Johnny hung back. He did not know how he managed to get into these awkward situations. It seemed every time he deliberately set out on a course, things got all jumbled up.
Etta felt dazed. She could not look up at the cowboy. She was too embarrassed. Did he always have to arrive when she was in a mess?
Feeling something poking her hip, she shifted and pulled two forks from beneath her and then reached for a spoon from under the buffet, handing all three to Latrice. She saw the cowboy’s hands extending two spoons. She reached to take them, and because there was no way out of it, she raised her eyes.
The cowboy was gazing down at her with his silvery eyes anxious and curious.
Etta said, “I’m sorry to tell you I still don’t have the money my husband owed you. I have even less now than I had the day we buried him.”
He looked surprised, then said quickly, “Oh, no, ma’am. I’m not here for the money. You see, I have a little filly out in my truck.” He gestured with his hat. “I need someplace to keep her, and I was hopin’ we could work somethin’ out.”
* * *
Chapter 9
Etta looked quickly into the man’s eyes. Steely gray, strikingly bright against his rugged face. A handsome heartbreak man, she thought instantly as she averted her gaze and smoothed her overalls.
“I’m sorry, but in case you didn’t notice, there is a for-sale sign in the front. There’s really no way I can help you, Mr. . . .” She stopped, feeling silly about not knowing his name.
“My name’s Johnny Bellah, ma’am. I guess we didn’t get properly introduced the other day.”
His voice was soft and deep, his face smiling, and he stuck out his hand. It was warm, moist, and rough. She was the one to pull her hand away.
He said, “I got the filly out at my truck, if you’d like to see her.”
Without waiting for her to answer, he tucked his hat on his head and moved quickly across the oak flooring, his spurs jingling softly with each step, to the door that he drew open for her.
Etta hesitated and then went with him, thinking that life was just flowing on and dragging her with it.
She spared him quick glances, noting again his starched shirt stretched over broad shoulders and his lean hips. And his limp, which seemed very pronounced today.
“Got my bad knee wrenched yesterday,” he explained, as if reading her mind.
Her eyes met his briefly before skittering away.
She said, “How much did you say my husband owed you, Mr. Bellah, and what for exactly?”
“Eight hundred dollars. I got the IOU right here.” Stopping, he pulled his wallet from his back pocket, took out a rumpled slip of paper and handed it to her. “I sold some horses for your husband down in Fort Worth back this winter . . . but this idn’t for that. This is for a poker game.” His voice dropped a notch, and his eyes shifted.
"Oh."
It was Roy’s handwriting all right, all his sweeping flourishes. Etta did not think she was much concerned with a poker debt.
Handing the note back to him, she looked over at his pickup parked in front of the barn. “You said you have a filly?” Shielding her eyes against the sun, she looked at his truck and saw two horses, which appeared to be tied to the back of the truck.
“Yes, ma’ am.” He hurried to fall in step with her again. “Little red dun, not four months old . . . and these two-year-olds, too.”
“You brought them here like that?” Etta asked, finding the image of the truck trailing horses down the highway quite amazing.
“Well now, I couldn’t very well put them in the back. They’d have beat this filly to death. I go slow so they can keep up.”
He shoved the older horses aside and opened the tailgate. Strong, rough hands . . . shoulder muscles thick beneath his blue shirt. Etta shifted her gaze from his body.
“Easy girl,” he murmured.
The filly backed up. She was so gaunt her ribs and hipbones protruded, and her legs looked like rickety sticks. He pretty much tugged her to the ground, struggling to bear her weight with his injured knee. Etta hovered, wanting to help but not knowing how.
“They took her mama to nurse an orphaned colt,” he told her, “and threw her out in the pen with the other string. She can’t hold her own with them, and she would’ve been dead in no time. I need a place to keep her and to break these other two for a fella. Thought maybe I could use your place here, in exchange for your husband’s IOU. I’ll only need a month or so.”
Of course he wanted to stable all three, but had mentioned only the filly at first. Etta was not at all surprised; such was the way of men like him, who were not being devious but simply assuming.
She gazed at him. He gazed at her, his luminous silvery eyes charming and expectant.
She thought she should say no, but instead she shrugged and put a hand to touch the filly’s soft nose. “I guess it’d be okay. Might as well get some use out of the place while we can.”
“Well now,” he drawled, a warm grin sweeping his face and lighting his eyes, “I certainly appreciate this, ma’ am . . . and I’ll tell you what. I’ll throw in breakin’ that red horse for you.”
Etta’s head came up. She saw his eyes bright and eager and his smile as easy and sweet as slipping down a child’s slide.
“Maybe,” she said, then turned and walked back to the house.
* * * *
Within the space of the following two days, with Etta watching from the safety of the house, Johnny Bellah not only moved his adopted filly and the two geldings he had contracted to train for Jed Stuart into the stable, but himself as well, moving his tack into the tack room and his belongings into the stablehand’s room.
Early afternoon of the second day he showed up leading a string of eight horses up the tree-lined lane.
This did not come as a great surprise to Etta, as she had known a man such as Johnny Bellah would not be content with one scrubby filly and two geldings of no particular worth.
Also, at the moment he came with the herd, she was upstairs in the bedroom she had shared with Roy, sitting on the bed and crying to him things such as: “I loved you, Roy, and you broke my heart. What are we gonna do now? You left a daughter, you know. You left her penniless, damn you to hell, Roy Rivers.”
She was so involved with venting her anger that she heard the horses’ thudding hooves for a full minute before she responded. Finally realizing the sound was horses’ hooves and not thunder, she knew instantly that Johnny Bellah was the cause. Nevertheless, she went to look out the window to make certain, and sure enough she saw him coming on the back of a big golden dun, dragging along a string behind him (only three of which were held by a rope), like a cowboy out of a picture show.
Etta ran down the stairs and out the front door, where she paused in a moment of uncertainty of her eyesight.
Johnny swept off his hat and called gaily, “Howdy, ma’am. Gorgeous afternoon, idn’t it?”
Etta raced around to the side yard, completely forgetting about the child she carried and the possibility of being run down in her effort to keep the loose horses away from the yard, while Latrice, coming off the side porch, waved her apron and hollered, “Don’t let them in my garden! Shoo, buggers . . . shoo!”
Grinning exuberantly, Johnny rode on by, leading the string into the big corral, turning quickly and coming out to drive the strays through the gate Etta held open. Then he jumped from the saddle, helped her shove the latch, and told her instantly how he had brought all eight head by himself thirteen miles down the county highway, with fencing and without it and with vehicles zipping past, suffering only one mishap when several horses trampled a row of rose bushes a lady had just set out at the edge of her yard.
He ended with, “This here big dun and that gray there are my own. The others I’m trainin’ for Harry Flagg. I’m in the trainin’ business again,” his silvery eyes pleased as pleased could be.
“Mr. Bellah, you are takin’ advantage of our deal. I agreed to the filly a
nd the two geldings—not to stablin’ an entire herd.”
“Well now, I guess that’s so, ma’ am,” he drawled, casting a smile calculated to be sheepish, “but there’s plenty of room . . . and the IOU is for eight hundred dollars. You got the space, and I got the talent.”
Hand on the rough fence rail, her heart pounding in a curious, frightening manner, Etta looked at the horses, at the powerful legs and noble heads, flying manes and tails, muscles moving in motion. She dared not return her eyes to the man who shifted beside her. She felt his gaze and his breath, and very nearly the cotton of his shirt and beating of his heart.
He said, “I’ll tell you what—if you’d like, I’ll train that red horse for you in exchange for the extra use of your place.”
She knew in that moment that this was what he was after all along—Little Gus.
She knew, with a small heartsickness, that from his bent, once-black hat to his gleaming champion belt buckle to his spurs that never came off his boots, he was in all ways exactly like her father and every other cowboy she had ever encountered. His life and breath were horses, and he could more easily stop eating and drinking than he could stop going after them, in the same manner that Roy had gone after women and God-knew-what-all.
Turning to face him, she saw his eyes flicker downward, reach her swollen belly, and zip back upward again, his cheeks glowing slightly. He knotted his brows and waited.
“Maybe,” she said and walked away toward the house. At the porch she stepped up beside Latrice, paused, and looked back at the large corral, where Johnny Bellah moved among the horses and the billows of dust in the light of a western sun. It was a beautiful sight, and Etta lingered, her hand braced on the porch post, watching and not knowing why she felt compelled to do so, until she felt Latrice looking at her.
She said, “He can be a help to Obie while he’s here," and went inside.
* * * *
An hour later, Johnny Bellah knocked at the kitchen door and requested PineSol, in order to clean the stablehand’s room in the barn, an act that immediately won Latrice’s admiration, as she had never known a man to disinfect. She kept going to the screen door and looking out and tossing out comments such as, “My land, he’s done thrown out that old mattress. He’s hauled out the dresser and shelf and is washin’ them. He’s brought out the springs now and is rinsin’ them . . . they’ll probably rust away. Lordy, he must have had a good mama.”
Latrice was in fact so captivated by Johnny Bellah’s apparent bent toward cleanliness (although she would have died before admitting it) that when he returned what was left of the Pine-Sol, she invited him to supper.
“A man who works that hard at cleanin’ is gonna need somethin’ to stick to his ribs,” she told Etta. “He loved my biscuits the other mornin’ he came to breakfast.”
“When did he come to breakfast?” Etta asked with some bit of shock.
“Oh, the day after the funeral, when you were sleepin’ in my bed. I forgot, you missed it.”
Latrice then told of the visit, and Etta absorbed the news with some wonderment. It seemed strange to think of goings-on in her own house that she was completely in the dark about.
Watching Johnny Bellah moving to and from the barn, she imagined him sitting in the kitchen, at the red Formica and chrome table, with his bright silvery eyes, eating a fluffy biscuit and drinking dark coffee with his work-worn hands, and asking to see her, while she had been sleeping in her voile nightgown just on the other side of the wall.
When he came to the door for Latrice’s promised supper, he wore a fresh starched shirt, clean jeans, and polished boots and his hair was neatly combed.
As she let him inside, Etta thought she caught a whiff of an odor. Whiskey, but then she considered it could be PineSol. She smoothed her worn overalls and hair, wishing she had changed and combed her hair.
Tossing off that nonsense, she straightened her back and waved him into a chair. They ate in the kitchen; Etta did not think the situation called for use of the dining room. Johnny Bellah fell into the category of a renter, a hand, not company.
Over supper, of which he ate a great quantity and with surprisingly impeccable manners, Johnny Bellah told them all about himself, with very little prodding. He had been supporting himself since arriving in the vicinity by working at the stock sale barn and for several local ranchers, and at nights he had been delivering bootleg. It concerned him some that it was illegal, but, “I don’t like to judge anyone,” he explained. “I like a nip myself now and then.”
Studying him, Etta wondered.
“That was all just temporary anyway,” he said. “I’m back to my chosen profession.”
“Which is?” Etta asked.
“Horseman, ma’am,” he said. He took up another soda biscuit, his fourth, and heaped jelly on it, saying, “I’ve cowboyed and rodeoed and done a lot of other things I’m proud of, but now I make my livin’ trainin’ horses. I’m a horseman.”
He continued to tell them about having grown up in Fort Worth, Texas, cowboy-town-America, until the age of thirteen when his mother had died, and he lit out on his own. He had worked a number of big old ranches in Texas—the King, the Waggoner, the XIT—and other, smaller spreads all over the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and into New Mexico.
He had been a rodeo cowboy riding a shooting star to fame and fortune as a bronc rider, bulldogger, sometimes team roper, with two bronc-riding and three all-round cowboy championships to his credit, when the army called his name and sent him to Korea. A jeep turned over on his knee in the Far East mud and knocked his rodeo star out of the sky. He was a compulsive reader of novels, liked the sound of certain words on his tongue, didn’t like rising early but loved to see the dawn break over the land, favored Nocona boots, would not come in the same room with cooked cabbage, loved warm apple pie with ice cream melting on it, and Hershey bars, and red horses best of all.
All of this he told them over that one meal, which of course caused them to linger long at the table.
“You are quite a talkative man, Mr. Bellah,” Etta told him, as Latrice began clearing their plates. She realized that she had not been bored listening to him, though.
“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded. “I figured you ladies would want to know all about me.”
Etta raised an eyebrow at that, and he added, “Since I’m usin’ your facilities and eatin’ at your table, you have a right to know about my caliber.”
His gaze flickered to Latrice and then rested on Etta for long seconds in which Etta felt drawn to him, despite herself.
“Would you tell me about that red horse of yours, ma’am?” he said, leaning forward on folded arms.
Etta stared at him.
Then she looked at her glass of tea, fingering the moisture. “His name is Little Pegasus. He’s out of a mare that Roy picked up cheap. The mare had already won a couple of races, and Roy planned to prepare her for goin’ over to New Mexico.”
She paused, thinking of how Roy had always had this dream of discovering a fantastic racehorse out of nowhere. She looked into Johnny Bellah’s silvery eyes, and he looked back, waiting.
“When the mare got here it was discovered that she was in foal and no one knew by what stallion. It was just one of those mistakes that can happen when people aren’t payin’ attention. The mare died when Little Gus was born. It looked like he wouldn’t make it either, but he did. He’s a tough horse.”
Johnny Bellah’s eyes were intent upon her. “Obie tells me that you doctored him and brought him around.”
“I had a lot of help,” Etta said. “Obie got us a nursing mare, and Latrice helped me massage his legs, and we got him standin’ every day, until he could do it on his own.”
Telling of it brought it all back to her in that brief moment, the fear and the struggle, and the triumph. She realized she had smiled slightly, and Johnny Bellah smiled in return. Etta averted her eyes and rose to get the coffee cups.
He said, “Obie said he’s been ridden once or t
wice.”
“Not really ridden. He was handled so much that gettin’ on him wasn’t hard, but I found out I was pregnant and had to quit on him. That was last fall. My husband got on him a couple of times, but Gus bucked him off.”
“Well now, he doesn’t look like much,” Johnny Bellah drawled, sitting back in his chair, “but you never know about some horses. Sometimes what’s on the inside of a horse can make up for a lot on the outside.”
This had always been Etta’s opinion about Little Gus; Johnny Bellah’s being on the same thought wave was unsettling.
Latrice brought their coffee and asked Johnny if he took cream and sugar.
“Take heaps of both when I can get ‘em,” he said, his face breaking into the sort of grin that is so pleased with life.
That’s how Johnny Bellah seemed—a man highly pleased with life and with himself. It was an attitude that enthralled, and irritated.
Latrice brought dishes of canned apricots with cream from Obie Lee’s cow. Johnny exclaimed over the dessert as if he had been given a three-tier and half-dozen-egg fudge cake.
"Uhmmm . . . you ladies have sure treated me tonight,” he said, eyes feasting on the sweet fruit.
Then his gaze came up and met Etta’s. His eyes shone, and seemed to feast on her, too.
Etta pushed up quickly from the table. “I don’t believe I need any dessert tonight, Latrice,” she said and went to the sink and began washing dishes, which earned her raised eyebrows from Latrice.
Plunging her hands into the warm, soapy water, she told herself that Johnny Bellah was not looking at her. He was looking for a way to Little Gus.
She told herself not to think of his silvery eyes or the way his dark hair curled on the back of his neck, or the foolish longings that really had nothing to do with him at all. The girl-child growing inside her, as if knowing already about a woman’s foolish inclinations, began knocking inside Etta’s belly, seeming to say, Remember me.
Despite her better intentions, as she put away the plates she sneaked looks at him, and twice she saw him looking at her. He did not hide this at all.
If Wishes Were Horses Page 11
