Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold (15 page)

Marie was thirteen and Cord fifteen that night. She had begged and wheedled until the family agreed to let them come along to a social in town. Marie was wildly excited, by the dance, by her new grown up dress, and by everything to do with the outing.

Cord was not particularly impressed by the confining clothes but was mildly interested in events and pleased with his sister’s happy bubbling. The two of them were instructed to sit at the side out of the way. Watching the women in their best finery satisfied Marie for a while, but soon she wanted to be somewhere else.

“If we were on the other side we could hear the music better and see the ladies’ dresses up close from near the punch bowl.”

“Walk across that floor, and we’ll be back at Eph’s house in five minutes and you know it. You can see from here.” Cord had no urge to see anyone’s dress better.

“We wouldn’t have to walk across the floor. We could go out the door right here and come in on the other side. They’d never notice.”

“Don’t blame me when you’re getting tucked into bed early. I’m staying here.”

“Coward.”

Name calling wouldn’t move him, and Marie knew it, but she always gave it a try. She was only gone a short while before he decided that her chattering company was better than none and followed her. Unable to find his sister, Cord started searching the surrounding area with increasing concern, unwilling to go to Frank or Ephraim and call attention to their disobedience.

“I found her because of the sound. It didn’t sound like her, it was like a kitten mewling, but somehow I knew it was her and it was bad. The moon was bright enough when I got close I could see her - and him.”

Marie was sprawled semi-conscious near a group of low bushes, her beloved new dress torn to the waist, skirts pushed up and underclothes ripped off. Jack Hatch, the worst of the town’s bullies, knelt between her parted thighs, engorged organ jutting obscenely in the moonlight, just starting to lower himself over the thirteen-year-old girl.

“When people talk about seeing red you think it’s just a way to say angry, but it’s not, it really happens like that,” Cord said. “I can’t even remember parts of it. I was in that jail cell before things started seeming real again. The rest is red-colored and I’m not sure what really happened and what only happened inside my head.”

Sounds of the fight attracted attention, and it was Noah Reynolds who choked Cord off Jack Hatch, but not before Jack lost consciousness and stopped breathing. Patrick Andrews, the town’s doctor at the time, was able to thump on Jack enough to get his heart and lungs going again, but he had been as close to dead as a man can get and come back. At fifteen, Cord ended up in jail, charged with attempted murder.

“That’s when all this devil talk started. They couldn’t believe I had Hatch down like that because he was so much bigger. Fact is I got a hell of a jump on him because he was busy with Marie, and Eph and Frank always used to make me mind by grabbing me by the scruff of the neck or whatever was handy. They never thought about how they were teaching me to deal with them. Wasn’t too long after that before Frank and Eph had to get together to do much with me. When I got to full size the both of them couldn’t win a fight with me. Eph’s too civilized.

“I was in jail ten days while the family went half-crazy trying to make sure there was no trial because they knew the town would be happy to throw their half-breed bastard in jail for life. Pa sold cattle for half what he should have got. Eph and Martha mortgaged their house. Frank and Judith gave up everything they’d saved. Hannah’s husband was already drinking pretty bad, but they came up with some cash too somehow. They paid the Hatches off. So those sons of bitches left town with more money than they’d ever dreamed about because Jack almost raped Marie.”

“I never heard about any of that,” Anne said. “Why wasn’t he charged for attacking a little girl?”

“Because she was Indian, and Indians don’t count. She was never the same after that. You remember how she looks?”

“Oh, yes, she’s beautiful,” Anne said.

“Beautiful and with light skin,” Cord said. “So she made up her mind she was going to get far enough away no one would know about her and she was going to be white. And that’s what she did.”

“Was that part of the reason she married that Denver man?” Anne asked.

“Howlett. Paul Howlett. That was the only reason. She barely knew him and he was twice her age. Nothing was ever the same,” Cord said bitterly. “Marie wasn’t the same. The family wasn’t the same. They almost bankrupted themselves over it. Pa died before they recovered financially. And I wasn’t the same either.”

“Because you almost killed a man?” Anne whispered.

“No, because while I was in his jail Noah told me things my family should have long before that, about what it means to be half-Indian in a white man’s world. I guess Marie figured it out for herself in one way. Some of it I knew really, but the way he put it, put it all together - they should have told us both from the time we were little. I know why they didn’t, but they should have.”

“They loved you.”

“They still should have told us.”

From that time, Cord felt more and more a stranger in his own family. Marie was no longer the sister who had been his best friend. Martha and Eph were living in town.

Frank’s wife, Judith, had always been a little uneasy around her husband’s half-brother, and now Judith’s fear blossomed into hysteria. She was afraid to be alone with him. She didn’t like him around her children. While the boys were bad enough, when the fourth and last child, born when Cord was seventeen, was a girl, Judith’s fear became uncontrollable. He was not allowed near the baby, never touched her, never held her.

At eighteen, heartsick and unable to endure any more, he started fixing up the buildings here on the original part of the ranch and moved off by himself.

A year later, Marie realized her ambition of making a new life. Cord tried to talk her out of marrying Howlett from the day of her engagement until the day of her wedding.

“Is she happy?” Anne asked.

“Don’t know. Haven’t seen her since she left. Frank and Eph visit her sometimes, but I’d give her story the lie, wouldn’t I?”

“You mean she doesn’t want to see you? Do you write?”

“Nope. She wouldn’t even speak to me at the end. What I know is what I hear from Martha mostly. She raised Howlett’s children from a first marriage. Never had any of her own. That could give her away too if she had a baby that looked like her own mother - or me.”

Marie was gone. The last of the barns and outbuildings on this part of the ranch and every piece of equipment that had been stored in them were repaired, and Cord was beginning to feel restless anyway, when a man he barely knew stopped him on the street in Mason one day.

“Hear tell they’re trying Jack Hatch for murder in Salt Lake City next week. They even got a witness. You going to go see him hang?”

Suddenly it seemed like attending the hanging would be the thing to do, seeing the end to something that had done so much damage to him and to his family.

Cord left Frank a note saying only that he was going away, packed, and left. After Salt Lake, there was no reason to head home, and he kept moving west, into Nevada, Oregon, then south through California, across Arizona and New Mexico Territories and into Texas.

In the border country of Texas he found a whole people of mixed blood, people who accepted him as easily as they did most other things in their lives. He worked for good wages breaking horses for one of the big ranches in the area and settled in, even living for almost a year with a round, brown, laughing woman named Rosa.

“Was she beautiful?” Anne asked.

“No. Pretty maybe. Maybe not even that, maybe just - happy, full of laughter.”

Cord spoke only a few words of Spanish, and Rosa spoke no English. They lived together without really knowing each other. He gave her extra cash every month in addition to paying all their bills.

When he found she was not spending the money on herself but giving it to family, she expected him to be angry. He wasn’t. He just gave her twice as much. Her whole family lived well.

“Did you - care about her?” Anne asked.

“Sure. Not the way Frank cares about Judith, if that’s what you’re asking,” Cord said. “We spent the nights in the same bed, but what she cared about was her family, and I was gone all day working horses.”

Things drifted along thoughtlessly in this fashion for months, and then Rosa was pregnant.

Suddenly Cord felt trapped. He knew with no shadow of a doubt he did not want to spend the rest of his life in the border country. The people were friendly, but they had different ways, different food, different beliefs and language. He began to hate the dry, flat country with its searing heat, snakes and lizards. With a sudden ache he knew he had always intended to return to Colorado and to the Bennett clan.

When Rosa miscarried, he felt sad, sympathetic - and undeniably, guiltily, free. He never touched her again. As soon as he was sure she was well, he left her with most of his savings from the riding job and started north for Colorado.

Almost five years after leaving, Cord arrived home riding the big brown gelding he called Keeper, stringing along ten head of horses he meant to start a breeding herd with.

He left home at nineteen, a lean, quiet boy, good enough with a gun to merit respect, too good with a knife and his fists, and better than most with a horse. Returning at twenty-four, he was leaner, quieter, and had strange new skills with fists, knives, and horses that reinforced gossip about him having the devil in him.

Bone-weary and exhausted from the long ride up from New Mexico with so many horses, he slept most of his first day home. On the second day, just when he was thinking of riding over to the main ranch, Frank rode up, alerted by the smoke from the chimney of the old house.

Cord left thinking his family would not miss him particularly, would probably be better off without him around. He was wrong. For five years not a day went by that Frank and Ephraim didn’t wonder where their half-brother was, worry about how he was, and fear for him. Frank rode into the yard and saw Cord standing there with hair down past his shoulders, wearing knee-high Apache moccasins, and five years of fear and worry turned instantly to rage. For once Frank was too angry even to raise his voice.

He looked Cord over and snarled, “So you just rode off and went Injun, you son of a bitch,” then wheeled his horse and left.

In the years since, the relationship between the brothers had often been worse, occasionally a little better, but never good. Frank and Ephraim never forgave Cord for the years of fear and worry, and Cord resented their attitude and would neither apologize nor explain. The remaining love and loyalty were not enough to bridge the deep chasm of estrangement among the brothers.

Of course, Cord told Anne only the facts. The emotions she surmised for herself, and she began to understand the combination of opposing forces that had produced this man who was on the one hand so silent, hard, and cold, and on the other so gentle, kind, and compassionate. Since they had first crossed paths as children, she had always instinctively liked him. What she was learning only proved how right she had been. She liked Cord Bennett, and she liked being his wife.

* * *

Chapter 16

ANNE SLIPPED AS SOUNDLESSLY AS
possible from bed in the middle of the night, careful not to wake Cord. Her body had given the familiar signs earlier in the day, and she was already wearing the straps that held the rags which would soon be needed to absorb her monthly flow.

Finding her slippers in the dark and wrapping her robe tightly around her, she felt her way to the rocker in the parlor. The rhythmic, miserable cramping in her lower abdomen had awakened her, and she knew she could not be still in the bed but would need to move with the pain. She curled in the chair, rocking slowly, both hands pressed to her stomach. The pain, her own fatigue, and the unnatural lateness of the hour combined to give the night an unreal quality.

She had no idea how long she had been there, quietly rocking, when she heard Cord’s voice. “Annie?”

“I’m sorry. I tried not to wake you.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just have a few cramps is all. Go back to bed. It’s all right.”

“What kind of cramps?”

She could hear the concern in his voice and smiled. Propriety was about to lose again.

“My monthly flow is starting, and I always have a few cramps for a couple of hours. When it happens in the day it doesn’t matter, I just keep moving around, but at night it’s a bother. I can’t be still in the bed you see. I didn’t want to wake you.”

She heard him moving away, then a match flared as he lit the kitchen lamp. He was naked in the light, and she watched him through a dreamy haze as he began to move around the kitchen.

The modesty she had been raised with dictated not only that she try to keep her own body covered at all times but that she avert her eyes from her husband. The big stove kept the kitchen and parlor very warm but left the bedrooms chilly this time of year. Even so, there were times he would simply stretch from the bed, walk across the room unclothed, or unself-consciously dress or undress before her.