Sweetwater Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  Sweetwater

  Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Henry

  Cover by: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  Editors: Rachel Haimowitz and Danielle Poiesz

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the copyright owner, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review.

  First edition

  September, 2014

  Smashwords edition

  March, 2018

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  Wyoming Territory, 1870

  Elijah Carter is afflicted. Most of the townsfolk of South Pass City treat him as a simpleton because he’s deaf, but that’s not what shames him the most. Something in Elijah runs contrary to nature and to God. Something that Elijah desperately tries to keep hidden.

  Harlan Crane, owner of the Empire saloon, knows Elijah for what he is—and for all the ungodly things he wants. And Crane isn’t the only one. Grady Mullins desires Elijah too, but unlike Crane, he refuses to push or mistreat the young man.

  When violence shatters Elijah’s world, he is caught between two very different men and two devastating urges: revenge and despair. In a boomtown teetering on the edge of a bust, Elijah must face what it means to be a man in control of his own destiny, and choose a course that might end his life . . . or truly begin it for the very first time.

  For Rachel, for making me write it, and for Jill, for reading it first.

  Also for my mum, for helping me imagine I was a cowboy.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  1870, South Pass City, Wyoming Territory

  A spray of blood hit his face like hot rain, and Elijah Carter clamped his mouth shut.

  “Hold him! Hold him!” The rough, angry shout cut right through the bellow of the distressed beast, and through Elijah’s partial deafness.

  The rope had slipped when Dawson made the first cut, and the yearling was trying to buck them off now. Elijah and Lovell had it pushed against the fence post and were attempting to hold it there, Lovell against its hindquarters and Elijah shoulder to shoulder with the beast. He didn’t know which of them had the worst end of it. He wasn’t sorry to be out of the way of those back legs, but if the swinging thick skull of the panicked animal collided with his, he’d be in real trouble. Elijah pushed his forehead against its neck. Closer was safer, if they could hold it.

  Dawson was drunk, probably. His hands shook too much, and they were weak nowadays. He’d been a good butcher once, back when Elijah first started working with him, scrubbing the floors and the counters in the shop and doing the deliveries. Then Dawson’s drinking had picked up, and now he couldn’t even slaughter a yearling without fucking it up. The blow he’d delivered hadn’t stunned the beast at all, only terrified it.

  Elijah’s cheek scraped against the yearling’s coarse coat. He smelled blood and dust.

  The yearling pitched forward, and Elijah’s grip slipped.

  “I said hold him, you simple deaf cunt!” Dawson grunted.

  He didn’t need to see the shape of Dawson’s mouth in the lamplight to make out the words. He’d heard the insult often enough.

  Hot blood washed over Elijah’s fingers. He dug his boots in the dirt, fighting against the struggling animal. It bellowed—a long, high-pitched sound that vibrated against Elijah’s face, his hands. It moved through him and jarred his bones.

  He closed his eyes as Dawson’s knife passed close in front of his face. He hoped Dawson wasn’t drunk enough to take his fingers with the next cut. He also hoped the lamp hanging off the fence gave enough light for Dawson to finish the task quickly for the yearling’s sake.

  Working in the dark was dangerous, but it had to be done. The cattle were mavericks, brought down from the hills into South Pass City when honest men were sleeping. They had to be slaughtered and butchered under the cover of the night, and served up on dinner plates all over town before the deputy came asking questions.

  Elijah hadn’t seen the faces of the men who’d herded them into town. There had been four of them maybe, all wearing their hats pulled low. In the darkness, they could have been anyone. Elijah hadn’t stared; it was safer that way. He’d stayed out of the way while Dawson had done business with the men, then Lovell had come to fetch him. And here they were.

  The yearling bellowed again.

  Blood again. A flood of it this time, as free-flowing and hot as freshly poured bathwater. It turned Elijah’s stomach, and he fought the instinct to pull away.

  The animal sank to its knees, and Elijah went forward with it. He could hear its heartbeat echoing inside his skull, in panicked counterpoint to his own. It beat slower, and slower still.

  Elijah was slick with blood. He shifted back, his body aching. He kept one bloodied hand on the neck of the yearling, his fingers splayed. It was too weak to struggle now. Its ears flicked back and forth, and its eyes rolled.

  The yearling’s breath came in short pants. So did Elijah’s. Kneeling together in the dirt, they waited. Blood, black in the night, pooled around them.

  Dawson laughed, lifting his arm to wipe his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. The blade of the knife made an arc in the scant lamplight, held tight in Dawson’s yellow, swollen hand. His skin was like that these days, and his gut was bloated too. Elijah had read enough of Dr. Carter’s medical books to recognize it as cirrhosis. Dawson was an asshole, and with every day, every drink, he moved closer to death. Elijah had more sympathy for the beast than the butcher.

  The yearling sighed, stilled.

  Lovell dropped a hand on Elijah’s shoulder. “We’re done.”

  Lovell never treated him like a fool. Never pulled his mouth into exaggerated shapes to mock the way Elijah spoke. Never laughed at him or slapped him in the head for being slow to understand.

  Elijah rose to his feet, bracing himself against the dead yearling. The beast felt more unyielding now than when it had been struggling against them. Dead things always did. The difference between alive and dead was both infinitesimal and immense: the tiny space of a single heartbeat was as wide as an abyss.

  He spat and wiped his hands on his bloody apron, for all the difference that it made.

  Dawson laughed again, a short, sharp sound that was more like a bark.

&n
bsp; Lovell turned his grizzled face to Elijah—the crooked nose, the wrinkled face, the graying beard, the skin made brown and coarse by the sun. Lovell formed his words slowly and clearly. He always did when he spoke to Elijah. Not many people bothered. “Get home before your pa misses you. You hear me?”

  Elijah nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  He bent down to clamber through the rails of the pen. Near the back door of the shop, he fished in the bottom of the tub of water for the block of lye soap. He made a face as he broke the oily scum on the water’s surface, then rubbed up a lather over his arms. He cupped his hands in the water and splashed it over his face. Water dripped off his nose and lips and back into the tub. Ripples radiated across the dark surface.

  He peeled off his apron. It was wet through with blood. It wasn’t the leather apron of a butcher but the calico one of a shop boy who should have been scrubbing the floors with lye and cleaning the windows with vinegar and newspaper, not climbing into the pen to slaughter yearlings. Except tonight, when they had to work fast.

  He lifted the lantern down from the hook. His hands were red with rope burn. And hell, he’d be sore in the morning. He wasn’t used to working with the cattle, and they panicked at the smell of blood. All that instinctual fear translated into pure force, and Elijah felt sorry for every beast he’d hauled toward its death.

  Dawson said he was nothing but a weak deaf cunt with no stomach for blood, but it wasn’t about the blood. Hell, Elijah was no stranger to blood. He was a doctor’s adopted son, after all, and had seen just as much tissue and muscle stripped bare on the table in Dr. Carter’s cabin than he had in Dawson’s butcher shop. It seemed strange to him that folk were expected to offer comfort to one frightened soul crossing the abyss and not another. A man’s eyes rolled in his head the same as a yearling’s.

  He slipped into the shop, balling his apron up in his hands.

  He was tired and wondered if Dr. Carter had noticed his absence. Maybe, if he’d been called out himself. Otherwise, Elijah might be able to slip back inside the cabin while he slept. He wasn’t a child—by best reckoning he was twenty—but Dr. Carter worried for him because of his deafness. He worried, and he lectured.

  There were things Elijah shouldn’t do.

  He shouldn’t stare.

  He shouldn’t mumble.

  He shouldn’t shout.

  He shouldn’t walk around with his head in the clouds.

  He shouldn’t go into the saloons or cardrooms.

  And he shouldn’t worry if he woke up in the night and Dr. Carter wasn’t there.

  Dr. Carter never said anything about Elijah not being there when he woke up though. He probably never thought it would happen. Probably thought he’d raised Elijah better. Dr. Carter was so worried that Elijah might get entangled in the immoral—saloons, card houses, alcohol, and loose women—that he must have thought a warning lecture about the illegal was unnecessary. Elijah didn’t know if he should be proud or ashamed of the way his adoptive father had underestimated him.

  Ashamed, he guessed.

  He rolled his aching shoulders. He just wanted to get home, get properly cleaned up, and get into bed.

  A touch on his shoulder: “Elijah.”

  He jumped and spun around. His heart hammered, and he hated that. Hated to feel startled, and stupid.

  Lovell sighed and held up an envelope. “Dawson wants you to take this to the Empire on your way home.”

  Elijah took the envelope. Money, probably. “The Empire?”

  “Straight to Mr. Crane. Understand?”

  Elijah bit his lip and nodded. “Yes, sir. Straight to Mr. Crane.”

  He wondered if Dawson was paying his gambling debts or if it was something else. Someone must have negotiated between Dawson and the cowboys who’d brought the yearlings down from the Wind River Range. A man like Harlan Crane was in a good position to do that, so maybe that explained it.

  Lovell patted him on the shoulder. “Good night, Elijah.”

  Elijah tucked the thick envelope into his pocket. “Good night.”

  He slipped out into the darkness.

  The Empire had sprung up with the boom. The first month, it was a large tent on the western end of South Pass City. The month after that it was a square flat-roofed cabin like most of the other buildings in town. From then, it had grown outward like a paper wasp’s nest. Now it was two levels high, with a large veranda, and stretched all the way to the street behind. It was always busy at night, always full of men and light and music. Shouting and screaming, a cacophony that was impossible for Elijah to comprehend. He couldn’t tell the difference between revelry and violence, and in a place like the Empire it could turn in a heartbeat.

  There were fights in the saloons most nights; grievances that began out in the dirt and the rocks of the diggings and were aggravated back in town by liquor and bravado. There were always miners who needed stitching up. Only last week, one of the women from the Empire—one of the whores—had been cut in the face with a razor. Dr. Carter had been sent for, and he’d said later that the man who’d cut the whore had already been dealt with when he’d arrived.

  No more was said about the incident, at least not in Elijah’s presence. It could have been shouted from the rooftops for all he knew, but he mostly needed to follow a man’s lips to know what was being said around him. He hadn’t seen anyone get dragged off to the jail, but he suspected the man had never left the Empire. That was the reputation the place had.

  The street around the saloon stank of liquor and piss.

  There was always a man working the door of the Empire. Always, from what Elijah could tell, the same man. He was big, bearded, and wore a stained shirt. There was a woman with him tonight, wearing her hair loose and her skirts hitched up. Her drawers were showing. Elijah’s face burned just from thinking about how she fucked men for money. He wondered how many men she’d known. He wondered if she liked it.

  His heart beat faster as he stepped up onto the porch. He was conscious of his bloodstained shirt, of his shaking hands, and of what Dr. Carter euphemistically called his affliction. Men like this one didn’t know the difference between deafness and idiocy. Elijah fucking knew it, just by looking.

  “Whatcha want, kid?”

  Elijah had to watch the man’s mouth carefully. His lips were obscured by his beard, making them difficult to read. “I have something for Mr. Crane, from Mr. Dawson.”

  The man just stared.

  God. Had he mumbled? Sometimes he didn’t know. His face burned as he tried again. “I have something for Mr. Crane, from Mr. Dawson. The butcher.”

  The hairy man held his hand out.

  He looked at those blunt, scarred fingers, and then back to the man’s face. “I’m to give it directly to Mr. Crane.” He flinched as the man bristled. “Sir.”

  The whore laughed at that. She threw her head back. Her throat undulated.

  The hairy man narrowed his eyes. “You’re the butcher’s boy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I know you.” The man’s beard split in a gap-toothed grin. “You’re Doc Carter’s son. The deaf kid.” He clapped his hands over his ears and laughed.

  Elijah balled his fingers into fists. “Yes, sir.”

  Fucking asshole.

  “Gorn,” the man said, nodding toward the door.

  Gorn. It took Elijah a moment to dredge the words out of the drawl. Gorn. Go on.

  Trying to swallow down his misgivings, he went inside.

  The light hit Elijah first—lanterns hanging from the ceiling, their glass panes gleaming—and then the noise. A sudden wall of it. Voices, laughter, music—all at once, all too loud, and impossible for Elijah to pick the threads apart into something he could recognize. This noise wasn’t cohesive. It didn’t flow together. It competed, and it made him nervous.

  There were too many people, too much happening, and Elijah fought the urge to turn and walk out.

  The Empire was probably no better or worse than any other salo
on in town. A long bar, the shelves behind it stacked with bottles. A piano. Tables and chairs. Sawdust on the floor. It smelled of whiskey, cigar smoke, and stale sweat.

  And people. The Empire was full of people. Miners, mostly. Some townsmen. Whores. And, sitting together at a corner table, four men that might have been ranchers. Might have been anyone, but something about them seemed familiar—their number, their bearing—and Elijah wondered if they were the same cowboys who had delivered the mavericks to Dawson. As Elijah walked toward the bar, the men turned their heads to watch him.

  One face stood out more than the rest: a square, stubbled jaw, sun-bleached hair, and eyes the color of the sky after a storm. Those eyes narrowed as the man looked at him.

  Elijah dropped his gaze quickly.

  God. It was a mistake coming in here.

  Soft fingers curled around his wrist, and Elijah started.

  “Come with me,” the whore from the front porch said. She looked older close-up. “I’ll take you to Mr. Crane.”

  She smelled of perfume and cigar smoke.

  He let himself be led through the barroom, toward the stairs. Some men watched him, some didn’t. Someone shouted something that Elijah didn’t catch—the man turned his face away as Elijah watched—but it was followed by openmouthed laughter from the men sitting around him.

  The whore laughed as well. Her painted lips made a moue. She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Special delivery for Mr. Crane!”

  More laughter, and Elijah’s face burned.

  The stairs creaked as he followed the whore; he felt the movement underfoot.

  Most of the doors upstairs were closed. One was open. He glanced in as they passed. He saw rumpled blankets and a woman sleeping with her nightdress rucked up to her dimpled thighs. She lay on her back with one arm flung over her head. She was snoring. Elijah looked away.