Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

  He opened his mouth, and the words that came out were rough with the desperation he felt. "Now that you got that flower horse of yours tamed, maybe you'd like to come riding with me."

  She lowered her gaze to her hands. They clutched the reins as if the pinto were still in danger of bolting, and not standing still munching quietly on the nettleleaf. "No, Mr. Rafferty, I do not want to go riding with you. I'll never want to go riding with you."

  CHAPTER 11

  One morning in late June, Clemetine took a hickory pole down to the river to catch supper.

  She followed the path that wended its way through cottonwoods to the river and the place where the fish lived. Here the water circled gently around big rocks, forming small pools where the big fish lived under the foam. Bluebottles rose off the still surface in small clouds. Cottony tufts drifted like snow from the trees. It was a hot day, the air soggy and limp.

  A lone willow grew on a small island in the middle of the river. Its branches wept low, as if bowing to the ground. Its leaves shivered, promising a breeze.

  She sat on a beaver-chewed log to take off her boots and stockings. She hiked up her skirts and, grabbing her pole and tackle, waded into the water. She gasped at its iciness and ran, laughing and splashing, to the little island.

  The grass was cool and satiny beneath her bare feet, like the silk counterpane on her bed in the house on Louisburg Square. She dropped down beneath the willow's shade. She baited her hook as Gus had shown her and cast it out into the deep water beyond the rocks. The line curved, sure and graceful, flashing like a thread of silver.

  She shut her eyes against the glare of sun on water. In the distance, over the softly rushing river, she could hear the pounding of Gus's hammer echoing in the thick air. He was building her the house he had promised.

  She sat in stillness, growing drowsy from the heat and the lullaby of the purling water. She could feel each sinew and muscle of her body. Feel the young and vital strength of her limbs and the life's blood pumping through her heart, the air gently filling her lungs. She felt alive. She wanted to sing with it, to laugh, and maybe to try to fly, the way the chicken hawks soared and floated across the big blue sky.

  She ran her hand over her bodice, from the cameo at her neck to the pinched velvet band at her waist. She could feel her breasts swelling, brushing almost painfully against the thin batiste of her camisole. And a heaviness deep in her belly, a warmth between her legs. She imagined she could feel a baby growing inside her.

  She pressed her hand there as memories flickered through her mind like the cards of a stereoscope. Pounding feet, her mother's screams, and servants whispering outside the nursery door. Black crepe draped across windows and mirrors, a cold wind blowing leaves over gravestones. Her father's hand lying heavy on her head as they prayed... prayed...

  Oh, God, how her mother had screamed.

  But only the baby had died. Mama had lived, and she had laughed with relief that day when the doctor said she must never try to have another. Laughed and then cried. There were so many questions Clementine had always wanted to ask of her mother, but she never had.

  Only two women—respectable, decently married women— lived within a few hours' ride from the Rocking R. Pleading a loneliness that was very real, she had prevailed upon Gus to take her to visit them. With each click of the buckboard's wheels, she had carefully composed the questions she would ask.

  Mrs. Weatherby lived in a soddy dug into the side of a thickly wooded hill above a coulee that gushed water from the mountain runoff. Mr. Weatherby was a sheepherder, and the shack smelled of the woolly monsters and of rotting paper. Inside, the walls were covered with old newspapers in a vain effort to keep out the seeping damp. "I read them," Mrs. Weatherby had said. "I read my walls aloud, and that way I can't hear the wind."

  Mrs. Weatherby was as plump and pale as a stewed dumpling, and the wind had driven her quite mad. She heard the cries of her two dead children calling for her in the wind. And sometimes the voice of her mother, gone these twenty years. While Clementine tried to speak to her of home, Mrs. Weatherby began to read aloud the wall above her head. An advertisement for stomach bitters.

  The sheepherder gave Clementine precious packets of vegetable seeds as they were leaving. Clementine spoke friendly words of good-bye. But she could barely hear them herself over the wailing wind.

  The sheepherder's wife was like a white mole hiding alone in her dugout soddy. But Mrs. Graham, the cattleman's wife, was a woman rooted firmly in the Montana dirt, tenacious and strong like a tree. She wore a mountain man's beaverskin hat and chewed tobacco like Nickel Annie. Her skin was weathered as brown as hickory, and five children in stepladder sizes clung to her skirts. She would surely know, Clementine thought, the signs of impending motherhood.

  Clementine's hopes grew when Mrs. Graham invited her inside and served sage tea in chipped blue-and-white cups. But no sooner had Clementine introduced the topic of the woman's many children than Mrs. Graham interrupted her in a voice that had a vinegar tang to it.

  "Oh, I know your sort, I do. I seen right off the way you looked at my man."

  "I beg your pardon?" Clementine said, startled, for she'd barely noticed Mr. Graham, who seemed as nondescript as his cattleman's Stetson and faded brown jeans.

  Mrs. Graham set her cup down with a rattle and drew herself up proudly. "My Horace is the handsomest man in these parts, don't think I don't know it. So I'm servin' you notice right here and now: if I ever catch you nearer to him than you oughta be, I'll pluck out your eyes and feed them to the buzzards."

  And so Clementine had left the Grahams that afternoon as ignorant as ever about the birthing of babies.

  Now, as she watched the fishing cork bob in the current, she thought she must bring herself to speak of it to Gus. It was he who pushed himself inside her at night where someday a baby must come out. Yet, strangely, each time she formed the questions in her mind, it was to his brother she imagined herself speaking, that profane and cruel man. There was nothing of life that man didn't know. It was in his eyes, those hard, cold, brassy eyes. Gus had once claimed to have seen the world, but it was his brother who had seen the guts of it. And she thought that if somehow she could bring herself to ask Zach Rafferty for the truth, he would deliver it without flinching before her innocence. She was a woman grown. Grown enough to lie with a man and breed a baby. Grown enough, surely, to be given the truth.

  And so, because she had been thinking of him so intently, she wasn't surprised to turn her head and see him standing on the bank. Watching her.

  The sun was hot overhead. It had rained during the night, and now the ground steamed like an Indian sweat lodge. Rafferty rode along the river, his clog trotting at Moses's heels. When he saw his brother's wife sitting on the ait, fishing, he dismounted and picketed his horse to a chokecherry tree.

  She turned her head, and their eyes met across the water. She sat unmoving, as if she had been waiting for him.

  He saw where she'd taken off her boots and stockings to wade through the water. She'd bought herself a pair of boys' riding boots, made of cowhide, dyed red at the top, and trimmed with brass at the toes. These things intrigued him about her. The way she'd given up her city shoes for practical footwear. And that old hat of Gus's that she wore instead of her fancy bonnets. A hat banded now with the skin of the snake he'd killed, as if she wanted to boast to the world that she could face down a rattler and an ornery cayuse and anything else this country could throw at her.

  Yet in most ways she hadn't changed, and he couldn't see her ever changing. She still wore her hair gathered up in a thick knot that looked too heavy for her slender neck to bear. And her lady's clothes, the skirts that brushed across the cabin floor, making intimate sounds, soft as lovers' whispers. Like the wisps of gauzy white stockings that lay beside her boots, she was so fine, so dainty and soft and feminine, she made his chest ache.

  He took off his own boots and stockings and, after a moment's thought, his gun belt. He
wanted to be with her for a while without fear and tension shimmering in the air between them. He wanted to make her smile and maybe laugh a little, to speak to her man to woman, brother to sister... No, it could never be like that between them. Hell, it was ludicrous to think they could even be friends. A man didn't become friends with a woman whose smile, whose laugh, whose very smell left him heavy with want.

  "You stay," he said to Atta Boy, who looked up at him with what seemed to be a big happy grin on his face, though Rafferty knew he was only panting in the heat. "Stay," he said again. The hound whined and collapsed onto the bank, burying his nose in his paws.

  Rafferty splashed through the water and sat down beside his brother's wife on the grassy ait. But when he went to speak, he could find the thoughts but not the words or the courage to shape them. He caught her gaze for a quick, heavy heartbeat before hers veered away.

  "Good morning, Mr. Rafferty," she said.

  As welcomes went, it wasn't much. But it was more than he'd ever gotten from her before. She sat with her hands laced around her bent knees. In spite of the heat, her dress was buttoned tightly from throat to waist. But she'd rolled up the sleeves. The skin on the inside of her arm was as pale and delicate as eggshells. For the hundredth time he wondered what Gus had been thinking of to bring her out here. It was like putting a hummingbird into a mud lark's nest.

  She wouldn't look at him again. For all her surface stillness there was a restlessness underneath, as if she was undecided about whether to flee or stay.

  He leaned over and tugged on her fishing line, feeling it drag through the current. "What're you using for bait?"

  "Salt pork."

  "You won't catch anything, then. They're feeding on the bluebottles."

  Even as he spoke, a black-spotted trout leaped out the water to snatch a fly on the wing. Her gaze focused intently on the ripples left by the jumping fish. He could read her thoughts as if they were written across her forehead in printer's ink. She was thinking she was going to have to twist her hook through the fat, hairy body of a big ol' fly. But he didn't make the mistake of assuming she was too squeamish to see it through. She was game, he had to give her that. One by one she had been confronting her tenderfoot fears, shooting them down like whiskey bottles off a stump.

  Except for him. He was one fear she wasn't facing, and he thought he knew better than she the reason why.

  "Clementine..." It was the first time he'd used her given name. It tasted wild and sweet on his tongue.

  Again he sought out her gaze, and this time he was able to hold it. Her lips parted as if she would speak. He lost himself in the deep shifting shadows of her eyes. For a while he must have stopped breathing. He blinked and drew in air, feeling dizzy, as if he had spun around too quickly in one place.

  "What did you do before?" she said.

  He almost choked on the air rushing back into his lungs. "Before what?"

  She slid her clasped hands down her legs and gripped her bare toes, lowering her shoulders and smiling a little. She looked like a young girl. Her feet were very white and slender. "Before here," she said. "Before Montana."

  He was absurdly pleased that she cared enough to want to know about him. He could feel his cheeks growing warm. "I mostly trailed beeves, which is to say, I straddled a horse all day in the broiling sun and choking dust, ate son-of-a-bitch stew and vinegar pie every night for supper, and slept alone on the cold ground."

  "Hunh." She pushed her lower lip out in a little pout that twisted his guts into knots. "I think you loved every bit of it."

  "Hell, no." He shook his head, smiling. He plucked a stem of clover, twirling it between his fingers. "Well, maybe I liked night-riding." He cast a glance up at her. She was looking at him with a wide, still gaze that called to something sweet and sharp in his heart.

  "I do remember some nights," he said, "when you'd think that if you had a dollar for every star you saw you'd be a rich man, and the air would taste better than whiskey in your belly. Nights like that, the time would pass by sweet, just ambling along with nothing but the jingle of your spurs for company. Sometimes it would get so quiet you'd swear you could hear your own heartbeat."

  And the lonesomeness of it would build up inside you until the tears would come if you didn't shut them off. Times like that a man would feel himself reaching for something, and there'd be an emptiness low in his belly that was partly hunger for a meal that wasn't sowbelly and beans, and partly his body saying he needed a woman, and partly the old ache for a home of his own, a place to belong to.

  And for something more, something Zach Rafferty hadn't been able to put a name to. Until now.

  He looked up. She was staring at him, her mouth partly open, her eyes deep and dark. He let the wild yearning rise up within him and overflow, and he thought he might be seeing a need in those eyes, but it could only have been that he couldn't bear not to see it.

  A pitiful wail disturbed the taut silence.

  Her gaze snapped away from his, and a faint blush colored her cheeks. She waved a delicate hand at the bank. "Your poor dog," she said, and Atta Boy threw back his head and howled again like a coyote at a full moon. Her lips trembled on the verge of a smile. "I think he's lonesome."

  Rafferty slowly released his caught breath. "You don't want him over here. He's been rolling in cow... mess. He stinks to high heaven."

  "Whiffier than a dead skunk?" she drawled, in a fair Pogey and Nash imitation. And this time she did smile. It blazed across her face and was gone, too fast.

  "Whiffier than a sheepherder's boots," he drawled back, and to his delight she laughed and topped him.

  "Whiffier than Nickel Annie's hat."

  Atta Boy growled. The brush rustled downriver. Rafferty caught out of the corner of his eye a patch of gray fur moving in the leafy shadows and he went still. You didn't usually see a lone timber wolf away from the pack.

  Beside him Clementine stirred a little, but she hadn't seen the wolf. Her gaze flickered to his face, then away again. Her breasts rose as she sighed. "Mr. Rafferty, I—"

  He covered her mouth with his hand, his eyes intent on the wolf that was now coming toward them at a rigid loping trot. "Be quiet, Boston."

  She twisted her head away. She sucked in a breath, and then she, too, caught sight of the wolf. She tensed, but she didn't scream. Rafferty thought of his gun, hanging on his saddle horn, too far away. The lobo was definitely alone, a renegade cast out of the pack. It moved stiffly as if its limbs were frozen, and its ribs showed skeletally beneath its matted gray hide. Its lips were curled back from its teeth in a growl, though it made no sound. Saliva drooled in foamy globs from its mouth.

  "Atta Boy, stay!" Rafferty shouted. But the hound charged down the bank at the wolf. They met in a brief frenzy of gray and pale yellow fur and snapping teeth before Atta Boy yelped in pain and ran off with his tail deep between his legs.

  With a strangled snarl the wolf leaped into the river and came at them.

  Rafferty thrust her to the ground and threw himself on top of her just as the wolf hit the island with a spray of water. Rafferty flung up one hand as the wolf lunged, his fingers digging into the animal's neck, while he groped for his knife with the other. Bloodstained teeth snapped, barely missing his eyes, spraying foam and strings of saliva and bathing his face with fetid breath. The flesh and fur beneath Rafferty's fist vibrated with the growls that were trapped in the wolf's convulsing throat. At last his free hand closed around the hilt of his bowie.

  He stabbed the blade deep into the wolf's neck and ripped it open.

  Blood gushed, spilling over his hands, splashing onto Clementine's face.

  She uttered not a sound, although she thrashed with her arms and legs, heaving against his back and shoulder, which had her trapped. He flung the wolf's body off them and hauled her to her feet. He dragged her into the deep part of the river and pushed her head under the water. She came up sputtering, then began to scrub frantically at her face and hair. "Get it off of me," she s
aid in an eerily controlled voice. "Get it off."

  He pushed her under twice more before he was satisfied that the river had washed away the wolf's blood and saliva. Shudders racked her body. Her hair was plastered to her skull. Her mouth fell open, her lips white and trembling. His hands hovered over her face, needing desperately to touch her.

  "Clementine... Oh, dear Christ, Clementine. Did he bite you?"

  She started to shake her head. Her gaze became caught in his and she grew still. Her eyes were turbulent green seas, deep and dark and forbidden, and he fell into them. His hands clasped the sides of her head and, with a low sound of despair, he brought his mouth down over hers.

  His kiss was hard and desperate. He was being too rough and he tried to soften the pressure of his lips, but he wanted her, oh, God, but he wanted her.

  One of her hands clenched in his hair, the other gripped his waist. Her lips moved beneath his, hungry and seeking. They opened, inviting his tongue. He drank of her, growing dizzy from her woman's taste and smell. He crushed her against him, pressed the length of his body to hers, felt her quiver, swallowed her moans, and somewhere, somehow found the will to stop.

  He tore his mouth from hers and thrust her away from him. He gasped for air, his heart and lungs straining.

  She brought a trembling fist up to her swollen lips and turned her face away, as if everything inside her would shatter if she had to look at him. She pushed her knuckles hard against her mouth. He wanted to lay her down and undress her slowly, and kiss and touch every inch of her. He wanted to spread her legs wide and bury his face between them and lick and suck her there until she came with soft cries and small tremblings and deep yearnings.