Lula was pissed. As she sat over the tin bath full of
rapidly freezing water, cleaning the piss and shit off his breeches, she was
pissed. No matter how slow or fast she scrubbed, his snoring followed the same
tempo. She sped up, he went into a full whine, she slowed down, he became a fat
sow. And when she stopped he gurgled in the back of his throat.
As annoying as his snoring was, and as much as she hated
scrubbing the piss, shit and the smell of other women out of his stinking
breeches, she was pissed because in two days this would all be stopping. The
feckless idiot, only three days home from chasing a fruitless bounty in the
Black Hills, would be leaving with those asshole Johnson brothers to head down
to Lubbock, Texas to try and bring in a wild gun they called Texas Red. Three
days, she thought as she worked on a particularly stubborn piece of shit, three
days he’s been back and he’s only fucked me properly once. If once includes him
not moving and then finishing before she’d even got started.
But she loved him. She’d loved him since the moment, as a
13-year-old, when he beat her elder cousin Bo for picking on the handicapped
boy who lived with his drunk father at the back of the saloon. The way he did
it, no trace of anger, just a stern look, a whispered threat and a solid
backhand when they didn’t suffice.
Two years after that she’d watched him come and go. He was
10 years older than her and every now and then he’d ride into town with another
woman. She hated that, but couldn’t help admire that he’d bring whatever woman
he wanted back. Black, Injun, Mexican, he didn’t care, the only thing he cared
was that they were pretty in the face, heavy in the chest and wide of hip.
By the time she hit 15 she knew he’d started to look at her.
It was July 1876, not long after the railroad began sneaking out towards their
town. He’d arrived back a week or so earlier with a hellcat Mexican woman with
eyes like the devil. From her window Lula could hear them. The screams when
they fought, the crashes and bangs when she threw anything she could get her
hands on and then the iron bed rattling the death train as they made up.
It was wet that morning. After three weeks of dust storms
the clouds broke and God pissed all over them. Dogs wallowed in the sod, kids
bathed in the puddles and Old Man Hickey, who’d been three parts mental since
birth, drank so much of the water that was contaminated with horse shit that
they had to stick him in the gaol after he tried to grope one of the whores in
O’Reilly’s.
She’d been on the porch peeling Daddy’s potatoes when she
heard the yell. Before she looked she knew it was him, and there he was,
chasing that Mexican out of his house, his body naked save for his gun belt and
boots and the contents of the chamber pot the hellcat had emptied over his
head. Lula never did ask why that had happened, but listening to him snoring
she could probably guess. He was just about to turn back into his house when he
stopped and looked over his shoulder, normally he’d have just nodded but his
gaze washed over her as he looked her up and down and smiled. She blushed like
a spring Primrose and tried not to look down from his eyes. At least not until
he turned around.
They were married three weeks later. Her Daddy wasn’t happy
at first, but after he’d beaten him at Stud and drank all his whiskey, they
came to an arrangement. Lula was Daddy’s favourite, on account of her looking
and acting like their dear Mother and not him. In every other child he saw his
deficiencies. The huge bent nose, the sallow Irish skin and the red hair he
thought a deficiency. But she was all her mother. 5’3”, hair raven black and
eyes that he said danced like a pair of wild Mustangs in the moonlight. She had
to take Daddy’s word for it as her Mother had died when she was three of the
consumption
The first year they’d been married was heaven. She persuaded
him to stop Bounty hunting and take a job dealing cards at the saloon. They
were happy, he’d saunter home every night and they’d drink a little, smoke a
little and fuck a lot. They fucked all around that little house, her held in
his arms and balanced on places she never even thought she’d sit, let alone do
that.
Then came the first miscarriage and the sex had to stop for
a while. He was fine about it, not like Duane Widdows who everybody knew was
back on his poor wife the moment she had given birth. He looked after her, even
cooked for her, and he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. But after the
fifth, when she was too broken inside to consider anything but the Laudanum, he
quit his job at the saloon and took up his guns again.
Three years now it had been this way. She knew he still
loved her, still wanted her, but she’d lost some of him along the way. For
months at a time he’d leave, and it’s not that she minded him seeking a bed
when he was away, after all he was only human and she’d come very close with
young Charlie Widdows when he came to chop her wood. It was that he wasn’t
there. That they were no longer the exception to the rule in a town where women
kept their mouths shut and their skirts open.
But she could never hate him. As she wrung his breeches out
and went to the kitchen he stirred and mumbled something. She walked over to
him, hoping that he was asking for her, that he wanted her to climb in with
him. But he wasn’t, he was dreaming about something. Fool’s Gold, Whore’s
skirts, who knew, what she knew that it wasn’t her.
As he rolled over and turned his back to her, she walked to
the kitchen, picked up his tobacco and headed to the porch. She knew the busy
body from across the street would tell everyone that she saw Lulu Hackett
rolling her own cigarettes and drinking whiskey, and she also knew that they’d
say that was why she couldn’t have a child. But she didn’t care. As she put the
cigarette between her lips, a mangy dog walked up and slumped in front of the
porch. Normally she’d shoo it away, fleabag that it was, but she figured they
had a bit in common. Inhaling deeply she began to rock to the beat of his
snoring, replacing the thought of him leaving with the sight of Charlie Widdows
chest under that shirt.
Owen Blackhurst
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