Heart of the West (72 page)

But the miracle could turn out to be as bogus as one of his father's if he didn't see it through. He wrapped an arm around his wife's waist and tried to use her to boost himself to his feet.

She staggered beneath his weight, and her hip bumped into the kitchen table. Something splashed, and a chair went skidding across the floor. "Gus, whatever are you doing? Lie still. Look, you almost knocked over the vinegar water."

"Help me up, Clem... Got to feed the cattle... Be blamed if I walked through a blizzard... only to see 'em die 'cause I couldn't get the hay from my yard out to where they're at."

She gripped his shoulders, pressing him back. "All right, all right, then," she said, speaking to him in the soothing voice she used on Daniel when he was suffering through one of his lung spasms. "I'll get the hay out to the cows, Gus. You just rest easy."

He tried to laugh and coughed instead. "Now look who's being the fool. You're five months gone—"

"Not so gone that I couldn't drag you in here after you'd fainted out in the yard and looked all set to drown in the snow." Her hands tightened, and she shook him a little, surprising him with her strength. "Not so gone that I couldn't make umpteen trips back and forth between here and the woodshed to keep us all from freezing during the most miserable weather Montana could dredge up. Not so gone that I..." She stopped, and the color came up high in her face. "Not so gone that I can't pitch a few forkfuls of hay to a few hungry cows."

It would be more than a few forkfuls, but he said nothing. He wasn't getting up; he could tell that now as he tried and failed to fight down another bout of bone-wrenching coughing. He let his head fall back, shutting his eyes. His chest hurt. He heard Clementine telling Sarah to mind Daniel and sing to him if he woke up fussing, and have a care not to get too close to the stove. And he struggled to keep from coughing again so that she wouldn't know how sick he really was, because then she wouldn't want to leave him alone.

His eyes drifted closed. When he opened them again she was leaning over him. "Gus, are you well enough to watch the children? I can't leave them if—"

"Yeah, sure, I'm well enough. Only resting easy is all, like you said... Clementine..." He groped for her hand, found it, and held on tight. "Out there last night—I did a lot of thinking. Not much else to do when you're slogging though snow and trying to keep your mind off how cold you are... A lot of the thinking I did was about you, about us." He swallowed hard, fighting down another urge to cough, and his chest burned. "I did you wrong, girl, taking you away from your home and family when you were so young. Bringing you out here to this hard, rough country, when you were raised to so much better... So many things I wished I could've given you and I never did. I did wrong by you, Clem, but from the first moment I saw you, I wanted you. I just didn't see a way I was going to get through life without you."

She knelt and brought their clasped hands up to her mouth to kiss his knuckles. "You didn't do wrong by me; you did right.

And what makes you think I would have wanted to go through life without you, Gus McQueen? If I had it to live over again, I would do all of it,
all
of it, in the exact same way." A gentle smile softened her face, and she touched his lips with her free hand, following the drooping curve of his mustache with her finger, stroking it. "You are the cowboy of my dreams."

"I am, huh? What's that supposed to mean?"

She lowered her head and kissed his mouth. "It means I love you."

Their entwined hands fell apart. She stood up and backed away from him. A small woman, delicate as heired china, elegant and graceful even in a long, ragged buffalo coat. But then, she'd always been prime, a real lady.

She opened the door and winter billowed inside. The cold air felt good on his hot face and he breathed it in. She paused a moment to look back at him. Then the door shut behind her and she was gone.

His thoughts drifted, making him smile. He had those red drawers in his saddle pack... meant to give 'em to her. Would get them out when she got back and make her put them on for him tonight. Only the drawers and nothing else. She had a fine pair of legs, long and slender, like a colt's.

He thought of how she'd looked, standing in doorway with the snowbright winter light behind her, and she'd been smiling. She didn't smile all that often, but when she did it was like turning on a gas jet. It lit up her whole face. So pretty. Just like the first time he'd seen her.

Clementine stood tall on the sleigh seat and looked back at the big house. Smoke puffed from the chimney. The icicles on the eaves glittered wet in the sun—a lemon-colored sun, shining without heat in a hard blue sky.

Ice crystals swirled and sparkled and flashed in the air. She could hear a faint tinkling sound, like glasses clinking in a toast. She wondered what caused it. Perhaps it was just the earth being cold.

Since the storm had come from the north, she drove the sled south toward the coulees and draws where the cattle would have drifted. The snow cried as it was cut by the sleigh's ash runners. The horses' hooves sent the loose flakes rippling like sea sand. The RainDance country was sheathed in ice, shimmering like a crystal pendant. The mountains stood out in stark relief like a long line of white tipis thrusting into the sky, clean and cold and beautiful.

And it
was
beautiful, she thought. Hard and cruel and frightening, yet so beautiful.

She found a bunch of cows piled up against the line fence. Most were dead, but a few lived, standing huddled together, shivering and hungry. Their coats glinted with hoarfrost, vapor shot from their snouts, and icicles dripped like fringe from their dewlaps and flanks. They tinkled like wind-stirred chandeliers as they unlocked their frozen legs and came toward her, drawn by the smell of the hay.

A wolf pack was feeding off the pile of stacked carcasses. Made brave by hunger, they hadn't even run off when she drove up. So she killed one cleanly with the Winchester, and the others scattered into the surrounding pines. She looked at the dead wolf and knew a sense of pride. Pride that she had made herself learn how to shoot long ago and then practiced until she could do it well.

She wrestled a bale off the load, cut through the baling twine, and began spreading the hay with a pitchfork. It smelled of summer. Last summer during the drought, when money was too tight to hire extra hands, she'd helped Gus put up their hay. She thought of how it felt to swing the scythe through the tall grass, the way the sharp blade sliced the hay and laid it down in perfect rows. It had been like making poetry with her body. And though she'd been clumsy at first, she'd learned to do it well. She could do many things well now. Montana things.

I am the bear,
she thought and she laughed. She threw back her head and shouted it aloud. "I am the bear!"

She breathed deeply, scouring her lungs with the cold air. She kept her face turned to the sky. A big, wide Montana sky with no wind, no clouds, just still air and cold sunshine.

She sensed a charged feeling in the air. And then it came, a warm gush of wind from out of the mountains. A wind that smelled of the earth, and of a sea that was hundreds of miles away. She turned her face to the southwest, where it came from, the warm dry wind. The chinook.

The balmy wind roared out of mountains, blowing the loose hay over the snowy field. The ice crust glistened, reflecting back the sun in prisms of glorious color. Chinook. A warm breath from the dark mother, so the Indians used to say. It was as if the earth wept. But if the earth was weeping, it was with joy.

You take it all in, with your eyes and your breath and the pores of your skin, all the beauty and the wildness of it...
Once, a man she loved had told her that. She hadn't really understood it then, but she did now. The missing things had been there within her all along. They were there in the land, and in hard work and good living, and the birthing and raising of children, and the love of two fine men.

She wanted to ride all over the range and feed all the cattle in the world while the warm wind blew in her face. But it was winter still, and darkness would come early, and Gus would be needing another dose of onion syrup soon. So she finished feeding the cattle she had found and turned for home.

She ran into the house, laughing, calling out to Gus, saying, "Gus, Gus, do you feel it? It as warm as summer. There's a chinook blowing outside, a real snow-eater, and... Oh, God."

Gus lay on the floor, his chest heaving as the breath rasped and rattled out of his throat. Sarah sat next to him, with Daniel beside her. Daniel was quiet, sucking his thumb. Sarah had been singing, but she stopped when Clementine burst through the door. "Daddy's fussing," she said, "and I can't make him be quiet."

"Gus! Oh, my God, Gus..." Clementine fell to her knees beside him. With trembling hands she lifted his head and laid it in her lap. She brushed the hair out of his face and pressed her mouth to his, as if she would give him the breath he fought for. Rubbed his swollen, fever-cracked lips with hers. His lips that knew how to smile and how to hurt, and how to love.

"Gus, please don't leave me." She clasped him to her chest and rocked. "Please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't..."

She had left the door open to the chinook. She held him in her arms as the lush, warm wind lapped at the snow. She thought she could almost see the frozen land take heart and begin to live again. She held him in her arms, and it was the strangest thing. One moment he was there with her, in her arms, and in the next he was not.

Part Four: 1891

CHAPTER 30

She was straining a bucket of fresh milk when she saw him across the prairie, a man on a dun-colored horse.

He didn't appear to be in a hurry, ambling along, sitting tall and easy and graceful in the saddle.

She set the foaming milk down to cool and poured a can of soured cream into a barrel churn. She fired up the stove and put on some coffee before she took the churn and a chair out onto the gallery and sat down.

The man had turned toward the ranch and was cutting through the hay meadow. She liked the way he rode, as if he'd been born to it. She hoped he was a saddle bum in need of work, a cowboy down on his luck. They could use some help with the spring roundup.

She had milked her cows in the muddy corral that morning and had broken a colt to the lead there that afternoon. She looked a fright now, with muck on her boots and on the divided skirt of her riding habit, and with her hair falling loose from its chignon. Once she would have rushed upstairs and tidied herself up for company; now it didn't seem as important as making the butter.

She pulled the churn up between her legs and began to crank the handle, turning the barrel end over end.

She narrowed her eyes, the better to make out the approaching rider. He was a cowboy surely by the look of his buckskin coat and dark Stetson hat. The late afternoon sky rose high and wide and gray in back of him, brooding up for another rain. A flight of drakes, bright in their courting feathers, pierced the low clouds above his head, bearing north.

She felt a strange uneasiness that she couldn't attribute to anything in particular, a restlessness. She paused a moment in her cranking to watch him come, then shrugged. If she liked the looks of him and he was willing to work for his thirty dollars a month plus beans and bacon, if he could handle a rope and bust a bronc, then she would definitely take him on for the roundup.

She and Saphronie, with the help of Pogey and Nash, had managed by themselves during the last four springs, mostly because there hadn't been many cows to round up. That first spring after Gus had died, that winter of the Great Die-Up, most of the RainDance country's cattle had wound up as carcasses stacked and stinking in the coulees, food for the buzzards and wolves. The few left living had been ragged and starved and hardly worth the slaughtering. But if a rancher couldn't find a meat market for his beeves, he made what money he could from selling their hides. It was called a skinning season. They'd had mostly skinning seasons since Gus died.

This spring would be different, though, especially if she could hire herself a man to help out. That man on the dun for instance, who was riding alongside the snake fence now and would soon be turning into the yard.

If he wasn't averse to working for a woman, which most men were.

If the Four Jacks Copper Mine and its offer of four dollars a day didn't hire him away.

She stopped cranking and peeked through the small glass window in the churn, and saw that the butter had come. But she didn't open the end of the churn, fling some cold water in it, and go on cranking as she should have. Instead she wiped her hands on her skirt and went out into the yard to meet the stranger.

He disappeared for a moment into the long shadows cast by the cottonwoods, then emerged into the wan, cloud-shrouded light. He must have seen her just then, because he checked his horse hard, as if he'd been surprised or startled. The dun reared and Clementine's steps faltered. There was something about the way he handled the horse, the way he held his head and shoulders, the way he was... She pressed her fist to her chest, because it felt as though her heart had suddenly stopped beating.

The dun was shedding its rough winter coat, and the man looked winter-worn as well. His dark brown hair hung long over the collar of his buckskin jacket; his boots were badly rundown and scuffed. The hat pulled low over his eyes had dents in the crown and a frayed brim. As he swung down from the saddle and looped the reins over his arm, she saw he wore a Colt slung low on his hip. And there was a Winchester rifle nestled in the boot holster. He came at her, walking like a cowboy, narrow hips swiveling, long muscular legs eating up the ground.

She sucked in a deep breath, feeling almost dizzy. She didn't want to believe it. To believe and then have it not be true would be more than a soul could bear.

He stopped while there was a good six feet still separating them. He thumbed up his hat a little, and she looked into a pair of fierce yellow eyes.

"Clementine," he said and his voice broke over the syllables.

She could say nothing at all. Only look at him. It hurt and it was wonderful to look at him.

The wind came up, tugging at the loosely knotted handkerchief that sagged from his throat and stirring the shaggy strands of his hair. His gaze broke from hers and moved back out into the open prairie.

"Where's that big brother of mine? Out chasin' cows?"

"It happened four years ago, during the winter of the Great Die-Up. He caught the grippe, and it settled on his lungs and he... died."

She had buried her husband beneath the cottonwoods, next to her son. The wolves had been so bad that winter they'd had to cover the grave with rocks, and the rocks were still there, mottled now with moss and lichen.

Gus's brother stood with his head bowed, his hat off and hanging from two fingers of the hand he had hooked on his gun belt. She studied his face—the fierce, strong lines and angles of bone under the dark, taut skin. A face that was imprinted on her soul, and yet a face she knew not at all. He'd always been good at keeping his feelings to himself, and whatever kind of life he'd been living during the last seven years had made him better at it.

Suddenly he whipped his head up and around to pin her with his intense gaze. "You out here all by yourself?"

She swallowed around the thickness in her throat. For so long, so long she had waited for this moment, for the day he would come home. Now he was here, standing so close to her she could have reached out and pulled his head down and pressed her mouth to his. And yet she could not, for he was a stranger.

"Saphronie's been living with us for a long while now," she finally managed. "And there's the children, of course."

One corner of his mouth lifted in what was almost a smile, but those yellow eyes burned hot, like a fire that had been fanned. A shock of recognition crimped her chest, and a shiver of the unknown.

"Children?" he said. "Y'all had more, then, after Sarah?"

"Two more. Two boys." She made a hard, jerky movement, as if a rope stretched taut between them, holding them together, and she had to break it with force. "I imagine you'll want to be alone with him for a while, to say good-bye. When you're done... there's coffee on the stove."

His gaze went back to the grave. He stood in silence, his eyes shielded now by his hat. "I already told him good-bye," he said, his voice flat and hard. "On that day I left here seven years ago."

He walked beside her across the yard, pausing to look up at the big house.

"Gus built it for me," she said, "not long before he died."

"He always worried that you'd get to missing that fancy house and all those fine things you left back in Boston."

"He was wrong about that."

"I know."

His gaze went to the Studebaker sheep wagon parked in the middle of the yard. A sign, bolted to the struts, stretched across the full length of the canvas top: Temple of Photography in large black block letters. And beneath that, in smaller script: Views of all Kinds, Family Groups and Individual Portraits, Parlor Gatherings Taken by Flashlight, Taken Either Stereoscopic or Plain.

He looked from the wagon to her, then back to the wagon again, shaking his head. "Boston... Lord, Boston..." The severe line of his mouth softened and curved, indenting the faint crease in his cheek. His eyes focused on her with breath-stopping intensity. Slowly his hand came up and he brushed the backs of his knuckles along her jaw. "You've always been a wonder to me," he said, his voice rough, "and I reckon you haven't changed."

He leaned against the doorjamb, one long leg crossed over the other, his fingers stuffed into his pockets, that damn hat still shadowing his face. His gaze roamed the room, taking in the maple breakfront cabinet filled with its white-and-blue patterned china set. The pie safe and the modern nickel-plated range. She wondered what he would say if he knew how much of it had been bought since Gus's death, with money she'd earned herself with her photography.

He wasn't likely to miss seeing her photographs, for they literally papered the walls.

Every summer she took the sheep wagon, which she'd converted into a portable photographic gallery, out on the road. Like a tin peddler, she and Saphronie and the children traveled all over western Montana, selling prints for fifty cents apiece. If he wanted to know, she had funny stories she could tell him, about keeping sticking wax on hand for pasting down those wing-shaped ears that stuck out like jug handles from so many men's heads. Or about the wads of cotton called plumpers that she stuffed inside the sunken cheeks of sodbusters' wives— those women so worn down by work and weather and hunger, and not wanting their folk back home to see them that way. About how an old woman of ninety, with a face like a withered apple, had insisted that every wrinkle be smoothed away by chemical magic before she would buy a final print.

If he asked, she would tell him that those were only portraits she made to sell, and so if the customers wanted pretty they got pretty, even if it was a lie. But there were times when she knew she had captured the truth of the person on the other side of her lens, and she was proud.

Those portraits she made to sell, and they were what kept the ranch going. But these others, the ones on her walls, she had made for herself.

If he asked, she would tell him about these others. About how she had discovered, through light and shadow, the rhythms and patterns and truth of life. The soft gray light of a foggy day, the bright, harsh light of a noonday sun, the cold and cheerless light of a winter afternoon. In every detail of these images—in the crumbs of ice around a cow's eyes, in a cattail bowing before the wind, in the rawhide texture of an old squaw's face—she had found a truth. If he asked, she would tell him that she had discovered where to look for the truth, because she had at last found the truth within herself.

If he asked, she would tell him... but he didn't ask.

He didn't even come all the way into the room. As if he thought he needed to keep the open, door at his back, so that he could turn around and be through it fast, before she could stop him.

The silence stretched taut between them. The coffee pot burped its strong smell into the air. She stood with the stove at her back, facing him. He propped up the doorjamb, saying nothing. For so long, for forever, a yearning for him had filled her days like a haze. Now he was here in her kitchen, and the years had made a stranger of him.

She saw his chest move as he drew in a breath. "Clementine," he said, and she felt Gus's shadow fall between them, even before he said the rest. "I'm sorry about him. That you lost him."

"You lost him, too."

He shrugged, his mouth tightening. "Yeah. But like I told you out there, it was a long time ago."

He was trying to sound rawhide-tough, the way a man was supposed to be. But her photographer's eye could see beyond his man's hard face to the raw places in his heart. To the truth.

He had, after all, loved Gus so much that he had ridden away from her and stayed gone for seven years.

She took the coffee pot off the fire and set it on the chrome fender of the stove. She went into the parlor and came back with another of her photographs, this one in an ornate silver frame. She held it out to him and he took it, but with a reluctance so deep she thought she saw him shudder.

"This was made the summer before he died," she said. That had been a bad summer for Gus, for them both, but you couldn't tell it by the picture. A laughing smile brightened his face, curling his mustache and crinkling his eyes. A shock of sun-tipped hair fell over his forehead, making him look young and boyish. Caught forever joyous in this picture, he was gilded with sunshine, as he was by the light of her memory.

"It's a good likeness," said his brother. But he set the photograph on the nearby windowsill, facedown.

"It was Gus you came back for." She said it flat out, knowing it to be so, yet wanting him to deny it.

He shrugged again, but his mouth stayed hard. "I thought maybe I could get something for my share of the ranch."

"Oh." She shook her head, trying to pull some air in through her tight throat. "The thing is, we're doing all right here... but we haven't so much extra put aside that—"

"I can see how you're doin', Clementine." He looked out the window. At the pine poles of the corral that had started to rot last winter. At the buckboard sitting in the shadow of the barn with its busted wheel. He would have seen the scarcity of Rocking R cattle as he'd ridden across the range.

"I suppose you thought... I suppose that after all this time you got to hankering for a spread of your own," she said.

His gaze caught and held hers, but only for a moment, before shifting away again. "I've been roamin' some while. A man can get tired of it."

A silence fell between them then. A silence heavy with the weight of years passed apart. She could have told him this place had always been his home and his leaving hadn't changed that. But
life
changed things. Time passed and it was like what winter did to the land. Cold snaps killed and blizzards ravaged the earth. The chill, bleak days wore and withered and wasted the fields. And come spring the land was never quite the same as it had been the spring before.

"Ma! Ma!"

The child's cries shattered the tense quiet.

"Ma, lookit!" Her younger boy burst into the kitchen, carrying a string of trout and tracking mud onto her oiled linoleum floor. "Saphro and me caught a whole mess for you to fry up."