Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  Gus stirred the toe of his boot through the links of chain and bent horseshoe nails that littered the floor. "Regardless of who shot who, we can't let those half-breeds get away with their thieving. Otherwise this whole valley'll be overrun with rustlers. Dammit, Zach, Iron Nose and his boy are stealing our beeves."

  "That don't make 'em unique. Half the ranchers in this territory got started in the cattle business with a wide loop and other men's calves."

  The hammer blows thrummed in Gus's chest and belly as he watched his brother shape the shoe. His skilled, cow-sawy brother, who probably knew all the ways there were to alter a brand and rustle a cow.

  Not for the first time he wondered if cattle thieving was the little difficulty with the law that had brought about the change in his brother's last name. What Zach had done, what things were done to him between the time they were split up as boys and nine years later, when their paths had crossed on a cattle drive in west Texas—it was never spoken of between them. Those years had taken a hard boy and hardened him further in ways that Gus didn't quite understand.

  But then, how well can you ever really know someone? How much can you ever know of that place deep inside a man's guts where he lives? All those shared hours of their boyhood, they had fought and dreamed and sinned together, and he had never really known his brother.

  Of all his memories of their shared boyhood it was the last one that haunted him the most. On that day the sun was beating down hot on the steamship's varnished deck. Black-skinned dockworkers were singing gospel as they tossed cotton bales into a dray, and the air was thick with the smell of jute and sugarcane. Zach was standing barefoot on the gray weathered wharf, his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his ragged britches, and there was this look on his face... as if he knew they weren't ever coming back....

  Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled through the open door, bringing with it the smell of woodsmoke and the coming rain. There was a hot hiss and a plume of steam as Zach plunged the horseshoe into the slake trough. It was one more thing they'd never been able to talk about. That day on the Natchez dock when only one of them had been saved and the other was left behind.

  He sucked in a deep breath to ease the raw ache of memory. He pressed his fists into his spine and stretched backward, wincing as the movement pulled on his bruised ribs. "Lord, I'm busted. Next time I pick a fight with you, try harder to talk me out it. We're getting too old for that kinda horse-mucking around."

  Zach tossed a hole punch onto the workbench and flashed him a sudden smile. "But it sure do beat the alternative."

  Gus had to purse his mouth against the wealth of emotion brought on by that smile. "Well, hell." He draped his arm across his brother's back, gripping his shoulder hard, shaking him. "I played hooky this afternoon and went fishing. Let's go inside and find out if that wife of mine has learned how to fry a trout without having it come out black as boot leather."

  Zach eased out from beneath his embrace. He picked up a handful of clench nails. "You go on ahead," he said, his face averted. "I want to put this shoe on first."

  "No, I'll wait," Gus said around a thickness in his throat. "I'll wait."

  They were almost at the door to the cabin when the rain came. They stood side by side and watched as it slashed in wind-hurried drifts, flattening the grass and hitting the cottonwoods with a snapping noise, like flags bucking in the wind. Lightning flashed, and the trees and mountains were silhouetted black against a sky of beaten silver.

  This land, Gus thought. The RainDance country. You worked it, and fought it and coveted it, and in the end you wound up loving it so much it scared you. He felt Zach as a solid presence beside him. Together they could build this place into the biggest and best spread in western Montana.

  So maybe, he thought, it didn't matter that he found it impossible to wholly understand his brother, for he knew one indomitable truth about him: he couldn't be beaten. Hurt, yes.

  Cut bone-deep and bruised soul-deep, but never beaten. Down deep inside the guts of him—in that secret, vulnerable place within a man where he lived—Zach McQueen, or Rafferty or whatever he chose to call himself, had never been beaten. And he never would be.

  CHAPTER 9

  "Now you must remain quite still, Mr. Montoya, while I shoot you."

  The silver bangles on the boy's sombrero shivered as he laughed. "You hear that, boss? Your wife, she say she goin' to shoot me."

  He struck a pose, his hand hooked on the red sash at his waist, one hip cocked. His leather pants were decorated with silver conchas, his boots stitched with flowers. He had been taken on by the Rocking R to help with the spring roundup. To Clementine's bedazzled eyes he looked as if he'd crossed the Rio Grande only yesterday.

  Bent beneath her focusing cloth, she couldn't see her husband's impatience but she could hear it. Boots shuffled behind her, stirring up dust. He slapped a coiled reata against his thigh. "Would you hurry it up, girl?" he finally said. "Those cows won't brand themselves. Sun's been up so long the dew's nearly dried."

  The sun had indeed burned off most of the morning haze. Clementine adjusted her lens to allow for it. She would not hurry her photographs. She would not. She drew in a deep breath, trying to ease the tightness in her chest caused by Gus's hovering. It seemed she was constantly defying him, testing him, as she had defied and tested her father. And had suffered for it.

  She drew in another breath of air that was thick with the grassy, hairy stench of cows. Even with their camp pitched a good distance from the roundup corral, she was still engulfed in the smell and noise of it. The cows bawled like hungry babes as they were choused out of the canyons and pine-studded foothills. The men whistled and yipped, herding the beasts into a bellowing mill of clacking horns. Dust haloed the sun, and hooves pounded the ground until Clementine could feel it hum beneath the soles of her shoes. The din made her ears tingle.

  They weren't much to look at, those cows. Their rough hides were mottled red, like withered apples, except for a triangle of white on their foreheads that gave them a bald-faced look. They were called shorthorns, though Clementine couldn't imagine why, since their horns were long and bowed and pointed. They were ornery, easily spooked, stupid creatures, and they didn't like her.

  The men would have the cattle all settled and grazing by dinnertime, but if Clementine went near them they'd get restless and begin to mill and hump up their tails. Gus said it was her skirts, which rustled when she walked and flapped in the constant wind. Mr. Rafferty said it was the smell of starch they couldn't abide.

  Mr. Rafferty.

  The cows might not like the sound and smell of her skirts, but that man—his very existence unsettled Clementine. She couldn't name or number all the emotions he aroused in her breast. But two feelings she did recognize all too well: fear and fascination.

  The evening of the day he'd come home from his carousing in Rainbow Springs, the day he'd given them the candlesticks, there had been a violent storm. Lightning splintered the dark sky, and thunder boomed so loud it sounded as if the heavens had cracked open to spill out the rain. When he entered the cabin it was as if the lightning had come inside with him, was a part of him, raw and violent and dangerous.

  His gaze had followed her every movement while she cooked supper. Those strange yellow eyes piercing the murky gloom lit by a single coal-oil lamp. Lightning eyes, watching her until she felt as if she were standing outside beneath the fury of the storm, alone and naked. She wanted to shout at him to stop his rude staring, but of course he was only doing it to provoke her, to frighten her... and it had worked. Oh, yes, it worked so well that she had to go into the bedroom and shut the door on his staring eyes. To lean against the door while the trembling shook her, and press a fist against her lips to stifle a scream from the frantic, frenzied feelings that built and built and built within her chest.

  He was utterly lawless, that man, everything she had been raised to despise. Lewd and profane and cruel, he was a drunkard and a rake—and worse, if he had truly
killed a man when he was only a boy. An animal, violent in his ways. Yet those times when she had dared to meet his gaze, that night and since, each time, the force of some strange emotion would slam into her chest, leaving her winded.

  "And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven."

  Like lightning he was...

  Like lightning.

  Clementine added another cottonwood branch to the precarious pile in her arms, anchoring it with her chin. A splinter dug into her neck, and she bit down on an oath before it could come flying out of her mouth.

  Squeezing her eyes shut, she stood with an armful of kindling in the middle of a Montana cattle range and fought to gather the fraying edges of her self. " Whosoever curseth his God shall bear his sin." Three months ago she hadn't even known the words with which to curse her God. Now, thanks to the education she had received from Nickel Annie and that man, profane words trembled on the tip of her tongue far more often than prayers.

  She was halfway from the mess wagon to the cookfire when her toe caught in the root of a rotting stump and she smacked into the ground, branches and river driftwood spilling out of her arms like jackstraws.

  She lay still a moment, her chest heaving as she struggled for breath. She rolled onto her back, blinking the dust from her eyes.

  The dust and the heat had flattened the morning breeze. The sun beat down on her, hot and dry. It had been so hot this past week that the whole valley had turned from a mud pit into a dust pit. What a hard country this was, she thought. Mercilessly hard, like the ground she lay on.

  She lay there and let the sun blister her face. She watched the clouds float across a sky so bright a blue it shimmered, and she thought of home.

  She had never before worried about how the coal scuttles came to be full in the house on Louisburg Square. Oh, she did have a vague memory of a bent-backed coal man carrying sacks from his cart to the kitchen cellar. Now if she wanted a fire she had to fetch her own wood. It wasn't such a grand adventure anymore; she was tired and scared. She felt... scattered. By coming to this wilderness she had taken everything that she was, everything she understood to be true, shaken it and tossed it in the air like the spilled kindling, letting the pieces fall where they might. Yet underneath the Stetson hat she now wore, and behind her sunburned face, she was still the old Clementine, filled with longings and furies.

  On a roundup they carried their fuel from camp to camp in a caboose, a cowhide pouch slung like a hammock beneath the wagon. It was called squaw wood, Gus had told her, because it was easily gathered without chopping. Squaw wood... She thought of Joe Proud Bear's wife. She wondered if the Indian girl resented her man and his high-handed ways. And Hannah Yorke, that laughing woman of the violet dress and red-tasseled shoes who offered her body for a man's pleasure only to be scorned for it. She wondered if they, too, awoke in the heavy and lonely hours before dawn suffused and restless with yearnings they couldn't name. Longings and furies and those empty places in the heart.

  She laid her forearm across her eyes, blocking out the sky. Her citybred ears listened to the strange lullaby of insects shrilling in the tall grass and of the river chattering to the rocks and trees. But the sun was hot, and a stick was poking her in the back, so after a moment she pushed herself to her feet.

  She picked up a few pieces of the scattered wood and carried them over to the fire. She cracked a branch in two and fed it to the flames. She tossed several handfuls of beans into a camp kettle that hung from a trammel, then filled the pot to the brim with water. As grub slinger for this outfit she got to select the menu for dinner. Well, today it would be beans, bacon, sourdough doughnuts, and coffee. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before yesterday.

  The outfit was a small one, consisting only of Gus and his brother, the Mexican boy, whose name was Palo Montoya, and the RainDance country's resident characters, Pogey and Nash. The two prospectors were helping with the roundup because they weren't going to see much silver out of their mine until Gus could spare the time to go over to Butte Camp and talk with potential investors about putting together a consortium to lease and operate the Four Jacks.

  Starting when dawn was just limning the hills, the men rode out to gather the cows, chousing them into a makeshift rope corral out on the range. At ten o'clock they came in to eat dinner, then spent the rest of the day cutting the calves out of the herd for branding.

  With the beans on the fire, Clementine decided there was time to take more photographs before the men returned to camp. The first view she took—of the remuda with the cookfire in the foreground—was unsuccessful. The horses were so much in motion that they looked like ghosts on the negative. And the blue smoke of the fire floating up into the trees, an effect she rather liked, had not shown up at all. She took a view of the mess wagon that turned out well. It was an old wagon, missing a canvas cover, so that its bare ribs silhouetted against the sky looked like a weathering carcass of mammoth bones. She took another of a late-born calf suckling at its mother. The calf, all bald face and spindly legs, made her smile. She was still fixing this last negative when she heard a man's voice, rough with anger, shouting her name.

  Heat and chemical fumes filled the dark tent. For a moment the voice had sounded so much like her father's that she gasped, and the bad air scorched her lungs. It was an old fear, of male anger and punishment, but so potent that she almost choked on it. Her hands shook, causing her to pour too much potassium cyanide into the fixing bath, spoiling the negative.

  She emerged from the tent and buttoned it up. She approached Gus and the cookfire. Her hands curled, her fingers rubbing and rubbing the ridges of scars. I will not fear him as I did my father, she vowed to herself. I will not. Yet it was there, the fear, pressing against her chest, running in rivulets of sweat between her breasts. The beans had swelled up to overflow the pot, smothering most of the fire. Gus watched her come, his face hard.

  He whacked his fringed leather gauntlets against his leg. "Where're the sourdoughs?"

  "I forgot to make them." She wiped her silver-stained hands on her flour-sack apron. "I became busy and I... forgot."

  His gaze flashed to the deep shade of the box elders where she'd set up her dark tent. His jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped. "Clementine, I'll take that blasted thing away from you—"

  "You will not!" she said so loud his head snapped back. She started to push past him, then swung around. "And I will not be married to my father! You see my hands, Gus?" she shouted, thrusting them up into his face. "You've wanted to know how I got the scars—my father gave them to me. He beat me until I bled because I wouldn't say I was sorry. I will not be married to my father." She clenched her hands into fists and pounded on his chest, punctuating her words with the blows. "I will not... be married... to my... father!"

  He grabbed her wrists, the anger hot and hard in his face. "What in the devil is the matter with you—"

  His head snapped around as Palo Montoya rode up with a jangle of silver conchas and spurs, followed by Pogey and Nash and Gus's brother on a foam-lathered horse, the half-blind dog loping at its heels.

  Rafferty pulled up, taking the scene in slowly. A lazy smile pulled at his mouth, a smile that for once went all the way to his eyes, as if he enjoyed the sight of her and Gus fighting. "I reckon this is what happens when you bed down with a cactus, boys," he drawled. "You wind up gettin' pricked in places you didn't even know you had."

  Only the Mexican boy laughed.

  Clementine pried her wrists loose from her husband's grasp. She brushed past him, heading for the mess wagon. "I'll fry up the bacon now."

  The men helped themselves to the beans. They ate standing up, washing the meal down with cups of hot coffee. A murmur or two drifted Clementine's way, but they fell quiet when she came up to the cookfire. Even Nash ate without talking. Gus looked grim enough to be chewing on his hat instead of the beans.

  Clementine squatted to thrust a three-legged skillet layered with rashers of bacon onto the coals. Sh
e stared up at her husband's tight mouth and bunched jaw. You have no right, she said silently to his set face. You have no right, no right, no right.

  "I have come to a decision, Mr. McQueen," she said aloud into the taut silence. "I will submit my best photographic views of your roundup to one of the journals back in the States." Defying, pushing, testing. "I don't believe anyone, not even a man, has photographed such an event before." The bulge in her husband's jaw was now as thick as a burl knot. Defying, pushing, testing—a quiver of guilty joy ran through her. "But there are many more sights I shall need to record. I thought I'd try to take one of a gentleman cow this afternoon."

  Pogey spewed a mouthful of coffee into the fire. Nash's jaw fell open so wide his teeth dropped. She refused to look at Mr. Rafferty, although she'd felt the hot intensity of his gaze on her all during her minor rebellion.

  All of her attention had been on Gus. Now he startled her by tipping back from the waist and releasing a great boom of laughter into the sky. "Gentleman cow!" he exclaimed and laughed again.

  His head fell forward and he nibbed his eyes. He stared down at her a moment, then took her arm, pulling her to her feet. His face grew gentle. He ran the backs of his fingers along her jaw. "Aw, girl," he said softly. "You're such a sweet innocent." He laughed again, then spun around to point his finger at the boy. "Montoya, what're you doing here shoveling beans into your mouth and grinning at my wife? Who's out minding the gentlemen cows?"

  Palo scrubbed his face with a flashy red silk bandanna, wiping off his smile. He dumped his dish, cup, and spoon with a rattle into the wooden wreck tub, then headed for the remuda with a jingle of silver and a swivel-hipped gait that held a strange fascination for Clementine.

  But this time she paid only scant attention to the Mexican boy. She'd been all primed for another argument, and now she was left feeling deflated by her husband's sudden change of mood. She bent over to shake the skillet with its bubbling bacon, fed more branches into the fire, and rattled the coffee pot to see if there was any left. Straightening, she turned and slammed into the stone wall of Rafferty's chest.