ON AN UNSEASONABLY cold Sunday afternoon in November, Homer Rinski and his hired man, Jack Thom, entered Rinski’s small cabin in Rattlesnake Gulch, western Dakota Territory, brushing snow from their coats. They stomped their boots and slapped their hats against their knees.
Their faces were red from the cold, hair mussed from their hats. The chill air invaded the cabin like the gray light, which swept shadows into corners before the door closed.
The tall, rail-thin Rinski was pushing a hard-earned sixty, and he sounded like every year of it, breathing hard from his work forking hay from the wagon into the paddock behind the barn.
He hacked phlegm from his lungs, opened the door a crack, and spat outside.
Turning back into the tiny two-room cabin, he found his nineteen-year-old daughter’s eyes on him. She’d been setting the table for dinner and held a plate in her hands. She had her late mother’s dour countenance.
“Do you have to do that?” she snapped at her father.
“Do what?”
“Do what?” the girl mocked. “Spit! And look at all the snow on the floor!”
“Oh, Mattie,” Homer Rinski lamented, hanging his coat
and hat on the deer antlers beside the door, “one should never raise one’s voice in the house of the Lord.”
“This ain’t a church,” the girl retorted sourly.
“The house of every good Christian is the house of the Lord, dear daughter. Besides, how you’re ever gonna find a husband, with a mouth like that, I’ll never know.”
Ignoring the remark, the girl slammed the plate on the table and turned to the range at the back of the cabin, where several pots gurgled and sighed, sending steam into the cabin’s late-afternoon murk. “Both of you wash. There’s water there on the bench. Then sit up. I don’t want this gettin’ cold after all I slaved today.”
Easing around each other in the cabin’s close quarters, the men washed and sat down to table with eager but slightly bashful looks on their rugged faces—like bad boys with clear consciences.
As was his custom, Jack Thom sat silently, eyes on the table, hands in his lap, until all the kettles and pans had been set before him, and Mattie had seated herself across from her father with a sigh. The hired man punctuated Rinski’s traditional five-minute table prayer with a heartfelt “A-men” and said nothing else until he’d scrubbed the last of the venison grease from his plate with a biscuit and downed the last of his coffee with an audible slurp.
“That sure was a fine spread you put on, Miss Mattie,” he praised with a truckling smile, consciously returning his hands to his lap. He was never sure what to do with the oversized appendages, but knew from Mattie’s caustic sneers they didn’t belong on the table. “I thank you very kindly.”
Thom was a big man with thin blond hair, a round face framed in a perpetual beard shadow, and dung-brown eyes, which Mattie thought the dumbest eyes she’d ever seen on a dog, much less a man. His clothes were old and worn from
countless washings. Even fresh from Mattie’s washtub, they smelled like cow- and horseshit and something distinctive but unidentifiable that Mattie attributed to the man himself.
The bunk in his shack smelled the same way.
“Yes, Jack,” she replied, tiredly clearing the table.
When they’d eaten all Mattie’s dried apricot pie, the men sat in their usual homemade chairs in the cabin’s small sitting room. They usually played cards or checkers on the small table between the chairs, but since this was Sunday and Homer Rinski didn’t think either game appropriate, they just sat there, silently staring, occasionally mentioning the weather or some chore that needed doing, regularly leaning forward to pluck a split cottonwood log from the woodbox and add it to the woodstove. They snoozed, snoring.
When Mattie had finished washing the dishes, she called from the kitchen, “Are you ready for your tea now, Papa?” Her voice had changed. It was not nearly as sharp as it had been. Homer Rinski thought the girl was happy to be through with her dishes.
Rinski smiled. His nightly tea, with a medicinal jigger of chokecherry wine. Homer Rinski did not sleep well without the toddy. He knew the Lord did not mind, for he never imbibed until he was drunk, only sleepy. Without a good night’s rest he would not be able to work his six full days, and does the Lord not “judgeth according to every man’s work”?
Settled back with his tea, laced with the wine to which Mattie had added several splashes of cheap corn liquor, Homer Rinski quoted from the Good Book in his droning singsong, pausing only when the flame in the wall lamp guttered and coughed black smoke.
Across from him, Jack Thom nodded his head, stifling yawns and feigning interest. He was anticipating eight o’clock, when he could return to his own shack for the night
and uncork a bottle of sour mash he’d bought from Nils Spernig on Big John Creek.
Mattie darned one of her father’s socks in her chair beside the stove. Occasionally she lifted her eyes to Jack Thom. His eyes met hers, then darted away. His face flushed. The girl smirked.
“Well, Jack, here is a passage I’d like you to sleep on tonight,” Homer Rinski told his hired man at five minutes to eight.
Thom slid his gaze to Rinski and smiled wanly.
Holding the ten-pound tome in his gnarled hands, Homer Rinski took a deep breath and quoted dramatically, “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.”
He looked at the hired man, who smiled and nodded. Rinski smiled sincerely. “Good night, Jack. Sleep well.”
Thom shook his head, as though deeply touched. “I do believe you missed your callin’, Mr. Rinski. You shoulda been a preacher.”
“We’re all God’s preachers, Jack.”
“Yes, sir.” Thom stood and stretched, seemingly reluctant to leave such cozy, wholesome quarters. He gave Mattie a brotherly nod. “Thank you again, Miss Mattie. That was one fine meal.”
The girl did not lift her eyes from her needlework, but only nodded. When Thom had buttoned his coat, snugged his hat on his head, and gone out into the cold, dark night, Mattie put down her work and stood.
“Another cup … since it’s Sunday?” she asked her father.
Homer Rinski made a show of considering the offer. Then he nodded gravely, casting his eyes back down at the open Bible in his lap. “Guess it couldn’t hurt,” he muttered.
He sipped the tea for another hour. Mattie repaired several
socks and a pair of long johns, occasionally lifting her eyes furtively to appraise the old man.
Rinski’s eyes were getting heavy, she could tell. He blinked often and squinted. Several times he jerked his head up from a doze.
“You’re looking sleepy, Papa,” Mattie said, smiling innocently.
Rinski only grunted and read on. Mattie rolled her eyes, clicking her knitting needles together and recrossing her legs under her long gray dress. Should have given him an extra shot, she thought.
When Rinski finally slammed the Good Book closed, Mattie gave a start. She’d about given up on him.
“Well, I do believe I’ll turn in, girl.” He rose stiffly, creakier still for the two shots of corn liquor Mattie had included with his wine. His blue eyes were rheumy and his bulbous nose fairly glowed.
“Okay, Papa,” Mattie said casually. “Sweet dreams.”
“You better go soon yourself.”
“I will.”
Mattie listened as Rinski climbed the ladder into the loft, undressed, and settled into his mattress sack. She continued darning, hands shaking with agitation and anticipation, biting her lower lip, until the old man’s snores had resounded for a good quarter hour.
Then she dropped her work in a pile by the chair, stood, and tiptoed to her heavy blanket coat hanging on a peg by the door. She pulled it on, wrapped a scarf around her head and neck, then stood listening to the snores, measuring them to make sure the old man was sound asleep.
Satisfied, she turned to open the door, then slipped quickly through the narrow opening, grimacing at the whoosh of the wind under the eaves. She softly latched the door behind her and, head down, ran into the darkness.
JACK THOM’S LEAN-TO sat half a mile from the main cabin, beyond a knoll and around an aspen copse.
It had been the first cabin Homer Rinski had built after arriving in Dakota Territory from his farm in Illinois. His wife, Anastasia, had fallen ill and died on the overland journey, leaving Homer to raise Mattie alone.
Mattie moved toward the hovel along the rock-hard hummocks lining the frozen creek, twisting her ankles with every step, lifting her skirts with both hands. The tiny triangular structure stood in silhouette against the rising moon. Smoke puffed from its chimney.
Mattie mounted its one step and pushed through the door, closing it quickly behind her.
“You could have waited in the barn for me!” she said sharply, marching across the small, cluttered room to the stove. She sat on the stool before it and crouched over her crossed arms, shaking. The thought that she’d spent the first half of her life in this tiny, fetid shelter made her even colder.
Jack Thom lay on the room’s single cot, under a buffalo robe, his head propped against the wall. He cradled a bottle beside him like a baby. His eyes were rheumy.
Mattie could smell the booze. It mixed with the smell of sweat and leather and mice and that other thing that could only be Jack Thom himself.
“I thought maybe your pa would go out and check the stock. He sometimes does that himself when he don’t … you know”—his voice thickened with self-pity—“when he don’t feel like he can trust me to do it.”
“So?”
Thom gave a half-hearted shrug and took a swig. “He woulda seen me lurkin’ there and wondered what the hell.”
Mattie sneered. “You coulda told him you were checkin’ the stock!”
“I—I never thoughta that, Mattie.”
Mattie rolled her eyes and lowered her head between her knees, gave a cry, and shuffled her feet angrily. “Oh, I’m so cold!”
Thom patted the cot. “Come over here; I’ll warm you up.”
Mattie looked at him and smiled thinly. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Thom nodded sincerely, as though he’d just been asked something deadly serious.
A flirtatious light rose in Mattie’s eyes. It made her gaunt features appear less so. Color rose in her cheeks. “Suppose I do. What then? Will you share that bottle with me?”
“Sure.” Thom held out the bottle as if for proof.
Mattie’s smile grew. Slowly she took off the blanket coat and dropped it on the floor beside the stove. “You know what I like about you, Jack?” Smiling, eyes glittering, she looked at him, awaiting an answer.
“What’s that, Miss Mattie?”
“You’re stupid.”
The big man wrinkled his brow. “I … I ain’t—”
“I’ve never minded that in a man,” Mattie said, thoughtfully unbuttoning her dress, her eyes on Thom. Sipping his whiskey, he watched her dull-wittedly, desire creeping into his eyes and smoothing the ridge in his brow.
“As a matter of fact, I prefer it. If they think too much, they might think about not minding what I say, and I wouldn’t like that.”
Mattie peeled the sleeves of her dress slowly down her arms. She shoved the garment down her waist and legs until it lay in a pile at her bare feet.
“I don’t like it when my men don’t mind me, Jack. You know what I’m sayin’?”
Thom swallowed, watching the thrust of Mattie’s pear-shaped breasts against the wash-worn chemise. “Huh?”
Suddenly her voice rose and her face turned angry. “Are you listening to me!”
“What? Yeah.”
“No, you weren’t. You were staring at my titties!”
“No! … Well, but—”
“Oh, shut up, Jack,” she said. “Here, have you a good look.” She pulled the chemise over her head and tossed it on the floor. The light from the single lamp shone on her powder-white breasts, soft belly, and plump thighs.
She undid her dark hair from its bun and let it fall across her shoulders. She stared at him coolly, enjoying his eyes on her body. At length she said, “It’s cold out here, Jack.”
Thom lifted the buffalo robe. “Come over here, Miss Mattie. Let me warm you some.”
“Thank you, Jack,” she whispered, crawling in beside him. “I don’t mind if I do.”
She gave a girlish giggle, reached for the bottle, and tipped it back. Snapping it back down, her eyes bulged as her throat worked, audibly fighting to keep the liquor in her stomach.
Finally she coughed. “That’s … awful.”
“It has to grow on ya slow,” Thom said defensively, taking back the bottle and enjoying a long swallow.
Mattie reached up and encircled her arms around the hired man’s thick, beard-bristled neck, which was the color of old saddle leather from all his years—probably since he was ten—of riding range, digging wells, and brush-popping lost calves.
Mattie didn’t know where he was from; she hadn’t asked and he hadn’t told. Theirs was not a relationship built on chatter. She could tell by looking at him what his life had been like—not all that different from hers.
The rough calluses on his hands often etched fine white lines on her flesh. The sweet pain tided her until she could sneak back to his cabin or meet him in the tall grass by the windmill.
“Pull it out, Jack,” she whispered in his car. “Pull it out and do me, Jack.”
“Wait,” he said, jerking the bottle back up.
She lifted her head to look into his face severely. “Pull it out and do me, Jack—not the bottle,” she said tightly.
Cowed, Thom corked the bottle and set it carefully on the floor beneath the cot, then went to work under the covers, slipping out of his breeches and fumbling with the fly of his long johns. He grunted with the effort, puffing his sour liquor breath and nearly nudging Mattie off the narrow cot.
She held on and crawled on top of him. A dark, willful look knitted her brow and tightened her jaw.
“Do me, damn it. Do me, Jack,” she groaned, mounting him.
They were going good when Thom heard something outside. It sounded like hooves crunching snow.
“Listen,” he whispered, but Mattie—head down, lips pooched out—was riding away on top of him and groaning louder and louder with each thrust. She hadn’t heard him, much less what was going on outside.
Thom listened. The sounds grew closer. A horse snorted.
“Listen!” Thom yelled, lifting his head and throwing the girl off him with a quick swing of his left arm.
As Mattie, screaming, hit the floor, the door blew open and two men ran into the cabin, shotguns aimed at the cot.
“Wait!” Thom yelled.
“You wait, ya ugly beggar!” rasped one of the men.
They were both dressed in long dusters. White flour sacks covered their faces. Holes had been cut to expose the eyes and mouth. Their breath was visible in the chill air.
To Thom they looked more like devils than anything his nightmares had ever conjured. His heart pounded. He was only vaguely aware of Mattie’s screams and curses.
“You wait for this!” the man on the right shouted.
Thom covered his head with his arms. “No! … wait. What do you want!”
“He wants to know what we want,” one man said to the other, eyes flashing with a grin. Then, as if noticing Mattie for the first time, he said to Thom, “Fuckin’ the boss’s daughter, eh, Jack?” He hooted. “Stealin’ our beef and fuckin’ the boss’s daughter. I do believe we got us a live one here!”
“I didn’t steal no beef, you lyin’ sons o’ bitches!”
“Sure you did, Jack. I seen you.”
“You’re just sayin’ that so’s you can kill me and drive the Rinskis out.”
Both men laughed, lips parting behind their masks, shotguns held high, the stocks snugged against their cheeks.
Thom peeked out from between his elbows, rolling his eyes between the two masked figures. “Oh, Lordy,” he said fearfully. “Oh, Lordy, you’re the ones that killed poor Lincoln Fairchild last summer, and that schoolteacher from Pittsburgh!”
One of the men laughed and turned to the other. He turned back to Thom. “Naw, that was bandits, Jack. Didn’t you hear what the sheriff said?”
Thom shook his head and swallowed hard. “That weren’t no bandits. It was you two killin’ those poor people and makin’ it look just enough like bandits so that’s what the sheriff would call it. You knew the rest of the Bench would know it was the Double X drivin’ ’em out.”
“You got it all figured out, don’t you, Jack?”
“Oh, Lordy,” Thom moaned.
The man on the left turned to Mattie. She was curled up against the woodbox, covering herself with her arms and spewing epithets at the two intruders. “You can tell your pa what ya seen here tonight,” the man told her. “Tell him you and him’s next if you don’t hightail it off the Bench—ya hear?”
“Get the hell out of here, you sons o’ bitches!”
“Did you hear me, girl?” the man yelled, turning to give her his full attention.
“I know who you are, you sons o’ bitches!”
“Who are we, then?”
“Randall Magnusson and Shelby Green!”
Just then Jack Thom flung his right hand beneath the cot and brought it up with a .44 Remington conversion revolver. Awkwardly he thumbed back the hammer, taking too much time. The Double X men discharged their shotguns with ear-pounding blasts, instantly filling the cabin with the smell of smoke, powder, and fresh blood.
Mattie screamed, covering her face against the horrible vision of Jack Thom disintegrating before her—blood and bone splattering the wall behind him. She continued screaming, dropping her head between her knees. Spittle and vomit leapt from her lips.
Her screams settled to low moans, and she heard shotguns broken open and shells dropped to the floor. Boots scuffed.
There was a long silence. She could hear harsh breathing. Someone cleared his throat, moving toward her. The toes of his boots prodded Mattie’s naked thigh.
“You know what?” he said to his partner. “I don’t think this little whore’s been satisfied … yet.”