Heart of the West (75 page)

He rubbed a spot on the rock clear of mud and grit and looked at it again, and a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. His thumb continued to stroke the stone over and over, even after he'd allowed the loupe to dangle and swing idly from the cord into his neck, and the smile had long since vanished.

His gaze went up the ravine, following the direction of the runoff. He began to climb.

About halfway up the steep, slippery slope, a scattering of boulders thrust up out of the soggy earth. He carried a sledge and bull prick in his belt, and he used them to chip a fist-sized piece off one of the rocks.

He slipped it into his saddlebag and then he went quickly back down into the gulch, heading for the stand of pines and his hidden horse. For a moment only, no more than a second or two, sunshine burst through a break in the clouds and flashed off the seven-pointed tin star that was pinned to his chest.

CHAPTER 31

The knife flew through the air, striking the wall handle-first and clattering to the floor.

"Bloody hell!"

Erlan Woo thrust another comb into the smooth ebony coil of her hair, ignoring the flying knife and the savage fury in the man's bellow. But she winced a moment later when she heard the crunch of wood being smashed and shattered by a heavy boot.

Holy God. First he flings his knife at the wall, and now he is destroying the beautiful carousel he spent all of last month carving.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, reminding herself that a woman should always strive for virtuous patience.

She turned away from the mirror and looked across the small bedroom at the man she lived with. Most days he was himself, her
anjing juren,
sweet and gentle. But there were other days when his ill moods lashed out like a dragon's tail.

She felt her love for him swelling warm and tender in her heart. He had tried, was trying, and she knew he did it for her. His fingers bore many scars where the knife had slipped, and the wall showed many nicks from when his temper had slipped, but he tried.

His head swiveled around just then to face her, although she hadn't moved or made a sound except to breathe. It was something he often did. She thought it was because he could see her with his heart. They were no longer two, but one.

"I'm forgetting, Lily," he said. "I'm forgetting what things look like. Even you. Your voice, the feel of your hair, the clean, sweet smell of you—they're all engraved in my heart. But not your face. I try to put your face into the black ocean and all I see is a blur, like looking into a clouded mirror."

She crossed the room to him, shuffling on her crippled feet. She gave him the smile she smiled for him alone, although he never saw it.

She knelt beside his chair and picked up one of the wooden horses that had been part of the carousel he had destroyed. Her loving gaze went from the ridges of scar tissue where his eyes used to be, over the broad flat bones of his cheeks, to the thick, strong throat that rose above the open collar of his chambray shirt. She watched him swallow.

She curled his scarred and bleeding fingers around the wooden horse. "Feel how the wind flies through its tail, how its hooves prance high. Can you not tell that you are getting good?"

"I'll never be as good as I was."

"You will be better."

His face knotted into a frown, but he said nothing.

"In China, today is the Festival of Pure Brightness. It is the day we
sao mu
—we sweep the graves of our ancestors and make offerings. Samuel and I... we would like you to come with us while we pay respect to his father's grave."

He sat very still, and beyond the silence of the room she could hear the suck and splash of wagon wheels plowing through the muddy road, and the distant rumble of thunder. The bedroom, which was nothing more than a lean-to added on to the shack where she ran her laundry, always smelled like this—of soap and starch and steam.

He felt for her lips with his fingers and softly brushed over them. "'Tes not that I don't want to be with you and Samuel, you understand. 'Tes that..."

She licked his fingers, tasting him. "I know."

His eyes were badly scarred and people stared, and although he couldn't see them staring, she knew he felt them. But she knew that, even more, he hated the shame of having to be led around. "Like a bloody little pug dog on a leash," he always said.

She stayed with him a moment longer and then she rose and went to fetch her son. She washed and dressed him in fine American clothes to please his father, and she put on the gold bracelet of a married Chinese woman because she was still married to Sam Woo and always would be.

Then she went back, with Samuel's hand in hers, to the door of the lean-to. "We are leaving now," she said to her lover who sat in the shadows beyond.

He turned his head and nodded. She saw the need on his face to ask her how long she'd be gone, to get some sort of assurance that she would be back. And she saw, too, the pride that kept him from asking.

Erlan dropped her son's hand and crossed her arms over her chest as if to protect her heart. He was getting good again with his carving. And when he did get good, truly as good as he had been before, then he would have something to live for besides her, and she would have no more reason to stay. She would have to leave him, and this time he would let her go without trying to stop her. Because he no longer believed himself worthy of her.

My destiny is a circle that is still only half drawn.

She would have to leave him.

Outside, the sludgy smoke from the copper smelting pit hung overhead, as smothering and smelly as a wet wool blanket. She and her son struggled through the sloppy mud as they trudged out of town, toward the Chinese cemetery.

"Aiya, these roads are as muddy as rice paddies," she said to Samuel, who had never seen a rice paddy. Her memories, too, were dim of the paddies she had only observed from the high garden wall of her lao chia. The citizens of Rainbow Springs wouldn't allow the Chinese to bury their dead in the town cemetery, so they had established a burial ground of their own, on land no one else wanted at the base of RainDance Butte, among the tailings and slag heaps and waste rock. It was as if a dragon had breathed upon this place. Not even a weed grew in the scorched earth.

Erlan gave Samuel a willow branch, showing him how to sweep his father's grave and so drive off any harmful spirits that might be lurking about. Then together they laid out the bean-curd cakes and rice dumplings and a single precious orange. As she arranged the burning incense sticks and small wax candles around the wooden grave marker, she told Samuel of the strong and honorable man the merchant Woo had been. And how it was now his duty to nurture his father's spirit in the shadow world.

This year Samuel was old enough to handle the kite by himself. Fashioned of red silk and kindling sticks, it was flown on the Festival of Pure Brightness to honor one's departed ancestors. Erlan watched the kite swoop and soar like a lazy bird across the smoke-hazed sky. She wondered what it felt like to be as free as that kite, free of always having to yield to the clinging hands of a fate she was no longer sure she wanted.

Free to serve only herself, please only herself.

The kite rode the wind, but still it was bound to the earth and to the hand of her son by its flying string. Its freedom was only an illusion. And if someone were to cut the string, the kite would float up, up, up into the vast and empty Montana sky to disappear forever.

A movement on the road leading into town from the lower valley caught Erlan's eye, a man and a woman on horseback.

The man she couldn't know from this distance, but the woman she recognized by the fairness of her hair, and because she had been expecting her.

Her gaze went from the woman on horseback up the butte to the stark skeletal gallus frame of the Four Jacks. And then back down and out into the flat prairie, where the new copper heap roasting pit spewed its foul brown smoke.

She took the kite from her son's hands and began to reel in the flying line. "Hurry up, Samuel. We must hurry and find Auntie Hannah."

Zach Rafferty allowed his gaze to roam slowly over the woman who rode beside him. He let the feeling of looking at her settle deep within him. Gus was dead.

The truth of it, the reality of that stone-piled grave, gripped at his chest like a fist and twisted. But he couldn't get his mind to settle on that yet—on Gus being dead.

Four years, she'd said. That rock-piled grave had been lying beneath the cottonwoods for four years, and all that time she'd been alone. Alone and... He couldn't bear to think of those four years wasted, couldn't bear to think he'd come back too late for her. Too late, maybe, for himself.

The temptation to do it, to come back, had been part of his every breath and heartbeat. He'd driven himself near crazy at times, trying to imagine what she was doing at any moment of the day. In his mind were a thousand memories, and he'd lived them again and again. Clementine with a fishing pole tucked between her knees. Clementine beating a bowl of cream, skirts swaying. Clementine smiling down at the head of the babe that suckled at her breast. Clementine doing things he'd never seen her do, only imagined. Like taking down her hair and pulling a silver hairbrush through its thick length again and again, her breasts rising and falling with each stroke. Or unrolling a black stocking up her calf and knee to the middle of a slender, creamy thigh. Clementine... Clementine living and doing none of it with him.

Each moment, each hour and day, had been one more spent without her, until all the miles and years that separated them had become unendurable. There were days when he'd been so lonesome for her he had shuddered with it, like a drunk too long without a bottle.

And now here he was and here she was... and here Gus wasn't. He looked at her face, so heartbreakingly familiar. And as cold and distant as the stars. He'd never been gut-sure of her love for him. Never really believed it would endure. The one and only time he'd asked her to come away with him she had chosen to stay with his brother.

He still wanted her, though. Lord, he still wanted her. But having a woman in your bed wasn't the same as having her in your life, as
making
her your life. Her and her children and a struggling ranch, another man's dream. His brother's dream.

He looked at her closed face and thought how the hells on earth were usually of your own creation.

Hell was what he thought he was seeing a moment later when they topped the last rise before town and his eyes beheld a pit of flames. His second thought was that it was a prairie fire, except that it couldn't have been, not with the ground wet enough to bog a butterfly. As they drew closer he realized he was looking at an enormous bowl in the earth filled with glowing coals and burning wood.

"Jesus God," he said.

The burning pit released a fumy smoke that smelled like souring hides and made a brown sludge that smothered the sky. The surrounding countryside was as bare and pocked as the face of the moon. The once pine-studded buttes had been logged almost bald, and the few trees left standing were stunted and dying. The grass was leached-looking. The Rainbow River ran swift from the heavy spring rains and snow runoff, but it was foul and foamy, like dirty soapsuds.

"It's called heap roasting." She turned in the saddle and cast him a look so sharp he felt it. "It's how the mine—the mine your father owns—smelts its copper, by burning layers of logs and the ore in a big pit. This one's a new and improved heap they fired up only last week, and it's twice as big as the last one. There's sulfur in that smoke, and arsenic. On hot summer days when the wind doesn't blow, the smoke can spread all the way out to the ranch. It's killing the land."

His gaze followed the streams of slime and tailings that ran from the mine. The butte was ugly with heaps of gravel, erosion ditches, and gray stumps. Huge piles of cut timber were stacked around the headframe and among the mine buildings.

"It burns up voracious amounts of wood—that pit," she said. "As does the mine itself, what with all the timber needed to shore up the miles of underground workings. If the Four Jacks has its way, there soon won't be a tree left standing in all of the RainDance country."

In town the raw, suffocating smoke was so thick he could barely see from one false-fronted building to the other. The lamps were lit against the dusk, although it was still midafternoon. Shadows cavorted behind the windows of the saloons and dance halls, and tinny music floated on the thick, heavy air.

"Rafferty."

He turned to look at her. Her face was a pale oval floating in the murk. "You were here in the beginning when the town was new," she said. "Tell me it doesn't hurt to see it like this."

He wished he could see her face, but even if he could have, he knew it wouldn't have changed things. It would never tell him what he wanted to know.

"It hurts," he said.

Hannah Yorke had spent most of that morning kneeling on the carpet in her bedroom being violently sick into a chamber pot.

As the bouts of nausea came and went, she'd thought of how tired she'd been lately, of how she'd fainted at their last whiskey party. Of how she couldn't remember the last time she'd suffered with her monthly curse, she who'd always been as regular as an eight-day clock.

She'd wiped her face with a wet cloth, and her lips puckered as if pulled by a drawstring. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, not sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.

She pushed herself to her knees, swaying dizzily. She caught a movement in the large mirror with its fluted gold frame. Her own startled image stared back at her, as if they both saw a stranger.

A baby. She was going to have a baby. There's buck in this ol' hoss yet, she thought, and had to stifle another hysterical laugh.

The woman in the mirror raised her hand and pushed her sweat dampened hair out of her face. My, what a hag! Although on any other day Hannah knew she looked good for forty, young still, not like those sheepherders' and sodbusters' wives. She had stayed out of the sun and off the booze for the most part, and she'd kept her figure. She wouldn't have her figure much longer, though, and there were those fine-drawn lines around her mouth and eyes that no amount of strawberry cream had been able to keep away.

She was forty years old and she was going to have a baby by a man practically young enough to be her son. It was ridiculous, scandalous. Why, the whole town would reel in horror at the thought. Most respectable women still averted their eyes and drew their skirts away when Hannah Yorke walked past. Imagine how they would behave when her belly got big enough to shade an elephant.

There were ways... But she wouldn't think of them. She pressed her hands protectively over her womb, as if even stray thoughts could do it harm. She still hadn't forgiven herself for giving up her first baby; she would have this one if it killed her. She
wanted
this child. It seemed she wanted it more than anything had been wanted since time began.