The Furies Read Online Free PDF Page A

buried their daughter. With the money they got from the sale of their land, they had negotiated for a house in the growing riverside settlement of Bexar.
    Soon after, Jaimie had set out for New Orleans to buy some needed furnishings, to visit the cemetery where his parents were buried and to order merchandise for a store he intended to open. But in New Orleans, cholera had struck him down—and his diseased body had been hastily dumped into a grave there, so it wouldn’t infect anyone else. Amanda learned of the death by means of a letter from a public official.
    What grieved her almost as much as the loss of her husband was the guilt she felt about that journey to New Orleans. Jaimie didn’t want to live in Bexar, let alone operate a mercantile establishment. He had been driven to it by his need to escape from all the bad memories the farm represented. He had chosen Bexar for her—knowing full well that the confinement of a town didn’t suit him and never would. He had lived outdoors—hunted and trapped in the north along the Missouri River—for much of his adult life, and he knew he’d be no better selling calico than he had been at raising corn.
    After Jaimie’s death, Amanda wanted nothing to do with storekeeping. But she had to find some way to earn a living. She knew she had some skill in the domestic areas that were the assigned provinces of women, and she decided that the natural place to apply that skill was in managing a decent hotel—which Bexar lacked.
    So, late in 1832, she had sold her house, bought an available adobe building on Soledad Street, borrowed heavily from a wealthy Mexican friend of the Veramendis to buy some beds and chairs and washstands and have the place refurbished—and by early in 1833, the first, rather spartan version of Gura’s Hotel was open. She had barely been able to meet expenses during the early months.
    The young sons of the town’s better Mexican families began frequenting her public bar in preference to the cantina. She poured an honest drink. But the young gentlemen complained about Bexar’s lack of feminine companionship. The two overweight prostitutes who occupied a filthy crib behind the cantina weren’t fit to touch, let alone kiss. The young gentlemen didn’t mind stains on their reputations from visiting such women, but they didn’t want pox sores in the bargain.
    Listening to that sort of thing night after night, Amanda had an inspiration. She soon added the desired service—with appropriate decorum and discipline—to the back rooms of her second floor. After that, her ledger showed a substantial profit every thirty days. She paid off the loan by year’s end, and began purchasing some better items of furniture.
    She saw nothing overwhelmingly immoral in converting part of Gura’s Hotel into a brothel. She had spent her adolescence and young womanhood among the Teton Sioux, and had come to regard sexual activity not as a great many white people did—unavoidable but somehow unclean—but as the Indians saw it: of almost inestimable importance because of its connection with the creation of life. Anything so important could only be engaged in one way—joyously.
    The Sioux were not a promiscuous people. Quite the opposite. Adultery, though never formally punished, was frowned upon. The virtue of young women was protected with elaborate rituals of courtship—though Amanda had never been so protected. When she had been sold to a young man of the tribe, she had already lost her virginity. Because of that—and because of her white skin—the rules didn’t apply.
    Gradually, she came to understand and share the happy duality of the Sioux attitude toward sex. The physical act of love was regarded with mystical reverence—and this produced an earthy appreciation of the act itself. Sex was not a sin but a celebration, a wondrous and necessary part of a fulfilled life.
    What a far cry from the views of those white women who whispered about the subject with