Heart of the West (3 page)

She held out her hands, palms up, and they only trembled a little.

The cane rose and fell, cutting through the air with a hiss, lashing her flesh. Clementine swayed and she nearly bit through her lip. But she didn't cry out. The whiplike rattan left a red and fiery welt.

My friend,
she said to herself with each blow,
my friend, my friend.
The words came like an incantation. Or a prayer.

When he was done, he blew the air out of his chest in a great gust and tossed the hair back from his eyes. "Onto your knees now and beg forgiveness of the Lord."

Her hands burned. She stared up at him, mute, her eyes wide open and unblinking.

"Clementine, daughter... The face of the Almighty turns against you when you give in to the wildness in your heart."

"But I am not sorry! I would do it again and again and again. I am not sorry."

His fingers gripped the cane so tightly it trembled. "Put out your hands, then, for I am not done."

She held out her hands.

The fifth stroke, two more than she'd ever been given before, broke the skin. Her whole body shuddered. But she didn't utter a sound. Again and again the cane slashed across her lacerated hands. She knew that all she had to do was scream or plead that she was sorry, but she wasn't going to give in to him, never would she give in to him, and so the cane rose and fell, again and again and again.

"Theo, stop! Oh, God, stop, stop!"

"I cannot stop. For her soul's sake I
must
not stop!"

"But she's only a child. Look what you've done..... She's only a child."

Clementine heard the shouting voices through a thick rushing in her ears. Shudder after shudder racked her thin body. The flesh of her palms gaped open in long cuts. Blood welled up, splashing onto the shell-patterned carpet. She thought she could taste the blood in the back of her throat, strong and hot.

Her mother's arms, the smell of roses... She wanted to press her face to that rose-scented breast, but she couldn't seem to make any part of her body move. Her father still held the cane gripped tightly in both hands, but tears ran from his eyes into his beard. His voice trembled. " 'Thou shalt beat thy child with the rod, and thou shalt deliver a soul from hell.' What kind of father would I be if I allowed her to take these paths of wickedness? She is wild and full of sin—"

"But, Theo, you go too
far."

A sob tore out his throat. The cane clattered to the floor, and he fell to his knees. His hands groped the air. "Come, daughter, we must pray. Hell is a lake of fire that can never be quenched, but I will show you the way to the Lord—"

"But I'm not sorry! I'm not sorry!" She screamed the words. But she didn't cry.

"I don't want to pray." To pray was to admit that she was sorry.

The mattress sighed, and her father's frock coat rustled as he shifted his weight. He sat beside her on the bed. She lay on her back with her hands outside the covers. Her mother had smoothed ointment on the cuts and bandaged them, but even her mother's tears hadn't stopped them from hurting.
She
hadn't cried, though. She had set her will to the thought that she would never cry again.

He shifted again and sighed himself. "Child, child..." He rarely touched her, but now he cupped her cheek with his big hand. "What I have done, what I do, is for love of you. So that you may grow up pure in the eyes of the Lord."

Clementine stared up at her father's face. She didn't believe him, for how could he truly love her when she remained wicked and full of wildness? And she wasn't even sorry for it.

"I don't want to pray," she said again.

He bowed his head. He was silent for so long she thought he must be praying to himself. But then he said, "Kiss me good night, then, daughter."

He leaned over her, bringing his face so close she could smell the spice of his shaving soap and the starch in his shirt. She lifted her head and brushed her lips across the soft black whiskers on his cheek. She lay back on the pillows and held herself still until he left the room, and then she rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand, over and over until her lips burned.

She slid a cracked and bent souvenir card from beneath her pillow. Again and again she tried to smooth it with her fingertips, which were swaddled in bandages. A cowboy's smiling face looked back at her. A cowboy in a fringed shirt and a ten-gallon hat, swinging a lariat with a loop as big as a haystack over his head.

She stared at him so long and hard that it seemed with just a little more effort she ought to be able to conjure him into full-blooded, laughing life.

"You are a woman grown."

So her mother said on the day Clementine turned sixteen. That morning she was allowed to pin up her hair in a thick roll at the back of her neck. A woman grown. She peered at her face in the beveled mirror of her dressing table, but she saw only herself.

But no more caps! she thought with a sudden smile. Wrinkling her nose, she picked up the one she had worn only yesterday and flung it into the fire. No more caps and a woman grown. She spun around on her toes and laughed.

It was her birthday and the day before Christmas, and they were going to a photographic gallery to have their portraits taken. They made a family outing of it, her father doing the driving himself in his new black brougham. The roofs and tree-tops all wore white bonnets. The winter air pinched her nose and chaffed her cheeks and smelled of the holidays—of wood fires and roasting chestnuts and evergreen boughs.

They passed the Common, where children raced their sleds down ice-crusted paths. One, a girl, must have struck a root, for her sled stopped but she kept going, tumbling head over heels, turning into a squall of blue skirts, red stockings, and flying snow. Her shrieking laughter bounced against the flat winter sky, and, oh, how Clementine yearned to be that girl. She longed for it with a fierce ache that pressed onto her heart like a pile of stones. She had never ridden a sled, never ice-skated on Jamaica-Pond or thrown snowballs, and now she was too old, a woman grown. It made her think of all the things she had already missed in her life. All the things she was missing now.

Her father stopped the surrey to let a beer wagon cross in front of them. In the corner house, a boy and a woman stood in a big bow window pooled in yellow gaslight. The woman's hands rested on the boy's shoulders as they watched the snow fall. A man came up behind them, and the woman lifted her head and turned her face around, and Clementine held her breath, for she thought the man was going to kiss the woman, there in the window for all the world to see.

"Clementine, you are gawking," her mother said. "Ladies do not gawk."

Clementine leaned back against the leather squabs and sighed. Her soul felt chaffed raw with a restless longing. Something was missing from her life, missing, missing, missing... She thought she would almost rather feel dead inside, wooden and dry like winter branches that would never grow leaves, than have this constant, changeless longing for things unknown, unnamed. The missing things.

Stanley Addison's Photographic Gallery was in the top flat of a brownstone on Milk Street. Mr. Addison was not a genteel man. He wore a striped waistcoat of a garish lime color and a paper collar. He sported a mustache so thin it looked inked onto the flesh beneath his nose. But Clementine barely noticed the man. She was mesmerized by the samples of his art, photographs and tintypes, that hung on the dull maroon gallery walls.

She circled the room, studying each portrait. Men of serious demeanor and pompous poses, actresses and opera singers in fanciful costumes, families of mother and father and stepping blocks of children... She stopped, a little hum of delight escaping through her lips.

Here was a cowboy. But a real one, not a made-up man on a souvenir card. He was decked out in silver-studded
chaparejos
and a fringed vest, with a scarf knotted flamboyantly around his neck. He sat on a hay bale, his booted legs rigid and braced apart as if he was more used to straddling a horse. A coiled lariat hung over one knee and a shotgun rode across his lap. He must have had a taste for violence, for a pair of pearl-handled six-shooters was strapped around his waist as well. His mustache grew thick and long, falling over the corners of his mouth and hiding the shape of it, just as the low-brimmed hat shadowed his eyes. He looked wild and young and fierce and noble, as untamed as the land he roamed.

Clementine swung around to the hovering Mr. Addison. She sent a barrage of questions at the man. She wanted to know how a photograph was made. She wanted to make one herself. She ignored her father's scowls, nor did she notice how Mr. Addison flushed and stammered as he led them to what he called his camera room, where he proposed to take their portrait.

To Clementine this place was even more fascinating than the gallery. An enormous window had been cut into the roof so that the room was washed in light. Painted screens lined the walls depicting trellised gardens and colonnaded porches; there was even one of the Egyptian pyramids. Among the screens stood several mirrors of various sizes and an enormous sheet of foiled tin on rollers.

The camera, a large wooden box with an accordion-like bellows, sat on a wheeled dolly. Clementine circled the thing, trying to puzzle out how it worked. She gave Mr. Addison a shy, tentative smile and asked him if she might view the world through the big unblinking eye of his camera.

He blushed and nearly tripped over his own feet as he showed her where to look. Clementine pressed her eye to a hole in the top of the box and saw the Reverend Mr. Kennicutt and his wife.

A canvas backdrop, painted to resemble a cozy sitting room, was stretched on a screen behind them. Her father sat on a fringed red velvet chair; Julia stood behind him. Her hand rested on his shoulder and he held it in place with his own hand, as if he feared she would bolt from the room if he didn't restrain her. A potted palm balanced the grouping, its fronds sheltering their heads like a big green umbrella.

Seeing them through the camera lens was to Clementine like looking at them from a great distance, as if they were not of this world. Or, no—as if they were still of the world but she had gone to a place beyond. Her father shifted his feet, uncomfortable in his ruffled dignity. The palm fronds cast small bars of shadow across her mother's face.

Clementine knew she looked like her mother. They had the same ash-fair hair and shadow-green eyes, the same air of porcelain fragility. A woman growing, a woman grown. She tried to see in the face of her mother the woman she was becoming. There were so many questions she wanted to ask of that woman. Why did you laugh when the doctor said you could have no more children? Have you ever wanted to stand at the window and lift your face to a man's to be kissed? Are there empty places inside you, yearnings you cannot name? She wanted to make photographs of her mother's face and study them for the answers.

"Miss Kennicutt, I believe your father grows impatient."

She left the camera to join her parents next to the potted palm. Aware now of the camera's eye, she kept herself apart from them. Even when Mr. Addison asked her to move in closer, she took care that no part of her person, not even her sleeve or the hem of her skirt, touched the man and woman who had given her life.

Mr. Addison fixed iron clamps behind their heads to assist them in holding still. He disappeared into a small closet, and a sharp, stinging smell like rubbing alcohol permeated the room. He emerged moments later, his movements rushed and jerky like a rabbit's. He carried a rectangular wooden box, which he slid into a slot in the camera. "Raise your chin, please, Mrs. Kennicutt. Er, Reverend, if you could give your vest a tug. Now, each of you draw in a deep breath and hold it, hold it, hold it... Miss Kennicutt, if I could coax from you a smile."

Clementine didn't smile. She wanted to memorize all that he was doing, to understand. Her deep, wide-spaced gaze went from the wondrous wooden box to the papier-mache props and painted screens. A growing excitement filled her until she felt that she was humming and crackling inside, like the new telephones that graced the lobby of the Tremont House hotel.

She was beginning to grasp, to know, what of life she wanted. And so it was that on that day over a year later when a cowboy from Montana knocked her down with his big-wheeled bicycle, Clementine Kennicutt was ready for him.

It would never have happened at all if a wheel hadn't come loose on her father's black brougham. It began to wobble when they turned onto Tremont Street, and soon the whole carriage was shuddering. Her father pulled over to let Clementine out. As they were only two blocks from the Tremont House, where she was to meet her mother and Aunt Etta for tea, Clementine was allowed to go on without him.

She walked slowly, savoring the glorious day. Shop awnings shielded the street from an unusually strong February sun, but the warmth of it was in the breeze and felt like milk against her skin. The strains of a waltz tinkled through the open doors of a pianoforte salesroom. She had to stiffen her back against a wild urge to go dancing down the sidewalk.

She paused before a milliner's window to stare with longing at a spring bonnet of white rice straw. A thick crimson plume flowed over the crown and was fastened onto one side with a plate buckle. A lady, Clementine knew, would have labeled the hat vulgar, but she loved it. It was like a peacock, flashy and gaudy, and it shouted to the world: "Look at me. I am beautiful!"

A delicious smell of chocolate and marshmallow wafted from the shop next door. She drifted down the street, following the smell, until she came face to face with a pyramid of candy. Sighing, she pressed her nose to the window glass. She was never given any money to spend on herself; otherwise she would have entered the shop and bought a dozen of the treats. She would have eaten each one slowly, licking the chocolate coating off first before biting into the gooey white center.

The frantic clatter of a trolley bell jangled through the air, followed by a scream and angry bellows. A silver flash caught her eye—the spokes of an enormous wheel weaving through the jam of traffic in the street.