"His name was Josh," he began. "Josh Sanderson. We worked together on a ranch down near a place called Dime Box, Texas. Near Austin." Will chuckled. "Dime Box was somethin’. It was like… well, maybe like watchin’the black and white movie after seeing the previews in color. A sorry little dump. Everything kind of dead, or waitin’ to die. The people, the cattle, the sagebrush. And nothing to do there on your night off. Nothing." Will paused, his brow smooth while his thoughts ranged back in time.
"So what’d you do?"
He shot her one quick glance. "This ain’t much of a subject for a wedding night, Eleanor."
"Most wives already know this kind of stuff about their husbands by their wedding night. Tell me-what’d you do?"
As if settling in for a long talk, he rolled his pillow into a ball, crooked his head against it, lifted one knee and linked his fingers over his belly. "All right, you asked, I’ll tell you. We used to go down to La Grange to the whorehouse there. Saturday nights. Take a bath and get all duded up and take our money into town and blow damn near all of it on booze and floozies. Me, I wasn’t fussy. Take anyone that was free. But Josh got to liking this one named Honey Rossiter." He shook his head disbelievingly. "Honey-can you believe that? She swore it was her given name but I never believed her. Josh did, though. Hell, Josh’d believe anything that woman told him. And he wouldn’t hear anything bad about Honey. Got real pissed off if I said a word against her. He had it bad for her, that’s a fact.
"She was tall-eighteen hands, we used to joke-and had this head full of hair the color of a palomino, hung clear down to her rump. It was some hair all right, curly but coarse as a horse’s mane, the kind a man could really sink his hands into. Josh used to talk about it, laying in his bunk at night-Honey and her honey hair. Then pretty soon he started talking about marrying her. Josh, I says, she’s a whore. Why would you want to marry a whore? Josh, he got real upset when I said that. He was so crazy over her he couldn’t tell truth from lies.
"She was like…" He rested a wrist on the updrawn knee, absently toying with a piece of green yarn on the quilt. "… well, like an actress in a picture show-played at being whatever a man needed. She’d change herself to suit the man, and when she was with Josh she acted like he was the only man for her. Trouble is, Josh started believing it.
"Then one night we came there and when Josh asked for Honey the old harlot who ran the place says Honey’s been spoken for for the next two hours. Who else would he like?
"Well, Josh never wanted anybody else, not after Honey. He waited. But by the time she come back down he was so steamed his lid was rattlin’ and he was ready to blow. She comes saunterin’ into the Leisure Room-that’s what they called the bar where the men waited on the women-and Lord a-mighty, you never heard such a squall as when Josh jumped her about who she was spendin’ two hours with while he was left downstairs coolin’ his heels.
"She says to him, You don’t own me, Josh Sanderson, and he says, Yeah, well, I’d like to. Then he pulls a ring out of his pocket and says he’d come there that night intendin’ to ask her to marry him."
Will shook his head. "She laughed in his face. Said she’d have to be crazy to marry a no-count saddle bum who’d probably keep her pregnant nine months out of twelve and expect her to take care of a houseful of his squallin’ brats. Said she had a life of luxury, spendin’ a few hours on her back each night and wearing silk and feathers and eatin’ oysters and steak anytime she wanted ’em.
"Well, Josh went wild. Told her he loved her and she wasn’t gonna screw anybody else-never. She was gonna leave with him-now!He made a grab for her and out of nowhere she pulls this little gun-Christ, I never knew the girls there even carried ’em. But there it was, pointed right at Josh’s eye and I reached for a bottle of Old Star whiskey and let her have it. Hell, I didn’t think. I just… well, I just beaned her. She went down like a tree, toppled sideways and cracked her head on a chair and laid there in a puddle of broken glass and blended whiskey and hardly even bled, she died so fast. I don’t know if it was the bottle or the chair that killed her, but it didn’t matter to the law. They had me behind bars in less than half an hour.
"I figured things’d come out all right-after all, I was defending Josh. If I hadn’t clunked her, she’d have shot Josh smack through his left eye. But what I didn’t figure was how serious he was about marrying her, how broke up he was when she died.
"He…" Will closed his eyes against the painful memory. Eleanor sat up, watching his face closely.
"He what?" she encouraged softly.
Will opened his eyes and fixed them on the ceiling. "He testified against me. Told this sob story about how he was gonna make an honest woman out of Honey Rossiter, take her away from her lousy life in that whorehouse and give her a home and respectability. And the jury fell for it. I did five years for savin’ my friend’s life." Will ran a hand through his hair and sighed. For seconds he stared at the ceiling, then rolled to a sitting position with arms loosely linked around his knees. "Some friend."
Eleanor studied the moles on his back, wanting to reach out and touch, comfort. Like him, she’d had only one friend. But hers had turned out loyal. She could imagine how deep her own hurt would have gone had Glendon betrayed her.
"I’m sorry, Will."
He threw his head aside as if to look back at her, but didn’t. Instead his gaze dropped to his loosely linked wrists. "Aw, what the hell. It was a long time ago."
"But it still hurts, I can tell."
He flopped back, ran both hands through his hair and clasped them behind his head.
"How’d we get on a subject like that anyway. Let’s talk about something else."
The mood had grown somber, and as they lay side by side Eleanor could think of little except Will’s sad, friendless youth. She had always thought herself the loneliest soul on earth, but… poor Will. Poor, poor Will. Now he had her at least, and the boys. But how long would it last if the war came?
"Is the war really like that, Will… like they showed in the movies?"
"I guess so."
"You think we’re gonna be in it, don’t you?"
"I don’t know. But if not, why is the President drafting men for the military?"
"If we were, would you have to go?"
"If I got drafted, yes."
Her mouth formed an oh, but the word never made it past her lips. The possibility pressed upon her, bringing with it a startling dread. Startling because she hadn’t guessed she’d feel so possessive about this man once he was her husband. The fact that he was made a tremendous difference. The black and white pictures from the newsreel flashed through her memory, followed by the colored ones of the War between the States. What an awful thing, war. She supposed, in the days when Grandpa had been alive, they would have prayed that America stay out of it. Instead, she closed her eyes and forced the grim pictures aside to make way for those of the beautiful ladies in their enormous silk skirts, and the men in their top hats, and Hopalong waving his white hat… and Donald Wade in Will’s black one… and eventually when she rode the thin line between sleep and wakefulness, Will himself riding Topper, waving his hat at her from the end of the driveway…
Minutes later, Will turned to say, Let’s not worry about it until the time comes. But he found she had fallen asleep, flat on her back, lips parted, hands crossed demurely beneath her breasts. He watched her breathe, a strand of hair on her shoulder catching the light with each beat. His gaze drifted down to her stomach, back up to her breasts, soft and unsculptured beneath her nightgown. He thought about how good it would feel to roll her onto her side, curl up behind her with his arms where hers were now and fall asleep with his face against her back. But what would she think if she awakened and found him that way? He would have to be on guard, even asleep.