Christmas at Home

by Carolyn Brown

  “Momma was a worrywart. She worried about you all the time,” Ada said.

  Essie tidied up a bun at the nape of her neck. It was smaller than it used to be in her youth and it was more gray now than red, but she still wore it the same as the day she put it up the first time.

  “You ever wish you had done things different?” Essie asked.

  “Well, hell, yeah! We all do. Right now I wish I hadn’t left the ranch. I should be overseeing that young cowboy and my granddaughter. It wasn’t too smart of me to up and leave them alone.”

  Essie’s green eyes twinkled. “Good lookin’, is he?”

  “I would’ve pushed him into my bedroom if I’d been thirty years younger.”

  “That’s a crock! You would’ve had to have been fifty years younger for him to let you push him anywhere near a bed.”

  Ada smiled. “I’m second-guessing myself. Momma said that I got the vision from Daddy. I knew the night that the cancer would finally take Tom away from me. And I knew that getting out of that canyon and making Sage face up to things was the right thing, but now I’m wondering if it was my own sight.”

  “Honey, there ain’t no vision. It ain’t nothing but common sense and intuition. Sage is a big girl, not just in size but in brains. Trust me, if she don’t like that cowboy he won’t even be there when you go back on Christmas Eve. And they’ll never find a scrap of hair or a bone to get any of that DNA off of either.”

  “You watch too much of that damned CSI shit,” Ada said.

  “Good thing that wasn’t on the television when Richard had his fling at forty or he wouldn’t have lived to see forty-one,” Essie said.

  Ada laid her hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Those were some bad times, weren’t they?”

  “Yes they were, but we lived through them and the boys never knew. The last words he said when he died was that he was sorry for hurting me. I was glad the boys weren’t in the room.”

  “Ever wish you would have had a daughter?” Ada asked.

  “I did want one but after three boys I figured all Richard could throw was boys and I stopped wishing. Maybe God knew what he was doing when he gave me boys. At least you’ll get a son-in-law when Sage marries, and you had a wonderful son. His only fault was that he didn’t want to stay in that gawdforsaken canyon. If he had, he might have lived to see Sage raised up.”

  “Grandson-in-law,” Ada corrected Essie.

  “No, you raised her so she’s yours. Sage is still young and this might not be the man for her. She might not be ready to settle down yet. I’m just glad you’re either selling the ranch or putting it in her name when you go back. I’m not a spring chicken and I want you here with me.”

  “It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?” Ada said.

  “Yes, it is, and Thomas would be proud. Now let’s go put on blinged-out sweat suits and go over to Idabelle’s for canasta. Texas can have all that snow and wind. I’m going to enjoy this forty-five-degree weather and sunshine.”

  * * *

  Creed awoke to the aroma of fresh banana bread baking in the oven. It was Christmas morning and his mother was in the kitchen making her traditional Christmas breakfast. They always had hot banana bread, cinnamon rolls, and a pumpkin roll with cream cheese filling on Christmas morning. All the nightmares about snow covering up the house had just been crazy dreams. He was in his bed at home on the family ranch. There wasn’t even a real canyon that looked like a giant bomb had exploded in the panhandle of Texas.

  He sat straight up in bed and realized in a split second that it was not Christmas morning and he wasn’t in Ringgold, Texas. He was in a canyon fast filling up with snow, and it was not a nightmare that disappeared when he opened his eyes.

  When he first drove out to that area it was the strangest sensation he’d ever known. Land met sky in every direction, and the ever-blowing Texas wind had picked up the remnants of a cotton crop on the side of the road and blew it around like big flakes of snow. He’d even gotten behind a cotton wagon taking a load from the field to the gin and then the wagon was gone, flat land was behind him, and he was following a twisting downhill road to the bottom of a big hole. It looked like someone had lobbed a nuclear bomb toward the Panhandle and it had landed between Silverton and Claude. It had been pretty that day, but the sun was shining and everything wasn’t covered with almost a foot of snow and colder’n a well digger’s naked butt in Alaska.

  “All that cotton was trying to tell me that this was coming along pretty soon,” he muttered as he jerked on a clean pair of jeans.

  He didn’t even stop to check on Angel and the kittens but followed his nose straight to the kitchen. Part of the dream had been real because there was a loaf of banana bread on the table with steam still rising from it.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Sage said. “Usually I paint when I can’t sleep, but I had a hankering for Grand’s banana bread so I made some.”

  She wore tight-fitting jeans and a sweatshirt with more paint stains on the front. The mistletoe he had tracked in was tied with a red ribbon and pinned to the curtain above the window.

  He moved toward her. “Smells good. I thought it was Christmas morning. Momma makes this for our breakfast on Christmas morning.”

  “Grand makes it too. But I had to eat my eggs before I could have it,” she said.

  He settled a hand on the cabinet on either side of her. Her eyes met his and her eyelids fluttered. Then something changed and she turned her head to the left to stare at the coffeepot.

  “Creed, I don’t know…”

  He tucked a fist under her chin and gently turned her back to face him. He looked up at the mistletoe and grinned.

  “Can’t waste it,” he whispered.

  His lips touched hers in a sweet, sweet kiss that ended too soon and left him yearning for more. He took two steps back and opened the drawer where the knives were kept. Before he could pick one up, her hand closed over his and forced him to shut the drawer.

  “Chores first. Breakfast after.”

  “You are downright mean. It’ll be cold by then.”

  “It will be perfect. The pecans will slice well instead of making a gummy mess on the knife, and the cream cheese will be softened to spread on it.”

  “You are killing me,” he groaned.

  “I’ll help with chores.”

  “That’s a poor second choice but I’ll take what I can get.” He started getting his coveralls on to go outside.

  * * *

  “Look!” Sage pointed. “I can see the outline of the barn. It’s slowed down, Creed!”

  “There is a God. I thought maybe He’d forgotten us and this whole canyon would be level with the rest of Texas before the storm moved on.”

  “It really is the worst storm I’ve ever seen. Grand talked about bad ones back when she and Grandpa first married, but this takes the cake for my generation,” she said.

  Going was still slow as they trudged through snow halfway to their knees. Noel bounded through it like she was running through daisies in the springtime and beat them to the barn by several minutes. The smell of hay, cows and warm cow patties greeted Creed when he opened the door. Noel dashed inside ahead of him and she ran to check on the milk cow before he could shut the barn door.

  “Are you putting another big bale in the doorway?” Sage asked.

  “That worked fairly well. If it quits sometime today or tonight, tomorrow I’ll put the plow on the front end of the tractor and scoop any snow they haven’t tramped into the ground to the sides of the feedlot so we can feed them out there. I’m just grateful for the lean-to roof that they could huddle under. If they’d been out in the far reaches, we might have lost a few.”

  “Grand wouldn’t have been happy about that,” Sage said.

  “Neither would I. Soon as possible I’m hauling my stock out here. I’ve got Angus and a few Long
horns. My hope is to build up the Longhorns for rodeo stock. I’ve got a friend over the Red River into Oklahoma who raises them for the Resistol Rodeo down near Dallas. He makes a fair amount of money that way.”

  Creed started the smaller of the two tractors and ran the front spike into a big round bale of hay. “She told me to bring this many bales into the barn right before she left. Think they’ll last until we thaw out?” he yelled over the hum of the engine.

  “She’s a smart old girl. When we get ice or bad weather she brings the cattle into this pasture and puts the big bales in the barn. She could use the little square ones to feed but says that she’d have to come out here three times a day if she did. She knows what she’s doing so I expect she knows how many bales you’ll need. It’s also the reason she had that lean-to built on the back of the barn,” Sage said with a smile.

  “Okay, open ’em up,” he said.

  She pushed the doors back and he stuffed the bale into the doorway. Before he could back away the cows were already chomping at it.

  He killed the tractor engine and hopped down from the seat, picked up a clean bucket, and went in the stall to milk the cow. “How often during a winter does she do this?”

  “Depends. Usually when we have a snow coming through. Maybe once or twice a winter. Sometimes not at all. Once the snow is melted, she turns the cattle back out into the whole ranch and brings in the big bales as she needs them.”

  “You always keep a milk cow?”

  “Not always. Grand likes one in the winter so if we get stranded down here and can’t get into town for supplies we have fresh milk and butter. She even makes cheese, but I have no idea how to do that. I do know how to run the electric churn and make butter.”

  “That’s good. In the spring we’ll be too busy to milk a cow twice a day,” he said.

  * * *

  There was that we business again. And she’d almost used the past tense when she talked about Grand. That was enough to depress Jesus on a good day in heaven. She grabbed a feed bucket, filled it with grain for the hogs, and headed toward the hog pen.

  She yelled at the hogs to drown out the niggling voices in her head. “Hey, pigs! You’re going to be happy to know that the snow is slowing down and in a few days it’ll warm up and your whole pen will be a brand-new mud bath,” she said, but it didn’t cheer her or the hogs up. They snorted, ate the grain, and she knew they’d much rather have a big bucket of cornmeal softened up with hot water or warm milk.

  The chickens were happier with their breakfast. Even the rooster flapped his wings and crowed. They gave her eight big brown eggs in exchange for the chicken scratch she’d spread out on the floor of the henhouse.

  When the ranch was really Creed’s, would he expect her to keep helping with chores? She’d always helped Grand and she’d miss not going out to check on the ranch every day, but when it was his, he would probably hire some help. The bunkhouse might even be full again and there could be cowboys all over the ranch.

  “Dammit!” She shook her fist at the chicken coop.

  She didn’t want to think of Grand in the past and she wanted to think of “if” not “when” Grand sold the Rockin’ C. And if Creed really did buy the property, she’d be damned if she helped do one thing. He and all his cowboy friends could feed his own hogs and gather his own eggs.

  Noel bounded out of the barn and stopped when she reached the chicken yard wire fence. When she stopped moving, she sunk down until her pregnant belly was brushing the snow.

  Sage let herself out the gate and secured it by turning the wooden latch crossways. “I’m okay, girl. I’m just mad. You going to be able to get out of that snow or do I need to give you a helping hand?”

  Noel stuck her nose in Sage’s hand.

  “I’m really fine, but you’d best be getting back to the house. You’ll have frozen puppies if you stay out here much longer.”

  With one jump, Noel was moving toward the house and barely sinking into the snow at all. They were halfway to the house when movement caught Sage’s eye. She followed the tiny tracks to the big cedar tree between the house and barn. She bent at the waist and pulled her dark hair back so she could see underneath the lower branches of the tree.

  Two cotton-tailed bunnies stared up at her. They huddled together against the tree trunk, their light bodies sitting right on top of what snow had drifted under the tree. Her special paint gods had given her the next painting. It wasn’t going to be the whole big cedar but just the bottom branches and the two brown rabbits surrounded by snow. She stood up and backed up slowly so she wouldn’t spook them and imagined a bright red bow and a bunch of mistletoe hanging from the bottom limb right in front of them.

  “Good Lord, I am besotted with mistletoe and holiday pictures.”

  Besotted! Shit! I’ve never used that word in my whole life. I don’t even like that word. It sounds so formal. Erase that, Lord!

  She made a motion in the air like she was erasing a big blackboard. “What the hell is the matter with my paint gods that all they are giving me are Christmas pictures with mistletoe in them? Will it be my best year ever next winter? Will they refer to this as the Sage Presley mistletoe season? Or will it put a screeching halt to my career?”

  Maybe it wasn’t paint gods. Maybe it was hormone devils making her see mistletoe since that was the first thing she noticed after the initial shock of Creed Riley bursting through the back door that first morning.

  “Maybe they’ll refer to this year as the year Sage Presley lost her edge and got all sappy.” She opened the door and Noel bounced inside ahead of her. Angel met them, bumped noses with Noel, and then proceeded to wind herself around Sage’s legs. The dog shook snow and dog-smelling water all over the floor.

  Sage unzipped her snow-covered coveralls to the waist, removed her boots and set them on the rug to drip, and then finished removing her coveralls. She hung them on the rack and grabbed the mop from the pantry. Wintertime had its problems just like all seasons in the canyon. But at least there was Christmas to make it bright and cheerful.

  “Is it your breakfast time, sweetie?” Sage crooned at the cat. “Well, that old slow cowboy will be here soon with warm milk…”

  “Who’s slow?” Creed pushed through the door, closed it behind him, and set the milk on the table. “Can I please have some of that bread now? I’m starving.”

  “Soon as I feed the house livestock and you get out of all those wet things.” She broke four eggs into a bowl, whisked them into an orange froth, and poured fresh milk over it.

  Angel hurried over to the pan and joined the dog when Sage set it on the floor.

  “They’re still sharing,” Creed said.

  “Looks like it. Let’s get that milk taken care of and we’ll share that loaf of bread,” she said.

  “Well, damn!”

  She spun around. “What?”

  “I thought it was just for me.”

  She smiled. “Too bad.”

  * * *

  Creed settled in a chair at the table with a spiral notebook before him.

  “What’s that?”

  “I usually keep the workings of the ranch on the computer, but since there’s no electricity and the battery is down on my laptop, I’m making notes. When things are back up to normal, I’ll get it all transferred into the computer. How’d your grandmother do things?”

  “By hand. I offered to put it on the computer, but she’d have none of it. She doesn’t even like banks,” Sage said. “Didn’t she give you the books?”

  “Not yet, but she said she would when she came back.”

  Sage’s giggle was soft but he heard it.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “There’s at least ten big boxes out in one of the bunkhouse bedrooms. You’ll pull your hair out when you start to go through all that,” she answered.

  The canvas she fast
ened into the easel was smaller than the one she’d just finished. Creed figured it to be an eleven-by-fourteen, about the same size as his momma’s velvet picture of the King. In no time she’d sketched in the lower branches of a cedar tree with a couple bunnies hiding underneath. It didn’t look like much right then, but he’d seen her work magic with nothing but a kitchen window as a model.

  From the corner of his eyes he watched Sage mix the colors and begin to work.

  “I told you in the beginning I don’t like people to watch me,” she said.

  “But you fascinate me. Bunnies, right?”

  “I saw them when I was on my way back inside. They’d taken shelter up under that big cedar between here and the barn.”

  “You going to take a whole month to paint that one?”

  “I don’t think so. Must be the Christmas season that’s gotten into my blood. Probably won’t sell but I’m having fun.”

  “Then you are a success,” Creed drawled.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Granny Riley said that if you love what you do, whether it’s diggin’ ditches or servin’ as president of the U.S. of A., then you are a success. Your love comes through the paintings, so you are a big success. Take a snapshot of that window painting and send it up to your gallery owner. See what they think, but I’m telling you, they’re going to love it,” he said.

  “You think I should?”

  “Can’t hurt. But if they say it is trash, don’t burn it. I’ll buy it to hang right where it is.”

  * * *

  Ada tried to call the house phone at the ranch in Texas, but evidently the lines were still down. She tried to call Sage’s cell phone and Creed’s as well, but service wasn’t available and with no electricity, they had no way to recharge their phone batteries anyway. The weatherman on the six o’clock news said that the storm was finally moving east but it was going slow. The last time the Panhandle had seen a storm that severe had been back in the thirties and thousands of people would be without power for several days.