Lone Star Woman

by CALLAHAN, SADIE

As they neared the fenced pasture behind the barn, the longhorn cows he kept as pets stood near the fence. The waning sunlight showed the wide spans of their horns as golden. Two of the cows thrust their noses through the fence rails in curiosity. Grandpa walked over and talked to them in a low voice as he gave their faces a good rub with his gnarled fingers, his affection for them palpable. “Cattle like these were the beginning of everything, Judith Ann.”

  “I know, Grandpa.” Jude, too, rubbed their faces. The cows and their three- and four-foot racks of horns looked frightening, but these were gentler than pet dogs.

  “Without their strength and toughness, there might’ve been no such thing as a cattle industry and our family wouldn’t be blessed with all we have.”

  Jude had heard him say this many times. “I know, Grandpa.”

  But longhorn cattle and their contribution to the cattle industry were of little interest to Jude this evening. After visiting Jake in town earlier and hearing the exchange between her grandfather and father at the supper table, Jude had Brady Fallon on her mind, and Jake and her cousin Cable and the days of their childhood. The urge to say what she was thinking overcame her. “Grandpa, did you not want Daddy to hire Brady Fallon?”

  “Jasper has been hiring our hands for years, Judith Ann. He can hire anyone he wants to. Why do you ask?”

  “I just got the impression at supper that you were unhappy that Daddy hired Mrs. Wallace’s nephew.”

  “No. I have nothing against young Fallon.”

  “But you said you wanted the 6-0 land to square the Circle C. Were you mad because he got the land?”

  “No. The 6-0 was Margie’s to do with as she saw fit. But not selling it to me at the market price when she had the chance was poor judgment on her part. Her young nephew would’ve been better off inheriting the money. He can’t do what he’s set out to do with that old ranch. No man without resources could.”

  Resources. When Grandpa used that word, he meant money. Grandpa thought in terms of dollars most of the time.

  “But no matter,” he said. “He’ll figure out he has to sell. We’ll be ready to buy him out when the time comes. Strike while the iron is hot, Judith Ann. I learned that from my father, who was a brilliant businessman. I’ve already alerted Bob Anderson at the bank in Abilene.”

  Jude angled a startled look at her grandfather, thinking of what she had heard of her great-grandfather, mostly from people outside the family. Many in Willard County viewed Franklin Bennett Strayhorn as something less than a brilliant businessman. Greedy ruthless shyster was the more common opinion. A few said his early demise from heart failure had been a blessing. “I thought Grandpa Frank was a lawyer.”

  “He was that, too. And he eventually became a stockman.”

  By marrying lucky, Jude thought. That’s what the local old-timers said, and she believed them, even if Frank Strayhorn was a blood relative. Grandpa’s mother, Penelope Ann Campbell, had met Frank Strayhorn when she went away to school in Dallas. She was a sheltered young woman who left a devoutly religious home. Handsome and persuasive, Frank Strayhorn swept an unsophisticated girl off her feet and married her. Eventually he persuaded her God-fearing father, Roslyn Shaffer Campbell, to tell the only other living Campbell heir, Grammy Pen’s aunt Martha Alice, who had married a Dallasite and rarely returned to Willard County, that the family’s West Texas land was worthless.

  Frank Strayhorn then brokered a deal whereby Roslyn Campbell purchased Martha Alice’s interest in the land and cattle for pennies. If Martha Alice had ever realized the falsehood that had fostered the dispossession of her hereditary right, she never acknowledged it, and she never returned to West Texas again in her life. Upon Frank Strayhorn’s death, Penelope Ann Campbell Strayhorn stood as the sole heir to the three hundred thoudand-acre Campbell ranching empire and its thousands of head of cattle and horses.

  And now, as Grammy Pen’s only offspring, Grandpa had inherited all of it.

  This story had been told to Jude by none other than their cook, Windy Arbuckle, and embellished by a few of the other older hands who had worked on the ranch for years. There was a benefit to not holding yourself above the people who were loyal to you, and that benefit was that they felt free to communicate with you.

  “But Grandpa, how can you know Brady Fallon has no resources?”

  “I know his mother and his father, Judith Ann.”

  At some point in the course of this conversation, a dawning had crept up on Jude. Now she realized why the Abilene banker had been so nervous about her attempting to buy the 6-0. The banker’s concern had nothing to do with fearing she might make a financial blunder with her trust-fund money. It had everything to do with the fact that Grandpa intended to acquire the 6-0 himself. How could she have been so naive as to not figure that out?

  Her offer for the old ranch would have been a million dollars, a substantial chunk of her trust fund. It was a fair offer for neglected rangeland in Willard County. If Brady Fallon found himself in financial straits—and Jude didn’t question her grandfather’s and father’s qualifications to make that determination—Grandpa and Daddy would be waiting to pounce like cougars. To get what they wanted at the price they wanted to pay, all they had to do was wait—wait and patiently watch Brady Fallon twist in the wind until the rope that held him broke.

  Who had spoken to her more often of the virtues of patience than the two men who had raised her?

  A sour taste formed in Jude’s mouth and a slow anger began to crawl around within her. It wasn’t fair. Brady Fallon had to be a good person or Jake wouldn’t call him a friend. Sympathy for the 6-0’s new owner flew through Jude, warring with family loyalty, and she couldn’t explain the conflicting emotions even to herself.

  “I know the Fallon family,” Grandpa went on. He picked up her slim, smooth hand with his knobby one and patted it, smiling. “Never forget, Judith Ann, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  She thought of the many stories she had heard of Frank Strayhorn’s underhanded shenanigans and wondered just how true that old saying might be. She leveled an assessing look at her grandfather. More important than what he had said about the 6-0 ranch and its new owner was what he hadn’t said.

  The longhorns moved away from the fence and began to snuffle through hay on the ground. She and Grandpa circled the small pasture in silence, then started back toward the house. Her mood had changed. She no longer felt quite as conciliatory to her grandfather’s age as she had been inclined to earlier, no longer felt like biting her tongue so as not to offend him.

  The way Daddy had cut off the conversation at supper when Grandpa mentioned Uncle Ike nagged at her and reminded her of things that had piqued her curiosity for years. If not for Grammy Pen, she would have precious little knowledge of the affair between her stepmother and Daddy’s brother. It was possible she wouldn’t even have known the circumstances of their deaths if Grammy Pen hadn’t told her. The locals might blather on about Frank Strayhorn, who had been dead for thirty years, but when it came to Grandpa and his three sons, they talked less freely.

  “I wish I could remember more about my uncle Ike,” she said, lifting her hand and letting the breeze take the blade of grass she had been toying with from her fingers. “And my stepmother.”

  Long moments passed before Grandpa spoke. “When it came to the work, when he set his mind to it, Ike was as good as there was. But he could be as bad as there was if he wanted to. He had a wildness to him. He wasn’t a steady hand like your daddy.”

  Jude waited for him to speak of her stepmother, Karen. Or of Jude’s mother, Vanessa. Or of someone. But he kept his silence.

  “Did Daddy and Uncle Ike get along before . . . you know, before the—”

  “Not well,” her grandfather answered before she could finish asking her question.

  No one ever answered a question or finished a sentence when it came to conversation about her uncle and stepmother. “They were too different,” Grandpa added. She waited again, but h
e said no more.

  Dark had descended by the time they returned to the house, and the sounds of crickets had risen in a steady rhythm in the nighttime emptiness. Grandpa said good night and shuffled to his ground-floor suite. Jude checked the doors and windows, preparing for the coming storm.

  She made her way upstairs, her thoughts continuing to trouble her. She tried to imagine what it must have been like for Daddy and Grandpa living in the same house for the past twenty-four years. Neither of them was great at communicating feelings. The death of a son and a wife, their lives ended while engaged in an illicit tryst, had to have caused some kind of schism between her father and grandfather. But if so, they kept it well hidden. She assumed they succeeded in getting along so well due to having a mutual interest in the ranch and the Campbell-Strayhorn legacy—and the fact that the family history was more powerful than they were. From what she had seen, the history had usually proved itself to be more enduring than mere mortals.

  Thunder had begun to rumble in the distance by the time she reached her room. She usually spent quiet evenings reading or watching TV. This evening, she changed into her pajamas and selected a book published in the forties about the great old ranches of the rolling plains of West Texas. She settled into the overstuffed chair where she always read, but couldn’t concentrate on the book. Seeing Brady Fallon, followed by learning who he was from Jake, then trying to extract information from Grandpa about Jake’s father and her own stepmother—all of it had pushed into her thoughts and wouldn’t relent.

  She closed her eyes and rested her head against the chair’s back, letting the past take over her mind. She had only shards of memory of those days following the fatal accident. She had a vague image of Grandma Ella, Grandpa’s wife, weeping and screaming. Grammy Pen had taken Jude into her room and made her put on a dress and black shoes—and white socks with lace on them. In her mind’s eye, Jude could still see her feet in those shoes and socks but had no recollection of the color of the dress. Someone had taken her out of the house and given her cookies and sat with her on the back porch. All these years, she thought it had been Jake, but could it have been Brady Fallon?

  She remembered melancholy hanging in the house like a heavy black curtain, people coming and going. Tears and woeful cries. A service in the church in town and the preacher talking forever. Grandpa weeping. But perhaps that memory was confused with Grandma Ella’s passing unexpectedly from complications from gall bladder surgery a few months later. Another funeral and a lot of food.

  The clearest memory she had of her father from those days was of a loud and fierce argument he’d had with Grandpa and Grandma Ella over where her uncle Ike should be buried. In the end, he had been laid to rest in the family cemetery. To this day, Jude didn’t know what the alternate choice might have been. Her stepmother had been buried somewhere in Abilene by her own family. Jude had never known where.

  After Ike’s funeral, Jake and his mother faded away, almost as if they had never existed, and Jude had lost touch with them until Jake returned to Lockett a few years ago. She was aware he had joined the army at a young age and later worked for the Dallas Police Department but knew little else about him.

  Thinking of how unforeseen events altered life in dramatic ways and sent people on irreversible courses, she drifted to sleep.

  The tempest arrived at midnight, rumbling and blowing and throwing rain against the windowpanes in great slaps. She loved storms, loved nature’s display of power and might. She awoke with a start, crawled into bed and listened. She dozed, but the storm kept her adrift in a state of half wakefulness.

  The next thing she knew, it was daylight. She had missed the end of the thunderstorm and had overslept. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have a plan for the day.

  After the storm, expecting humidity along with the heat, she dressed in jeans and a camisole with spaghetti straps and made her way to the kitchen, where she found Windy and Irene already at work on the noon meal.

  “Mornin’, Judith Ann,” Windy said without looking up from his task. With hands the size of hams, he was doing something delicate with Jell-O. The creation under construction looked fragile.

  Irene came to her, smiling and wiping her hands on a towel. “Buenos días, Yudee.” She pronounced Jude’s name as if it had two syllables, replacing the hard American J with a soft spanish Y. “You want the breakfast?” She spread her arms wide as if encompassing the world. “Bien grande?”

  Jude regarded their Mexican help with great affection. In broken English, a Mexican housekeeper had explained menstruation to her. A different Mexican housekeeper had taught her to braid her hair. Her daily life was filled with small tasks she might not have learned to perform well, if at all, without the Mexican housekeepers who had always been employed by the ranch.

  Jude couldn’t keep from laughing at Irene’s pronunciation of her name, knowing the letter J’s sound wasn’t commonly used in Spanish. Trying to speak English was Irene’s attempt to be like other Americans. She had grown up in a non-English-speaking home, so what little English she knew had come from taking lessons at the church in town and working with Windy. Since Windy probably hadn’t gone past eighth grade and had been a ranch hand at the Circle C for more than forty years, his speech was mostly rural cowboy slang and a litany of cusswords. Exactly what Irene might be learning from him, Jude didn’t dare guess.

  “No, thanks,” she told Irene. “I’ll just have a bowl of cereal.” She prepared a bowl of corn flakes with milk and sugar and backed against the counter edge to eat it. “Who’s coming to eat dinner?” she asked Windy. The noon meal had always been “dinner” and the evening meal had always been “supper” at the Circle C.

  “Clary Harper and Doc Barrett got some AQHA folks coming down from Amarillo today.”

  Ah, politics and horse breeding, Jude thought. Clarence Harper was the horse wrangler who took care of the remuda, and Dr. John Barrett was the ranch’s vet. With someone from the American Quarter Horse Association present, the dinner meeting, she suspected, would be about quarter-horse breeding, thus artificial insemination and embryo transfer. She knew the Pitchfork had a couple of highbred mares they wanted Sandy Dandy to breed with. And by now, some of the other ranches with breeding programs might have ready mares, too. Sandy Dandy was the ranch’s latest superstud. He was a powerful, award-winning stallion with a good disposition except when it came to the mares. With them, he was tough and dominant and brooked no rebellion.

  Jude had mixed emotions about transferring embryos from impregnated mares into surrogate mothers. She appreciated the advancement of the science and the positive benefits, but the whole process flew so blatantly in the face of what nature intended that it made her uncomfortable.

  And it made her even more uncomfortable knowing that, usually, the motive for doing it was making more money off the horses’ bloodlines.

  She often wondered if Thoroughbred horse owners were the ones who had the right idea, allowing highbred horses to be registered only if reproduced as a result of live cover. Every time she had those thoughts, she accused herself of being as old-fashioned as Daddy and Grandpa. With live cover, bacteria and disease could more readily be introduced into a mare’s reproductive tract. Stallions were aggressive and could be mean during copulation. If a mare resisted, live cover could turn into a violent event and cause injury to both stud and mare. Artificial insemination was safer all around.

  Though the Circle C’s breeding program had produced several famous horses, money wasn’t what drove it. The primary purpose had always been to produce the best and strongest ranch horses possible and maintain the ranch’s remuda at approximately a hundred head. Consequently, most of the male horses were gelded and the best of the fillies were added to the herd of broodmares. But if a male foal had outstanding bloodlines or looked as if he might grow to be a superior animal, he was kept as a stud. The Circle C couldn’t keep every horse that was born, so no one balked at selling a colt or a filly for racing or cutting or rodeo,
or even pleasure.

  After the breeding conversation, the men would sit at the table and smoke cigars and probably get into a more pointed discussion of breeding the stallion Sandy Dandy to some particular mare. Several of his offspring had been doing well in various cutting competitions.

  She told Windy to include her in lunch. No one had invited her specifically, but she lived here. She didn’t need an invitation.

  She finished her cereal and placed her dish in the sink. Just in case someone later wondered about her whereabouts, she told Windy, “I’m going to town to run some errands.”

  Twenty minutes later, she rumbled across the 6-0’s driveway.

  6

  The old Wallace house had no attached garage, but Jude saw the new owner’s pickup parked under a metal shed that was rusting from the ground up and the roof down. It was located across the driveway from the house. The battered metal roof looked as if it might collapse onto the truck at any minute. She parked her own pickup near the house’s sagging front porch and slid out. She could hear thumps and thuds from behind the house and loud country-western music. She recognized Gretchen Wilson’s voice belting out “Redneck Woman.”

  “Hellooo? Anybody home?”

  When no one answered, she walked through the weedy side yard toward the barn, her boots rustling through the springing grass, the morning sun warming her bare shoulders. June was a great time to be alive in West Texas. She saw Brady Fallon walking away from the barn, carrying several long, wide boards.

  “Morning,” she called out, stuffing her hands into her jeans’ back pockets as she walked toward him.

  He didn’t stop but continued a few more steps to a neat stack of long weathered boards similar to those he carried. He dropped his load on the ground, bent over and began to pick up the boards one at a time and lay them on the stack.

  She stood in silence, unable to not watch him—the raw-boned lankiness of his body, the ripple of powerful muscle under the faded blue T-shirt he wore, his taut efficiency and smooth agility as he worked. The whole package exuded the epitome of energy and masculinity and sent a shiver all the way to her toes. She appreciated physical perfection in all animals, including humans.