Sweet Wind, Wild Wind

by Elizabeth Lowell

  The old woman looked at Carson and nodded slowly. She understood. If she interfered, nothing would save her from Carson’s wrath. In that he was very much like the man who had adopted him.

  “Carson?” called Susanna from the library door.

  “Goodbye,” Carson said carelessly, heading for the stairway that led to the second-floor bedrooms.

  “I thought we were going to – “

  “No.” Carson’s voice was firm. He didn’t pause on the stairway. “I told you seven months ago that it was over. Go back to town and your banker boyfriend. Yolanda,” he continued, raising his voice, “what kind of cake did you say Lara liked?”

  “Chocolate,” called the old woman to Carson’s broad, retreating back.

  “Bake one.”

  “Is your nose dead from la huera’s cheap perfume?” demanded the old woman. “Such a cake is right now cooling on the kitchen counter!”

  “You’re an angel from heaven,” retorted Carson, pausing long enough to wink over his shoulder at Yolanda.

  Susanna watched the long, powerful legs vanish up the stairway just beyond her reach, heard the bedroom door slam shut and said a few very inelegant words as she stalked to the front door. Under Yolanda’s baleful eye, la huera climbed behind the wheel of the convertible and roared up the driveway with far more speed than skill. Carson didn’t notice Susanna’s angry departure. He was standing by the bedroom window, watching Lara hurry toward the bunkhouse. As he remembered the stunned expression on her face when she had seen his shirt open to his waist, he smiled like a chess player whose opening gambit has been an unqualified success. Whistling softly, he tested the stubble on his cheeks, decided it was too harsh for Lara’s luminous skin and went to shave.

  He would give her an hour. Maybe two. Then he would go after her. The thought of catching her brought a slow smile to his mouth and a flood of heat through his body. He never should have let her get away four years ago. He had wanted her ever since.

  Now he would have her, and the Rocking B as well.

  Chapter Three

  Willie’ s narrow face split into a grin when he spotted Lara standing on the bunkhouse steps.

  “Come in, gal, come in! We was just talking about you and wondering if n you was going to drop by soon.”

  Lara’s smile was a bit grim and her face was flushed, but no one seemed to notice. She was grateful. She had been as shocked by the sudden flood of anger she had felt while she walked to the bunkhouse as she had been by her response to the sight of Carson’s bare chest. Who did he think he was to ask me over to look at the Blackridge photos and then to dangle a cheap blonde under my nose?

  Even as the words echoed in Lara’s head, she realized that she had no right to ask the question. In the first place, she hadn’t told Carson that she was coming over that night; she had left him standing at the gate without a word as to when – or if – she would come to the ranch house. In the second place, if he wanted to chase cheap blondes – or even expensive ones – through his library, it was none of her business. In the third place – in the third place – Lara’s thoughts fragmented on the memory of Carson standing and rubbing his neck wearily, his shirt open to the waist and light shifting over his powerful torso with each of his movements. It had been all she could do not to simply turn and run without saying a word. She had been very shy of men since Carson had rejected her. Even the thought of being naked and being touched by a man frightened her. She had once thought that making love would be beautiful, but Carson had taught her that it was hurtful and unspeakably tawdry. The shame of the moment when she had offered herself and he had refused still splintered through her at unexpected moments, freezing her.

  “You remember Murchison, don’t you?” asked Willie.

  “Of course. Hello, Murchison.” Lara repeated the greeting to Jim-Bob and Dusty. “Which one of you do I have to thank for repairing Shadow’s tack and shoeing her?”

  A chorus of disclaimers went up, capped by Willie’s calm words.

  “Musta been Carson. When he heard you was coming, he had the old homestead cleaned. He caught Shadow and shook the kinks out of her, too. Guess he don’t want you getting thrown. That’s a right lively little mare, ‘specially after running loose for durn near a year.”

  Lara’s mouth opened, but no words came out. She could hardly believe that Carson had gone out of his way to help her. Carson, who had barely spoken to her at Cheyenne’s funeral. Of course, if she was honest, she hadn’t given Carson much of a chance to say or do anything. She had looked right through him when he had tried to offer her comfort. The only crying she had done had been in Yolan-da’s understanding arms while Larry Blackridge had sat nearby in his new wheelchair, looking exhausted by the strokes that had ultimately killed him. Sharon Blackridge hadn’t been at the funeral; she had died weeks before.

  With an involuntary shake of her head, Lara put away the memory of Cheyenne’s funeral and her unacknowledged father’s illness. Both men had lived full, productive, active lives, surrounded by the country and the ranch they loved. There was nothing for her to pity or regret in that, no cause for her sorrow or grief. If she could die after a life that was half as interesting and constructive as theirs had been, she would know that she had lived well.

  Willie finished the introductions without noticing that Lara’s attention was divided between the past and the present. She smiled and murmured the correct words as she memorized the faces young and old that were in the bunk-house. Twelve men, more than she ever remembered having lived on the Rocking B. The ranch had flourished under Carson’s leadership in the past few years, as illness forced Larry Blackridge to give over the reins to his adopted, well-educated and very shrewd son.

  The men who lived in the Rocking B’s large bunkhouse were a mixture of youth and age and everything in between. That was common to big ranches, where men came and went with the seasons. Most of the hands had been born on a farm or a ranch somewhere in the West, but some of them had come from the East’s overcrowded cities and had found a home in the uncrowded lands where cattle and sheep grazed. Some of the men, like Willie, were determined bachelors who were painfully shy with any woman they hadn’t known as a little girl. Others, like Murchison, were divorced. Still others, like the handsome young man known only as Spur, had an appreciation of women that was uncluttered by any shyness or notions of the necessity of rings and vows.

  Lara smiled around the circle of attentive faces once again. Behind the men she saw overstuffed chairs and well-used card tables with worn playing cards placed facedown where men had been sitting. Materials to write a letter were scattered across a scarred desk, and magazines were heaped at one end of a long coffee table. A television crackled in the corner as a laugh track tried to coax watchers into believing that the flickering sitcom was amusing rather than merely simpleminded.

  “I’m interrupting you,” Lara said. “Please, go back to whatever you were doing. I just wanted to talk to Willie for a few minutes.”

  Another chorus of disclaimers went up as Spur walked over and snapped off the TV. “No way,” he said, smiling as he turned to face Lara. “Willie’s been telling us all about you, but somehow he didn’t get around to saying how pretty you are.”

  Lara smiled slightly. Spur’s charm was of the generic, automatic sort common to some men. It wasn’t the specific kind of charm used by a man who was interested in a particular woman.

  “I’ll bet you have a lot of success with that line,” Lara said dryly, smiling even as she let Spur know that she wasn’t in the market for any lines, new or old.

  Immediately the rest of the men relaxed and started ribbing Spur about his success with the ladies. Spur laughed, not at all put off by the teasing or by Lara’s deft refusal of his invitation to join him in the oldest game of all.

  “Is that what you’re doing your research on – Western lines?” he asked.

  She shook her head, smiling. “Nothing
that spicy. I’m doing a history of the Rocking B from 1860 to 1960.”

  “Before my time,” said Spur. “Before yours, too,” he added, giving her an appreciative once-over with vivid blue eyes.

  “That’s what makes it interesting to me,” Lara said, shrugging out of her backpack before Spur could offer to help. As she unzipped the biggest pocket, she glanced up. “You’re sure I’m not interrupting?”

  she asked, looking particularly at the older hands.

  “Hell, honey,” said Jim-Bob, rubbing his grizzled head, “we been playing gin with each other so long we know the discards before we see them. No sport to it a’tall. We’d much rather talk to a sweet young thing.”

  “Well, if you find one, tell me and I’ll let you go talk to her,” Lara muttered as she rummaged in the backpack’s huge pocket. The men laughed and nudged each other appreciatively while Willie looked on like a proud papa. Knowing that Lara had not come to flirt with any of the hands allowed all of the men to relax and enjoy her company.

  “The kind of history I’m doing,” began Lara, laying out the tape recorder, “is informal. I don’t care if you remember who was governor and who was president during the time your story takes place. What matters to me are the events and the people of the Rocking B ranch itself. I want the kind of stories your grandfathers told you, and the kind you would tell your friends or your children and grandchildren.”

  Lara looked up, glancing at each man’s face, trying to make them understand why memories that might seem trivial to them were important to her.

  “The Rocking B of the old days is gone,” she said quietly. “It lives only in your memories, and in the stories you know about men and women who are now dead. Some of you have been here all of your lives, and when you were young, you worked with older hands who had also been here all of their lives. It was the same for those older men. They had been young once, and they had listened and learned from the Rocking B’s old hands.”

  The older men nodded slowly, remembering their youth a half century before, when they had listened to stories told by men who had been young before the century had turned.

  “In a way,” Lara continued, “the men who have lived in the Rocking B’s bunkhouse are like a family passing stories down through the years. At least, it used to be that way,” she said, grimacing toward the now-silent TV. “Telling stories used to be a major form of entertainment for ranch hands. That time is past. I want to gather all the old stories before they’re forgotten. I want anyone who reads my history to be able to close his eyes and hear voices from the past whispering of horses and cattle and storms and sweethearts. I want people to know, really know, what it was like to live on the Rocking B

  a long time ago.”

  Jim-Bob, who had once been quite a lady’s man and who still cut a fancy figure among the local widows, rubbed his chin slowly. “You sure you want to know about the women, too? Not all of them were what you’d call respectable. Not that I’d know anything about it firsthand,” he added hastily. “But I’ve heard some stories, sure enough.”

  Lara hid her smile. “If my tape recorder blushes or faints, I promise I’ll throw it away and get a sturdier model.”

  Jim-Bob chuckled.

  “The people who live on the Rocking B now aren’t saints,” Lara said matter-of-factly, “and neither am I. I’m sure it was the same in the past. I don’t want a sanitized kind of history. I want it just the way you’d tell it if I weren’t here listening. In fact, if my being here bothers you, I’ll show Willie how to change the tape and bow out right now. Or, if you like, you can write down any story you’d be embarrassed to tell out loud. But whatever you do, please, please pass on the story. Don’t let a wonderfully funny or sad or simply human piece of history die because you’re embarrassed to share it with a woman.”

  Jim-Bob looked dubious. “Some of the stories are kinda raw, if you get my drift.”

  Lara smiled and said calmly, “If you’re thinking of the story about Hustlin’ Annie and the bunkhouse fire, or about Big Sally’s Halloween surprise, or the night Cheyenne’s daddy ran naked all the way back from town with a buttful of rock salt after getting caught in somebody else’s saddle – “

  The laughter of the old hands drowned out Lara’s words. She smiled widely. “I grew up here, remember? And if it helps, the first informal history I ever participated in researching was the life of a ninety-year-old spinster living over on the Firehole River who had worked in every whorehouse in Montana. After that charming old bawd, I’m shockproof.”

  “Sounds like Tickling Liz,” muttered Willie.

  “She said to say hello if I saw you,” Lara murmured without missing a beat, “and to ask you if you still were partial to dancing barefoot in the spring grass.”

  Willie flushed to the roots of his thinning hair while the men around him howled with glee. Then Willie began to laugh, too, and there was a remembering kind of gleam in his eyes as he thought of the easy-smiling older woman who had long ago taught him why God had made girls one way and boys another.

  After that the stories began to flow. Unobtrusively Lara finished setting up the tape recorder, checked the sound level and settled back to be an attentive audience. Tonight she would make no attempt to direct the stream of reminiscence and memories. The time for that would be later, after the men were accustomed to seeing her in their midst. Then she could ask for their oldest memories; they would answer in ways that would surprise even themselves, for the human mind works in amazing ways, dredging up incidents that the men would have sworn they had forgotten.

  “…had this old spotted mare that just wouldn’t hit the trail unless she had a cup of Java like the rest of the hands.

  Well,” Murchison said, stopping long enough to light up a cigarette, “the new man, Perkins, couldn’t believe the mare liked coffee. He thought the hands were pulling his leg. So he ups and saddles the mare after breakfast, and she walks about ten feet and then she sits down in the middle of the trail,” said Murchison. “Swear to God. She sat right down like a big ol* hound dog and just dared Perkins to do something about it. Well, he kicked and he cussed, and that old mare just sat tight and rolled her eyeballs at him.”

  “What’d he finally do?” asked Spur, grinning.

  “Well, by the time he gave up, the chuck wagon was long gone over the hill,” Murchison continued, blowing out a stream of smoke.

  “So Perkins spent half the morning chasing the wagon on foot and the other half hauling a bucket of coffee back to that walleyed ol’ mare.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? Were they funning him all along?”

  “Nope. Mare only liked coffee with cream. Last anyone saw of Perkins, that poor fool was running over the hills, trying to rope a mama longhom. To this day, I’ve heard that you can see him when the moon is just right and the calves are just getting up to weaning size.”

  Lara’s laughter blended with the deeper sounds of masculine amusement. She loved it when the men started talking about the horses they had known, for each man’s life was intimately involved with the big, affectionate and sometimes epically willful animals.

  “Did you ever hear about Wild Blue?” asked Dusty.

  Lara shook her head, although the name sounded vaguely familiar to her.

  “He was a big stud that roamed around here way, way back, about the time the first Blackridge rode into the valley through South Pass. The Indians had tried to catch that mustang, but it was like trying to catch the wind. So they took their best mares and turned them loose to get bred by the wild blue roan. He threw some of the prettiest Appa-loosa colts ever to eat Montana grass,” Dusty said. The cowhand’s voice was slow, the words almost hesitant. He was more than seventy years old and had been born on the Rocking B. He had a lot of memories to search through for the threads of the story he was telling. Lara listened to both the words and the silences, letting the sto
ry grow in her mind, seeing again a time when horses ran free and were pursued by men just slightly less wild than the mustangs themselves.

  The stories blended one into the other like streams joining a river running back through time itself. When it was necessary, Lara changed the tape unobtrusively, not interrupting the flow of words as she labeled each tape and entered it into her interview log. Eventually the talk turned to the raucous celebrations that used to follow a roundup, when everyone would let off steam after the brutal work of catching, branding, dehorning and castrating spring calves. The square dances would go on until dawn and beyond, with couples sneaking away to be alone and then returning later, flushed with secrets.

  Spur, who had been pretty well left out of the storytelling up to that point, brightened at the mention of dancing. With little urging Willie hauled out his fiddle, cranked the strings into tune and began to play all the old hoedown songs with surprisingly agile fingers. Spur turned out to be a superb square dancer whose family had a long tradition of calling dances all over the West. He began to chant the dances that he had learned and to demonstrate the rhythmic, exuberant steps that accompanied the words.

  “This step is known as Over the Moon and Around the Mountain,”

  Spur said.

  Lara blinked. She was no authority on square dances, but she had the feeling that her leg was being very gently pulled. On the other hand, that kind of droll teasing was very much a part of ranch life both today and in the past. She had no objection to providing the men with a little entertainment at her own expense.

  “Over the Moon and Around the Mountain,” she repeated gravely.

  “That sounds, er, strenuous.”

  “Oh, it’s not bad a’tall,” drawled Spur. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  He held out his arms. Lara hesitated for several seconds before lifting her own arms and stepping forward. As Spur pulled her into dancing position, she realized that Spur was every bit as tall as Carson and nearly as strong. The young cowboy’s eyes were a very vivid blue, and his long, light mustache was worn in a drooping handlebar style that would have gone unremarked more than a century before.