Heart of the West (34 page)

The reverend rested his elbows on the top rail of the fence and hooked a bootheel over the lower one. Rafferty cast a sideways glance at his father. The man was almost fifty now and looking it. Small broken veins webbed his nose, and the skin sagged off his prominent cheekbones. A fold of belly hung over his trousers. Rafferty had seen a man break a bone in his hand once, trying to hit that belly. Now you could bury your fist in there like in a pillow.

His father felt him looking. A faint flush colored his cheeks and he hitched his pants up over the bulge at his waist. "You boys have yourselves a nice little spread here," he said, the skin around his eye crinkling with his roguish smile. "And there appears to be plenty of sheep in this valley just ripe for salvation. Perhaps I'll hang out my shingle—metaphorically speaking, of course. Do some work in the Lord's name."

"Don't say that where Gus can hear you. You'll spoil his day."

The reverend's head fell back in a deep and genuine laugh. "I do like you, boy. I've always liked your style. It's a pity you didn't stick with me instead of leaving me high, dry, and lonesome as you did. It was I, after all, who taught you everything you know."

Yeah, Rafferty thought, like how to cheat and steal from others before they can cheat and steal from you.

"Why, by the time you were old enough to make a bone in your britches, you could pull a bunco, buzz a pocket, screw a woman till she was dizzy blind, and play the sharpest skin game I've ever had the pleasure to witness—and all without breaking into a sweat. I raised you up in my image, just as the Holy Book says. I
made
you, my dear Zacharias."

And those, Rafferty thought, were the truest words the man had probably spoken all year. Jack McQueen was in him, a part of him. It wasn't just a case of there but for the grace of God, but rather only a matter of time. One day he was going to look in a mirror and see his father staring back at him. The life he hoped to make for himself, the
man
he wanted to make of himself... it would all collapse like a rotten pumpkin.

His ma had known the truth. She had stood on the deck of the steamboat and watched him grow smaller as the muddy water rose up between them, and she had looked into his soul and seen nothing there worth taking with her and certainly nothing worth coming back for.

"What I don't understand," his father was saying in an aggrieved tone, "is why you took off, and in the manner you did— like a thief in the night, if you'll pardon the expression. Apparently I was laboring under the misapprehension that you and I were partners."

Partners... my God. "Hell, I couldn't get away from you fast enough."

"You are being hurtful, Zacharias." And the devil of it was, the old man looked and sounded hurt. But then, you could never tell with Jack McQueen what was genuine and what was merely guile. "My old man used to whale on me until I couldn't walk," he said. "But I never raised a hand to either of you boys. Indeed, I treated you as if you had brains and were tough enough to use them—although I admit I often had my doubts about Gustavus. I did the one thing a father can do for his sons: I taught you how the game is played."

"You taught us how to cheat at it."

"That
is
how the game is played. Don't say you've grown soft on me, boy."

The cowboy was riding the chestnut now, combing its sides with his spurs to make it pitch livelier, kicking up a whirlwind of dust. "Eehaw!" Gus yelled from the other side of the corral. "Stay with her!"

A stillness came over Rafferty. A feeling of suspended breath, of quiet waiting. He turned his head, knowing she would be there.

Clementine and Hannah were walking down from the new house to see the bronco-busting. Hannah was laughing, and there was a lilt to Clementine's step. The breeze blew her skirt against the swell of her belly, and sunlight glistened off her hair. He couldn't help watching her any more than he could help breathing.

His father's voice rasped in his ear. "Fancy Gustavus taking himself such a wife. I'll wager you he has to court her every time he wants to bed her. That redheaded filly, now, is more to my taste—long and snappy as a six-horse whip. She would give a man quite a ride."

"Hannah is mine."

His father's laugh was deep and easy. "Not only yours, she isn't. The good Lord, bless him, made women like her to be shared. And I lied when I said you have yourselves a nice spread here. Any fool can see it's barely making it. Any fool but Gustavus. He expects the dollars to start crawling into his jeans any day now, doesn't he? But you know you're only a cold winter or a dry summer away from being busted. Only you'll stick it because you're stubborn and you always did have to try to spare that pretty-pious brother of yours the pain of his illusions."

"That's right, Revver," Rafferty said, letting anger edge his voice. The old man had rarely given Gus any credit, never allowed him any pride. Gus was the heart and guts of the ranch. A bad year might break them, but the ranch wouldn't even exist if it weren't for his brother. "I'm sticking it."

"Of course you are, dear boy. Right up until the day he walks in on you in bed with his wife."

Rafferty went very still. In the corral the chestnut crawfished backward and the cowboy rode air, then hit the dirt with a bone-rattling thud.

Rafferty had spent the summer he was eighteen breaking bangtails like that chestnut at five bucks a head. One hot afternoon he had been given a coal-black bronc with the biggest feet he'd ever seen on a horse. One of those old-timers who hang on corral fences all day had observed that a horse with feet that big couldn't be ridden, but Rafferty had only laughed.

He had thought his tailbone was going to get pounded out through the top of his rattled head, but he'd stuck to that damn cayuse until its nose was hanging down between its knees, and he'd laughed again at the old-timer. "I thought you said he couldn't be rode," he crowed, and no sooner was the last of it out of his mouth than the bronc arched its back and plunged sideways through the air. One minute Rafferty had been sitting relaxed and cocky in the saddle, and the next he was lying flat on his back in the dust and biting down on the unmanly urge to scream from the pain in his dislocated shoulder.

The old-timer had stood over him, grinning like he'd just won first prize at a kissing booth. "That'll larn you, kid, never t' underestimate a horse or a man."

He had forgotten how dangerous it was to underestimate his father. Even with only one good eye, Jack McQueen could still see in a glance what it took most men years' worth of studying.

He made his fists open. He wrapped his hands around the rail, gripping the wood so tight the veins and sinews of his wrists stood out. "You son of a bitch," he said.

"You are being hurtful again, and I am not the one at fault here. 'Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids.' If it were only you lusting after her, I would say the poor boy might be spared the humiliation of being cuckolded by his own brother. But I've seen the way she looks at you. She hasn't worked it all out in her mind just yet, but when she does, she's going to be lifting her skirts for you quicker than—"

Rafferty whipped around and grabbed the lapels of his father's coat, hauling him up on his toes so that they were eye to eye. "If I didn't already know there was such as thing as pure trouble in this world, you would alter my mind." He flexed his muscles once, then relaxed his grip, letting the reverend slide out of his hands. He smoothed out the wrinkles in his father's coat and spoke in a flat, soft voice. "You keep your thoughts to yourself and your mouth shut, and if you come even close to causing her misery in any way, I'll kill you for it."

Jack McQueen's clever mouth turned disdainful. "Such a display, dear boy. And all for naught. You can't seriously expect me to believe you would slaughter your own flesh and blood. You're tough, but not that tough."

Rafferty waited a beat, long enough to see the uncertainty settle over his father's face. Long enough to see the tic take up its pulse below the black patch. Then he smiled his meanest smile.

"Tell that to the man who took your eye."

The mustang bawled and pitched, squealing as it crashed into the poles of the corral.

The Reverend Jack cupped his hand around his mouth and shouted across the minced dirt of the arena, "He's too much horse for you, Gustavus!"

The brothers stood next to each other, watching as four men tried to saddle the crazed horse. "He's spoiled," Rafferty said. "Someone's already tried to break him and mishandled it." The horse was a claybank, the same color as a mountain cat and just as wild.

A muscle bunched along Gus's jaw as he stared at the bronc. Gus was a fine rider, but the fact was he didn't much like horses, and deep down in the guts of him he had a fear of the really raw ones.

Rafferty saw the fear in his brother's face, in the taut skin over his cheekbones and in his bright, shifting eyes. "Sun's close to setting," he said. "Might as well just turn him loose and call it a day."

"A man," the reverend said loud enough for all the other fence riders to hear, "shouldn't fork a saddle if he's scared of being throwed. Or so they say."

Gus's gaze stayed riveted on the bronc—all bunched and quivering eight hundred pounds of him. Rafferty felt a flash of irritation with his brother. Some days tormenting him was as easy as squashing an ant with a sledgehammer.

"You're all the time bragging that you can ride anything with hair on it," Gus said. "I'm surprised you don't have calluses from patting yourself on the back." He pointed his chin at the bronc. "So why don't you try that one?"

"Because he ain't worth messin' with." And he hadn't done any bragging, either, but Rafferty let that pass.

"Some men," Jack McQueen said, "can't help feeling a certain shame to discover they've fathered a boy with a weak gizzard. 'Be strong, and quit yourselves like men,' so saith the Lord. I, on the other hand, am more tolerant of human foibles. You have nothing to prove to me, Gustavus."

Rafferty started toward the mustang, to turn it loose, not to ride it. Gus caught his arm.

"Leave the saddle on him."

"How many times've you watched the old man stir up trouble just for the hell of it? Why are you letting him chouse you into this?"

Gus jerked his head in a hard, sharp nod. "You know why. Okay, so maybe I'm scared, and maybe it's harder to do it when you're scared. You wouldn't appreciate that, because you've never been scared of a blasted thing in your entire life. For once I'm going to prove it to him. I'm going to prove it to myself."

"Prove what, dammit—that you're stupid?"

Gus pushed past him, mouth and jaw set rigid.

"Ah, hell," Rafferty said, and followed him.

The bronc was snubbed to a corral post by a lasso tight around its neck. Two men with braced feet had either side of the hackamore. Held down as he was, the horse still looked ready to explode, crouched back on its haunches, ears flat, nostrils flaring. Gus was going to get his fool neck broken, and Rafferty was mad enough at him now not to give a good goddamn.

Rafferty slipped the lasso and took hold of the hackamore's left cheek strap, forcing the bronc's head sharp around toward its neck. The other men melted back, putting the fence between themselves and any flying hooves.

Rafferty stroked the trembling withers. "Easy, boy," he said softly. "Easy, easy, now." The horse snorted hot breath on his neck.

Gus approached the mustang's side, quirt in his hand, silver spurs glinting in the sun. The bronc's right rear leg flashed, the hoof slicing air. Gus tugged his hat down tight and low over his eyes, as if he actually thought he might still be wearing it after all this was over.

Rafferty gave him a taunting smile. "Hadn't you ought to take off that pretty vest of yours, big brother? You wouldn't want to be getting it all dirty."

The smile Gus gave back to him was tight and full of fear, but Rafferty was being careful not to look directly at him. "Are you implying, little brother, that I'm going to wind up eating dust?"

"Soon as your butt hits the saddle."

Gus gathered up the reins and with his right hand turned the stirrup for his boot. "Use the bucking strap," Rafferty said, pitching his voice low so that only his brother could hear.

Gus's mouth flattened, but he wrapped his fingers around the strap. The bronc snorted, hindquarters dancing.

The brothers' gazes met, and deep in Gus's eyes was the same bruised and bewildered look he would get as a boy when the old man would lay into him like this, not with a strap or a fist, but with words that could hurt down to the bone. Gus hadn't understood it then and he didn't now—how cruelty could exist in the world without a reason. He just kept on thinking there should be a way to make his father love him.

Rafferty took a deep breath, trying to shake off the ache. "Gus, you don't have to do this."

"It's always been so easy for you," Gus said, the words coming out mangled from the tightness in his throat. "You're not only tougher than the rest of us poor sons of bitches, you
know
you're tougher. You make me sick—"

"Shut up and get on the fucking horse."

Rafferty released the cheek strap and whipped the blindfold off the mustang's eyes as soon as Gus's right foot left the ground. The horse jackknifed and Gus slammed into the saddle with such force Rafferty heard his teeth crack. The mustang bogged its head and boiled, lock-legged, its back arched like a bow.

And Gus flew off him like crack-the-whip.

"What do I do with this?"

Clementine looked up from the purple slabs of huckleberry pie she was cutting to the huge brown crock full of baked beans in Hannah's arms. "Oh, dear..." Mrs. Graham's beans had been a dismal failure, which was not to be wondered at with men who, seven days out of seven, ate beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. "Perhaps White Hawk...?"

Hannah shook her head, dimples flashing. "I already tried him. He pointed to the beans, down to his belly, back to the beans again, then bent over and made a noise like he was going to puke."