Redeeming the Rancher

by Leslie North

  “What did you see?” he asked.

  “A trick of the light. The power of suggestion.”

  “No Léon Bonnat?”

  “Only you.”

  She floated the admission out there, regretted how it might come across. But they had promised honesty.

  “What about you? Who did you see?”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders, formidable in the fill of his coat against the twilight. “It only works the first time. I was seventeen.”

  “And?”

  “I thought I saw someone. Didn’t recognize her. For a while, I kept an eye out for her. But then I went into the Marines where there was nothing to look at but wall-to-wall men. I guess I forgot about her. Until now.”

  “Daniel wrote about this place. Part of the magic, he said.”

  This time, when Livie mentioned her half brother, Wes did not bristle. Maybe the intimacy of the rowboat encouraged confidences. Tiny waves lapped at the boat’s hull, the only witness to vulnerabilities.

  “He said the time you brought him out here, everyone was swimming in the nearby cove. You insisted he take some girl who worked at the Dairy Mart out in the rowboat.”

  Wes smiled. He stared at the water shifting between their feet inside the boat, but it was dark and Livie suspected he saw nothing of the water and everything about which they spoke.

  “She got so scared, she fell in the water.” One mirth-filled moment slipped free. His transfixed expression softened on a laugh. “Cursed him up one side and down the other, all the way to the shore. We gave him shit about it for days.”

  “I never heard the rest of the story, but in the letter before he died he said something about an illusion. I didn’t know what he meant until tonight.” She swallowed, hard. “Wes…”

  “Don’t…” Wes’s warning came low, even, nearly devoid of the strength to hold her back from the truth.

  “He saw you, didn’t he? In that moment, he saw you. He always knew it.”

  “Please…”

  “In his final letter, he went on and on about how much he respected you, how much you had changed his life.”

  Wes collected the oars, began rowing, more splashing than progress.

  Livie reached across the boat and gripped an oar to still it.

  “Daniel loved you.”

  Wes’s labored breaths joined the night. A man clearly unaccustomed to truths, to confessions of such a delicate nature, seemed to have run a marathon in the time it took Livie to reach his epiphany of truth. Under cloak of darkness, his voice charged out, broken.

  “He came to me the week before. Told me everything. I said I understood. I didn’t know what to say, so I pulled away, kept my distance. He must have sensed it, because he pulled double-duty that day so we would be together. He kept wanting to talk, and I’d tell him later, later. But later never came. He shouldn’t have been there that day. He shouldn’t have been there…”

  Livie walked her grip up the oar to Wes’s hand. At her touch, he threaded her fingers through his. The power of his grip reached all the way inside, to her chest, and squeezed her heart.

  “What happened wasn’t your fault, Wes. Daniel loved being a Marine, more than anything. And if he was there that day, then he had found his happiness because he served his country alongside his best friend.”

  Wes nodded, looked out where the lake carried things away. Long minutes passed, the silence between them necessary, comforting. And when they had drifted out too far, he put the oars in the water and rowed them back. A few strokes in, he paused, confessed again.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be what he needed.”

  “I’m not. You showed him everything about who you were that summer he came here that gave him so much joy. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.” Livie reached forward and gave Wes’s knee a playful shove. “Besides, you’re kind of a Bonnat. I can totally see it.”

  Wes fell from the tenuous wire he walked between sadness and joy. His chuckle eased the grip on her heart. Even in the blue-black light, she swore he turned a shade of red.

  “Thank you for bringing me here,” she said. “For showing me all of this.”

  “Not helping you get much done.”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong. The trestle informed the precise angle of armature I needed. And the company? Well, it informed quite a bit more.”

  Livie had yet to finish sketching the most important part: the soldier. This night, she would. She felt it in the fullness just beneath her skin; she felt it inside the buoyancy of her mood that seemed to carry him right along with her. Out of nowhere, she had penetrated in him what was, before, out of reach. The bronze would be chin down, Wes, yet any man and no man. He would be Daniel and Wes and Gully and Clem, and he would carry this town, these people, into hope. The hope that lived on in legends beneath a train trestle. The hope that carried them beyond dark days.

  The hope that Daniel would want Wes to have again.

  * * *

  Christmas in Close Call was what Mona called all gussied and tied up with hallelujah. Every person on the Meier ranch had to knock off chores an hour early each day in December simply to usher in some flimsy holiday excuse to be merry—carols, cookies, cards. Wes’s mother sent word she’d be enjoying the new year in Barcelona. Beneath the stars and a scattering of blankets one night, January told the group about Spain, and Olive chimed in with such an artist’s eye, Wes couldn’t say he blamed his momma for staying put.

  The closest Wes came to true seasonal bliss was the time he spent in the barn, alone, with Olive.

  In the week since their outing in the rowboat, he had discovered the manufactured hay wall between their work areas shrank by one bale each day, mostly at the edges. No one on the ranch owned up to the deed, which meant she was deconstructing what had once been so important. Wes couldn’t deny he enjoyed the game of it all—everything but the slow-burn realization that he wanted her. His mind couldn’t move past the hurt Daniel must have felt in his final hours, and there was no way Wes would subject his sister to the kind of pain he was capable of causing.

  He wanted to tell Nat all of this. Confide the way Nat had to him, time and again, about January, about his fears of holding it all together and supporting a family on nothing more substantial than his imagination. And five hundred or so head of cattle. At the town’s annual Lights on Main bulb-hanging event, two weeks before Christmas, Wes tried.

  “I don’t know, man.” Nat stood wide, like a boat captain, as if untangling a massive string of lights required sea legs and an iron constitution. “I don’t see the problem. Guy loved it here. You two were inseparable, all the way back to boot camp. Why wouldn’t he want you showing an interest in his sister?”

  “For one, he’s not here.”

  “Because this is 1950 and you need his permission?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Because she’s sophisticated and beautiful and you still decide what you’re going to wear each day by sniffing it?”

  Wes grabbed another string of lights from the boxes that someone on the town council had dumped near the courthouse steps. Inside the wreath of bulbs, he displayed his middle finger like an Advent candle.

  Nat laughed and returned fire with a gnome-like Santa lawn decoration—a covert, plastic-resin white glove with one choice human digit. Game on. Trading creative fuck offs was likely to escalate into something that involved a phallic nutcracker in front of the Roll in the Hay Feed Store or the freshly cut wood displayed in the First Baptist manger scene.

  “This is why I come to you.” Wes’s voice dripped with sarcasm. He collapsed on the courthouse steps and tackled the snarled, green plastic wire.

  His brother sat beside him. “Come on, man. This is what we do. The only thing missing here is that you’re not having fun.”

  “That’s the thing. This place has always been that—fun. My lifeline. No matter what shit went down over there, I came back here and it was like some grand reset button because this
place never changes. I need it light here because it was so damned dark over there. But she’s changing all that, man.”

  “How?”

  “Just looking at her reminds me of Daniel because they have the same eyes.” Wes snapped his fingers, stiff from the cold. “Like that, I’m back, watching the life slip out of him, right there in my hands, because we can’t get him evaced out fast enough. I can’t be pulled back there every time I look at her. I just can’t.”

  Nat shrugged and unsnarled a cluster of lights the size of his fists. “Make new memories. She isn’t her brother, Wes. In fact, she’s almost nothing like him—what I remember of him. You heard her story around the table that first night—she hadn’t even been in the same room with him since she was nine. They were continents apart after the divorce.”

  “But the parts of her that are like him…”

  “Are the parts you’re falling for.”

  Wes dropped his string. No part of his brain could process how to disentangle the mess. His stomach felt rich, like he’d downed a truck load of holiday cookies in a single sitting. “Yeah.”

  “Remember that time the bull kicked me?” said Nat. “Broke my collarbone when I was down?”

  “Yeah.” Wes had been on a remote assignment, little communication. He didn’t hear about the incident until his brother’s bone had already healed.

  “For months after the bandages came off, I couldn’t step inside a bull pen. It was like I couldn’t stop my brain from going right back to that moment of pain, focusing on that, feeling it all over again.”

  Wes frowned. “You never told me that.”

  “You were kinda busy, kicking some militant ass halfway around the world.”

  Wes backtracked his thoughts to the last time he’d seen Nat up close with a bull. Insemination tests. Clearly, he had gotten past whatever it was. “What’d you do?”

  “When I started to feel like my nuts were kicked up into my throat, I remembered other details about that moment. That day, Jared wore the most god-awful shirt. Color of baby shit with a big stain from where he’d spilled his red sports drink down the front. And the grass when I went down? Had sprouted tiny, white, crown-looking flowers. White onion, I think. I felt a rope burn on my hand from when the bastard had pulled loose, and when I brought my hand up to my lips, I tasted blood.”

  “All nice additions to the memory, I’m sure.”

  “That was the thing. The more I remembered about the moment—the angle of the sun, how hot it was that day, how my right boot slipped clear off my foot—the less I remembered the pain. Every time I approached a bull after that, I’d remember something new. After a while, memory got too crowded, I guess. I didn’t remember the pain as much.”

  Wes’s chest felt heavy; his mind in that pen, in Afghanistan. The breath he drew might as well have been knocked clear out of him, and when it soldiered back in, it was cold and unsatisfying. There were days he felt as if he, too, had been trampled by a one-ton beast. Those were the times he shifted off-center, found his happiness in empty things.

  They lapsed into a quiet union, watching the movement of those around them, some neighbors, none strangers.

  “I’m not saying that getting kicked by a bull is anything close to what you experienced,” said Nat. “Hell, little brother, I’d have taken a bone break for every horrible memory you made over there if I thought it would put you back to the easygoing kid who enlisted. Try to remember the rest of the memory, not just the part where you became a martyr and blamed yourself for what happened.”

  Wes buried his chin inside the warm collar of his coat. He wished he could do the same for the rest of him. Coming here, bringing this all up, was a mistake.

  Nat freed the remainder of his string, stood, and stretched it out enough to pass it down the line to those with extension ladders on the courthouse. He may have been done with that particular length, but he wasn’t done with Wes.

  “Until you can get inside the pen of that memory, ask her to stay for Christmas. January says she’ll be all alone in New York if she goes back.” Nat flagged down a passing beverage cart, bought two hot cocoas, and handed them both to Wes. “Last I saw her, she was stringing lights outside the book store. Probably could use some help.”

  Hands full, retreating home seemed pointless. Besides, Nat had sight of him across the town square. His brother wouldn’t hesitate to pile on Mona’s extra holiday chores—and guilt—if Wes didn’t follow through.

  Wes reached the strip of concrete where Olive’s statue would be erected and stopped. He became oddly aware of time pushing forward, and he felt powerless to stop it. When the live oak pushed out fresh leaves in spring, the place his boots occupied would be buried inside a bronze’s base. He wondered what the sculpture would be. Abstract or lifelike? Something open to interpretation or literal? Olive had only allowed the mayor a peek of her final sketches for approval. According to town gossip, Gretchen wasn’t talking.

  He glanced back at Nat, who watched him from the courthouse steps. His brother nodded, his expression clouded into a slight stink-face that might have been attributed to the unpalatable task of untangling another snarl of lights. Wes read it as a telepathic kick in the ass.

  8

  Close Call’s bookstore was a catchall—new books, old books, volumes about local paranormal stories like Eliza Grace’s, largely embellished to sell copies. The shop had coffee and tea, a few Polish kolaches brought down from the bakery, and places to sit and talk—tables and dining room chairs, armchairs and sofas, all harvested from dozens of estate sales. Local artists’ works for sale crowded the walls. To Wes, the décor paled in comparison to the building’s skeleton: Acme brick, stamped 1925, originally the pharmacy and soda fountain where Clem took his bride out for a treat in a truck whose rebuild was coming along nicely inside the Meier barn.

  Close Call’s bookstore was also the most artfully festive business on Main. Every other bulb on the strings had been diligently swapped to create a candy cane effect, and strands of light hugged every line of the storefront’s architecture. It was entirely possible Olive had overloaded the circuits, but it did make for an impressive display as the clock tower chimed five times. One by one, proprietors lit their businesses.

  Olive climbed down from a ladder and studied her handiwork with a critical eye.

  “Competitively speaking, it’s the best on the street.” Wes handed her one of the cocoas.

  “Non-competitively speaking?”

  “You’re an overachiever, and the ladies group of the Missionary Baptist Church might organize a takedown for overshadowing their Cowboy Christ.”

  “That’s a thing here?”

  “Only every other year.” Wes winked and took a sip.

  Her pink cheeks rounded into a smile. She missed nothing. He loved that about her.

  “Let’s warm up inside,” he suggested.

  Olive wanted no part of sitting. The moment she laid her eyes on the displayed art, she had to spend time with each creation. Time and again, a painting near the back drew her attention—a grassy field, the distant, shadowy form of a man with some kind of pack or figure on his back. His image repeated to the foreground, progressively blurred, until the closest looked more like dust kicked up on a breeze. Strokes of bright yellow-white and blue-white paint drew the eye to different points on the canvas—a lantern, the horizon, what looked like a small fire on the horizon. At Olive’s most reflective, her eyes rounded, the fingers of her right hand shielded her lips, and she allowed the curtain of her hair to shroud her—a study in enchantment. Wes could have watched her all night.

  As patrons cycled through, Wes and Olive remained. The owner’s son, Chet, came over to say hello. Wes introduced them.

  “This one is...” she stalled on a thought.

  Chet waited for her to finish. She didn’t.

  “My uncle painted this. He died last year in Chicago. We brought some of his things back, but mom didn’t have room in her house for them all.”

/>   “Was he known?”

  “He had a few gallery shows a couple of decades ago. Never really took off, I guess. This was his last.”

  “Do you know anything about it?” asked Olive.

  “He told me once it was a self-portrait,” Chet said. “Unconventional, given that there are so many figures. I always thought the third one looked like a woman.”

  “Did he tell you anything else?” She was rapt, insistent.

  “Toward the end, he said he had learned that each day was a new life but also a carbon copy if he allowed it. He said he had finally figured out a way to live in the now.”

  Wes’s gaze slipped to the card. George Langley. The Infinite Nows.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” Olive placed her free hand on the man’s sleeve.

  Chet gave a sad smile, as if her touch was a welcome gesture after what she had asked of him. “Stay as long as you like. We have some bookkeeping to do in the back.”

  The crowd had dwindled; most people had gone home. A soft instrumental slipped through the speakers, a welcome retreat from the forced cheer. In a pair of mismatched chairs around a too-small table, Wes asked Olive what she saw when she looked at the painting.

  “I don’t share that. With anyone. Not about art.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too personal. What we see in art unlocks parts of us that no one sees.” She turned the cup in her hand and tugged at the cardboard sleeve as if she mentally toyed with sliding away other barriers. “My interpretation will never be yours. By telling you, I might make you feel as if your ideas are wrong in some way.”

  “Not even a glimpse?”

  She met his gaze. He saw the temptation lingering in the slight part of lips poised to answer, in her more frequent blinks, as if her courage and her isolation waged an inner war.

  “The fire in the background. The way it lights up the dark sky. It reminds me of why I wanted to sculpt.”

  The sleeve slipped free of her cup. She allowed it to remain there, exposed in the light of a vintage Edison bulb hanging just above their heads. Her hands were close enough to hold.