Since there were still few frontier towns, mostly temporary boom towns, and since the traces connecting them were also few, it was not surprising that Demeter ran into her daughter, Cory, nor were the circumstances. Demeter approached a small boomtown, just past its peak. It was a dry spring and the prairie was slow to green. Few were in the streets. One big saloon dominated the town: “The Devil’s Schooner” with a big painting of a sailing ship on the front and under the ship the motto, “Drown your troubles here.” Late in the morning the front was still dark and locked. Demeter circled around to the back where there was a wide porch.
Wash was hanging in the sun and a child and big black dog sat side-by-side on a bench. The child seemed to be half-Chinese with a long braid of blue-black hair. “What’s your dog’s name?” asked Demeter to open a conversation without immediately asking for food.
“Serb.”
“Serb?”
“From Serbia. That’s the country he’s from.”
“Hmm. I’d have guessed Newfoundland or Labrador.”
“No, Serb.”
“May I rest here?” She tentatively braced her pack on the rough lumber of the porch. The child shrugged. A man’s shape came to the door. He was Chinese with an apron over his black pajamas and a queue down his back.
“Want food?” he asked. She was grateful. He brought a bowl of bread and milk.
A fleshy woman with dark hair, makeup smeared over her eyes, staggered to the doorway in a piegnoir once white but now gray and greasy down the front. “Hop! Where’s my coffee?” She threw up her hands to shield her eyes from the sun. “Put a little whisky in it, will you?” Hop went in to get it.
The two women stared at each other, Cory squinting and Demeter trying not to move her face at all. It wasn’t that they were slow to recognize each other, but rather that they were slow to admit it. “I might have known,” finally said Cory.
“Bound to happen,” her mother agreed.
Hop came back with the mug of spiked coffee and put it in Cory’s hand. The dog and child didn’t stir from their bench but simply watched with interest. They were used to drama, but this was an anticlimax. “Put my mother in some room with a bed, Hop,” said Cory, “She looks pretty rough.” She went back upstairs with her mug.
Hop took sheets off his wash line and gestured for Demeter to follow. The dog and child came, too. The room smelled fetid, but with the window wide open Demeter felt she could sleep and she did, so soundly that she woke once -- surprised to find the dog and child sleeping alongside her. The sound of hoeing came from Hop in his drought-stunted garden under the open window. She slept again.
When she woke the second time, the light was diminishing and reddening. Cory was sitting by her, dressed for “work” in a vulgar low-cut dress with festoons and rosettes. Her face paint was renewed. “Looking for Pers, I suppose,” she said.
“Where is she?”
Wild laughter made Cory’s shoulders shake -- and also her... well, her two chief assets. She loved it when men stared at her breasts and then moved their eyes up her throat to her red mouth. She knew they rarely listened to her words and probably wouldn’t understand them if they did pay attention to what she said. For them to pay attention was enough for her. She liked it better when they were drunk, besotted... confused. She’d have liked her mother better that way. She liked her SELF that way better. Swirls and jags of emotion, dramatic scenarios, power used and resisted -- to Cory this was life.
“It’s liable to get pretty noisy tonight,” she said. “Payday at the mines. I can’t really guarantee no one will find you up here. I don’t put locks on these doors. Slows things down if someone needs to get in, so they tend to break up the doors coming through them.”
Demeter wondered whether her revolver were in her pack as it was supposed to be.
“Hop sent you a tray. I put it on the dresser.” Cory left but her smell stayed, a strong musk.
Before she ate, Demeter got her revolver out of her pack, put it under her pillow, and -- with that security and the good feeling of the first real food in a while -- lay back, half-sleep, dreaming of the Old Country at harvest time when the daylight stretched right on through the white nights and work wore everyone out to the point where they were something like drunk.
It was there she’d conceived Cory, and she was pretty sure it was with the nobleman himself, the land owner. At least someone masterful had come to her where she had slept among trees to escape the bright moonlight, someone who had marked where she went, and knew how to deal with entangling clothes.
She hated entanglements and once she was freed and aroused by knowing hands, she had gladly joined the rhythm of conception, panting and working her strong fingers against the man’s back. She had welcomed the pregnancy, bloomed throughout it, and given birth with no trouble. The man never appeared again, but these summer fertility festivals often produced such children. It was as though they came from the earth itself. Marriage was not a question. She was wealthy enough, thanks to generations of work on fertile land, to raise as many children as she wanted. No one questioned her.
Her problem with Cory was not that she was so licentious, but that she did it so sluttishly, so half-consciously -- all right, so unhygienically. There was no style, so selection, just anything goes, all comers welcome.
Shouts and crashes came from downstairs, mixed with what was probably supposed to be music. In a while it blurred together into cacophony and she slipped back into her dreams of long ago, the smell and weight of her dark visitor becoming gradually more intense until she realized she was awake. Someone truly was on top of her. She pushed against him with no result.
“Long ago and far away, we made quite a daughter, didn’t we?” She thought surely she was still dreaming, but she wasn’t. How could this happen? Had she conjured him up?
“Who are you?”
“I think you know.”
She realized that she did. It was Mort Lethe. “Get out!” She felt under her pillow, found the butt of her revolver and pressed the muzzle against his chest.
He only laughed. “I took the bullets out.” She pulled the trigger and discovered he was telling the truth. “But I’m going. Just wanted to visit -- not to stay.” The weight on her lifted, the door opened and closed and she could feel that the room was empty.
For the rest of the night she did not sleep, though she lit a candle, found the bullets Mort had left on the dresser and reloaded her gun. When it was nearly dawn, the child and Serb came into the room and sat on either side of her against the headboard, as though they were guarding her. The noise from downstairs sounded like a riot, but it stayed down there.
At daylight Cory entered, looking like the survivor of some kind of war. She was badly battered, stained with spilled wine, even bloody in streaks and her smile was nearly a grimace. “Do you like my daughter as much as you like me?” she asked sarcastically, nodding at the child, who looked to see what Demeter would say.
“But she’s half-Chinese,” said Demeter without thinking. The girl wasn’t insulted. She already knew that.
“Hop and I have an understanding. We take care of each other.” She smoothed back the child’s hair from her forehead. “And the child and the dog do their best to help.” Both guardians clearly enjoyed Cory’s attention. Demeter was impressed in spite of herself.
Cory went on. “I like living at the mouth of Hell and Hop is a Celestial. He doesn’t believe in Hell. But we agree that you don’t belong here. Best go on quickly. These people are stirred up because of the lack of rain. They know farming is through -- they’ll lose their homes. Some have already lost family members.”
Outside there was a rising tide of noise coming up the street. The child went to look. “They have Indians, Mother. They’re going to force them to dance -- rain dance to break the drought.”
The crowd wanted to hang the two miserable Indians with their feet barely touching the ground so that they would struggle. They had thrown the ropes over a porch bracket and were putting the loops over the heads of the Indians. The child and the dog disappeared from behind the women and racketed down the wooden stairs out in the hall. “No,” screamed both women. “Come back here!”
Then there was a bigger racket -- it was Hop, charging out the front of the saloon, wearing a pot on his head, clanging other pots and lids as though they were cymbals, charging recklessly at the crowd as though he were a dragon in a Chinese parade, trying to drive off an eclipse. They didn’t know what to think -- most of them were still badly hungover and couldn’t tolerate the noise. The dog flew out at them, barking and snarling and then came the child hurling Chinese firecrackers.
At last Demeter came to her senses and began to fire her revolver over the heads of the crowd. All but one man fled. Even the Indians ran away. The one person who did not flee was attacked by Cerb, frothing and roaring. That person pulled a knife and stabbed the dog, then stalked off, wiping the blade on his thigh.
“Shoot him,” commanded Cory hoarsely. “Shoot that sunnavabitch! NOW!” But he had turned his back and was not running. Demeter was too civilized to shoot him. Cory tried to grab the gun, succeeded and dropped the man on his face.
“The law!” Demeter was appalled.
Cory snorted. “There’s no law here.” She handed back the revolver. “Time to move on, anyway. You go your way and I’ll go mine.”
“Wait, where’s your sister?”
Kory threw the answer over her shoulder. “Up at the mine. In Mort’s house.”
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