Jacob said, “Excuse me-”
Rachel interrupted him before he could finish. She said, “Whether you’ll have it or no is nothing at all to me. This is how it must be. I’ve found a man who can be relied upon to keep his word, and I aim to marry him. As for you, Seamus Flanagan, you had your chance and then some. You must learn to keep your pants on before you declare your undying devotion to any woman.”
Seamus grabbed Rachel by the wrist. She cried out. He said, “You’ll be coming back with me to Topeka, and there’s no two ways about it.”
Jacob then interjected himself in the situation. He wasn’t sure then what compelled him to do so. Though he had been raised to believe that a man should never strike a woman, he knew as he moved forward that he would be better off if he let Seamus have his way. He could go back to his normal life, and then decide whether or not he wanted to help Callahan find a new man to look after his cattle. He could go to the Salinas Valley and buy himself an orange orchard, if he so chose. He had enough money saved up. He could go today, if he wanted to. He thought about all the fruits he would pick. He thought about hiring migrant workers to help out with each season’s harvest, and then selling his products to whoever would take them. He thought about these things even while he put a hand on Seamus’ chest.
He said, “Excuse me-”
Seamus said, “A pox on you!”
Then, he struck Jacob so hard about the head that the world went dark before Jacob even hit the floor.
Chapter 6
He woke up to find Rachel wringing out a white towel into a washbasin. He lay in bed- that was strange enough. He couldn’t recall actually sleeping in any kind of bed at all since he had come to Nevada. He had made do with what he had, which was good enough for him. Now, as he opened his eyes to get a sense of his surroundings, he understood why people put themselves through so much trouble to get mattresses in their bedrooms. The bed was comfortable, so impossibly comfortable that he could not quite believe it. His head rested on a pillow. He had almost forgotten that pillows existed, much less that he could lay down on one. He decided that if a warm bed was what putting down roots felt like, then that might not be as bad as he had once thought.
He murmured while he stretched his legs. Rachel looked at him at once. Concern filled her eyes. She said, “Oh my love, are you hurt?”
He said, “Love?”
The word felt out of place to him. He had known Rachel O’Leary all of five minutes. He wasn’t sure what he thought of her. He still wasn’t sure how it was that she had come so quickly after the advertisement had been placed. Either the mail traveled very fast indeed, or one of the newspapers had sent out their boilerplate before they published it in their own papers. He thought that was unlikely. He planned to ask her, if he ever got around to it. That, he suspected, might be some time away. He had always heard the phrase, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Rachel had come of her own will with a proposition of marriage. If she meant it, if she was willing to commit to spending the rest of her life with him, then that might not be so bad. For, as much as he didn’t like to admit it, he had wanted to find a wife when he put those advertisements out.
She said, “Don’t try to get up. You’ve been asleep these past few hours.”
As consciousness fully returned to Jacob, he found that his head was pounding. He put a hand to his temple, where he had been struck. His mouth had gone dry. He blinked stars away from his eyes. He said, “Hours? How long has it been?”
“It’s about five in the evening, I should reckon. Seamus clocked you good. You went out like a light.”
Jacob found that he had a definitive memory of being punched, yet not of hitting the floor. He tried to grasp at what had happened after he had been hit, yet there was only a black emptiness in his mind where those events should have been. He said, “It sure feels like somebody walloped on me pretty good.”
Rachel put a cold compress on his forehead. She stroked his cheek and said, “My mother once told me that a man who is willing to stand up for what is right is one in one thousand.”
Jacob tried to gather his thoughts as best he could. He said, “You have a wise mother. Is she in Ireland?”
Rachel’s voice became quiet. The change only brought out her accent that much more. She said, “Nay, she’s in New York. She came over a few years ago, when your President Grant started talking about building America once again. It sounds ridiculous, perhaps, yet to an outsider like me, it seemed as though he was finally willing to put the senseless bloodshed of the civil war behind him.”
Jacob choked back an indignant reply. Though he had himself not taken part in the civil war, he had ardently hoped for a southern victory. Even while he abhorred slavery, he abhorred even further how people forgot that the several states had once been independent countries. Each state had its own president, its own congress. He had been disappointed when the north had won. That, more than anything else, had caused him to move west. He no longer believed in Washington’s power to protect its citizens, if that power had ever existed in the first place.
He said, “Whatever caused you to move out to Kansas?”
“People back east, they have a fever to move out west. Maybe it’s a fever to grab whatever bit of freedom they can. Some come looking for money, I expect. Others come looking for peace of mind. Or maybe a job that isn’t in a factory. I talked about that with mother quite a bit before I left. She said that she moved from Ireland to escape the famines. She told me if I ever got a chance to move to someplace better than where I was, I should take it.”
“But she didn’t come along?”
“That she did not. My father didn’t want to move. In fact, he insisted that I stay. I snuck away on a train headed west against his will. I suppose one of these days, I’ll send him a letter. Once I get settled, that is.”
Jacob wasn’t sure whether he wanted to ask about Seamus. He decided that, since the man had punched him, that he ought to find out what he could. He said, “And your fiancé? What does he have to do with all of this?”
“Oh, Seamus I met on the train out of New York. He and I hit it off quickly. He tries to be a good man. He really does. But he lets his passion get the better of him. He doesn’t have a filter on his emotions, do you see? When he loves someone, he loves them with all his heart. When he is angry with someone, he is angry to the point of deadly violence. I would have stayed with him, had he not gone sleeping around with every skirt he could find. It hurts when a man is disloyal like that. You give them all your faith and trust, only to have it repaid with betrayal. So I left him.
“Now I know what you’re going to ask next, Mr. Renmyer. You’ve a right to ask it, seeing as how Seamus thumped you good. He found the newspaper ad that I had circled. He asked me about it. I told him then that I was going to become a mail-order bride. After all, he was my fiancé, but he had never given me a ring. I had never signed any document binding myself to him, nor made a pledge in front of witnesses. He had asked me to marry when we reached Kansas, and like the fool girl that I was, I said yes. But we never did marry, you see. I never trusted him enough for that to happen.”
Jacob said, “But you trust me?”
“You’ve already proven yourself trustworthy, Mr. Renmyer-”
“Call me Jacob.”
“Jacob it is then. A man proves himself not by his words, but by his actions. You’ve given me no reason to think of you as anything less than a gentleman.”
Jacob studied her face. He had no idea what she was thinking. Women were a mystery to him. Even if a book was printed explaining in detail why women behaved the way they did, he was sure that he would not be able to make heads or tails of it. He said, “And does it usually happen that you hitch up with the first man you meet?”
“Only if I think he’s worth my time. I’m not picky, Jacob. You must understand that. A woman like me might wait her whole life for the right man to come along, and miss the opportunities that are presented to her. When you have
to act, you should act. There’s no two ways about that. Life isn’t kind enough to help out anyone who misses their chance.”
Jacob said, “Might be you’re right about that. I don’t know if I’d make any kind of father or husband. I’ve lived on my own for most of my life, ever since I was fifteen and old enough to work for my own money. I-”
His next sentence was cut off as Rachel pressed her lips to his.
Chapter 7
She unbuttoned his shirt, one button at a time. She pulled his shirt off him. First the right sleeve came off, then the left sleeve came off. Jacob found himself lifting his back off the bed so that she pull the shirt all the way off him. A shiver ran through his body. It was a nervous tingling of the sort that he had only experienced a few times before in his life. He always recognized it as something more than the animalistic carnal lust that came over men who leered at the nearest woman who happened to pass by. He had felt that within himself at times. He had even confessed that he wanted to give into it. He might have done that too, if the winters did not require him to spend most of his discretionary income squirrelling away food and firewood just to survive the cold months when the cattle didn’t need punching.
He recognized it as a calling of person to person. Were he inclined to believe in the religion that everyone else in the town professed to believe in, he might have said it was a calling of soul to soul. Something within him, something intangible that he rarely thought about or even interacted with recognized that same something within her. He could not explain it other than to say that her flint had sparked his tinder.
His breathing came heavy. He heard of a new invention called electricity. A man from England named Joseph Swan had been working on an iridescent lamp that was, as far as anyone could tell, capable of creating light by using nothing more than the natural substances of the world. He imagined that this principle was similar to what he experienced as her fingers touched his stomach just below his belly button.
He had a smooth stomach, the result of working hard and eating light meals. He had muscular arms from years of liftings stacks of hay. She drew circles on the skin of his stomach with her fingers until she moved to the ribcage. He shivered, for her fingertips were cold. He looked deep into her eyes. He saw something there that most of the women he had seen throughout his life had tried to hide: real, honest-to-god desire.
He put his hand in the middle of her back. He felt her back arch beneath his touch, a sign that she felt what he felt. She experienced the same kind of connection that he did. Was it so impossible to imagine that love at first sight really existed, and that it could be found out in the middle of the frontier? He hoped that it was, with everything that he was. He could not explain it; he did not need to explain it. He had found the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. She had not come to town wearing false hair, or with a false bosom, or with holstered hips. She had come as she was. That was enough for him.
He used his free hand to hold the nearest hand of hers that he could find. Her hand was cold, yet that didn’t seem to matter to him. If he had to be warm enough for both of them, he would be. Soon, he found that her hand got sweaty. He gripped that hand as tightly as he could.
Her breath was heavy and hot. It brushed against his cheek until he thought he would go mad with desire for her. He craned his neck up and kissed her. Her mouth was smooth and soft, her lips wet. She pressed his lips against his own with a fervor that she could barely control. He lost himself within her then, lost his mind, lost his sense of purpose, lost the knowledge of where he was or what he had been about to do with his Friday afternoon when he walked into the saloon. He knew only her hot breath, her cold hands, and her green eyes. Her eyes were like two shining emeralds set precisely in her head. Their luminescence was all he needed. He thought that it would be all that he would ever need. He would never need to eat or work again, as long as he had her. That would be more than enough. It would be far more than any man ever had, no matter how long he lived.
He was on the point of taking his belt off when the door was flung open. There in the hallway stood Seamus Flanagan.
Chapter 8
Seamus roared, “Oh this is how it’s to be, is it? You jump on the first man you find, eh? Leave old poor Seamus in the ditch just like always?”
Rachel started in surprise, then turned to see who might be there. She sucked in her breath sharply. She said, “Seamus, you best be leaving.”
Seamus lumbered into the bedroom. He grabbed Rachel’s foot, pulling her off of Jacob. Rachel screamed then, a sound that Jacob never wanted to hear again. He had seen men killed in the frontier. He had seen Indian raiding parties looking for glory or horses shoot or scalp anybody who wasn’t wise enough to take cover. He had seen entire wagon trains burned. Yet in all that time, he had never seen a woman harmed in any way. The only law that applied on the frontier was do what thou wilt- except to women. A man could be lynched for hurting a woman. There had even been tales coming down from Wyoming which stated that outlaws had lynched a man who harmed a woman. Traveling in the countryside with a woman was like traveling with a shield, for no one dared to assault any man who had female companionship.
As a result, seeing Rachel dragged out of bed by force brought powerful feelings of anger to surface for Jacob. He would have cut Seamus’ heart out and ate it then and there, if he had a knife to hand. He got up out of bed while Rachel flopped onto the floor, crying for anyone to help her.
She screamed, “Fire! Murder! Rape! Help, anybody!”
Jacob had not been able to hold on to her hand. The sweat that had gathered on their palms had made her skin to slippery to grasp. He had let go just when he wanted to hold on the most. He stood up, not caring that his boots had been taken off. His bare feet touched the wooden floor. That only added to his anger. He was put in mind of a day during his childhood when his father was beating his mother with a leather strap. Rather than staying in bed, he had got out to watch what was happening. Some part of his brain kept telling him to speak up, to say something. Yet, he never did. He watched as his mother cried for mercy and his father, as drunk as he had ever been, kept at it until the man finally fell down on his posterior. He had stalked out of the room, not even noticing Jacob. Ever since that day, he had sworn to himself that if he ever saw a woman being manhandled or mistreated, he would say something about it. He would no longer stay silent.
He said, “Mr. Flanagan, I’ll tell you but once. You best leave us both in peace and go your own way. If you don’t, then I’m liable to give you the beating of your life.”
Seamus pulled at Rachel. She had grabbed onto the frame of the bed with both her hands. He tried to pull her off. Then his eyes went wide with a maniacal fury as he saw the man standing before him. He let go of Rachel, then put his fists up in front of him. He said, “Come on then, you want to have a go? Let’s have a go. I’ll knock your bloody block off, that I will.”
Jacob raised his own fists. He had seen prize fights before. They had been sorry affairs that lasted fifty to a hundred rounds. Both men involved in those fights had been beaten senseless. He had an idea of how those fights were won and lost. The man with the longer arms often won against the man with shorter arms. Tall man regularly beat men shorter than themselves. He saw that he was taller than Seamus, and had longer arms. When he saw that, it didn’t matter that he had been in few fights himself. He knew his course.
He struck Seamus hard across the jaw. The Irishman staggered back for a moment. He cursed under his breath, then tried to return a punch in turn. Jacob had been paying close attention to the man’s elbows. A man always gave away which hand he would punch by moving his elbows. Once he saw Seamus’ elbows move, then it was only a matter of dodging out of the way in time.
He struck Seamus in the nose as hard as he could. He felt bone and cartilage break beneath his fist. Instantly, blood spurted out from the man’s nose. Jacob kept hitting the man. He hit him in the eyes, in the chin, on the nose. He hit Seamus un
til the man was on the ground, his face a mask of purple and red. Still Jacob kept hitting him.
He stopped when he realized that he didn’t have feeling in his right hand anymore. By then, Seamus lay on the floor, half-conscious. There was blood on Jacob’s hand, on his shirt, on his pants, on the floor, and on Seamus himself. Jacob panted out his breath. The pure, exquisite sensation that he had enjoyed only a moment ago had vanished. In its place was a dull ache that started from the back of his head and ran all through his body.
During the fight, Rachel had cowered against the foot of the bed. Now, she approached Seamus in order to see what had happened to the man. She crossed herself, then said, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. That’s a man who will never be the same again.”
Jacob said nothing. There were any number of things he could say. He could tell her that Seamus had deserved it. He could tell her that Seamus would have gotten the same treatment from any other man who saw him abusing a woman that was not his wife. There seemed little point in doing so, since Seamus now lay insensate.
He said, “That’s so. I’m of a mind to leave him to his own devices. What do you say?”
Rachel stood up. She kicked at one of Seamus’ arms. She said, “I’d say that’s a mighty fine suggestion. May I have your hand, Mr. Renmyer?”
“That you may, Miss O’Leary.”
He extended his left hand. She grabbed on to it. He walked out of the room, hoping that someone had a basin full of cold water at hand. If there wasn’t one, he would have to ride an hour to the north to find the nearest stream.
When he left his room, he found that he had been given a room on the second floor of the saloon. Zebediah Scribner greeted Jacob, who told him what had transpired. He then made his out of the swinging doors, not caring if any of the regulars who usually turned up around five in the evening saw him leading a woman by the hand or not. It turned out that Scribner did not have any cold water to hand.
Roommates Page 108
