His stomach was still tight, and there was an acid taste in the back of his throat from the narrow game he had played over at the hotel. It had never crossed his mind that Chinky might get involved, and there was no way he could have told her that he hadn't loaded the gun. After long cogitation earlier that afternoon, he had worked out that this was the way the Ringo Kid would play it. The hardest part of the 'ploy' (that's what Mr. Anthony Bradford Chumms called Ringo's tricks) had been fighting off his urge to slip into the Other Place when that hand had descended suddenly on his shoulder. But the ploy had worked; the next time they saw him with the gun, they would be relaxed and off their guard.
He decided it wasn't worthwhile to start a fire in the potbellied stove, considering that in half an hour he would be going to the Mercantile for supper; following his usual routine, as B. J. had instructed him, to avoid suspicion. As soon as it got dark, Ruth Lillian would sneak down behind the buildings to the back door of the store, and both he and Mr. Kane would learn if there'd been any changes in Coots's plan. Matthew clutched the blanket to his throat and went to his table to light his lamp because, although it was only five o'clock, the street beyond his window was already storm-dark. He had trouble lighting the wick because his shivering made the lucifer tremble. The wick caught; he lowered the chimney; and the expanding yellow light pressed back the darkness, revealing his pa's gun standing against the wall where he had left it. He knelt beside his bed and dragged out the canvas bag, then opened the shotgun and took one of the thick shells from the bag. Matthew tried to load it into the gun… but he couldn't do it! The wax-slimy feeling of the shell made him shudder and drop it onto his bed. He scrubbed his palms hard on his trouser legs to get rid of the feeling and cleared his throat harshly to relieve the panicky constriction. He took several long, deep, slow breaths and, clenching his teeth, forced himself to reach out for the shell again and touch…
His back door burst open!
Kersti stepped through the sheet of rain falling from the roof. She was drenched to the skin, the dark of her nipples visible through her sodden dress.
'Kersti!' He crammed the shell back into the canvas bag and shoved it under his bed, then he crossed to the door and reached out through the glistening curtain of rain to pull it shut, wetting his shirtsleeve from elbow to cuff. Closing the door altered the sound of the downpour, subtracting the crisp sound of rain whipping up lather on puddles from the deeper drill on the metal roof. 'Here.' He put his blanket around her shoulders. 'What is wrong with you, coming out in a storm like this?
Your ma is going to tan you good and prop-' He stopped short. She had been hit in the face. There was a bruise on one cheekbone, and her upper lip was swollen. 'What happened?' She stood whimpering with cold and misery as rainwater dripped from her disheveled hair. 'Here, sit down. I'll get a fire going.' He pulled his soap-stiff 'other shirt' down from the string line on which it had dried a couple of days before. 'Here, use this to wipe your hair. What happened, Kersti?'
'My ma, she… ' It was hard to speak because when she unclenched her teeth they began chattering. '… she won't have me in the house! Told me to… go back… to the hotel.'
Matthew was lighting a little tepee of dry wood in his stove, splinters ripped from the walls of the derelict buildings that served the whole town as a source of kindling. 'Here, sit by the stove. What do you mean, go back to the hotel?' While she explained in a voice broken by cold and emotion, he knelt at her feet, feeding the stove first with bigger kindling, then with small chips of railroad coal. She described how Lieder had told her folks that he wanted Kersti to come over and do him, and if she didn't, then those men would beat her pa and Oskar up again, and wreck the place, and do nasty things to her and her ma. Then Lieder had left, telling her folks to think it over and follow their consciences. So her ma, she… Kersti fell silent.
Without looking up from tending the fire, Matthew asked. 'Your ma told you to go?'
'No. No, she didn't tell me to go. She just…' Kersti sniffed back a runny nose. 'She just…'
'Here. Put your hands on the stove. It's starting to warm up.'
She laid her palms on the tepid stove top then carried the warmth back to her cheeks.
'She just… what?' Matthew asked.
'She said it was up to me. I should do what I thought was right. But she wasn't sure that Pa and Oskar could take another beating up. They might fight back, then they'd get killed for sure… but it was up to me. And it would break her heart to see everything she'd worked and slaved for all these years broken up and burned… but I should do what I thought was right. Then she just stared into the corner… crying without making any noise. Then she…' Kersti shrugged and sniffed.
'She what?'
'Well, she said that if I didn't give myself to that boss man, then his men would come and rape both me and her, and since I was going to lose my virtue no matter what… but it was up to me.'
'So you went to the hotel?'
She nodded, then her face spread flat as she began to cry, hiss-sobbing between clenched teeth.
The top of the stove was too hot to touch now, but the sides were not, so Matthew put his palms against them until they were as warm as he could stand, then he put them around her throat… like his ma used to do when he came back from school wet and cold. 'It's okay, Kersti,' he said in his ma's singsong, comforting tone. 'Don't you worry. Everything'll be okay.' But he remembered how, even as a little child, he had known that was a lie; everything wouldn't be okay. Now that the stove had caught well, he opened the door and threw in the rest of the coal he had scrounged from around the old railroad depot. 'There now! You'll be warm as toast in no time!' He could hear his mother's false and helpless optimism in his voice, and he knew he was babbling on because he didn't want to learn what had happened to her in the hotel. Somehow he felt this was all his fault because of the way he'd treated Kersti.
But Kersti needed to talk about it. Staring hard at the flickering glow behind the heat-wrinkled mica of the stove door, she gingerly touched her split lip with the tip of her tongue. Then she began to speak in a drained monotone. 'He brought me upstairs and he sat me down on the bed and began talking to me… talking crazy, but real sincere, you know what I mean? He said he knew I wasn't worthy to receive his seed, but considering that the only other women in town were my ma and the hotel's whores, he'd have to make do with me. So he… he made me play with him, but his pecker wouldn't stand up… well, it'd stand up, but it wouldn't stay up, and that made him mad. Just crazy mad! Every time he'd push my legs apart and start to put it in, it'd shrink to nothing, and he'd swear and grit his teeth, and I felt pretty sure he had never done a woman… not in the regular way, anyhow. Then he… he grabbed me by my hair and snatched me around and told me that if I ever… ever… told anybody about him not being able to do a woman, he'd flay the skin off'n me! And do it real slow! And I started to blub because I was scared and because he was just about pulling my hair out! And it was like my crying made him get hot, 'cause he got hard again, but as soon as he tried to put it in, it went soft, so he raged and punched the wall until his knuckles split, and there was tears in his eyes, and he said it wasn't his fault his pecker wouldn't stay up! Somebody once beat it with a ruler! Hard! And ever since then… but he said there was something I could do to help him, and he dragged me off the bed onto my knees, and he got me by the hair and told me to get to work, so I… I…' She made a tight noise at the back of her throat. 'What could I do?' Her eyes searched Matthew's. 'I mean… what could I do?'
He closed his eyes and shook his head…. All his fault.
She didn't speak for a time, but he could hear her swallowing back tears. '… then his men started shouting from downstairs, saying you were coming across the street with a gun, and I was glad because I thought you were coming to get me out of there. But you weren't. After he… you know… did his business… he told me I better not make a sound if I didn't want to get the shit beat out of me, then he went tippy-toe down the stairs. Pretty soon he comes back up, laughing, and he starts with me again, and the storm breaks and the rain starts pelting down, and that kind of excited him, but it still wouldn't stay up, so he got real mad, and he slapped me in the face and said I'd tricked him! I wasn't no pure virgin! That's why it wouldn't stay hard! And I screamed at him that he was right! I wasn't no virgin! If he wanted a virgin, then why didn't he get that Ruth Lillian Kane with her hair all piled up, and I-!' Kersti broke down in sobs.
Matthew was stunned for a moment, then he put his arms around her awkwardly and patted her back, in part to comfort her, in part to make her stop crying so he could think things out. His mind had hung up on one terrible fact. 'You… you told him about Ruth Lillian?'
'It just slipped out! And anyway, it ain't right for her to be all safe and hidden away while I'm there getting beat up! It ain't fair!' Matthew was rigid, and she felt his mute accusation. 'It wasn't my fault! I was being slapped around and forced to do him thataway!'
