B00DVWSNZ8 EBOK

by Jeffrey, Anna

  Entering the house through the back door, Jude heard no activity except for Windy and his Mexican helper, Irene, talking in the kitchen. The aroma of onions, garlic and Tex-Mex spices was potent and tantalizing. Supper was under way.

  Their latest house cook, Windy Arbuckle, had been the chuck wagon cook until he slipped on some ice last winter and broke his hip. The aging widower had recovered but was left with an awkward limp and Grandpa and Daddy would no longer allow him go out on the chuck wagon to distant parts of the ranch. Now he and his limp were confined to thumping around the Circle C's kitchen in his cowboy boots. He cooked in the chuck tent only during roundup.

  Some outfits would have let Windy go when he became unable to perform the job for which he had been hired, but generations back, it had become the Circle C's custom to take care of its hands. Many of them, like Windy, had spent decades in the ranch's employ.

  Besides that, Windy and Daddy had gone to school together in Lockett. They had been friends their whole lives and Windy had a proprietary attitude toward the ranch. He had whittled wooden dolls for Jude when she was a child. Once he had whittled her a "cowboy toothbrush" from a skinny mesquite limb and taught her how to use it to clean her teeth. The Arbuckle children had been Jude's playmates and she still called them friends, though all of them had left Willard County long ago.

  Jude veered through the kitchen, said hello, then made her way to her second-floor suite, passing paintings of some of the Circle C's majestic stallions hanging along the stairway. The Circle C was as well known for its fine horses as for its fine cattle.

  She changed into a brown broom skirt and a pale green sleeveless T, freshened her makeup and pulled her hair back with a leather barrette at her nape. She dabbed a few drops of Interlude behind her ears and between her breasts. It was an old-fashioned fragrance, but it had been Grammy Pen's favorite. For as long as Jude could remember, her great-grandmother had moved through her life in a cloud of the musky scent. By wearing it, Jude could keep the only female relative she had ever known close to her.

  She added a turquoise squash-blossom necklace and silver earrings. She didn't mind dressing for supper. Doing it held a kind of old-world appeal. She spent quite a lot on her Santa Fe-style wardrobe. With her lack of social life, if not to dine with Grandpa, where else would she wear the clothing and jewelry she bought?

  Jude returned downstairs to the kitchen to see Windy wreathed in a cloud of steam and smoke curling up from the grill. The mouthwatering aroma of searing meat and onions filled the kitchen.

  "Hmm-yum. Whatcha cooking?" she asked, her voice slightly echoing in the cavernous galley-style room. When the original Circle C ranch house had been built, everyone, including the ranch hands, ate in the big house. For ease of cleaning, the kitchen's walls as well as the floors were covered with tile. That, coupled with the room's size and high ceiling, created the hollow-sounding acoustics.

  "I'm grillin' up some o' yore granddad's beef into the best dang fa-hee-tas you'll ever eat," Windy said.

  Windy was a superior cook of basic food, much of it spicy with Tex-Mex flavors. But his traditional American frontier food, like Dutch-oven buttermilk biscuits and sourdough bread pudding, had won prizes at fairs. He even kept a crock of sourdough starter in the refrigerator, to which he regularly fed potatoes.

  Jude laughed. "I don't doubt it for a minute. They're low cal, right?"

  "I wouldn't know about that. All I know is I'm using prime lean beef from this ranch and fresh, homegrown vegetables I picked out of the garden just yesterday. We've got some fine sourdough biscuits and a few fried Idaho taters and onions. You know yore granddad's got to have his fried taters and onions."

  "I know," Jude said with a grin. Grandpa ate fried potatoes and onions with every meal. An old friend in Idaho shipped him the fresh-from-the-field vegetables. Jude often teased him, telling him those two items in his diet were responsible for his long healthy life, which was a fact as much as a joke.

  Jude had had something on her mind all week that she wanted to discuss with her father. "Is Daddy here?" she asked Windy.

  Both his hands were busy, so Windy's head tilted toward the dining room. "He went off to fix hisself a little toddy."

  Daddy's custom was to retire to his study up the hall from the dining room for a drink before supper. Jude left the kitchen and made her way there. She tapped on the deep brown oak door and at the same time stepped inside the room onto rust-colored Mexican tile softened with cowhides. Heads and horns from game animals, most of them bagged on the ranch, looked down from the walls.

  The office had a compact bar and sure enough, she found her father standing at it. Wearing clean Wranglers and a fresh short-sleeve snap-button shirt, he had cleaned up for supper. From his appearance, unless someone noticed the custom-made boots he wore, no one would ever guess his financial worth.

  Jude had always thought him handsome. He was a tall and sturdy man whose body, as a result of a lifetime of physical work, belied his age. His face, on the other hand, was overtanned to a permanent russet brown and deeply creased around the eyes from spending every day in the Texas sun. But his forehead, constantly shaded by his hat, was pale white. His hair, once a reddish brown like hers, was now white, but it was still thick. He kept it cut short.

  Jude had wondered often whether he was lonely. She had never known of him having a female companion except for a couple of local "friends." Occasionally he invited one of them out to dinner or to some function, but as far as Jude knew, that was the extent of his romantic life.

  The scent of cigar smoke lingered in the air and she saw a stub in his left hand. His head turned her way and he smiled. "Hi, punkin. Just having a little drink before supper. Want something?"

  Mentally, Jude clenched her teeth. She hated that childhood pet name. Long ago she had given up asking him not to use it. The habit was too ingrained.

  She walked over to the bar that hid behind slatted bifold doors when not in use. A hint of Aramis, the cologne she had always associated with her father, commingled with the fruity aroma of his cigar.

  "Sure,” she said. “But be sure to fix mine with lots of water."

  He chuckled and dropped ice cubes into a second tumbler. They clinked softly in the heavy crystal. He poured a generous portion of Crown Royal into each glass, then added ice water to hers from a stainless-steel pitcher. "Haven't seen you since this morning, sugar. Whatcha been doing?"

  "Oh, this and that."

  He handed her the glass of whiskey. She carried it to a large leather wing chair in front of his desk and tested a baby sip, shuddering as the alcohol burned her throat and hit her empty stomach. A whiskey guzzler she was not and never had been, even in college.

  Sitting in the wingback chair put her at eye level with the credenza behind her father's desk. There, among photographs of sleek horses and massive Hereford bulls in their curly-faced maleness, was an assortment of photographs of Jude at various stages in her life. Tucked among them and partially hidden was one from eleven years ago of her and Webb Henderson at an A&M/UT football game. Webb was a graduate of the University of Texas law school. Daddy and Grandpa had viewed him as excellent husband material. Proof of how much they thought of him was the fact that Daddy kept that picture on the credenza with his favorite bulls and horses.

  She had been introduced to Webb when she was eighteen and a freshman at A&M. Grandpa and Webb's father, an Austin lawyer and politician, had known each other for years. Mr. Henderson had insisted that his son and Jude meet.

  Webb's marriage proposal came almost at once, as if preordained. She accepted because she had been too young and too sheltered to know her own mind and she had thought that by planning marriage to a family friend, she was doing what her father and grandfather wanted. But as the engagement progressed and Jude grew smarter, she came to see Webb as a money-grubbing pain in the neck, too eager to marry into her family.

  Daddy and Grandpa had spent almost no time around him. They had never seen that greed
y quality in him. They had been so eager for her to marry, they had been dazzled by Webb and his father's brownnosing.

  Beyond greed, Webb Henderson had other traits that had both shocked and appalled her, among them, control issues and selfishness and a streak of willfulness. No one had ever tried to control her in the ways Webb had attempted. But her Strayhorn stubbornness had won out and in spite of her family, she had managed to free herself of Webb.

  She didn't think about him much these days. She had ended the relationship, to Daddy and Grandpa's chagrin, without discussing it with them. They might not realize it, but she had saved them, as well as herself, from future pain and consternation. She had no doubt she had done the right tiling.

  She steered her eyes away from Webb's picture. She could scarcely stand to look at him.

  Chapter 4

  "I was in town for a minute," Jude said to her father. "Then I went to Suzanne's." Even to her own ears, her day sounded boring and empty.

  She rarely told Daddy when she visited Jake, though she knew her father didn't hate him. The Strayhorn family had supported his run for sheriff and contributed heavily to his campaign. And Jake hadn't turned down their money or changed his name. Still, very few words about him were ever voiced in the Circle C house.

  "How's Truett Breedlove doing these days?" Daddy asked. "Haven't seen him around town lately."

  Jude swallowed another baby sip of her strong drink. The ranch had an intermittent relationship with Suzanne's father in that he sometimes hauled Circle C cattle. "On the road a lot, I think."

  Daddy came from the bar, sat down beside her on a wing chair that matched hers. He drew on his cigar and exhaled. He shook his head as a swirl of sweet smoke encircled him. "He spends so much time in that truck, somebody'll find him dead in it one of these days."

  Could be, Jude thought. "It's what he's done all his life, Daddy."

  But Suzanne's father wasn't what was on Jude's mind. "Listen, I'm sort of at loose ends until I have to get ready for school. I thought I might ride with you next week and help with the weaning. I could help separate the calves."

  The weaning process would start on Monday. Calves born in February and March now weighed six hundred pounds or so. Old enough to graze, they would be parted from their mothers, loaded into trailers and relocated into their own pasture miles away. Allowing them to continue nursing was a drain on the strength and health of their pregnant mothers.

  Some of the large ranches used helicopters to round up the cattle, but Grandpa and Daddy believed it caused undue stress on the cattle and was more expensive than manual labor. With the price of fuel skyrocketing, Jude didn't disagree about the cost. She had opinions that conflicted with theirs on several elements of the cattle operation, but she understood their preference for using men on the ground for roundups.

  She, too, liked the idea of good cowboys on good horses flushing the cows and calves out of the brush and arroyos, then driving them from remote corners of the ranch. They were preserving a practice that was more than a hundred years old. It also provided the chance to "see" the ranch. With 469 square miles under fence, the Circle C encompassed areas no one went near for months, or years even.

  Daddy sipped his drink before answering. Jude had discussed ranch chores with him often enough to know he was framing a rebuttal. She had tried a dozen approaches to making a case for being allowed to play a greater role in the ranch's operation. Thus far, she had made no inroads into Daddy's and Grandpa's thinking. But she refused to give up.

  "Why spend all day on a horse out in the hot sun?" he said. "If you need something to do before school starts, darlin', go up to Santa Fe and go shopping. Take the plane and go over to Dallas for some R and R."

  Sometimes, in conversations with her father, Jude felt as if her ankle was chained to a stump and she was standing barefoot in the middle of a fire ant bed. "I haven't done anything to exert myself since school was out," she said. "I don't think I need R and R. I wish you'd let me work the cows with you. I can be of some help."

  Her father sighed and adjusted his silver wire-rimmed glasses. "Jude, I just don't understand why you want to do that. It's man's work. Most girls don't—"

  She interrupted him by leaning forward and looking him in the eye. "Daddy, I'm not a girl. I'm twenty-nine years old. Why did you teach me to ride and rope if you never intended for me to do it?"

  His eyes lowered to the contents of his glass, an indication his mind was closed to the idea. "Most young ladies, then. Most don't want to get on a horse and spend a day sweating in the sun with a bunch of cowhands." He swirled the ice cubes in his drink, looked up and gave her a smile. "They'd rather get prettied up and go out on dates."

  She studied his profile as he tilted his head back and drained his glass. Had that been his perception of women his entire life?

  …Get prettied up and go out on dates…That description apparently fit the two women he had married. His first wife, who was Jude's mother, Vanessa, had spent most of her time getting "prettied up," according to Jude's great-grandmother, Penelope Ann. Even Grandpa had said Vanessa had an obsessive preoccupation with her appearance.

  The story Grammy Pen had told was that Daddy met Vanessa O'Reilly when she came from Connecticut to interview for a teaching job. The woman took one look at a young man who was the same age as she and his tie to the Strayhorn holdings and decided to stay. Grammy Pen also said Daddy was lucky the woman left. Jude's great-grandmother had never minced words.

  If Daddy felt the same about his first wife as Grandpa and Grammy Pen did, he had never said so in Jude's presence. If he knew where she was or what had happened to her, he hadn't mentioned that, either. The rough life in West Texas was too much for her to bear, was the excuse he gave for her abandoning her husband and her child forever.

  To Jude's knowledge, the bitch had never been in touch with Daddy again. Or with Jude herself. That was just fine. Jude had grown up perfectly well without her. Daddy and Grandpa and her other grandparents had provided all the parenting she needed. Long ago she had labeled her mother an irresponsible nitwit, a coward and a pantywaist, and a few more choice names unfit for use in public.

  Then there was Daddy's second wife, Karen. She spent her time going out on dates all right. Dates with Daddy's younger brother, Ike, who was Jake's father. Ike and Karen Strayhorn had died together in a drunken, grinding car wreck on a desolate rural road. A generation later, the family was still recovering from the pain and scandal that had ensued.

  Another mark chalked up to the Campbell Curse, Grammy Pen had declared. According to her, the incident had been caused by excessive undisciplined behavior by two people who kept no check on their appetites. Jude was grown before she figured out that Grammy Pen hadn't been talking about food.

  Water over the dam, Jude thought now. She missed her great-grandmother who had passed at age ninety-five, just four years ago.

  "I want to feel useful, Daddy," she said, veering back to the conversation with her father.

  "But sweetheart, you are useful. You help me buy good bulls. Your research and knowledge are more help than you'll ever know."

  "That's no big deal," she said.

  And it wasn't. It wasn't even a challenge. Her knowledge came from her education in biology and genetics. Most of her research and her contacts all over the Southwest and West came via her computer and the telephone. If she decided to go outside the ranch to acquire a bull, she could locate him and spot his quality as a sire with a glance at his registration papers and his statistics. She could make deals to buy with one eye closed and one hand tied behind her back. She kept such thorough records on premium bulls, rarely did she ever have to actually see one standing in a pasture somewhere to know if he was worth considering.

  The corners of Daddy's mouth lifted into a smile that led to a chuckle. "You might not think so, but if I didn't have you to do it, I'd have to do it myself. And as you keep reminding me, I'm a klutz on the computer."

  Jude smiled and shrugged
. "You just haven't tried to learn to use the computer."

  "If managing the bull herd isn't enough, look at the work you do at the school, teaching these harebrained kids around here a little science. You work with your horses. You've got ol' Patch in the best shape he's ever been in. The paint horse show's coming up in Fort Worth. Why don't you take him over there and show him off a little?"

  He referred to her paint stallion. Patch's snow-white coat was marked with large black patches so perfect he looked as if he had been painted with a brush. A Tobiano paint, his bloodline went all the way back to the 1870s and one of the original Circle C stallions her great-great-great-grandfather had purchased from the Comanche.

  If not for Patch's illustrious bloodline, he would have been gelded and sold to be used as some dude's pleasure horse. He was a fine horse all right and he met the ranch's criteria for being a good using horse, except for one fact. Ranch hands, superstitious by nature, preferred solid-color horses.

  "He is in good shape, but he can't compete in those events. I haven't trained him to be a show horse."

  "Don't they have a team penning round? Why, smart as Patch is, he could do that one on three legs."

  The event required a team of three riders who had practiced together. Jude laughed, rising to her feet. She carried her glass to the bar's small counter and dumped her ice cubes into the sink. "Oh, Daddy. What am I going to do with you? I can't compete in team penning. I'm not part of a team. Patch is a cow horse and he knows it. He wants to do real work."

  She returned to her father's chair, sat down on the arm and hooked her arm around his shoulder, taking in again the scent of Aramis and cigars, now mixed with whiskey. "Let me help with the weaning and I'll show you just how good he's gotten at cutting calves."

  Her father patted her forearm. "Jude, honey, weaning's a hard, dirty job. And sometimes it's dangerous."

  Jude didn't disagree. At the Circle C, weaning was an age-old, fast-moving process that cowhands, under Daddy's direction, had made as efficient as it could possibly be while dealing with dimwitted animals that had an instinct to bunch together in herds. She had never dwelled on the dangerous part of ranch chores. It was a given that riding or handling animals that outweighed humans several times over carried an element of risk. "Getting dirty has never bothered me and I'm not afraid."