

  "I wish to go to sleep now, Mr. McQueen," she said. She thought he would draw away from her then, but he didn't.

  Away from the light of the fading fire, the dark was thick and deep. A coyote cried, a high quavering that sounded lonely. Clementine rubbed her tongue over her lips, tasting him.

  They lay together, snug in the soogans. He slept, his arm resting on her hipbone, his hand warm on her stomach. She could feel him along the length of her, from feet to knees to his chest pressed against her back.

  Moments ago she had been laughing at the snow. Now she felt an aching sadness that she couldn't understand, a hollow emptiness. A fear began to grow in her that was as wide and raw as the Montana sky. A fear that somehow she had brought the loneliness of her father's house with her.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gus McQueen held his horse still a moment as he looked across the valley that was his home.

  He felt a piercing joy as the word formed in his mind. The sky was a clear blue, stretching to the end of the world. The copper sun put a shimmer on the Rainbow River as it wound through sweet-grass meadows carpeted with pale purple wind-flowers and pink bitterroot. Mile after mile of fat, rich grass rolled into tree-furred mountains and the slope-shouldered buttes with their scattering of pines. Seen like this, today, the RainDance country looked almost pretty and tame. Not wild as he knew it was. And possessed of a loneliness that could seep into you if you weren't careful, to lie there like an ache on the bone.

  He turned his gaze from the horizon to his wife. She sat the high, hard seat of the mule skinner's wagon as if it were a throne. Her pale face was chapped by the wind, her fashionable clothes grimed with dust and dried mud. But just as a good cow pony could be told in the way it moved and held its head, there was no doubting the quality of Clementine. She was prime. She was a lady.

  Clementine... Even the echo of her name in his mind made him ache. He remembered how she had lifted her laughing face up to the sky the night it snowed, how she had made his body hard and trembling with wanting her. The snow was gone now. Spring snows never stayed long on the ground. Not like in the winter when the stuff piled up in drifts higher than the ranch house roof, and it got so cold a man's breath froze in his chest. Montana winters could defeat a woman, grind her down like fodder beneath a stone. The winter and the wind.

  Longing and fear swelled within Gus's chest as he stared at his wife. She was more precious than the land, and he had never believed he would think that of a woman. She stole a man's breath. Her hair was as golden as the light of the dawn sun, her eyes deep green and rippling like range grass in spring. All of her was as fragile and delicate as heired china.

  She ought to be preserved in a glass bell, he thought, so that she wouldn't get broken and her purity would never be tainted. The winter and the wind. He knew what Montana could do to a woman.

  She turned her head just then and caught him looking at her, and her mouth curved into a shy smile. A smile that made his body grow hard. He felt ashamed sometimes of the raw lust he felt for his wife.

  "I like your RainDance country, Mr. McQueen," she said. "It is truly as beautiful as you said it would be."

  He felt an easing deep within his chest at her words. Until that moment he hadn't realized what it was he'd been dreading. That once she had a look at the place he'd brought her to, she'd want to go back—back to Boston and civilization and the life she'd been raised to. A broad smile stretched across his face. They could be happy here in the RainDance, he and Clementine.

  "If you think this is pretty, Clem," he said, laughing with joy over life, over her, "just wait until you see the ranch."

  Nickel Annie made a snorting sound like a pig at feeding time. "Yup. The prettiest place in the world to work yourself to death."

  Clementine McQueen had to stiffen her back to keep from squirming in her excitement. Weeks of days with the constant wind sanding her face raw, whipping at her clothes and hair, coating her teeth with the grit of prairie dust. Weeks of nights spent on the hard ground or in the lumpy, bug-infested bed of some dismal road ranch. Weeks of mile after lurching, bumping mile, perched like a sparrow on the freight wagon's seat, dodging Nickel Annie's taunts and tobacco spittle. Weeks of days and nights and miles that had to be endured somehow and that now at last, at last, were almost over.

  In these last days they had ridden through stands of fir and larch pines whose great needled boughs filtered the sun and caught the wind and whose beauty made her ache. Then yesterday they had emerged from a pass through glacier-sheared mountains to look out over a valley that stretched raw and empty, like the Montana sky. Gus had pointed to a slope-sided hill that thrust up out of the rolling rangeland, a butte shaped like the crown of a hat. "At the foot of that butte is Rainbow Springs, and on the other side of it is my ranch. Our ranch," he'd amended, and the words warmed her, making her smile.

  "It's how the RainDance country got its name, from that butte," he went on, spinning dreams out of words. "The story goes that once long ago a Blackfeet girl lost her lover during a time of great famine, because he had hunted only to feed the others of his tribe and saved nothing to fill his own belly. The morning of his death, she carried his body up to the top of the butte. There she danced in her grief and wept so hard her tears fell like rain upon the valley, and that summer the buffalo grass grew taller than a brave on horseback and thicker than a grizzly's coat, and her people grew fat off the land." He cocked his head at her, smiling with his eyes. "And some of that story might even be true."

  Clementine didn't care whether the story was true. It was sad and beautiful, and she thought of it often while she watched the butte grow larger as they meandered across the valley, following the serpentine curves of the river. Now at last, at last, she could see the sun slanting off the tin roofs of Rainbow Springs, Gus's town. Her town now, her home.

  Quaking aspens lined the river as it flowed around the butte where the Indian girl had mourned her man with a rain dance. Snug on the river's far bank a lone smoke-stained tipi rose tan-white in the sun. Clementine searched for signs of life, for an Indian maiden and her brave lover, but the tipi appeared abandoned. The wide road—wide enough to give a span of mules maneuvering room, so Nickel Annie said—was deserted as well. It ended at the slope of the butte, which was pocked with the holes of abandoned mine shafts.

  A pile of tin cans and bottles marked the beginning of what Clementine had come to learn was Montana's idea of a town— a scattering of log shacks weathered to the gray-yellow of old bones, their tin roofs striped with rust. Two sported signboards: The Best in the West Casino and Sam Woo's General Mercantile. The lettering had been painted by the same person, who liked putting elaborate curlicues on his capitals.

  But Clementine's most vivid first impression of Rainbow Springs was of the mud. The mules' hooves made sucking, popping sounds in the soupy mud. The wagon wheels sank half up to their hubs in mud and sent mud splattering in red globules onto Clementine's skirts. Nickel Annie cursed and whipped the air above the mules' heads as they strained to pull the heavy wagon through the mud. Gumbo was what they called such mud, Gus had told her. It was red and glutinous and had a swampy, feral smell to it.

  The wagon squelched to a stop in front of a livery barn. Attached to the barn was a blacksmith's shop. Within the shadow of the forge, a man with a long, tangled gray beard and a belly that rode low over a leather apron was fitting the lid onto a fresh pine coffin.

  Gus dismounted just as the slam of a door smacked against the crisp air. A woman in a ruched and draped gown the vivid
hue of hothouse violets came running. She lifted her skirts high and hopscotched on the planks and boards that had been laid down in the mud, flaunting red-tasseled shoes, pink-and-lilac-striped petticoats, and royal purple silk stockings.

  "Oh, Annie, you darling!" the woman cried, laughing as she ran. "You've brought it at last. You've brought my piano!"

  At the sight of Gus the woman stumbled to a stop and lowered her skirts. Rich color flooded her cheeks as she smoothed flyaway strands of hair that was of a deep beech red. She had a face and body meant to go with red hair and a violet dress— dimpled and naughtily seductive.

  "Well, how there, Gus," she said in a voice that was rough and breaking like a boy's. "You were gone so long I reckon even I was starting to miss you."

  Gus walked past her as if she were a ghost he couldn't see.

  With Gus's help, Clementine climbed off the tall wagon, using the wheel rim and hub as a ladder. The woman had run around to the other side to throw her arms around Nickel Annie, and she was now climbing up the wheel for a better look at her piano, not caring that she exposed the red tassels on her shoes and her purple silk stockings. Clementine was fascinated by this woman in her vibrant violet silk dress. Her mother would have called the gown vulgar, Clementine knew. She herself had never been allowed to wear anything that wasn't some refined shade of gray or brown. She wondered how she would look, how she would feel, wearing such a gaudy dress.

  "God almighty, if it ain't Gus McQueen!" The blacksmith loped up to them, his leather apron slapping his shins. He grinned to reveal a checkerboard row of black gaps and stubby teeth. He smelled of horse liniment. "Howdy, stranger." He bellowed a laugh and thumped Gus on the back with a meaty fist. "We ain't caught sight of your ugly face around these parts in a coon's age."

  "Howdy, Snake-Eye. Who's the toe-pincher for?" Gus said, nodding at the casket. Resting on a sawhorse, it had been fashioned of rough pine boards, broad at the top and narrow at the foot, and built long for a tall man.

  "That Scotchman, MacDonald, got hisself kilt," the blacksmith said, and Clementine, who had her hand on Gus's arm, felt him relax as if he'd been fearing the answer. "He was found out on his north range, shot in the back. We're all figuring it was Iron Nose and his boys what did it. The poor bastard probably caught 'em laying rope on his spring calves, and they plugged him when he tried to stop 'em. Some of us've been saying its about time we formed ourselves up a lynching party to track them renegades down and string 'em up."

  The blacksmith's gaze had been bouncing between Gus and Clementine like a ball on a string. Now he paused and looked at Gus, a frank question in his eyes, which were as small and pale as pumpkin seeds.

  Gus slipped his arm around Clementine's waist. "Snake-Eye, I'd like for you to meet my wife. Snake-Eye runs the livery, does the blacksmithing, and passes for the town's undertaker when it's needed."

  Clementine nodded politely. "How do you do, Mr...." She faltered. "Mr. Snake-Eye" sounded ridiculous.

  Snake-Eye stared at her, his mouth hanging open. He shut it with an audible click of his few teeth. "Well, shi—shucks, Gus. You went and brought yerself back a wife. Well, shucks."

  "Welcome to Rainbow Springs, Mrs. McQueen." The woman in the purple dress had come up behind them, and at the sound of her husky voice, Clementine turned.

  The high color on her face came partly from paint, Clementine realized. A friendly smile put deep dimples in her cheeks. But her coffee-brown eyes held a touch of wariness and vulnerability as her gaze flickered from Clementine to Gus.

  Gus tightened his embrace of Clementine's waist, swinging her away from the woman. "Be back in a shake, Snake-Eye," he said. He took her elbow, pulling her after him. "Come along, Clementine."

  The woman's voice, dry and taunting now, followed after them: "My, but if some folk don't have no more manners than cows in a stampede."

  Clementine's shoes sucked and popped in the thick red mud. She grappled one-handed with her skirts, trying to find a safe island on one of the planks and boards that lay haphazardly across the road. "Wait, please, Mr. McQueen. I am floundering in this mud."

  "You may as well get used to it, girl," he flung back at her over his shoulder. "It's here to stay till June."

  "Will you at least tell me where we are going in such a hurry? And why are you behaving so rudely to that woman?"

  "I'm not introducing my wife to the town harlot."

  The town harlot. Clementine wanted to turn around for another look at the woman. The memory of that violet silk dress, rich and so gay, was bright in her mind. She could see why they were called fancy women.

  The town's few buildings were made of rough-hewn logs. Only one, the hurdy-gurdy hall, was the least bit dandified, with whitewashed chinking and a rack of deer antlers over the double front doors. But as they passed by the saloon, Clementine saw in back of it a house nestled in a grove of quaking aspen and pines. A two-story white frame house made of sawed lumber, with wood-carved rosettes and teardrops festooned along the top of the front gallery and a balcony with a spooled railing. "Who lives in that house?" she wondered aloud.

  "You saw her. Hannah Yorke, owner of the Best in the West and the town harlot. Mrs. Yorke, she styles herself, although if she's ever been married to any of the men she's had in her bed, I'll eat my horse—hooves, tail and all. Put her out of your mind now, Clementine. You'll be wanting no truck with her."

  There must be a profit in it, Clementine thought. This selling of one's body for a man's pleasure. After seeing all those places where they'd spent the nights on the trail, those road ranches and claim cabins, she'd begun to fear her husband's place would also turn out to be little better than a sod shack. But surely, she thought now, their house must be at least as nice as the town harlot's.

  Gus came to such an abrupt halt that she almost walked up the back of his boots. "This here's the mercantile," he said, waving at a square, squat building that boasted a single window with a sack stuffed in one broken pane and the others so filthy that all Clementine could see of the inside was the dim flicker of a lantern. "Why don't you go on in and have a look around?

  I'm going back to the livery to see about borrowing a buckboard to take us out to the ranch. If you find anything you'd like, just have Sam Woo mark it down on the ranch account."

  Clementine watched her husband's long legs plow back through the mud toward the livery stable and Nickel Annie's freight wagon. He had brought her over here to the mercantile just so she wouldn't become soiled by contact with the town harlot. Yet the woman hadn't seemed at all wicked. Only cheerful, and perhaps a little shy.

  Clementine watched Hannah Yorke as she circled the freight wagon almost skipping in her joy, like a bright bird in her violet plumage. Nickel Annie and Snake-Eye were wrestling with the piano, trying to get a rope around it so that it could be winched out of the wagon bed. The woman's laughter, light and tinkling as silver bells, joined with the mule skinner's hearty, liquid guffaws. They are friends, Clementine thought, Hannah Yorke, Nickel Annie, and Snake-Eye. Watching them, hearing their easy laughter, she felt a strange and wistful envy.

  She turned her back on the livery stable and climbed the two sagging steps to the mercantile's front door. It was already slightly ajar, and she pushed it open, knocking into a pair of cowbells that announced her arrival with a loud jangle. She looked for a mat on which to wipe her feet and saw that it would be pointless. The warped puncheon floor was only slightly less muddy than the road outside.

  She lifted her skirt to step over the high threshold and raised her eyes to find three men staring at her as if she'd just come crawling out of a bog.

  Two of the men were toasting their backs before a small black pot-bellied stove. One was a tall string bean of a person with eyes as wide and serious as a barn owl's and a sunken, toothless mouth. The other was short and round. His head was as bald as a china doorknob, but his beard grew long and thick to the middle of his chest and was the flat yellow color of old wax. Because of the red clay that
stained their clothes and their hobnailed boots, she thought the men must be prospectors. They both appeared to patronize the same tailor as Nickel Annie.

  Behind a counter of rough planks laid between two pickle barrels was obviously the Sam Woo memorialized in fancy script on the signboard outside. He stared at her from behind a pair of spectacles, mostly hidden beneath a green eyeshade pulled low on his forehead. He had a flat-boned face and a set of ink-black chin whiskers so stiff and sparse they looked like the bristles on a horse brush.

  Clementine took a single step across the threshold, and the breath seemed to leave the three men in a collective sigh.

  "Well, I'll be..." the tall, thin man began.

  "Damned," the small, fat man finished for him.

  "Holy God," said Sam Woo.

  Clementine gave them all a polite little nod, feeling shy and as though she were on display.

  The Chinese man put his palms together and bowed, his long queue swinging past his waist. He spoke in an odd singsong that seemed to be mocking her. "Sam Woo welcomes you to his humble mercantile, madam. This wretched self is honored. Tell me how I may serve you."

  Clementine wet her lips and swallowed. "I should only like to look today, thank you. I'm not yet sure of all that I will come to need." She waved a hand at the two prospectors. "Please, continue helping these gentlemen."

  Sam Woo bowed again, the lenses of his thick spectacles winking in the dim light as he straightened. Uncomfortable with the men's goggle-eyed scrutiny, Clementine turned away, pretending interest in a wrought-iron birdcage that was still littered with the feathers of some long gone canary. After a long, uncomfortable silence, the men gave up staring at her and huddled together, bending over a dog-eared catalog that lay spread open on the counter.

  Never had Clementine seen so many disparate things all gathered together in one place. Her nose twitched at the strong smells of coal oil and saddle soap, cured fish and wheels of moldy cheese. A set of checkers lay atop a stack of frypans, which in turn balanced precariously on a pile of lard buckets. Brass lanterns were displayed next to men's unmentionables, little cans of crimson paste next to boxes of Goodwin candles. Something brushed against her head, becoming entangled in her bonnet, and she looked up to see an old-fashioned crinoline hanging from the ceiling.