by Alethea White
Colleen walked slowly up the tangled pathway, keeping her shawl close around her shoulders. She held tightly to the leather bag Dr. Mike had leant her for the short trip, to carry some randomly assembled supplies for the new doctor. Bits of gauze, a bottle or two of iodine, morphine. The stagecoach had been late once again, as it had been for weeks. Little of the outside world had had safe passage into Colorado Springs. A band of marauders had been terrorizing those on the outskirts of town. A murder of a farmer, a gentle man by the name of Flannery, and his wife the week before had turned the quiet townspeople into a mass of heretical screams and panicked glances. An abandoned wagon, burning, the fire puffing up its chest and breathing smoke into the air for miles around the site, had been discovered only two days before. The occupants had yet to turn up. It was a hopeless week, black, dense with the worry that danced like wet humidity in the autumn air. No one knew what to do. So they did what they could. Banded together.
And Colleen had seen less and less of Andrew Cook, Preston hurried by his fund-pumping heart to secure his hotel's customers, to make them feel at ease, relaxed in the midst of a town's turmoil. He had kept the young man occupied with the smallest of medical complaints, grievances about bruised toes and aching heads tying him to his clinic the better part of each day. Daylight would spring into focus, bloom under the noontime heat, and wither away at dusk, and still she kept to town, he to the hotel. It bothered her. She was ashamed, however, to admit the reason why.
She heard creatures furtively moving in the underbrush to either side, hidden in the phantom foliage and watching her with a maniacal patience. She drew closer to herself, keeping her arms locked about her chest, quickening her steps. Colleen was ashamed to look on him with a favorable eye, though she doubted her shame masked her heart. Nothing hid her love for him. Nothing, but her worries, her doubts.
As a child, all she had known of men was loss. Her father had abandoned them, for reasons she still believed she would never comprehend. Something deep within her hated him for that. She had watched her mother dying, alone, a wedding ring still around her finger, a hope of his return still constricting like a serpent around her heart. She had watched her eyes fading, her smile dropping, and then she was gone. The best of the two from which she had come, and she had lost her. Through no fault of her own. Matthew and Brian. Both had lost her as well. Matthew then lost Ingrid. Brian had lost Anthony. Loss was everywhere, like an ever-present fog that took the light and led her stumbling into a gypsy darkness. She wanted to know love for herself, to taste that pink sweetness of another face beside her own in the morning, to hear passion's music on the southern wind. To stand before a preacher and offer herself for eternity. The thought struck her, hurriedly, and she looked away from the dank ground beneath her, and turned her eyes to the heavens.
Andrew. She remembered the first time she had seen him, standing so sheepishly beside her grandmother, brought along as a cure for the problem of the doctor having the child. He had felt so out of place, so mistaken. She had smiled, stared on him with a fascination she had not been able to mask. From Boston. Young, handsome, so intelligent. She had never dreamed that for one moment he would look on her with anything but friendship, if she would be lucky enough to call even that her own. But now, she had noticed the change in his eyes when she knocked on his door, that auburn glow that warmed his face when she approached him, their feet creating a labyrinth of dust on the town's streets as the two of them shuffled, fidgeted, acted as nervous as newfound strangers. And she adored him.
His eyes, those two arches to his heart. His face, his mouth, that smile that ripped through her like the heat of the sun combating a frigid breeze. His arms, those few times wrapped around her, to protect her, to assure her that he would put himself in harm's way in her stead. Did he love her? Could she admit to herself that she loved him?
A twig cracked behind her, and Colleen lost focus of the white holes in the sky. Fear snuck behind her and encircled her waist, her eyes, her curved fingers, that gripped now her burden more tenaciously. Her breath was white, shards of a glacier forcing their way into the air. Her feet trampled on bits of forgotten rock and desperate grass as she began to run. She was blinded by anxiety, her heart pounding a fierce July rhythm within her chest. Andrew. Please, God, let me get there. Let me arrive safely.
The hotel's lights were dimly brilliant in the distance, a few hundred yards, secluded behind a heaven-stretching hill that kept the hotel's occupants from witnessing the rumored shabbiness of their town. Preston had made it such an exclusive hideaway, when plain life was only moments from the backporch. Life, as it should be lived, without jacketed waiters, or silver-plated trays, without tea services and piano concerts. Life, as it was to her, loving.
She stumbled, dropping her shawl, and she stopped, confused. Her legs refused to move, practice ruling as she stooped to retrieve it. Something whispered to her of her irrationality. Turn around. Face it.
And she did. Her breath rapid, her heart still waltzing against her lungs, she turned and looked behind her. Only the blanched cheeks of the night stared back. Alone. There was a murmur of late-season crickets striking up a melody, and she berated herself for acting so childishly. Trust. She had lost it, and she had to convince herself to search for it once again. Andrew, safety, were just over that hill. Step slowly, believe nothing will hurt you, and nothing can.
Standing there, lacing her pale violet shawl once again around her shoulders, Colleen began to hold her eyes open to the night air. A widowed moon, mourning her mortal children, wept in the heat of God's sky. She smiled, muttering a silent prayer, and twisted the handle of the medical bag as she willed herself onward. A stray wind erased the cold sweat that had so lately occupied her brow. She was safe. Safe, and happy.
The crickets ceased to sing. As Colleen turned, a hand knitted itself across her mouth, absorbing her wild scream. Shadows whipped her feet together, tightening her arms behind her back. A faceless form, breath rancid in the shadows, grabbed the medical bag and emptied its contents on the ground. Finding nothing of what it desired, angered at the vicious thrashing of the young woman against her bonds, it raised a hand and her attackers pulled her into an unwilling submission, against the backdrop of the iced forest.
Her eyes were red with horror. Please, God. Please, no. The forms, the unattached hands, slowly began to become men, like sorcerers in the waves of grey moonlight. Each was dirtied with the sweat of a chased afternoon. They were hungry, desperate, and she understood that they had sought money in the bag. They had found none. And now, what would they do with her?
"Untie her feet, Jason."
The one who had haphazardly thrown Dr. Mike's aged black leather on the ground stooped to release her ankles, a slicing glint off of his yellowed teeth reflecting in her peripheral vision. She had her head turned, trying to comfort herself by keeping her eyes closed, her mouth silent. They will release me. I have nothing to offer them.
The one behind her spoke again. "Alright, boys, go back to the road and keep watch. Some of those hotel folks could come out for a late-night walk." The three men looked on her, lust painting itself across their cheeks, and an orphaned tear dripped down her face.
"I said go."
Such patience in his command, and such respect in their humble obedience. Three backs turned to her, against the will of their own hearts, and stumbled quietly back to the road.
The man took his hand from off her mouth, turned her around to face him. Though her feet were free, they continued to feel bound, trapped. Colleen knew no way of escape. She was stricken with a fearful paralysis.
Suddenly, his hand turned vicious, palm eyeing her face, and he slapped her across the left cheek. Stunned, she saw sparks dazzling a path through her eyes, and the pain was biting. Colleen let her head fall to the side. She tasted blood at the downward angle.
Again, this time from the opposite side, she felt a hand touch her face, his other expertly occupying her shoulder, to restrain her. His palm hid itself this time, and his fist cut into her eye. She could no longer see, blue diamonds of pain rearing themselves around her vision. His face, blackened by the overhanging shadows, grimaced, as though it bothered him to destroy her. She felt the marionette of a cruel puppeteer.
His voice remained a thin mystery, dabbling only in her memory. He would not speak now, the murmurs of gentlemanly conversation from the roadside, his companions engaged in comfortable banter, the only speech to which she was privy. Still stunned by the blows, her cheeks already beginning to swell, blood pooling in her open jaw, Colleen stood unmoving. She felt his hand loosen its hold on her shoulder. She prayed she would be freed. She could pray for nothing else.
She found her mouth moving, her lips eager to speak her peace.
"Please..." Dry mouth, cotton tongue, numb words.
"Please, you...you can take what...whatever you want from the b...bag..."
Her mind believed her mouth a renegade, and claimed no control over the sentence. It was hopeless to try, and only a youthful heart possessed of a wise foolishness would have spoken so.
The man laughed, his teeth gorgeous and satanic as the moon throbbed. Turning her, her knees too weak to withstand, he threw her onto the ground, face down. Colleen's chin struck an errant stone, grey, drawn rouge with her blood. She craved darkness, could smell the cooked aroma of exhaustion around her eyes. Please, leave me be. Leave me be.
He pulled off his jacket, laying it carefully, half folded, on the ground beside her head. Colleen remarked the rawhide stitching around the right breast pocket. She smelled the nervousness of his quest wrapped in the seams. He doesn't know why he does this. He doesn't know at all.
She felt Andrew with her, felt her heart shining a healthy green against the dry mud of the earth beneath her. Save me, she prayed. But nothing would stop him.
She heard the rustle of metal mouths opening, his belt falling from his waist. No. Colleen opened her mouth to scream, and only a parched, strained whisper fell forth. No. Her skirts were lifted, a torturous pressure against her thigh. Save me, God. Save me.
Hours had passed. Her eyes were swollen almost shut, her skirts bunched around her knees. She lay in the fetal position, turned onto her right side, and as she tried to sit, she saw the rawhide jacket was gone. No further murmur of cruelly amused accomplices from the side bushes. They had left her.
She crawled, half dragging herself to a nearby tree. Such pain, she had never before felt. Her legs, her face. Colleen strained to grab hold of a high branch, her palm barely attaining the grip as she struggled to stand. Her eye caught sight of a trail of blood, fresh, writing itself from where she had just lain to the base of the tree. Clean breaths of nausea and pain married themselves in her stomach, and she fell against the tree for support. Her right shoulder brushed the elderly bark, and she could feel it was out of place. What have they done?
With eyes too pained to spit her tears, she drank her weeping, crossing ever so slowly to the road. Dr. Mike's leather bag, the gauze still scattered haphazardly across the dirt, all of it, there. Untouched. This had been done to her for nothing.
Colleen almost bent to retrieve it. No. I have to get away. She turned her face towards the hill, and recognized the hotel's familiar lantern glow. Such exotic pleasures. I am here, dying. And you cannot help.
She began to stumble, lifting each leg like a blacksmith's anvil, so heavy. She created cinnamon footprints in the road as she stepped along, the blood from her wound eager to make its presence known. She sobbed, her chest broken, her heart ripped asunder. Andrew's Boston countenance filled her vision, as she watched the hotel creep closer and closer. Please, help me. Colleen tried to scream it, believing another step would destroy her, but again her mouth seemed plugged. Her heart would not speak to him, as it envied her mind's freedom. One had escaped the remembrance of this torture. The other would bear the burden for eternity.
The grass-plagued hill passed on her right. The well-trodden dirt path wound its way around the base of the natural monument and led her to the dainty face of the Lodge chateau. The crickets were once again playing her song of torment, and she cursed them under her breath, the only way remaining for her to speak.
She watched the pattern of blood and footprints appearing behind her, wishing she had the strength to stir the dirt over the rouge shame that marked her way. Others would follow her, and they would know. They would see her exposed and fouled, used. God, no. Restore me. Oh, I beg of you.
A stray thought ventured a movement across her throbbing head. She thought of Andrew finding her this way. She saw him turning from her in disgust. How could he desire her, after she had been soiled so? She couldn't lose him like this. She would die if he turned from her. She would have no further will to breathe in this tormented frame.
The clinic was on the right of the hotel's welcoming porch. All chairs and benches were empty. She wondered how long she had lay there, hidden in the living knuckles of the forest. Had it been hours? Minutes? Would life have changed, and left her behind?
Thankful for the lack of prying strangers, Colleen closed her eyes to shut out the bare slit of nighttime that was able to slip in, and prayed the clinic's light would still be aflame, the early morning oil his sign of welcome. She moved her swollen lips and turned a bruised set of brown eyes to the clinic door. It was slightly ajar in its frame. A hearty lemon glow burst forth from beneath the brass hinges. Andrew.
Her feet fell beneath her, sliding out of her way as she crumpled to the ground. Before the darkness that teased her eyesight could claim her, she threw her heart into a fierce motion and poured her love for him through her battered lips. Colleen heard her own voice erupt, proud, strong even in this great pity. He would come.
"ANDREW!"
The pen jumped with a wild motion across his desk, his hand startled in writing. Andrew stood, the scream so freshly heard reverberating in the clinic's
walls. Stumbling over tossed patient files and his cumbersome examination
table, he threw open the door to the outside of the hotel. A woman, crumpled in
the dust. Colleen.
"Colleen! My God..."
His feet carried him through the dense night, across the few feet that sep arated them. Andrew stooped to hold her, to pick her up, and crushed her face into the light. She had been beaten, her face a delicate maze of violet and wine strings. Her eyes were bloodied, her arm hanging limply in the dirt. Tears began to well in his eyes. What had been done? My God, what has been done to her?
He leaned over to pick her up, throwing with a gentle urgency her left arm over his shoulder, gathering her torn skirts in the crook of his left arm. Andrew spied the trail of blood behind her. She was bleeding. And he saw no open wounds on her face.
Colleen stirred, her face only inches from his own as he ran with her in his arms back into the bowels of the clinic. She could barely whisper, and he cried through masculine moans as he laid her on the examination table. Her hair was matted with blood, her jaw a trail of pain. She tried to sit up, to gather him to her. Andrew paused, and leaned into her embrace. He cried on her shoulder, gingerly, sobbing. She adjusted the position of her withered mouth and spoke to him, needing.
"Andrew... God, Andrew, please hold me. Hold me..." His vision blurred, stinging tears triumphing over his need to be strong, he sat beside her on the small space afforded on the examination table and gathered her to him. She was warm, beautiful, soft and perfect. Such a delicate creature. He had not stopped them from doing this to her. He had abandoned her, without realizing his sin.
Colleen pulled back from him in a sudden gesture, her hands falling to her stomach. She cried out in pain, her mouth agape, her eyes blank as she looked on his. He laid her down, drew her hands away from her stomach. Turning his back on her, as his will summoned him back to her side, Andrew searched out his bottle of chloroform, massaging the relieving fluid over a strip of gauze and, as he kissed her pained forehead, laid it over her mouth. She struggled, and then relaxed beneath him. Oh, God. Colleen. My love, what have they done to you?
Her body limp on the table, Andrew promised himself he would find his strength, and unfastened her skirts. He drew them down, his chest heaving with the weighted air that had suddenly become like iron within these four wooden walls. His medical degree, his awards, they reflected the visage of a broken man as he undressed the woman he loved, helpless under him. He saw the bits of clotted blood stuck to her legs, saw the budding pool underneath her. Oh, Colleen. Anything but this. Tell me they didn't do this to you.
She awoke hours later, an apostolic sun burning through the cover of the window shades. Her eyes were swollen shut, and she could see nothing, only feel the heat across her battered cheeks. The pain was white, the hue of a melted icecap in a Colorado sea, and Colleen could not breathe without remembering their hands gripping her shoulders, shoving her in a thousand directions, her face wetly grasping the earth. Please, no more.
A tear slid down, welling forth from a brown eye too pained to shed its light on the world around her. It hurt so badly. Everything. Her chest, her face. Her heart. She remembered seeing Andrew fling open the door to his clinic, rushing towards her, and then only the gentle darkness. She called again on the thoughts she had had, stumbling towards him in the night. Would he turn from me? Has he turned from me now?
She listened, straining to hear him. No shuffle of feet, no turning over of papers. No life around her. She was alone, blind, helpless. And Colleen had never felt such bitter desperation before.
His warm hand clasped her own, his other covering it, his kisses raining over her forehead. Such docility in his caress. She loved him. She loved him more than her own life. And she could not be ashamed of that any longer. She had never before lain so wholly exposed.
An abstractly formed tear fell onto her forearm, and she turned her head to face him, where she believed him to be. A shaky voice welcomed her into the day.
"Colleen?"
She smiled, holding the happiness in a rocking balance until the pain offered by the sudden facial movement caused her to withdraw into her expressionless face. Colleen imagined she was weeping. She imagined he wept along with her.
"Andrew? Andrew, I'm so sorry...."
A sob choked her. She put one hand down, attempting to sit up. He held her other palm tenderly, and as she rose, an auburn pain gripped her, clasping her fiercely, and she cried out. The young woman sank back to the table, her head limp. It was so difficult. Colleen could not imagine what had been done to her. She remembered the man atop her, struggling to... Oh, God. He had taken advantage of her. He had broken her, used her, wiped her virginity from her forever.
"Sorry? No, no, Colleen. You've done nothing wrong. You've done nothing wrong."
His hands touched her face, gingerly, drawing away when she grimaced in pain. She believed herself destroyed. She believed herself wronged.
"Andrew, I was coming to give you some supplies. Dr. Mike left them for you before she went to Boston. Andrew, I thought it was safe. I thought I'd be safe."
She turned her eyes to him, his face a tribal painting of grief. There had never been something so injurious to him. Never in his life. His heart was breaking. He loved her. And he had not protected her, something he had vowed to himself to do from the moment he had first seen her. A Western gem, an innocent beauty that told of lifetimes of gentle ease. She was meant to be unharmed, untouched. That pedestal had shattered beneath her, and he had turned his eyes in cowardice. In mental blindness.
"Colleen, what did they do to you?"
"I don't...don't want to remember. I don't want to feel his hands on me anymore, his sweat falling on me, his friends urging him on. I don't want him to hurt me anymore, to hit me, to throw me down, to pull apart my legs and tear my skirt, and..."
She stopped speaking. Colleen did not cry. She did not succumb to her own pity. She would be strong. Andrew held her, pulled her close, in a thought-out abandon of her pain and his misery at seeing her in such a state. He held her as tightly as he dared, to keep her warm, to offer her the love that branded his heart with her name. Colleen. I have failed you. You will never be able to look on me.
The young woman, her spiced hair tangled, her fingers still marked with the filth of a dank Nature, pushed him away, ever so softly. Colleen placed his hand across her heart, its thumping like a strip of visible foam, strongly pushing towards the watered shore. She turned her face to his, her other hand searching out that familiar jawline, those rugged lips. She found him, out there in her darkness, cheeks drenched with his weeping for her. She shook her head, used a willing thumb to wipe away those marks of his guilt. No, don't cry for me.
"Andrew?" His guttural response was primitive, angered. He had not stopped this. But he was here now, and she cared about nothing else.
"I love you. I've loved you with every gust of wind that touched my face since I first saw you. I've loved your jealousy and your pain and your happiness. Your heart commands my own, Andrew. And I was saving myself, for you, for no one else. That's been stolen from me. Everything has been stolen from me."
The man grabbed her hands, placed his head on her lap, sporadic sobs heaving through him with colossal force.
"But if you are here with me now, if you stay with me, if you love me, I'll get through this. I can. I'm strong. And I know that giving in to them will only make their victory more secure. I love you. That is what will keep me alive. I'll survive, because I have you."
Something in her sang at this release. She was a woman, a woman who knew her own mind, not needing black eyes to see her own heart. And she had been triumphant. He would love her. Of that she was certain.
His head raised, he kissed her hands, placed his palms in passionate symmetry around her cheekbones. Andrew touched her, and the current of his misery drove through her with a railroad speed.
"I have loved you, Colleen. I have dreamed of you, and prayed for you, and desired so fiercely, I thought my own heart would collapse under the strain. To see you like this, I know I am punished, for not having been with you, for not having been more concerned about you, above anything else, which is where you stand with me. Never again will I leave you alone. Never again will you have to be afraid. I promise you that. I will protect you. I will always protect you..."