Francine

Francine is a sex worker in Butcher’s Crossing whose connection with William Andrews illuminates both the limits of his assumptions about her and his own pattern of desire, recoil, and flight. She offers him affection as well as intimacy, but their relationship ends not in a promise of life together: after returning to her room and spending the night with her, Andrews leaves before dawn, placing most of his money where she can find it.

Identity and Life in Butcher’s Crossing

When Miller introduces Francine to Andrews, he identifies her plainly as a prostitute. Miller says that nine or ten women work in the village: six at the saloon, with two Native women working in shacks along the river. Charley Hoge, still trembling, calls her a woman of sin; Miller answers that Hoge studies the Bible and reads it fairly well. The exchange places Francine within the village’s ordinary social world, while also showing how quickly the men around her define her through their own moral or transactional language.

Francine tells Andrews that she has lived in Butcher’s Crossing for two years. Before that, she was in Saint Louis, where there were too many women and she did not get along. She says she likes the village: in summer she can rest, and there are fewer people. Her account is direct and comparatively untroubled. Andrews hears it through a different frame, imagining her as an unaware victim of an artificial world and its machinery, stranded on a desolate plateau before the wilderness. His pity reveals his own assumptions more than it reveals her feelings; when he calls her life terrible, she questions the judgment and says that Butcher’s Crossing is better for her than Saint Louis.

Encounters with William Andrews

Andrews’s attention to Francine begins in close observation. At their first introduction, he remains half-risen from his chair as she is presented, then watches her cross the room. He notices her slow speech and slight German accent, and the glossy dress with broad white and blue stripes. Later, during Miller’s absence, the two meet outside Jackson’s Saloon at noon. Francine asks whether Andrews is beginning to settle in. Their brief conversation gives way to an awkward silence; she remains still, smiling and blinking slowly, while he mumbles an excuse and walks away as if he has somewhere to be.

They meet again on the saloon’s long upper staircase. Francine descends carefully, placing her feet in the center of the boards. Andrews watches her pass from the shadow into the morning light, her loose red-gold hair illuminated against her pale face. Later, when he leaves the company of the men to get some air, he finds her standing on the first step of the same steep staircase. In the darkness she reaches out and rests a hand on his shoulder, speaking to him from above. The stairway becomes a recurring setting for their encounters: a threshold where Andrews is drawn toward her, yet repeatedly unsure how to remain.

During their conversation, Andrews takes her hand and tells her that her life must be terrible. Francine does not adopt his account of her circumstances. She says that the men treat her well and that there are fewer women than in Saint Louis. Andrews, meanwhile, is absorbed in compassion and disgust at the world he imagines has trapped her. He remembers Fred Schneider grabbing her by the arm and speaking vulgarly, and for an instant thinks he understands the humiliations she has had to bear. The contrast is telling: the affront is real, but Andrews turns it into a broad diagnosis of her life that she herself has not offered.

Francine asks whether Andrews wants to stay with her until he leaves. She touches the back of his hand and invites him to make love to her. When he does not answer, she clarifies that she is not working then: she wants him because she wants him. Her offer makes the relationship more than a transaction in her own account, though Andrews remains absorbed in the sensation of her fingers on his hand and cannot respond. The subsequent encounter ends with him fleeing her room. He later recalls the revulsion that followed his intense desire as she approached him naked, and wonders why he ran.

Absence, Memory, and the Hunt

Francine returns to Andrews’s thoughts while he is away from Butcher’s Crossing. Around the campfire, Schneider crudely asks whether Andrews remembers the woman from the village and presses him about whether he slept with her. Andrews gives her name but turns toward the fire when Schneider suggests she had a weakness for him. Schneider insists that she had said she was off duty and boasts that, on returning to town, he will pay her for a couple of days. Miller tells him to stop, but Schneider’s talk reduces Francine to a sexual claim and makes her an object of rivalry between the men.

That night, Andrews cannot keep her out of his mind. He remembers the last moments in her room, before he turned and ran, and considers the combination of desire and nausea that drove him away. He links that flight to his recent escape from the sight of a slaughtered bison in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The animal had been proud and alive moments before, but lay exposed and powerless, reduced to inert meat. Andrews understands that his horror was not simply disgust at blood or entrails: he had been shaken by the destruction of the creature’s identity, and by the corresponding destruction of something in himself that he could not face. The parallel does not make Francine equivalent to the animal; rather, it exposes the pattern in Andrews, whose intimacy and encounters with violence bring him up against forms of vulnerability he then cannot bear.

Reunion and Final Departure

After the expedition, Andrews asks a woman in town whether Francine is still there. She confirms that Francine remains in Butcher’s Crossing but has been packing for several days and may not stay much longer. Andrews declines the offer to have her called and says he will see her later. He eventually climbs the saloon stairs, crosses the dark upper floor by feeling along the wall, and knocks at the door beneath a narrow line of yellow light. Francine opens it in a long dressing gown and, after a pause, recognizes him by name.

Andrews tells her that he is sorry for the way he left. While trapped by snow all winter, he says, he kept thinking about that night and wanted her to understand that she had done nothing wrong: he had acted alone. Francine has thought throughout the winter that he was dead. When Andrews turns as if to leave, she asks him not to go away again. He stops and says that this time he will stay. Francine asks him to remain with her for a while and says that it is not the same as it is with everyone else. Her response gives their reunion a tenderness absent from Andrews’s earlier, self-absorbed flight, but the moment does not resolve into a lasting commitment.

At dawn, Andrews watches Francine sleeping and can scarcely remember the passion that brought him into her room, just as he can scarcely remember the wilderness passion that carried him across the continent in search of a final identity. He takes two bills from his money and puts them in his pocket, arranging the rest on the table for Francine. He thinks she will need it wherever she goes, while he will need the money for a new rug and curtains. Then he takes his sleeping bag and leaves without waking her or turning back. The practical division of the money accompanies an emotional one: he acknowledges her needs, but chooses departure once more.

Narrative Significance

Francine’s significance lies partly in the distance between her account of herself and the meanings Andrews assigns to her. He first casts her as a victim in need of his sympathy; later, he recognizes that his flight from her was his own failure, not hers. Yet even after apologizing and staying the night, he does not remain. His final gesture is care expressed materially, alongside another withdrawal.

The recurring staircase frames this unsettled connection. Andrews sees Francine descending into morning light, meets her at its first step in darkness, and ultimately climbs the stairs to find her after the expedition. The repeated threshold marks approach without guaranteeing arrival. Through Francine, the book brings Andrews’s private desire into contact with his larger crisis of identity: he is drawn toward intimacy, then retreats when desire becomes inseparable from vulnerability. Their reunion softens his earlier abandonment but does not undo the pattern. Francine is left asleep as he departs a village he imagines will soon return to ruins, making their separation part of his final passage out of Butcher’s Crossing.