Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  He left a deep stillness behind him, broken only by the whirring katydid. She tossed the potato into the camp pot. She ventured a peek over her shoulder. He hadn't left after all. He stood next to the cookfire, his gaze fastened on her and a strange, dark tension sharpening the harsh bones of his face.

  Caught fast by his staring eyes, like a rabbit in a sudden wash of light, she groped behind her for the burlap sack and another potato... and the world erupted into a kaleidoscope of sound and movement. The katydid whirred again. Rafferty's hand flashed, shooting fire. A whistling wind pressed against her ear. The sack exploded. Pieces of burlap and potato hit her in the chest and rang against the iron camp pot. Clementine screamed and flung her arms up to cover her face and head.

  He came at her. Smoke wisped from the muzzle of his revolver. She backed up with a hard jerk, knocking into the table. He stopped in front of her, the gun pointed at her chest.

  She gasped, sucking in a deep, rattled breath. "You tried to kill me!"

  His laughter startled her so much, she flinched. "If I was tryin' to kill you, Boston, you'd be dead."

  He poked the gun barrel into the remains of the potato sack. With his free hand he picked up what her eyes first saw as a thick piece of rawhide rope. Not until he held it up before her face did she see that it was a snake.

  A large snake. With scaly olive-green skin marked with rows of round brown spots, and a tail of hard, horny rinds that fit one into the other. The head was missing, shot away by Zach Rafferty's revolver.

  Another scream burst from her throat before she could stop it. She leaned as far back as she could, away from him and the snake, until the edge of the table pressed painfully into the small of her back. She wanted desperately to run, but he had her trapped.

  He held the snake pinched between two fingers, swinging it before her wide, unblinking gaze. Her fingers fluttered up to her cameo, where her pulse beat fast in her throat. She realized what she was doing and forced her hand down to her side, clenching her fist. She tried to suck in a deep breath, as if she could retrieve her composure from the very air. "Take it... away," she said.

  He clicked his tongue against his teeth. "Nasty, ain't it? Eleven rattles."

  It was only a snake, she told herself. Well, a rattlesnake, but it was dead. She refused to let the man taunt her like this. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

  She straightened, lifting her head. "Eleven rattles, Mr. Rafferty? My, my, I am impressed... to discover that you can count past your fingers."

  A half smile played upon his lips. "Just another one of my small talents, and if you keep strikin' at me with those venomous fangs of yours I just might shoot you after all, like I did this sidewinder. Or maybe..." he drawled as he holstered his gun, the words thick as the sorghum syrup Gus poured over his flapjacks, "maybe I'll kill you Indian style. Slow and quiet."

  So quickly her mind barely registered the motion, he pulled a wicked-looking knife out of a sheath inside his boot. She jerked backward as the long, pointed blade flashed in the sun and barely missed slicing off her nose.

  He slit the belly of the snake instead. A black liquid oozed out of it to drip in the dirt. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth, and her muscles from trying not to shudder. She stared up at him wide-eyed, trying to prove that she was brave, that she could take anything he and this country flung at her and not cower or whimper or plead for mercy.

  He stared back at her for so long, the world became swallowed by the pounding thunder of her heartbeat. Yet she would not break before him, she would not.

  His glaze slid away from hers, and a corner of his mouth twitched in what could almost have been a spasm of regret. "Ah hell, Boston, I shouldn't..." A faint band of color darkened his prominent cheekbones. "This skin'll make a nice band for your hat. And the meat fries up tasty."

  "Then eat it yourself. And if God is kind, perhaps it will poison you."

  As soon as the words were out her mouth she wished them back. They had sounded so petty and mean. He tossed the snake carcass onto the table among the bits of potatoes and the ruins of the burlap sack and spun away from her, muttering a foul word beneath his breath.

  She stared at the rattler and thought of the biscuit-colored hound left half blind from a snakebite. Crude and violent the man might be, but he had saved her from such a fate, if not from death. Breeding tells, her mother had always said, and her breeding did not allow for poor manners or ingratitude.

  "Mr. Rafferty?" It came out scratchy and uncertain. She cleared her throat. "I must thank you for saving my life."

  He turned around. He still had the knife in his hand, and he looked as wild and savage as any Indian of her imagination, especially with his mouth set cruel and hard, and his bronze eyes glittering in the shadow cast by his hat brim.

  "Forget it." He wiped the knife on his chaps and slid it back into his boot. "It was a prairie rattler anyway, not a diamond-back. Like as not you wouldn't have died even if he'd bitten you. Not with someone around to suck out the poison."

  "Still, I must insist."

  His hat brim tilted up like a quirked eyebrow. "You must insist? Bossy little thing, ain't you? All right, then, I accept your apology."

  "Apology! Since when does a polite expression of gratitude become an apology? You're the one—" She stopped, suddenly aware that he was teasing her. Not taunting her, but teasing her, the way a friend might do. The thought flustered her.

  They looked at each other, and a silence stretched between them that was fraught with shifting emotions as treacherous as quicksand. She hated and feared him, yet she felt an odd, forbidden exhilaration at the very thought of him.

  The spell broke as Gus came galloping into the camp. Rafferty sauntered over to meet him, and they talked, too quietly for her to hear. Once his gaze flashed back to her, and she snapped hers away so fast she made herself dizzy. Yet she remained uncomfortably aware of him until he mounted Gus's horse and rode out of the camp.

  She looked at the snake... prairie rattler. She ran her finger along the scaly skin. She expected it to be slimy like a fish's. But it was dry and smooth and cool and felt much the way she imagined the barrel of a gun would feel.

  Gus came up beside her and blew out a soft whistle. "That's quite a beauty. Do you want me to finish dressing it out for you?"

  She swallowed around a cottony dryness in her mouth. Her belly hummed with a terrible excitement that had to do with snakes and guns and a man quick and deadly enough to handle both. "Mr. Rafferty is quite a proficient shot."

  "He can drill a hole in a silver dollar from two hundred yards away."

  She heard pride in Gus's voice and a gruff affection. She looked at him, at his open, sun-bright face. She felt a rush of fondness for him so strong and full it made her heart swell. She had been so unfair to this man, her husband, blaming him for her own failed expectations. Blaming him for the betrayal that was Montana.

  She laid her hand on his arm. "Gus... I'm sorry about forgetting to make the sourdoughs and for getting sick during the branding." He turned to look at her, but she averted her face. "I fear that I will never make a good rancher's wife."

  "Aw, Clementine." His arms came around her, familiar, strong. "Do you think I care so much about those blasted sourdoughs?" He cupped her cheeks and looked into her eyes. "It's enough that I have you, girl. That we have each other."

  Her head fell forward and she burrowed her face into his chest. She pressed against the soft red plaid flannel of his shirt, feeling more than hearing the steady beat of his heart, breathing in the smell of him, of woodsmoke and cow and hard-work sweat. For all of his dreaming ways, Gus McQueen was of the earth, root-bearing and elemental in the way of the earth. Not empty and vast and raw like the sky. He did not frighten her or call to her or stir those lonely places deep within her.

  "It's enough that we have each other," Gus said again.

  She buried her face deeper in his chest, shutting out the sky.

  CHAPTER 10

  Sp
arks from the cookfire spiraled into a late afternoon sky that was the deep blue-gray of gunmetal. The wind had come back up, chasing away the dust and carrying with it the homey scent of coffee and burning cottonwood. In the quiet of the roundup's evening camp, Clementine could almost forget what had come before: the grit and the heat. And the violence.

  Hampered by her skirts, she sat on a stump. Gus sat on the ground in front of her, his back braced against her knees. He rubbed the bottom fringe of his mustache while he studied his tally book, trying to estimate how many cows had been lost to winter storms, predatory animals, and Iron Nose's rustling.

  The others used their saddles and bedrolls as backrests. Pogey and Nash kept up a steady stream of blather, spiking their coffee from a whiskey flask when they thought Gus wasn't watching. Zach Rafferty sat apart, smoking and cleaning his gun.

  Nash had seized onto the subject of rattlesnakes and was worrying it to death like a terrier with a rag bone. "I've heard of sidewinders holing up in some funny places to get outta the sun," he said, "but a sack of potatoes sure do beat all. Now, your soogan's a much more likely place to find a snake when you least want him. i recall a time in Missouri during the year of the great grasshopper storms—"

  "Hold on, now," Pogey interrupted, thrusting his feet toward the fire, "let me stretch out my legs so's you can pull em both."

  "'S God's truth," Nash proclaimed, making a cross over his heart. "'Twere back in 'fifty-nine. Them hoppers were so thick that summer they'd chew on anything green. One old woman walked out her soddy wearing a green dress, and they ate it off her down to the skin." He chuckled and scratched his grizzled jaw. "Now, a body can think by the sound it makes that a big-winged grasshopper is a rattlesnake. So after hearing snakes day in and day out and finding nothing but hoppers, you can't fault me for becoming complacent. One night I crawled bone-yard-tired into my soogan without first checkin' for snakes, and durned if I didn't hear a hissin' noise. More of them grasshoppers, I think to myself... till I feel something a-slitherin' cold up my belly." He paused to glance around the cookfire, collecting his audience like a tentshow preacher.

  "Was it a rattlesnake?" Clementine prompted, to oblige him. She rested her elbows on her thighs and hid a smile by cradling her chin with her clasped hands.

  "You bet your last bit 'twere a rattler. A diamondback seven feet long if he were an inch, and fangs on him thick as a wild pig's tusks. I'll be blamed if that snake didn't curl up tight as a lariat right atop my chest and go to sleep. There I lay hour after hour, the sweat meltin' off me like hot tallow. Come mornin' he wakes up—me, I ain't slept a wink—and we're staring eyeball to eyeball and I'm figuring I'm so close to bein' a dead man I might as well take up harp playing..."

  The prospector paused again, awaiting his cue. In the silence Clementine could hear the tinkle of the remuda's bell mare and the low chorus of cow parlor talk: cud chewing, grunting, and blowing over contented stomachs. "So what did you do, Mr. Nash?"

  "Bit off his head before he could bite me!" he exclaimed, slapping his knee. His large putty-colored eyes twinkled at her. "Them was in my younger days. I was quicker then."

  Pogey, who'd been following this recital with a pained look on his face, rolled his eyes heavenward. "Shee-it... oot. The only thing ever been quick about you is your tongue. And something else I won't mention, but which the ladies at the Best in the West can all attest to."

  Nash's cheeks colored brightly, and the others all laughed except Clementine. She didn't know what was so funny, but she wasn't about to ask.

  At the thought of the saloon and the sinning that went on there, her gaze sought out Mr. Rafferty. His long fingers moved over the oily metal of his gun almost lovingly. He must have felt her eyes on him, for he glanced up. For a moment he stared at her in that darkly intense way of his. Then a corner of his mouth curved into a slow smile that indented the faint dimple in his cheek. And caught her like a blow beneath the ribs.

  She snapped her attention away from him, yet the pain in her chest lingered. Her head fell back and she stared wide-eyed at the sky. A single star twinkled in the vast emptiness. In another hour or so the heavens would be as thick as clotted cream with stars. Out here they burned so bright and close it seemed she was not under them but among them. A star herself, caught fast by the dark night.

  "Looks to be a quiet night," Nash said.

  "Quiet for who?" Pogey retorted. He ripped a piece off his tobacco twist and plugged it into his cheek. "Your snoring could give away our camp to a dead Injun."

  "Well, if'n he wasn't dead already, the smell of you would sure nuff kill him."

  "You sayin' I stink?"

  "Whiffier than a dead skunk."

  Pogey lifted his arm and sniffed at his stained armpit. He shrugged. "I can't smell nothin', and what's to worry about anyways? We ain't had us a good Injun scare in these parts in so long I've forgot what it feels like. Time was when them Black-feet were the meanest Injuns living. Time was them Bloods woulda lifted your hair soon as look at you. They've had the starch taken outta them by smallpox and firewater and the army, though. Pride's mostly all gone now."

  At the talk of Indians, Clementine had stiffened. She couldn't seem to overcome her fear of the painted devils so luridly described in the yellowback novels she'd read as a child. She glanced up to find Mr. Rafferty's eyes on her. She lifted her chin. "I expect you've seen a lot of Indians in your time, Mr. Pogey?" she said.

  Pogey's chest swelled and his cheeks puffed with air, but Nash jumped in first. "If you're lookin' to consult an expert on the subject, I'm your man. Now you take your Salish, they're pretty much peaceable savages, whereas your Crows are thievish and sassy. The Sioux can be mean as snakes when their venom gets stirred up. Take Sitting Bull, for instance. Meanest Injun I ever met was Sitting Bull. I guess you could say we was on pipe-smoking terms for a while before he took to the warpath. What he did to Custer and the boys at the Little Big Horn were not a pretty sight, let me tell you. I was there not an hour after it happened, an' what I saw plumb curdled my blood. Bodies lyin' every whicha way and all too dead to skin."

  Pogey sucked in such a hefty snort that tobacco juice dribbled into his beard. "Damn you, Nash, but if you ever did half the things you claim to've done, you woulda been wore to a frazzle long before now. You ain't never been within a hundred miles of Sittin' Bull—"

  Nash snatched off his hat, the better to glare at his partner. "Are you callin' me a liar?"

  Pogey likewise snatched off his hat, to make the glaring contest even. "I'm saying you bend all hell out of the truth. The closest you've ever been to any Injun with any meanness to speak of is ol' Iron Nose. And the closest you ever been to him was to catch a glimpse of the back end of his hoss, and even then you was shakin' like a pup with a chill."

  "As I recall, you was there at the time, and I didn't see any fur growin' on your brisket." Nash wedged his hat back on his head, tapping its caved-in crown, settling the argument. "Not that Iron Nose ain't one mean Injun."

  "He's a mestee," Pogey explained for Clementine's benefit, "which is to say he's got white in him from both sides of the blanket. But it's his red blood that gets to boilin' when he's riled. Why, he's so mean even the Bloods expelled him from the tribe. Got his nose chewed off in a fight once, and some blacksmith fashioned him a new one. I reckon he ain't been the same ever since."

  "Yup, it were losing his nose what took that particular Injun beyond the realm of ornery and into pure meanness," Nash agreed happily. "It wasn't long after he got his nose bit off that he and his kin hacked that buffalo hunter to bits right there in the cabin where y'all are living now—"

  Pogey kicked him hard in the shin with his dome-toed boot. "Put a stopper in your mouth, you jughead. Can't you see ye're frightening the missus?"

  So the story was true... Somehow Clementine had convinced herself it was too horrible to be possible. She could feel the pulse beating wildly against the cameo at her neck. With an effort she kept her hand from going to h
er throat. She would not look at Mr. Rafferty. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

  Gus stirred, shutting his tally book and stretching as he got to his feet. He patted her knee. "Don't fret about it, Clem. Except for a spot of thieving, there haven't been any serious hostilities with the Indians in these parts in over two years."

  She made herself get up and gather the dishes in the wreck tub for washing. She didn't want to go down to the river, but she had to before it grew too dark. She wanted to ask Gus to come with her, but she decided that she would almost rather be scalped by Iron Nose than parade her foolish fears in front of Mr. Rafferty.

  It was darker closer to the river. Stunted willows and wild plum thickets cast shadows over the bank. The blossoming plums filled the air with their sweet scent, as did the heavy white flower clusters that Gus had said were chokecherries. Come fall, he'd said, the fruit would hang fat and purple off the trees and she would be able to make pies and jellies with it. Except that she didn't know the first thing about the making of pies and jellies.

  Away from camp the evening seemed quiet, but in truth it was full of noise. Frogs croaked their love songs in a deep-throated chorus. A white-winged magpie fussed at her. The river chattered over its rocky bed. Oh, how she longed for a good soaking bath. Dust caked her face and hair; her skin itched beneath her corset ribs. It seemed she hadn't been truly clean since she left Boston. She probably smelled like the bottom of a horse's hoof, certainly strong enough to rouse a dead Indian. The thought made her smile.

  She had just finished rinsing the sand from the last dish when she noticed that the frogs had fallen silent. Even the river had stopped its song. Her breath hung suspended in her throat, her ears tensed. She heard a footfall in the grass and a soft rustle of leaves. Her belly fluttered and her scalp prickled. Slowly she turned her head...