He knew better than to ask how long she’d be gone, just as he had known better than to ask if she was staying when she arrived ten years ago. He felt something small inside him, a shard of resentment that wanted revenge, and fought to keep it silent until she was halfway to the gate.
“Nobody’s going to water the lilacs,” he called to her.
She brushed it off with a wave of her hand over her shoulder. She wasn’t even going to look at him?
“Or those mulberries, nobody’s going to . . .”
She spun and marched right up to him, the expression on her face so fierce he took half a step back before he caught himself. Staring at him, eyes filled with tears, she clasped the back of his head and pulled his mouth to hers, kissed him so deep and long he began to hope, until she released him. Did she think that would keep him until she returned? He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, worked to keep the anger out of his voice when he told her that she shouldn’t leave; though it hurt him to beg, he came as close as he could, pulling her into his arms, smelling her sweet iris perfume, willing himself to remember their first night together under the coarse wool blanket with another folded for a pillow on the ground beneath the stars.
“I’ll bring Hayward to visit,” J.B. said. Hope jumped in her eyes before she caught herself, smoothed the front of her duster and tugged on the black kid gloves that snugged her fingers too tightly now, her hands nearly ruined by the harsh weather, rough land, and hard chores. She’d have to cut her wedding ring off someday, he thought with a pang.
She shook her head.
“Do you have enough money for the trip?” He half turned toward the house. “I can—”
“You go get Cullen from your father and I’ll come back,” she said.
She shifted her gaze to the man beside her on the wagon bench. “Mr. Stubs?”
When he didn’t move, she lifted the whip from its holder and cracked it over the horses’ backs. Lunging forward, they swept against J.B. and pushed him backward.
“You’ll never see Hayward again,” he yelled as the wagon left the barnyard. He couldn’t fetch Cullen and his defeat slumped his shoulders as he watched the ball of dust churn down the road, until finally they were a mere speck disappearing over the last hill on the horizon.
Hayward rode happily around the corral on his new spotted horse, which trotted three steps for every ten it walked to keep the swaying rider on its back. J.B. watched his boy and felt both pride and sadness swell in his chest, and soon another feeling, one that made him spin on his heel and hurry inside the house, run up the stairs two at a time, and yank open the door to their bedroom, where he discovered that she’d left her perfume bottles, the silver-backed brush, comb, and mirror set he’d given her, and the glass jars of creams and powders he was helpless to understand, sitting on top of the clumsy dressing table he’d made for her. Cottonwood. He brushed the dented surface with the edge of his hand. Wood so soft it bore the impression of everything she’d ever set down too hard. Had she been so angry? He’d waxed the wood to bring out the soft yellow hue, but over the years it had darkened along certain grains, and small dark spots dotted the surface like tears. Had she wept here? Suddenly, he knew with a force that punched the breath out of his chest that if she wept, it had not been for him, anyone but her husband, who had given his eldest son to his father. Cullen, this was all about Cullen.
He grabbed one of the jars, spun, and threw it with all his might at the wall over their bed. It didn’t smash and splinter into greasy shards like he’d hoped, merely thumped harmlessly and bounced across the bed she’d so carefully made, folding his mother’s wedding ring quilt at the bottom, to be drawn up in the night chill, as if she would return on the morrow, as if she would return at all—
He ripped the quilt from the bed, yanking at the end to tear it to pieces, but heard only the barely audible pop of a stitch or two before he threw it down in disgust. She had taken nothing of their life together, he noticed, as soon as the red mist cleared his eyes. There was the lithograph of the carriage on a misty Paris boulevard, trees swept up and away over the streetlights. The coatrack in the corner where he hung his hat and jacket and she the thick wool robe he’d given her that first Christmas, when it had been so cold she fussed about getting out of bed of a morning. It still hung there, dusty, unused. They had laughed that he so misjudged her size, and the rough blue-and-black weave made her skin prickle. His face reddened as he remembered her smile, the one he mistook for pleasure, and now saw as derision. She’d been laughing at him every day of their life together.
There had to be something he could hold as hostage against her return. She was determined, and when she put her mind to a thing it would take a train to stand in her way. That’s why he’d been surprised when she’d let Cullen leave, let Drum convince her. What had that old bastard said? Had he told her about their bargain?
He took a deep breath, smelled the musk of the face powder encircled with its own dust, and the perfume bottle she hadn’t bothered with, as if she would change herself so completely that he couldn’t even recognize her scent should they ever meet again. He sat on her bench covered with needlepoint roses. He didn’t even know where she was going. Maybe running off with some cowboy. The thought made him gasp, and he stopped. He would never believe that about her.
Facing her vanity table, he picked up the silver-backed mirror and laid it back down, then the brush, with silver handle wrought into twining flowers, he didn’t even know what kind, his big callused palm could barely register the texture, and he wondered if she had put her fingertips in the curves of the stems and leaves, what she had thought as she lifted the brush, as he did now, and drew it through her hair, as he did now, with long and even strokes, over and over, as he had watched her do on countless nights. Had he ever once asked if he could do it for her? Surely she would have enjoyed letting her exhausted arms fall loose in her lap, hands cupped, while he brushed and separated and finally plaited her heavy auburn hair into a braid that would last almost the entire night if they didn’t make love. He stopped, set down the brush, and looked at its fine bristles, embedded with a few of her long auburn hairs, and three of his own shorter, thicker black ones.
Five years after she left, her old one-eyed horse began its decline and J.B. spent a week of cold nights in the corral with it. “I’m always on my way to her,” J.B. spoke aloud. “I boarded the train that first summer and got as far as Council Bluffs before I got off. It was as if I was drunk, the blow of not seeing her staggered me. She let me know she was in Chicago with her people, in case I cared to send the boys. She knew I couldn’t do that. It got so bad I couldn’t stand the ranch and found myself in town more than was right. Heard about the business up on Pine Ridge and decided to take a look. I don’t think I much cared what happened to me and the boy, but she kept writing and messaging and reminding me to take care of Hayward, so when I went up to watch the dancing I took him, too. Thank God he was home safe the next time, in December.”
He bowed his head to the horse’s neck and breathed in the coarse, dusty hair, tried to dislodge the pictures of bodies falling before cannon and rifle fire, red roses blooming in the snow, soldiers riding down stragglers with their guns and sabers. “She came back to North Platte the next March and sent word to come, but Hayward got the measles, and a freak late snow stopped the wagon on the way to town. Remember that? I unhitched you and rode you back in a blizzard. We were both half-froze.”
He stroked the old horse’s neck, burying his fingers in the thick, brittle coat that hadn’t shed out the past spring, a sign the end was near. J.B. had kept the horse close the past summer, fed her special mashes when she couldn’t chew hay or grass because her teeth had fallen out. Now the horse lay wrapped in the wedding ring quilt from his own bed, its breathing labored as he spoke.