Chapter 18
Brazos woke with a start, jerked his head up off his pillow.
Instantly his long-barreled Peacemaker was in his hand, his thumb ratcheting the hammer back. His heart thudded. He looked around the dark room before him—all brown mist and blurred edges in the first light of dawn that barely touched the room’s single window.
He’d heard something.
He drew a breath to calm his heart and the sudden rush of blood in his ears. Then he heard it again—a very soft thudding, rustling sound.
Again, his heart thudded.
Brazos swept the bedcovers back with his right hand, dropped his bare feet to the floor. Clad in only his wash-worn longhandles, he crossed the small bedroom to the door, twisted the knob, and drew the door open quickly. He peered around the tiny cabin. A shadow flickered across the curtained window to his left.
Someone was out there, all right.
Holding the Peacemaker barrel up near his right shoulder, Brazos padded across the cabin’s scarred puncheon floor. A footstep sounded outside, then another. Someone was approaching the door. Just then, the interloper stepped up onto the small front stoop. Brazos heard the soft thud of a stealthy foot, the creak of a wooden floorboard. Gritting his teeth, he placed his left hand on the porcelain knob. He turned it and, just like he’d done with the bedroom door, he drew it open quickly and thrust the Russian straight out before him.
“Oh!” The person before him stumbled straight backward, dropping the load of split stove wood in his arms.
No. Her arms . . .
She got her ankle-booted feet set beneath her and closed her hands over her mouth, staring at the cocked Peacemaker in Brazos’s hand. He could see the dim light of the dawn glinting fearfully in her round, dark eyes, over the hands clamped across her mouth to quell another scream.
“Mrs. Rose!”
“Mr. McQueen!”
Brazos depressed the Peacemaker’s hammer and holstered the gun. “I’m so sorry . . . I didn’t . . . I didn’t know it was you.” He crouched to pick up the wood she’d dropped—six or seven sticks of split pine and cedar. “What’re you doin’ out here? You know I can fetch my own wood!”
Mrs. Rose rented the cabin behind her own humble shack, a hundred feet at the end of a meandering, well-worn path that connected the two hovels. She lowered her hands from her face to cross her arms beneath her breasts, over the humble flower-printed cambric dress she wore. She was a handsome Black woman, a few years younger than Brazos himself. She’d lost her husband two years before, gunned down by a drunken gambler who objected to the presence of a Black man in the saloon they were both drinking and gambling in.
Mrs. Rose hadn’t shared too much about her husband, but Brazos had been able to tell by her demeanor, in the four days since he’d taken a room here in the shack she rented out to help with her own paltry income, that Mr. Rose had not been a man she’d been proud of. Now she lived alone in her own ancient log cabin, originally built and owned by a prospector, one of the first few on Wolfwater Creek, and took in laundry and sewing.
“You’ve been working so hard,” Mrs. Rose said. “I saw last night when I fetched water from the creek to fill the bucket in your kitchen that you had no wood for this morning. I heard you return . . . not all that long ago—you’ve been keeping late nights, Mr. McQueen—and knew you were likely too tired to fetch your own wood. Not that I’m keeping tabs on you, Mr. McQueen. And not that I didn’t think that—oh!” she intoned, laughing quietly and shaking her head. “How I do go on!”
“Thank you, Mrs. Rose. I do apologize for . . . well . . .”
“Were you expecting someone, Mr. McQueen?” She frowned questioningly up at him. “I’ve seen you . . . seen you walking around your cabin after you’ve returned from work, as though you’re afraid that someone might . . .”
She clapped a slender, work-callused hand to her mouth, her dark eyes flashing lustrously, with a wry intelligence and humor that belied the hardness of her life—living alone with a small child and working her mahogany hands nearly to the bone every day and night. Still, she’d retained her beauty, as well as her figure. Brazos had not been too busy or too distracted with laying down the law in Wolfwater to notice.
“There I go again,” she said.
“An old lawman’s habit,” Brazos said. “A lawman, you know . . . we tend to make a lot of enemies. I do believe Cha’les and I have done made our share already in just the week we’ve been back on the job together.”
It was true. They’d broken up enough fights and laid down the law in enough saloons, just sort of introducing themselves to the town, and locking up a few miners for fighting, that both men knew they had targets on their backs. It was also true, however, that when Brazos circled his cabin every evening once returning home, he wasn’t just looking for men whose feelings he might have hurt, or whose jaws he might have cracked earlier that day.
“Old friends, you and Mr. Tuttle?”
“Yes.” Brazos smiled. “Old friends . . . me an’ Cha’les.”
“Nice to be back working with him again.”
“You could say that.” It was. He’d missed being around the at-once surly and amusing legendary lawman. Again, he felt a pang of guilt and foolishness for his mistake about Catfish and Vonetta. He should have known Catfish would never have betrayed him in the way Brazos thought he had. “Anyway,” he said, turning with the load of wood in his arms and stepping back into the cabin, “let me set this wood down by the stove.”
“I tell you what, Mr. McQueen,” Mrs. Rose said, stepping into the doorway and placing one hand on the frame, “no need for you to start a fire. I already have breakfast started at my place. Fresh coffee on the stove . . .”
Brazos dropped the wood in the corrugated tin washtub he used for a wood box, and turned back to the woman. Mrs. Rose had suddenly, self-consciously, adjusted the wide red bandanna tied around the top of her head to hold her long, curly black hair back from her face. Her visage was still smooth and supple, despite her age and all her long years of hardship—both emotional and physical.
It was the way of most people, but the way of people like his people, most of all. He knew from personal experience, having been born on a plantation back in Alabama several years before the war freed him, had made it legal for him to travel around, free, to more or less choose his own future, like other men. Like white men.
Though most Black men knew that no Black man was ever really free. Maybe on paper, but there were other ways—many various and sundry other ways—to enslave a man. Half the saloons in Wolfwater still didn’t allow Black men to cross their thresholds or to mingle with their working girls.
“I believe I won’t take time for breakfast,” Brazos said, striding slowly back toward her. “But, perhaps coffee . . . if you don’t think it’d be improper. You know—a man in your cabin . . . ?”
“Oh, I don’t care what’s proper, Mr. McQueen,” she said, adjusting the bandanna with the index finger of her left hand, tucking a stray lock of hair under it. She glanced around the yard, touched now with the milky light of dawn. “Besides . . . who’s going to know?”
Her home and the cabin she rented were set back off the main trail into Wolfwater, in some scraggly desert trees on the opposite side of the creek from the town, with buttes shelving around it, concealing it from the trail, as well as the town itself.
“All right, then,” Brazos said, and hooked a wry half smile. “But only if you stop with the ‘Mr. McQueen,’ Mrs. Rose. I’m Brazos.”
“I’m Hettie.” She flashed a white-toothed smile of her own.
“All right, then.” Brazos was about to extend his hand to indicate her cabin, but then he suddenly realized he’d been standing here in his longhandles, talking to this woman. “Oh, Lordy!” he intoned, looking down at himself. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t realize . . . !”
She laughed into her hand. “It’s all right, Mr., er, I mean, Brazos.” She laughed huskily. “I was wondering when you were going to notice!” Still laughing, she swung around and began striding toward the back door of her cabin at the end of the curving path. “I’ll have that coffee good and hot when you get here!”
Brazos closed the door, opened it, and called, “All right. I’ll be there in five minutes,” then closed the door again.
He sighed and chuckled, then headed for his bedroom to dress.
Fifteen minutes later, he was seated at the lady’s kitchen table. She filled the two cups she’d set on her oilcloth-covered table, and Brazos felt his stomach grumble and his mouth water as the smoking coal-black liquid tumbled from the spout of the large white-speckled black pot into the thick white mug.
“That smells fine, Mrs. Rose.”
She gave him an admonishing look from beneath her brows.
He chuckled, then said, “Old habits do die hard . . . Hettie.” He glanced at the bowl and the small burlap pouches of flour and sugar and the two brown eggs that also sat on the table, near a porcelain mixing bowl, in which a long-handled wooden spoon rested. “I don’t want to interrupt your cooking, Hettie.”
She set the pot back on the warming rack on the range, then returned to the table, rubbing her hands on the white apron she wore around her waist. She sat down in the hide-bottom chair across the table from Brazos. She tucked one leg under her, sitting sort of sideways, one arm hooked over a spool jutting up from the chair back.
“I’m in no rush. Peter won’t be up for another hour, I’m sure. He wasn’t feeling well last . . .”
She let her voice trail off when a latch clicked behind her. Both she and Brazos turned to see one of the two doors in the rear wall, in the parlor side of the cabin, open slowly. A boy’s small, round face under a cap of tight, black hair appeared. He was dressed in a white cotton gown that hung nearly to his small brown feet.
“Peter . . .”
“Momma.” The boy’s chocolate eyes slid to Brazos. He reacted hopefully. “Is it Poppa . . . ?”
Hettie glanced at Brazos, coloring behind her natural tan, then returned her gaze to the boy. “No, Peter. It’s our neighbor, Mr. McQueen,” she said, glancing at Brazos with a smile. “You remember him. He’s the nice man renting the other cabin.”
“Oh,” Peter said, his eyes remaining on Brazos.
“How do you feel, child?” Hettie asked him.
“Better.”
“Maybe you’d better go back to bed and sleep another hour. I’ll call you when breakfast is ready.”
“All right,” the boy said. Keeping his vaguely curious gaze on the man wearing the black duster, where behind its left lapel the deputy marshal’s badge shone, he slowly closed the door until the latch clicked.
Hettie turned back to Brazos, gave a somewhat sheepish smile, and lifted her steaming mug to her lips.
“His pa?” Brazos asked, frowning curiously across the table at the woman.
She sipped the coffee, swallowed, and hesitated, again a flush rising behind the natural dark coffee color of her nicely tapered cheeks. She set the coffee cup down, averted her gaze to it, then lifted her eyes to Brazos. “I’m afraid I wasn’t able to tell him that his father died,” she said, keeping her voice low. She ran a hand in a small circle on the oilcloth. “If I had, I would have had to tell him how Samuel died. In a common saloon brawl with other men as drunk as he.”
She frowned, heaving a weary sigh.
“I’ll have to eventually, of course,” she said, glancing again at the closed door behind her. “I thought I’d put it off until . . .” She shrugged a shoulder. “Until he might be able to understand, though something like that will be hard for him to understand at any age, I’m afraid. Peter is a sensitive child. His stomach often bothers him. That was the problem last night.”
“Poor child,” Brazos said. “I’m sorry, Hettie. Life hasn’t been good to you. It’s not fair. You’re a good lady.”
“No, but who is life fair to, Brazos?” She arched one brow. “You?”
Brazos shrugged and took another sip of his coffee. “I can’t complain.”
“Can’t you? Or maybe you won’t.”
“What good would it do?”
“You were here before, I’m told. A few years ago.”
“Yes.”
“You came back to avenge your friend Marshal Wilkes.”
“That’s right. And to fetch his daughter back from those jackals.”
“You’re a brave, honorable man, Mr.”—she smiled again—“Brazos.”
Brazos shrugged again. “Any man would have done it, if he was close enough. I was close enough. I figured Cha’les would go after her . . . an’ them. He’d need help.”
“And you’re staying.”
“For now, yes, ma’am. Until we can get the town’s wolf back on its leash.” Brazos gave an ironic grin over the steaming rim of his cup. “Might take a while.”
Hettie gazed across the table at him, chin down, demurely. “Would I be too forward if I said I was glad?”
Brazos felt the blood rise in his cheeks. He shared a shy, crooked smile. “No, ma’am.”
“Would I also be too forward in asking you if you’d like to have supper with me and my son some night, Brazos?”
Brazos’s smile was still on his face. “No, ma’am. It might be a while, though. Cha’les an’ I got our hands full, especially around the supper hour, even during the week these days, with the train having come to town.” He paused, kept his direct gaze on her own, feeling an intimacy growing between him and this kind, hardworking, still-comely woman. It felt good, that feeling. Warm, gentle—unlike anything else he’d felt after his return to Wolfwater, aside from his easy friendship and camaraderie with Catfish Charlie Tuttle. “As folks do in the ritzy hotels, can I pencil my name on your register? Ink it in later?”
“Well, this humble cabin is far from a ritzy hotel, Brazos.”
“Not to me, Hettie.”
“Then you can do just that.”
Brazos tipped back the last of his coffee, set his cup back down on the table. “I best head into town, get to work,” he said with a sigh. He himself hadn’t gotten much sleep. He could do with another hour or two, but, like he’d told Hettie, he and Catfish were badly understaffed. So far, they’d hired two night deputies to act mainly as jailers, to keep an eye on the several prisoners he and Catfish had arrested over the past several days. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“I enjoyed our talk.”
“I did, too.”
Brazos rose and walked over to the door. He removed his hat from a peg to the right of the door and set it on his head.
“Oh, wait.” Hettie rose from her chair. “I have your clothes. Freshly washed just yesterday.”
She walked into the parlor, where several sets of neatly folded clothes were stacked on a horsehide sofa. She returned them to Brazos, who dug several coins out of his pants pocket.
“Much obliged, Hettie,” he said, extending his hand to the woman, over the small pile of clothes in her own hands.
“Oh, no,” she said, placing her left hand on his right one. “You already paid me—remember?”
“Oh.” Brazos looked down at the woman’s hand on his own. How warm her hand was. Soft, despite all her hard work. Feminine.
She looked down at her hand on his. Again, a flush rose in her cheeks, and she pulled her hand back quickly, self-consciously. Brazos accepted the clothes, still feeling another, not unpleasant, flush in his cheeks behind his beard.
“Maybe I’ll stop in for coffee again,” he blurted out, wanting to say one more thing before he had to leave, which he discovered he was reluctant to do.
My God—was he tumbling for this woman?!
“I would like that,” she said.
He pinched his hat brim to her, fumbled with the door, awkward in his self-consciousness, then pulled the door closed behind him, knocking it against his heels, almost tripping. He stood on the small porch fronting the woman’s cabin, staring out at the dawn building in the willows screening the creek. He grinned, chuckled, shook his head.
He’d be damned if he didn’t feel seventeen years old.
Not a bad feeling.
He chuckled again, then turned and strode down off the porch, walking back around Hettie’s cabin, to leave the clothes in his own before heading back into the Wolfwater fray.