Heart of the West by Penelope Williamson

decent women out here, and some men forget how to behave."
    His gaze came back to hers and then settled hard and long on her mouth. Her lips felt as if they were burning. It was all she could do not to wet them with her tongue or to cover them with her fingers. Hold me, she suddenly wanted to say to him. Kiss me.
    "Why don't you go ahead and wash up?" he said, and an instant later the door shut behind him.
    She curled her hand into a fist and pressed it to her mouth.
    The room was the size of a horse stall, part of a larger room that had been broken up with calico partitions. One of the partitions went up to the middle of the room's only window, and there was a three-inch gap between the deep-set sashed panes and the calico wall. She could hear men moving about and talking on the other side of the thin cloth, which had once been red but was now faded to a dusty rose. She saw the flash of a brown flannel sleeve through the gap when one of the men came up to the window.
    Through the dust-streaked glass Clementine could look down on the chippies she must pretend did not exist as they strolled like pretty birds along the boardwalk in their bright plumes and niched trains. Soiled doves, Gus had called them, these women who sold themselves for a man's pleasure outside the sanctity of the marriage bed.
    The marriage bed.
    She stared at the jack bed built into the corner, with its moth-eaten gray army blanket and lumpy straw ticking. There were intimacies between husband and wife that went beyond kissing and a man holding his woman in his arms. To share his bed, to lie with him, to become one flesh. "I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me." Words—sly, whispered words, the sacred, solemn words of Scripture—words were all she knew of the physical act of loving. She was Gus McQueen's wife, but there had been no marriage bed for them as yet.
    They had passed the train ride from Boston to Saint Louis on hard wooden benches, pressed knee to knee with a family of German immigrants. The swaying, smoking kerosene lamps and the reek of sausage and sauerkraut had Clementine passing the hours in a haze of nausea. The one night they'd spent in a hotel in Saint Louis had been in separate rooms, for they hadn't yet become husband and wife. The next morning they'd been married by a judge, and they'd gone from the courthouse straight to the levee and boarded the steamboat that would take them up the Missouri River to Fort Benton.
    The steamer was making its first run of the year, over a month earlier than usual because of a light winter. They were only a day out of Saint Louis when the captain spotted the smoke of a rival boat, and it became a race to see who could navigate the tricky waters of the river faster. They dodged ice floes and uprooted trees in the rough current. They stopped rarely, only to wood up, even traveling at night and sounding the channel by lantern light.
    She had seen buffalo once, an enormous herd that was a black smudge on the horizon. Once they'd been fired upon by hostile Indians that Gus said were the same Sioux who'd massacred General Custer at the Little Big Horn only three years before. But they'd been too far away for her to see so much as a feather on their war bonnets, and their shots had fallen harmlessly in the water, sounding like a string of firecrackers.
    To Clementine, safe on the riverboat, it had all been so exciting, like living an adventure out of one of Shona's novels. Gus had been less a husband to her than a companion in that adventure, the wood-wise scout to her intrepid explorer. Their nights they'd spent sleeping in the common room of some woodyard with the steamer's roustabouts. Or in cots on the second deck with only a canvas tarp to shelter them and no privacy at all—
    "I thought you were going to wash up."
    She swung around, startled, for she hadn't heard the door open. Gus shut it with the heel of his boot. He came right up to her until only a handspan separated them, and she had