Saviours of Oestend Oestend 2 (9 page)

* * * *

The rain let up soon afterwards, and they walked back to the ranch in silence. They found the horses in the barn, the venison still strapped to their backs.
Frances seemed unconcerned about what had passed between them in the shack, and Dante tried to act the same. He refused to think about Frances as a valid option. He did the rest of his chores. He intentionally avoided the kitchen while the rest of the men ate. And all along, he refused to think about it.
Which of course meant he was thinking about it every single damn moment.
When the hands had all left, he wandered into the kitchen. The wind had picked up again, and a light rain pattered ineffectually against the window. Dante poured himself a very large drink as Cami put a plate of food down for him and turned back to her work.
And he continued to pretend that he wasn’t thinking about it.
He’d hated himself for years for wanting men, and yet, when he thought about it rationally, he couldn’t explain why. It wasn’t as if it were unheard of. Men like Deacon and Aren who lived as a married couple were unusual, but out here in the prairie, where women were in short supply, it was common knowledge that turning to men was an obvious answer. “What’s a hand job between friends?” he’d once heard a ranch hand say, and although he’d been too young to understand it at the time, he could see the practicality of it now.
Still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to embrace it. And yet, he couldn’t embrace women either.
Over the years, he’d tried to have sex with various women—mostly maids at the McAllen ranch, and Daisy, of course, and a whore or two in between. He’d even succeeded on occasion. But for the most part, he found it was more trouble than it was worth. Although he knew he should want women, in truth, when it came to sex, he found them borderline repulsive. The moist gap between their legs seemed foul. The cloying odour of their sex made him reel. When he compared his experiences with them to his time with Deacon in the barn, and the pure, bright joy of their pleasure, he knew he’d never,
ever
find what he sought with a woman. He’d married Daisy because it was what he was supposed to do, and because he hoped to someday have a family of his own, but their marriage had been a disaster from the start.
Yet somehow, he’d always felt that he
wanted
a wife. How that fitted with not wanting to fuck her, he didn’t know.
He watched Cami as she moved around the kitchen. Her back was to him. She wasn’t what most men looked for in a woman. She was tall, with no curves to speak of, and yet, she wasn’t at all unattractive. She was slim and willowy and graceful. More importantly, she was pleasant and bright and practical. What would happen if he asked her to be his wife?
The real question was, what would happen when they got to the bedroom? He couldn’t imagine undressing Cami, or touching her. There was no way he could kiss her. He couldn’t bear the thought of what he’d see in her big brown eyes when he couldn’t perform as a man. Would she be hurt or disappointed? Or would she laugh, as the whore back at The Chalice had done when he was eighteen?
No. Marrying Cami was definitely not an option.
He sighed. He closed his eyes again and tried not to think about Frances.
“Is everything all right?” Cami asked.
He nodded but didn’t look up at her. “I’m just tired.”
He heard her step near. He felt her hand on his shoulder, and heard her pour more whisky into his glass. He wished her touch stirred something in him.
“That was one hell of a storm today.”
“It was.”
“Frances said you cut your back.”
“It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”
He heard her steps as she crossed back to him, and then felt her fingers on his neck. He jumped and swatted her hand away.
“I’m just going to check it.”
He sighed. Of course that’s all she was doing. Still, would it have killed her to warn him? “I’m sorry. I’m just tense.”
“I noticed.”
She began massaging his shoulders through his shirt. It felt good—not in a sexual way, but just in the simple way it was meant—and he was tempted to give in to her touch and let himself relax, but he was also scared of what her intentions were.
He reached up and gripped the fingers of her right hand. “Cami, I don’t mean to be cruel, but…”
How to put it
? “I don’t want you to touch me.”
“I know.” She pulled her hand free. She didn’t sound hurt by his words. Just practical, as always. “If I thought you wanted me to touch you, I probably wouldn’t. Now quit being ornery and hold still.” She pulled his shirt off his shoulder then he felt her gentle fingers testing the skin.
“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling for some reason he couldn’t quite understand that he had to explain himself.
“Shut up, Dante. It doesn’t hurt my feelings that you don’t want to fuck me. Frankly, it makes things easier.” She pulled his shirt back up over his shoulder. “The wound doesn’t look bad. It’s scabbed over. No sign of infection yet. You want me to wash it out, just to be sure?”
“It’s fine.”
She shrugged. “All right. Let me know if you change your mind.”
He turned to look up at her, almost wishing he hadn’t stopped her from rubbing his shoulders. He wondered if it would be rude to ask her to do it again. He didn’t need to, though. She seemed to read his thoughts. She rolled her eyes at him, but then she put her hands back on his shoulders and began to knead them. It felt amazing. He could almost have purred. He let his head fall forward. He quit worrying about what she wanted from him and finally let himself relax.
She was quiet for a long time. The only sound in the kitchen was the quiet crackling of the fire in the hearth, the rain on the window, and the gentle song of the wind blowing across the prairie as it always did. “I worked in a whorehouse,” Cami said at last, her voice quiet. Her hands still moved in a rhythmic, hypnotic way on his shoulders and neck. “Being desired sexually doesn’t feel like a compliment. It feels more like a chore. It’s not like that here, Dante. I like working here. I like living in this house with you. And what I like most about it is that it’s easy. There’s nothing complicated about it. It doesn’t ever feel like a chore.”
Dante took a deep breath and let it go. It felt cleansing. Yes, the doubts about Frances were still there, but at least he knew where things stood with Cami, and it was right where he wanted them to be. He and Cami had created a haven together, without ever meaning to—a place where they were both safe from their personal demons. A fortress against the storm, both literal and symbolic.
And although it felt childish and simplistic, he said what was in his heart. “I like having you here, too.”
It really was as simple as that.

Chapter Ten

Somehow, their simple confession in the kitchen seemed to set them free. She moved easier with him and laughed more, and over the next couple of weeks, they fell into an easy routine. In the evening, after the generator had been turned on, but before it was time for bed, they’d sit together in the living room. She always had mending to do, and she’d sit by the lamp where she had the best light, and one of them would tell a story.

“Tell me about your brother,” she said one night. “The one who died here.”

And so Dante told her all about Brighton, who had always been happy and carefree. He’d had the ability to let every slight or difficulty roll off his back, and to laugh about it later, and yet, he’d never been a pushover. He knew what he wanted and had no qualms about pursuing it. He’d been a bright spot in the family—balancing out Dante’s sullen hostility and Jay’s lazy disinterest.

“He was the best of us,” Dante said. “It should have been me.”
“If it had, I’d still be a whore.”
Dante couldn’t argue with that.
She asked about his parents, and his childhood, and he found himself lost in memories

he hadn’t revisited in years. Memories from before the incident in the barn, before his grandfather had made him so ashamed of himself. Memories of what it was like to be a boy growing up on the prairie. The BarChi had seemed huge back then, and magical, and he and Deacon had prowled over every inch of it together. Sometimes Brighton or Jay would tag along, but many times they’d intentionally ditched the younger boys. They’d pretended to be kings and hunters and warriors. They’d unearthed what seemed like forgotten treasures in the outbuildings and done their very best to dam the river at least a hundred times.

“All this time I thought it was Tama you were in love with,” Cami said. “But it’s really Deacon.”
Somehow, he didn’t even feel ashamed of it. She made it sound the way it felt—natural. “It’s always been Deacon.”
He tried several times to turn the tables and ask about her past. Sometimes she’d share bits and pieces.
“Have you ever been in love?” he asked her one evening.
“I thought I was once.”
“What happened?”
She thought about it a bit, and he knew she was trying to decide if it was a story she could tell or not.
“He could only love me in secret,” she said at last.
Dante thought about Deacon, and the hope he’d held onto for so many years. “Is that so bad?”
“I don’t think you can be ashamed of somebody and really love them, too. He was embarrassed of loving me. How could I feel good about that?”
For the most part, though, she evaded his questions, and Dante found he liked it best when she did, because she’d distract him with some other story.
“Do you know the one about Rider, who fought the giant?” she’d ask. Or, “Do you know the one about Seamus and the lost island of gold?” Or, “Have you heard the story of Joseph and the magic horse?”
No matter which story it was, Dante’s answer was always, “No”.
They were fairy myths and fables, and he realised they were tales most kids probably knew, but he’d never heard any of them.
“How do you know that story?” he’d asked the first few times, and the answer was always a shrug. “Everybody knows it,” she’d say.
The more stories he heard, the more Dante realised how much of the world he’d missed. He’d lived his entire life on the prairie. His mother had died when he was six, and his memories of her were hazy and dim. After her death, there’d been only his father and his grandfather, Olsa, and a hundred hands who’d come and gone. Olsa had told them stories, but they’d been few and far between, and they’d all been about the Ainuai.
Cami’s upbringing in the busy port city of Francshire had been so different from his own. She remembered her stepmother fondly, but she rarely spoke of her father.
“He had high aspirations,” she told him one of the few times she shared something about herself. “We always had maids and cooks, and I had private tutors.”
“So they taught you the stories?”
“Not really. The stories were always there, although sometimes there are different versions.”
“What do you mean about your father having high aspirations?”
“He was always on the upper end of the working class, and he wanted so much to be one of the bourgeois.”
“Why didn’t he marry you off to some rich bourgeois brat, then?”
She smiled without meeting his eyes. “Do you know the story about Rasp and Raif and the magic flute?”
“You know I don’t.”
And Dante would close his eyes and get lost in the tales she spun, where heroes rescued princesses and magic was ordinary. It quickly became his favourite part of the day.

* * * *

One evening, as he sat in front of the fire, Cami surprised him by bringing him a giant roll of parchment.
“I found this,” she told him. “It was in the back of my closet.”
It was a map, and it was unlike anything he’d ever seen. He’d seen hastily scratched charts at his father’s house, showing only the BarChi land. There was an illustration on the wall of the general store in Milton that showed the railroad lines in Oestend, from Francshire to Milton. There was another, in the bank, that showed Lanstead and the sea, but it ended just west of Oestend’s eastern coast. But he’d never seen anything like the map he was looking at now.
It was Oestend—not the eastern parts, but the real Oestend. It started in the grain belt and stretched west of Milton farther than Dante could imagine. There were mountains, and grasslands, and lakes and rivers. There was forest to the northwest, and desert in the south.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “I had no idea such a thing even existed.”
She pointed to the bottom right corner. “See the year? It’s from before the wraiths. And see here?” She pointed to a strange circular mountain sketched onto the map. “That has to be the mesa Redmond talked about in his memoirs. This map must be from his expedition.” He turned to look up at her. “Who?”
She blushed. “You know. Paulus Redmond. He’d heard stories about a mountain of gold in the west, so he put together an expedition. They spent four years wandering around, but never found anything.”
“Is that another one of your fairy tales?”
She laughed. “No, silly. It’s history.”
“How do you know?”
He saw the sudden elusiveness in her eyes. It was much as it had been on their trip to the BarChi, when she would suddenly seem to decide she didn’t want to tell any more of a particular story. She shrugged. “I just do. Anyway, look. Milton and the ranches were drawn in later.”
She was right. Milton was marked with a pencil instead of ink. There were also brands marking the various ranches, with property lines sketched out around them. Out in the plains, there was another brand—at least that’s what it looked like to Dante—an A in a circle.
“What do you suppose those are?”
“I don’t know, but look at this.” She took the map and flipped it over to show him the back. There were signatures there, and although Dante couldn’t quite read the names, he recognised the brands scratched next to them—the McAllens, the Ralstons, the BarChi, and the Austins. “This was their contract.”
It was a strange piece of history, and one Dante felt he had no claim to. “We’ll send it to the BarChi, next time somebody goes into town. Possible my dad or Aren will have a use for it.”
“All right.” She didn’t say anything else, but he could tell there was something else she wanted to say.
He turned around and raised his eyebrows at her. “What is it?”
She glanced away from him, biting her lip in thought, as if debating what to say. Finally, she sighed. “I found these, too.” She said it as if she were confessing a terrible sin. She pulled something from the pocket of her skirt and held them out for him to see.
They were combs. Not the kind used to actually comb hair, but the decorative kind women wore in their hair like jewellery. He thought maybe they were ivory, carved with an intricate floral pattern.
It amused him that she would feel compelled to give them to him. “What?” he teased. “You think I want them?”
“They were in a box, up on the shelf in the closet of my room.” She shrugged. “It felt wrong for me to keep them.”
Maybe so, but she liked them. He could tell by the way she held them, and the way her thumb brushed over them as they rested in her palm. She reached up and absentmindedly touched her dark hair, as if imagining them there.
“No reason for them to be stuck in some box when you like them so much.”
“Really?” she asked, her eyes bright. “I can have them?”
“I sure can’t think of any other use for them. They’d look awful silly on my cows.”
The smile she gave him was huge and contagious, and for the first time, Dante found himself thinking she was pretty. She went to the window. With the lamplight inside, and the dark out, it served as a mirror of sorts. She spent what Dante thought was a silly amount of time arranging them in her hair. When she turned to face him again, her cheeks were pink.
“They look nice,” he said, more because he felt he should than because he actually cared. Still, the smile his compliment elicited was worth it.
He went back to studying the map, and she went to her usual spot by the lamp, where she always sat in the evenings as she mended.
“So,” Dante said, “tell me about Paulus Redmond and his mountain of gold.”