Heart of the West (61 page)

She left his side, and he almost reached out to pull her back. He heard her cross the kitchen, her heels clicking on the pine boards. There was the rattle of crockery and then the click of her heels again, and then she was setting something between his spread elbows, something that clanked when it hit the table and smelled of flour.

It had been in the flour bin,
bidden
in the flour bin. He felt the flour on his fingers when he picked it up, this sacklike thing that was shaped like a heart and made of some silky material, this sacklike thing that clanked and was heavy and was filled with...

He lifted his head and stared at her. She stared back at him with that wide, still gaze of hers.

His hand closed around the silk sack, so tight he bruised the flesh of his palm. "Where did this come from?" And he thought in the next instant that if she said it had come from his brother, he would kill her.

"From my mother. There was more, but I've spent some of it over time. On my photographic equipment, because you disapproved of it so, and it didn't seem right to use your money, and... and on other things—"

"Other things I disapproved of?"

She drew in her breath, her shoulders stiffening. Yet she clamped her mouth shut, as she always did rather than argue with him. He wanted to shake her, he wanted to hit her. He wanted to make her
feel
something, damn her.

He didn't realize he had lunged up out of the chair, his hand raised in the air, until she flinched away from him. Her eyes were wide and dark now, her fists gripping the heavy black material of her skirt.

She lifted her chin, but the fear was still wild in her eyes, and he felt a certain satisfaction in it, God help him. "Will you strike me, Gus?" she said in a small, tight voice. "Will you go back on your word and strike me again?"

His hand fell to his side, balling into a fist, and he turned away from her. "No. But I ought to. I ought to."

He tossed the sack of money onto the table and flinched himself at the loud clatter it made in the suddenly silent kitchen. All these years... she'd had it all these years, and she'd kept it hidden from him. She'd had it the year of the fire, and the winter he and Zach had gone wolfing. He flung his head back, clamping his teeth together hard to hold back a howl of pain and rage. Inside him something felt torn. "Just tell me one thing: all those times we could've used it... why didn't you give it to me before?"

When she didn't answer, he swung around. "Why, damn you?"

"Because it was mine.
Mine."
He watched her chest heave as she struggled to draw in a breath, watched her trying to contain herself, this woman who never cried, never broke, never gave in. "And because Mama... she made me promise, and I owed it to her to keep my promise. She—she said no matter what sort of man I believed you to be, I should keep it as my own secret. Otherwise you would think it yours by right and take it, and then if I ever had to leave, I wouldn't... I couldn't..." She drew her lower lip between her teeth and pushed it back out again, and to his utter self-disgust he was suddenly filled with a fierce need to press his mouth to hers, to take her mouth. And he hated her for it. In that moment he truly hated her.

"And has that crossed your mind, Clementine? Are you going to leave me someday? 'Cause if you are, then you may as well get while the gettin's good, huh? You don't do me any big favor by staying, you know. I got along fine before I met you, and i reckon I'll go on living if you decide to leave."

The blood drained completely from her face, as if he'd torn open her heart. She jerked her head back and forth, once. "Oh, Gus... how can you say such a thing? You don't understand—"

"You're goddamned right I don't understand! I gave you all that I had. Everything that was mine I gave to you. Everything I had to give, from heart to guts, I let you take it all, and willingly. I'm not saying I wasn't willing. But I swear to God, girl, I feel sometimes as if I'm looking at you from the other side of a hurricane fence. Is there a heart inside you? Are there any
feelings
beneath all that starch and all those manners?"

She took his words like blows, almost cringing. "I don't mean to be that way. I don't mean it..."

She didn't cry; she never cried. Yet her shoulders bowed and she clutched at her belly as if he'd driven his fist in there. He'd hurt her, just as he'd meant to, and now he couldn't bear it.

"Clementine..." He reached for her, pulled her into his arms.

And she clung to him as if she were drowning. She sought his mouth, sucked frantically on his lips as if she could draw the life out of him and into herself. She arched against him, pressed her body hard to the length of his. She breathed into him, spoke into his mouth. "Love me, Gus. Please love me."

He gripped the sides of her head and looked down into her face, searching for the truth. Searching for her. "Please," she said.

"Let's go upstairs."

A faint flush colored her cheeks, but she nodded and pulled away from him, breathing hard. She led the way out of the kitchen and up to their bedroom.

The green shutters had been pulled closed against the glare and heat of the sun. The room was dim, quiet. From outside he could hear the faint sound of his daughter's laughter and the mad cluck of chickens and the wind that rose up late every morning, a false harbinger of afternoon storms that never came. In all the years of their marriage they had never made love in the daylight. It wasn't the sort of thing a decent man asked of his gently reared, God-fearing, preacher's daughter, virgin-when-you-married-her, and every-inch-a-lady wife. But now it struck him, looking at her in that moment, that whoever he had always thought her to be... she wasn't that woman at all.

She stood at the end of the bed, facing him, her hands at her sides. She started to lift them, to let down her hair, maybe, or to unbutton her dress, but then she let them fall again, She looked so vulnerable, so ashfair, frail, and delicate, so like the girl he had married seven years ago. He slowly let go of the breath that fought to leave his chest. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I'm not sorry, Gus." She shook her head hard, fiercely. And the fierceness was in her voice as well. "I've never been sorry."

They weren't talking about the same thing, but it didn't matter, because she had crossed the room and come into his arms, and the feel of her was so familiar and he wanted her. She was Clementine and she was in his arms.

And still, it wasn't enough.

Clementine sucked in her stomach, grunting with the effort it seemed to be taking to hook her corset. Her Dr. Jaeger's combination undergarment, made properly out of wool to absorb perspiration, was serving its purpose—already it clung to her sticky skin. Onto the corset she buttoned a crinolette petticoat, and over this she tied on a horsehair bustle. She had to sit in a chair to fasten her half boots, which still smelled faintly oily from the fresh blacking she'd rubbed on them last week. She put on a plain black alpaca skirt and a matching wasp-waist jacket bodice. She pulled her hair into a snood on the back of her neck and covered it with a black slat bonnet. In spite of the stifling heat she put on a linen duster, for she could not afford to expose her clothes to the ruinous alkali dust. And Limerick gloves to protect her hands. Hands that had been ruined long ago.

She had started to leave the room when her gaze fell on the bed. Dusty bars of light cast by the sun slanting through the shutters fell across the rumpled sheets. The smell of sex was thick in the still, heavy air.

He had been desperate in his loving, almost rough. Well, they'd both been that way, going at each other like animals. It might have been, she thought, his own feelings of failure that had pulled Gus behind her up those stairs, into bed. A need to get back his man's pride. But she knew she was the one who had failed him, was failing him.

She turned her back on the bed and all the feelings of longing and loneliness that it evoked. She went downstairs and out into the yard.

Saphronie already had the spring wagon hitched up for her, the eggs packed with straw in their baskets, the butter crocks covered with cheesecloth against the flies. A Winchester rifle angled muzzle-down next to the plank seat, although the country wasn't so dangerous anymore. The wolves and panthers and bears had been driven higher up into the mountains. Iron Nose and his band of renegades had ridden into legend.

Clementine's gaze went to the buffalo hunter's shack. She had a sudden memory of herself standing at that old sawbuck table, up to her elbows in bread dough, and Gus smiling at her, saying, "I ought to get you a milch cow so's you can have fresh milk for your coffee. And maybe a flock of laying hens, too." And her thinking then how she didn't know the first thing about milk cows or laying hens.

What a child she'd been that day, feeling disappointed because Montana and the ranch weren't what her dreams had been made of. Yet she had been happy. She was sure, remembering it now, that she had been happy.

She held her hat down against a sudden gust of wind that whipped up the dust in the yard. She tilted her head back, squinting. The sky was flat and dull as a tarnished pewter dish. High herringbone clouds wreathed the sun. There would be no rain again today.

The door banged behind her and Clementine whirled, surprised, for she thought Gus had ridden out already. He hadn't even finished dressing. His braces dangled at his hips and his shirt was unbuttoned. He wasn't wearing his hat, and his sun-shot hair was mussed where she had raked her fingers through it. His forehead, usually covered by his hat, was startlingly white next to the rest of his face, which was as brown as a hazelnut. There were white creases around his eyes, too, from when he used to laugh. It was the thing about him she'd always loved— his easy and joyous laughter.

They looked at each other for a long moment in silence. His thick mustache fell over the corners of a mouth that hadn't smiled since the rain had stopped coming, maybe not since Charlie... He no longer had that bright unbeatable look about him. She wanted to bring it back, but she didn't know how.

"It's too late to be going into town now," he said.

"I thought we needed money," she said back to him, hating herself for fighting him unfairly when she shouldn't have been fighting him at all.

His face flushed and his mouth tightened. "I reckon we won't starve between now and tomorrow, though."

Once every week or so she took her butter and eggs into town to sell. And though she had planned on going today, she could just as easily go tomorrow. But the wildness was building inside her—those frantic, frenzied soul-yearnings that threatened at times to drive her mad. She had to get away, away from Gus and the ranch, out where the sky was bottomless and with- out end in any direction, where the cloud shadows chased each other across mile after mile of grass. Out where she could surrender to the loneliness.

She drew in a slow, deep breath and fought to still the trembling that was going on inside her. "Gus..."

She wanted to tell him that all this disquiet, this restlessness, this constant yearning for things she couldn't even name had nothing to do with him. It was all her fault. What he'd said about the hurricane fence—he was right. It seemed she'd always looked at life from behind a high, broad barrier. She wanted to talk to him about all that he had given her, how he had saved her, shown her, been the cowboy of her dreams.

She climbed into the wagon, gathered up the reins.

He laid his hand on her arm. "Clementine, don't be like this. If you're angry with me for what..."

She looked down into his eyes, eyes that were blue as the noon sky but full of reproach and hurt and the residue of anger. And questions she couldn't answer for herself, let alone for him.

"My going into town has nothing to do with... with what just happened," she said. She wished she knew what had happened between them. It seemed they had brought each other release, but they hadn't soothed each other's heartache.

I love you, Gus,
she thought,
but not enough for me. And not enough for you.
And ironically, because it wasn't enough for him, because he had that sort of pride, he made her think she could love him enough after all, if she tried hard, really tried. And if she would only stop listening to the sound the wind made as it blew through the cottonwoods, and stop thinking of what could have been.

She clicked to the team. The iron tires crunched over the hard ground. The wind drove grit into her face, and she shut her mouth against the bitter taste of it. When she turned onto the road into town, she looked back. The dust the wagon had churned up was settling down, and Gus was gone.

The wind was blowing Montana-strong now. She had to brace both feet on the dash and lean into it. The horses walked with their heads down, tails whipping. She could feel her face drawing tight, like a cowhide stretched in the sun to dry. The dust burned her nostrils and stuck to her sweat-slick skin. The sunlight was bright, hard, and metallic, fading the colors of the land.

This land, this place. The fierceness, the heartbreaking emptiness. The wild loneliness of it called to what blew wild and empty and lonely within her. Perhaps, she thought, there were some spaces within a soul that could never be filled.

She stopped for a moment when she arrived at the new acreage Gus had bought. It was mostly beautiful buttes heavily timbered with yellow pine, black ash, and box elder. Running between the two biggest hills was a coulee choked with red dust and rocks and entangled with stonecrop and wild plum thickets. The coulee had been cut through the earth during the wet springs of earlier years.

Built into the slope above the coulee was an old sod house that had collapsed in upon itself. It was known around the RainDance as the madwoman's soddy because poor Mrs. Weatherby, who'd once lived there, had been driven mad by the wind. There were many such abandoned places throughout the valley. They were called "hope's skeletons." Clementine wondered if that would be said someday of the new house Gus had built for her—just another hope's skeleton. And found she could not bear the thought.