Chapter Text
She was there, in the late afternoon — early autumn — when he came into the coffee house alone with a scowl, and with the earth-damp scent of the leather and the horse hair and the sagebrush through which he had rode.
A young man, he was barely older than Eliza herself.
Beautiful, if she was allowed to think such a thing. And yet rugged, as if he had lived every moment of his life up ‘til then in the dominating shadow of The Bighorns. In the mountains themselves, perhaps. Or on the prairie, open and wide and wild.
He did not notice her, this stranger, for whatever thoughts otherwise occupied his mind.
He cast a surreptitious glance about the coffee house, looking without really seeing, before turning his boot into a table beside the window. Through the condensation, it was dappled with the struggling last light of the sun that had followed the rain, or else chased it away, and the same light played across the man’s tanned skin, the wheat-field blond of his hair — the shade, like golden sheaves warmed good and proper in the summer — peaking out by his ears from beneath the gambler hat. It sunk into the chapped lines of his lips; the scarred, but pink enough still to be recent indentation on his shaven chin.
The column of his neck.
The dip, at the base of his throat, where the collarbones parted to curve off beneath the mauve shirt fabric and the worn, sheepskin-lined jacket.
Eliza was not aware that she had paused; that her observations, quiet, yet fanciful as they were, had stilled her hand in mid-air, at least until Mr Winton coughed pointedly and she resumed to pouring his coffee.
She had wanted to see to the stranger quickly, then, to ask, “Anything to drink, sir?” with a smile, and a helpful cant of her head. Indeed, Eliza moved with the intention, wiping her free hand down on her apron, glancing into the muggy reflection of the mirror above the counter to smooth the hair that curled at her temple.
Cora, however.
Of course, dear Cora — who, although married, and happily, with three little boys to occupy her time, had a knack for reaching the most good looking of patrons first. She’d said once it was to protect Eliza, from herself, for she remembered being younger and with a head full of ideas, and how often the fantasies had played out in her mind of riding away with a handsome cowboy upon his horse, set for freedom, and nothing more. “That’s dangerous,” Cora had insisted, “especially with those just passin’ by.” And rightly so. She had pushed her way between the occupied tables before Eliza had the chance, her introduction lost beneath the clink of the crockery, the silverware and the low murmur of conversation.
Eliza caught only the rumble of the stranger’s voice in reply, trailing tentatively in Cora’s footsteps under the guise of cleaning.
She would never ask the stranger from where he had travelled, in which backwater town he had been born to attribute for that wonderful drawl, although she wondered. As with so many other things about the man, she guessed: down south, or Midwestern. An amalgamation of every central-to-southern state, comprised somehow of the stranger’s uh — yeah, yes ma’am — just the coffee, I already ate —
All the while, even with Cora beside him, talking business-like, polite, about baked bread and fresh fruit and cream, he was distracted, running the side of a finger over his upper lip as he looked back and forth between her and the window, out to where he’d been; to the street, where the horses were tethered in an orderly row.
It seemed he was waiting, watching for something or someone. And afraid to let them slip by.
Cora made sure to catch Eliza’s elbow to turn her away when at last she let the stranger alone.
“Come on,” she said, “you don’t fool me! Now put your eyes back in, girl.”
“Do y’know his name?”
“He’s just a fella,” Cora insisted. “Nothin’ to see.”
But she was wrong.
The stranger, as far as Eliza was convinced, was everything except nothing. She kept half an eye trained on the side-profile of his face as she resumed her work — another refill for Mr Winton, for Mrs Eisenberg, without a tip; three cups and their saucers collected from the ladies who decided to brave the journey home, before the rain that lingered in the air could return — and she willed and wished and hoped for the stranger to be drawn in her direction, whenever she clattered the plates too loudly onto a tray to be whisked away for washing, though he never was.
Only when the last empty tables were being scrubbed down before closing did he stand from his seat, with another shifty glance about, and Cora locked the door right behind his retreating back without another word passed.
*
There, two days later; still in town, hadn’t moved on. Still waiting and watching.
Eliza had her hands full of Cora’s children in the doorway that led out back from the kitchen, to the yard and the alleyway behind — the youngest crying for no discernible reason, as was his way, and wiping his wet nose against his sleeve as Eliza hoisted him up.
“It’s dead,” Clyde, the oldest at seven, was saying, attempting to pull her out into the yard.
Pointing, over there.
Andrew ran with the stick he was using as a sword over to the corner, where the debris of the coffee house was stacked haphazardly; the hole in the fence behind, channelled by the rats, barely big enough for any other animal to squeeze through, such as a dog. A dog, beneath the month’s rubbish yet to be collected and burned, lying nevertheless on it’s side, and revealed when Andrew lifted the tangle of worn rag cloths into the air.
“Ah,” said Eliza, and, “Stop! Don’t touch it, land’s sake!”
Andrew toed the scrawny body of the animal with the tip of his shoe anyway, face alight, entranced, before Clyde tugged him away.
“What’d we do with it, ‘Liza?”
“Do dogs get to be buried, like people?”
“D’you think they go to Heaven like us, ‘Liza?”
She didn’t know. Eliza shooed the older boys back into the kitchen, keeping little Theo clutched and bouncing on her hip as she dragged the dog out by it’s tail.
It was a dreadful skinny thing, she thought, with it’s sunken stomach, ribs stark and with the skin stretched atop. Likely it had starved, or eaten the poison in desperation that Cora had left out for the rats. But it didn’t matter much now. Eliza could only move the body out of their yard and further into the alleyway, to the lip where the smooth flattened mud met the wagon-churned street.
Yes, there: the stranger, just coming along.
He walked slow and close to the buildings on the opposite side, his horse following the lax grip on the reigns; beautiful, like him, a big bay chestnut with a star of white.
The stranger didn’t say anything, but he saw. On this, Eliza was certain. He probably figured the small child on Eliza’s hip was hers, if not a sibling, and his eyes flickered between the pair to the dead dog, stretched stiff and cold at Eliza’s feet.
She couldn’t blame him for that.
When the stranger came again into the coffee house, a quarter hour later, he offered only a touch of his hat to Eliza when she strode through to deposit a teary Theo into his mother’s arms.
She wouldn’t mention the dog.
Nor did the stranger.
He took a slice of bread, thick with butter, for lunch and resumed to staring out of the window, in the same seat he’d chosen before, as Cora patted her son gently on the back with one hand and poured tea with the other, and told her older boys to get out of the way. I’m working, my darling, she said. Look, you’re gonna knock somethin’ all over this nice lady if you aren’t careful. No, I mean it — you go and sit down.
Andrew, take that stick out of my sight!
Clyde resolved to loitering beside the stranger uninvited, whilst Andrew clamoured for a lunch of his own, yet arguing, and unwilling to dispose of his new favourite toy. Eliza could hear the intrusive questions even as she took the orders from the newly arriving patrons — the type of unwelcome curiosity only a child could wield without being punched, or worse.
“Where’re you from, Mister?” Clyde kept asking. “I ain’t seen you around. You don’t work none, or nothin’? Mister. D’you know how to shoot that gun?”
“I’m sorry,” Eliza told him, although the stranger smiled.
He chuckled a little.
He answered Clyde, apparently in a better mood than the previous visit, in that rumbling slow voice, shaking his head and nodding between sips of coffee.
“He’s okay,” he said, to Eliza, pulling his sheepskin jacket over the holstered revolver at her approach. “S’just a kid.”
“They only come in when they want feeding, see,” Eliza explained, “and, as they’re boys…”
Well, that spoke for itself.
Eliza couldn’t remember eating her way through house and home in the way of Cora’s children but, said Cora, that was in their nature; what God designed. Was why she worked the coffee house whilst Ernest worked the train station. Why she always offered jam or onion compote automatically to the men who came in to eat, where she reserved herself with the women until they asked.
“Yeah,” said the stranger.
But he was looking now truly at Eliza, the way not so different to how she’d ogled at him.
“You sure you don’t want another slice, sir?” Eliza asked, in lieu of pandering to the heat that rose beneath her collar; the squirm of anticipation in her stomach. She gestured loosely to the stranger’s empty plate, little crumbs left behind, a streak of white butter at the edge. “Or a cake? We have tarts, made yesterday, and there’s a cobbler — ”
“I’m alright.”
“Right,” said Eliza.
Her fingers closed around Clyde’s shoulder, and the stranger followed them, quick, before darting back to her face and away, to the glass pane of the window.
“I know you’re busy,” he said, with a small, sorry grin.
I don’t aim to cause trouble, I don’t gotta be watched, in half as many words.
Cora aimed to refill the man’s coffee cup, thereafter, soon as Theo had stopped crying; when all three of her boys were fed and trundling happily to play in the yard again.
“Be mindful,” she warned, in an undertone, as Eliza passed her.
And later, beside the fireplace in their home upstairs, “You can talk to him just fine, ‘Liza. Talking’s fine. It’s what men come to expect when you’re friendly with ‘em worries me. Happen I should buy you a wedding ring. Just to pretend.”
“I’m not about to pretend,” said Eliza. “You don’t know him. I don’t. He might be a gentleman.”
“Gentlemen are the worst of the lot,” said Cora, and that was that, for the rest of the evening.
Until the third time.
*
It was a week gone by, quiet and uneventful.
Mr Winton had visited four times in six days, and stayed for the majority of the afternoon on each, and all that amounted to gossip in the town was that Mrs Browne from two doors left of the chapel had been caught sneaking off again with the carpenter’s boy — a half her age — to no one’s real surprise.
They hadn’t been open for long, but twenty minutes, dedicated to sweeping the floors, scrubbing down the tables that yesterday Cora said could wait ‘til the morning. She was in the kitchen, kneading the dough, and Eliza out front with a rag cloth in hand.
Glory, glory, Hallelujah, sung in a whisper beneath her breath.
When the stranger shouldered his way into the coffee house, he brought in the breeze and a flurry of rust-coloured leaves, the smell of the lye soap from the hotel, as he came on foot from across the street. Eliza made good to pretend she hadn’t been watching; hadn’t seen him leave shortly before to make the journey to collect his mail; a letter, now tucked into the crook of his arm.
The stranger assessed the coffee house as twice before, taking his usual seat, unfolding the letter. Reading. He mouthed the words silently before turning the paper over, and back, and read it all over again.
“From your folks?” was Eliza’s greeting, with a nod to the letter.
The stranger twitched it away from her prying eyes as she rounded to his side, the cloth tossed over her shoulder.
“Some’in’ like that,” he said, followed by a pause. “You know, that’s awful nosy.”
“Do you mind?” Eliza asked.
She had a feeling, an inkling, like the giddy and ticklish sensation beneath her skin, that he did not — and the laugh he let out? Deep, yet boyish, and displaying every one of those straight, ivory teeth. The sound kept the suggestion of the storm, prickling in the air outside, at bay. It lit the coffee house from the inside, where the sky beyond the window was dark, leaden and heavy with clouds.
He didn’t answer, not that Eliza was dissuaded.
She set to fixing him something to drink, all too aware when Cora’s head poked from around the kitchen doorway, eyes narrowed, and yet set the cup down with a peculiar flourish. For that singular glorious hour, they had the place to themselves.
Eliza. The stranger, tucking the letter away.
She could feel his gaze drifting over to her on occasion, and so the next smile she gave to him, edged with coy excitement, was returned lopsidedly.
“That dog you moved yours?”
“What?” said Eliza. “Oh, no. A mongrel, he was. A stray.” She paused in her wiping of the adjacent table. “Just the boys found it out back and I didn’t want them messing. They’re curious, see. ‘Specially the older two.”
“I thought as much.”
“Andrew says he’s gonna be a doctor one day.”
“Is that right.” The stranger smiled again. A quirk of his eyebrows followed, in the shadow of his hat. “And, uh — Andrew — is — are they yours?”
“I ain’t married, sir,” Eliza told him, “so…” No. She was nineteen years old with the only suitor in her life being the boy who had died after falling into the river, two winters back, and drowned although the townsfolk pulled him out.
She decided against continuing with that sorry story, however, choosing to interpret the stranger’s hum as an indication of his satisfaction.
“What about you?” Eliza said, as she straightened up. “D’you have a family, sir, to be writing them letters? ‘Cause that’s what the boys are to me, you know, whether or not we got the same blood.”
“It’s Arthur,” said the stranger. “Hell, I ain’t no sir.”
“Eliza,” she said. “But do you?”
“I got people; no blood, but as good as.”
“Like me.”
“Like you,” said Arthur, “yeah.”
He was reaching his hand out then, into the empty space between them, and after a moment Eliza realised he meant for her to shake it.
Thumb up, his warm palm open.
A gentleman, supplied the voice in the back of Eliza’s head, although something was deeply wrong in the assumption when he was sitting before her.
Maybe, she thought, those callouses on his fingers. The faintest trace of the scabs on his knuckles, where his free hand lay atop the table.
A half of Eliza expected the stranger — this, Arthur — to drag her in immediately as she accepted the shake, ‘cause he was back to looking at her like she was something of interest, an enigma in an apron and floral dress; like he might want to tear it off in private, as Cora said was common. God’s design. Men were unable to help themselves when faced with a woman they found appealing. And that half feared it.
The other flushed hot and squealed and giggled, and Eliza found herself preening when the man held her hand and raised the back of it to his lips.
“You’ll get me in mighty big trouble,” she warned him, almost breathless, as an honest smirk slid across Arthur’s mouth and he chuckled, and let her go. Too soon. “I’m serious,” said Eliza. But she didn’t leave the table.
She fell into the chair opposite, convinced her knees might buckle.
That Cora would be out at any second with a rag cloth of her own raised, to beat the stranger out of the coffee house.
“I’m real innocent, y’know,” Arthur said. “I ain’t stoppin’ you workin’.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t. You’d like me to leave?”
“No,” said Eliza quickly. “Lord, no, just — look,” she said. And right on cue, dear Cora, coming out of the kitchen. Eliza was back on her feet as quickly as she’d sat down. “Just don’t go makin’ passes,” she hissed, yet another source of Arthur’s amusement. “Not when she’s here. Woman’s like my keeper!”
*
Was easy then, their talking. All through the end of September and into mid-autumn, October, a month where Arthur scarcely left, neither town nor the coffee house.
Eliza watched, as he watched the world, and marvelled always at his patience; how the man could ignore every person but her in the place in favour of staring onto the street, and yet flinch to attention at the sound of rolling coins, quick across the floor if they were dropped, as if he’d never held even the most modest of riches in his life.
Sensible, level-headed after schooling herself, Eliza determined to keep their relations pure.
Not only for Cora’s sake, but her own, as well.
After all, no one liked a loose woman. And Eliza was certain she wouldn’t fall into that category.
So it started small.
General conversation. Hello, Arthur. Good morning. Good afternoon. Cora’s made the cobbler you like so much again. Clyde, would you let him alone, please? I’m sorry, you know you won’t get a moment’s peace when they’re in here. Yet Arthur didn’t complain. Sometimes, he would ask the boys what game they were playing, if they’d been out in the street before coming for something to eat, and Eliza, too, about her evenings; what she did when the coffee house was closed up. How she spent her Sundays.
She explained about the apple orchards, not too far out of town. Said they should go together, even if the fruits had been harvested.
Eliza also asked near repeatedly about his work, although there was never a clear answer. Not really. Arthur was more content to let Eliza guess, and he laughed when she said she’d never seen anyone but an army man care to keep a gun so well-polished.
“I don’t believe for a second, sir,” she said, “that you’re a cowboy or a ranch-hand.”
“Well, I’m not,” Arthur told her, his grin wide and friendly, unaffected by the lashing of the rain on the roof above their heads. “What’s it to you?”
“I prefer to know who I’m gettin’ myself involved with,” said Eliza.
Still enamoured. She couldn’t stop herself from admiring the shift of blue-green in the stranger’s eyes, nor even the nick on his cheek, where he’d caught himself shaving.
“It’s like this,” Arthur said, as he leaned across the table. Secretive, now. “You look after your livelihood, don’tcha? And if you sweep these floors, polish them glasses — every glass in here ‘til it shines — I do the same. Only mine takes a bullet.”
“So you’re like one of those gunslingers,” Eliza guessed, “from a book. I don’t know if that’s a job.”
“I do what I gotta,” said Arthur, “that’s all.”
The closest to the truth, for a good long while.
It must’ve worked to placate Eliza, all the same; to feed the curiosity shared by Clyde and Andrew, and occasionally Theo, if he were being carted around in his mother’s arms because he wouldn’t quit his maudlin, ‘til Arthur looked, and smiled soft, and quietened something in his little self that he barely had the words to speak of.
Eliza liked that about Arthur more than anything.
She noticed when Theo toddled over to his side, on a day of slow business when the rain was still pelting down, great sheets of it, and all three boys were hiding out and playing with their toy soldiers, the gloom overridden again by Arthur’s laughter. He needn’t have entertained Theo, for his brothers were right there, calling out. But after several seconds of being stared at, the child with the mousy brown hair sticking up at all angles — after this, Arthur lifted him onto another chair, plucked his hat from his own head, and placed it onto Theo’s.
“I, uh — I knew a woman hadda little brother, back in Sedgwick County,” Arthur offered, when Eliza later teased him. “He seemed to like wearin’ it, I ‘spose.”
And so did Theo.
From that point on he took an active interest in Arthur, the man who’s hat smelt like woodsmoke, cold damp air, a cheap pomade sold in the general store. His horse was the only one in the street at which Theo would point, and want to pat, and maybe that was why Cora loosened her reigns as well; even warmed a tad to the stranger who became a regular. It certainly contributed to her chastising turning slowly from stay well away to Eliza, be careful, I mean it, though she continued to give to Eliza that stern, knowing look, whenever she caught her slacking; when Eliza’s pivotal mistake was to press too closely as she cleared the plates from Arthur’s table, accidentally-on-purpose enticing his eyes to the soft skin where the top buttons of Eliza’s dress were undone.
She thought of him like that, and far more than was Christian. When she oughtn’t to.
If it were Eliza lonesome at night and every stirring Annie-Mae had spoken of feeling in the weeks before she married her husband bubbled to the surface, Eliza found herself aching with the want of it. Am I your girl? the question on her lips.
Do you like me enough to ask yet?
Worse was that Cora began to ponder aloud about Arthur’s intentions during his stay, like what Arthur was doing between jobs, why he was still around.
“What on God’s green earth is he waiting for?”
But the answer came thereafter. Two more men, older than him; one with fine hair the colour of beach sand and the other’s thick and dark and curling like sin at the base of his neck.
The what, and who, Arthur had waited for.
He met them on the wagon-dragged street, horse tethered up by the hotel, though he led both of theirs — a black, and a dappled grey — across to the front of the coffee house, despite their gesturing to the saloon.
“S’about Goddamn time,” he was saying, in a hush, as he opened the door.
The dark haired man first, pocket watch and vest; the light blond patting Arthur on the shoulder and explaining away their absence.
For almost an hour they sat and talked, at the table by the window with an extra chair pulled up alongside. Cora came bustling in, of course, because that man in the vest she didn’t trust an inch, couldn’t reason why, though Eliza understood even as he smiled and tipped well and tidied the cups into a neat stack when they had finished their drinks.
Suddenly, Eliza found herself terrified to tread too closely. She hovered in the peripheral, listening hard above Mr Winton’s persistent clearing of his throat, and did she enjoy it?
For once, she did not.
Mary, the men said. They repeated the woman’s name several times in the course of their conversation, to varying replies and retorts from Arthur; and Eliza, whilst unable to make out the full extent of what they discussed — for they kept their voices low — heard the name every time, in between the mentions of how Miss Grimshaw was to be bringing John over soon, how he’d finally calmed down —
And Mary. The farm. And Mary!
Perpetually, back to Mary.
“I don’t care a lick,” Arthur growled eventually. “D’y’hear me? I don’t. I’ve had plenty of time to think, and I ain’t goin’ back, Dutch, ‘cause this? Right here.” He threw a hand into the air, a suggestion of the scowl he’d worn when he originally arrived in town back in place on his face. “It’s a good distraction, y’know! I’ve got — pretty girls — a good room — ”
“You needn’t be angry.” This, from the dark haired man.
He shot an apologetic simper at the ladies on the closest table, all short of clutching their pearls. (An argument? In public?)
“All I mean is that we had a plan, Arthur, for after here…”
“Well, you mighta mentioned it before you got me so involved with her,” said Arthur sulkily, turning away, and his companions didn’t have an answer for that.
They fell into an uncomfortable silence; Eliza, into a sort of daze, where she proceeded about her duties without the conscious thought, and told herself she wouldn’t cry, and nevertheless had to excuse herself early from work to drag a hand over her damp cheeks.
How foolish.
Pathetic, pressed against the cold grey wall at the side of the coffee house.
She didn’t know for how long she stood, gasping and trying to collect herself, only that Arthur had found her eventually, when the light had lowered with the fading, lutescent line of the sun on the horizon.
“I didn’t mean distraction,” he stressed, “or — for Christ’s sake! You shouldn’t’ve been listenin’.”
“Is that how you see me?” Eliza asked. “Are there others? Pretty girls.”
“Ah, Darlin’…”
The first time Arthur had called Eliza anything other than her name, with the vaguest hints of irritable desperation as he attempted to back-peddle into her good graces once more.
Turns out, it was easy enough done.
All it really took for Eliza to forgive whatever she didn’t know clearly about was a kiss stolen in the alleyway, inches from where she’d left the dead dog — now, nowhere to be found — and the grip of Arthur’s fingers around her cheek and her chin and the intensity of the tobacco-come-coffee flavour that stuck to the inside of his mouth; that flooded out on his breath into the scant space between them when he insisted, no. “I only talk to you, ‘Liza.”
“D’you promise?”
“I swear it.”
*
“You’re a good girl,” Cora told her wearily, that evening, “but them cowboys don’t differentiate between a good girl and a whore. Remember little Edie Fisher? There, see.”
“I remember,” said Eliza.
For that’s how men were, with most, even when they thought they were being discrete.
Every woman for a country mile knew that Benjamin Bryan had promised Edie to marry her, when he was next back in town; that he loved her. But the damage had already been done. Edie had pressed every dime she’d ever earned into Benjamin Bryan’s palm, urging him to buy a ring, saying they’d take up together and that life would be easier on his return. But, Benjamin never came back. Edie had been ousted from her home when the rent came around and she couldn’t pay, and now the poor girl was whoring to pay for the accommodation she took in the boarding house for destitute women, fallen from grace. Too bespoiled for other men.
“Arthur’s real different,” said Eliza firmly, and almost completely convinced by her own words. “I just know it, Cora. He is. Patience, and you’ll see.”
*
But he wasn’t.
Or he was, but Eliza hadn’t to know in the beginning that he’d prove himself better than the others; any ghosts, the skeletons lurking in the back of Cora’s closet.
Arthur didn’t try to kiss Eliza again, for a while. He kept a respectable distance to appease Cora Dearest and besides that, grew busy. So suddenly. He wasn’t in the coffee house every day for Eliza’s amusement; even bailed on the walk they’d plan to take on the Sunday, making his excuses later.
Despite this, Eliza remained hopeful — as a child at Christmas — for more keenly she felt the bubble of arousal so low and carnal inside after that moment in the alley, and she believed Arthur’s promise, of no girl in town but her. To the Devil with his Mary. She sat out the days as he strode around with his friends, at ease with them despite their disagreements, and she smiled big and let herself fall into the trap of romance whenever Arthur came by in between, once with an apple, shiny and fresh from the grocer.
He threw it to her, a couple of paces away in the street as she swept the front porch of the coffee house, uncaring for the lingering remnants of the gunpowder on his fingers, nor on the apple itself; the smokey tang of the bite beneath Eliza’s teeth.
That Arthur remembered was a reward in and of its own.
Eliza wasn’t likely to complain of his newfound routine, to Cora, to anyone, when every second he spared in her company was as sweet as the apple’s flesh beneath its skin. Some burdens were made to be carried alone, Ernest had explained in the distant past, back when Eliza was newly orphaned, and he was trying to provide comfort having never known his own parents — so carry them, Eliza did. There was no getting around the fact, that she wanted to kiss Arthur again and to be kissed; to be swallowed up whole by the man who hadn’t the right to take up so much room in her mind, and yet did, with his tender stories of far-flung lands and outlaws and renegades.
A fabrication, he joked. Until it wasn’t. And tiny trinkets and then whole heaps of cash started to disappear from the businesses and homesteads around the town, and Cora swore blind it had something to do with that stranger with the dark hair.