Mistletoe Cowboy

by Carolyn Brown

  She was tempted to rush, but she forced herself to slow down, to shut her eyes several times and get the female bird’s part in the picture just right. Even though her colors weren’t as brilliant as her counterpart’s, and even though the wood between the panes separated them, she was his choice. And the angel was smiling down on them.

  When both birds were to her satisfaction, she picked up the brush to paint in the mistletoe. She glanced back at the window and suddenly in her mind’s eye the mistletoe wasn’t lying on the sill but was tied up together with a bright red satin ribbon and hanging from the bottom of the poinsettia valance.

  She blinked and it was back on the windowsill, but Sage Presley did not argue with her visions. If the gods said that she should hang the mistletoe then she would do just that. The times when she’d done what she wanted rather than what her visions gave her, those paintings had been a big flop. When she listened, the critics went wild with what she produced.

  ***

  Creed and Noel played tug-of-war with an old wash rag he’d found in the scrub bucket. Creed held onto the rag with his hand and Noel pulled against it with all her might using her teeth. Even while he played, he kept a steady watch on the picture’s progress. He didn’t know jack shit about good art versus bad art. But the canvas on the easel was alive with color and motion. Two birds on the windowsill, feathers fluffed out against the cold wind, the promise of warmth behind the thin glass, mistletoe and poinsettias and an angel floating in the background.

  When Sage painted the mistletoe above the cardinal’s head, Creed could actually feel the painting. He couldn’t have put a single thought into words, but it touched all the senses. He imagined one hand on the outside of the window and the other on the inside. One cold. One hot. He could taste the snowflakes on his lips, and the mistletoe reminded him of the kiss he and Sage had shared.

  Lots of kisses were shared under the mistletoe during the Christmas season. He’d seen posters about Jesus being the reason for the season. If he turned it around maybe the season was the reason he felt such an attraction to Sage when she was definitely not the type that usually caught his eye.

  ***

  Sage signed her name to the bottom of the picture, removed it from the easel, and carried it across the room where she hung it on two screws in a bare spot.

  “Why’d you put it right there?” Creed asked.

  “That’s where my work dries.”

  “Now what?” Creed asked.

  She pulled the rocking chair away from the fireplace and parked it in front of the picture. “I study it to determine what I could have done better. I look at it through the critic’s eye and the buyer’s. Then I decide if I’m going to burn it or put it with my stash to take to the gallery.”

  “Good God, Sage! You’ve worked on that thing for hours and hours. Surely you wouldn’t burn it,” Creed said.

  “What would you do if you were riding a horse, one that you’d raised yourself from birth, one you’d broken to the saddle and who’d carried you through a blizzard to a warm house, and he stepped in a hole and snapped his leg bone so badly that it stuck out of the skin and it could never be fixed? Would you shoot him to put him out of his misery or let him lie there in excruciating pain?”

  “It would break my heart, but I’d shoot him,” Creed said.

  “That’s my point. I’d rather burn it than take something that looks like a second grader’s coloring book page to a gallery showing. And this picture scares me. I’ve never painted anything that quickly.”

  Creed gave the cleaning rag to Noel and pulled his rocking chair over close to Sage’s chair. He reached across the distance separating them and laid his hand on hers and together they studied the painting.

  “What do you see?” she asked finally.

  “I’m not a critic. I don’t know how long a masterpiece is supposed to take from start to finish. Hell, my momma thinks the prettiest picture in her house is a velvet Elvis that Daddy bought for her when they visited Graceland for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It hangs above her bed and there’s never a spot of dust on it.”

  “Surely you see something,” she said.

  Creed took a deep breath and told her the emotions it had evoked in him when she was painting the mistletoe.

  “And you say you aren’t a critic.” She smiled. “It’s just that I’ve never painted snow before. I’m building a reputation as a Western artist.”

  He pointed to the picture hanging above the credenza just inside the front door. “Like that?”

  She nodded. “What do you see in that one?”

  “I see the big rock formation over on the backside of the property. And the way the top is eroded, it looks like an old cowboy without his hat. His neck is sagging with age and his eyebrows have drooped. His face is fuller and wider than it would have been in his youth, but there’s character there and lessons he could teach a grandchild.”

  “Wow!” She pulled her hand from his and hugged herself.

  “Do I get an A?”

  “A-plus. Are there any similarities in the pictures?” she pressed on.

  “Oh, yeah!” He pointed to the one above the sofa again. “That one is fall and the end of life is near for the old cowboy. The one you painted is right now and there’s a beginning for those two birds if they survive the cold. He’d like to kiss her under the mistletoe, but his little beak is frozen.” Creed chuckled at his own joke.

  “Then you could tell that the same artist painted them?” she asked.

  Creed studied one picture and then the other. They were so different that his first thought was no one would ever know that Sage Presley had done both. But that first impression was totally wrong. It was very evident that she’d done both pictures.

  “Well?”

  “Give me a minute to put my words together. And while I’m doing that, Sage, you should be building a career as an artist, period, not solely as a Western artist. Paint life. It will sell because people will feel it.”

  “It’s just that I’ve never finished a picture, even a small one, this fast and it scares me. I usually do six a year, maybe eight on a very good year.”

  “Okay, does size mean anything to a critic? Is bigger better?” he asked.

  She giggled nervously. “Are we still talking about paintings?”

  He laughed with her. “For now, we definitely are.”

  “Then the answer is no. Size is not a factor.”

  “You won’t think I’m a sissy if I tell you my honest opinion, will you?” Creed asked.

  She shook her head.

  He ran his fingers through his dark hair. Men weren’t supposed to see feelings or feel emotion or pain and they damn sure weren’t supposed to discuss any of the above. That was women’s business when they got together for a hen session.

  He cleared his throat and started, “What I see is emotion, Sage. It’s not just pretty pictures that you paint. It is feelings. Momma says that when she looks at her velvet Elvis she remembers the wonderful second honeymoon she and Daddy had. To her that is pure art. When I look at these two pictures, I see that old cowboy not caring that his days are up and time is short before the cold winter takes him away from this world. But there’s a smile on his face and he’s taking a whole passel of memories with him to the other side. In the other one I see the promise of spring, birds singing as they build a nest, and life buds once again in spite of the terrible storm. I feel warmth inside the window and sympathy for the poor little birds that are so cold. The angel promises protection if they’ll remember the love of the season. That curtain thing is old so it’s representative of the past. The angel is the promise of an eternal future.”

  When he looked over at Sage, tears were flowing down her cheeks. “Those are the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard.”

  Heat crawled up his back and he felt the sting of a blush on his cheeks. Creed could not remember the last time he’d blushed.

  She squeezed his hand. “Thank you. I won’t burn
it and I’m going to paint more like it.”

  Angel hopped down from the window and ran across the room, landed in Sage’s lap with a thud, and looked up at her. Sage pulled her hand away from Creed’s and stroked the cat’s long fur while she continued to look at the picture.

  “She’s purring, Creed. I think she’s thanking us for the milk and food,” she said.

  ***

  Creed grinned.

  Us.

  She had said us.

  Some miracles weren’t instant. Some of them took a while in coming around.

  Noel left the business of tearing up the rag and joined the family, putting her paws on the edge of Creed’s rocking chair.

  “Feeling left out, are you?” Creed scratched her ears.

  “Didn’t take them long to make themselves at home, did it?” Sage said.

  “I think the children are asking you to do a portrait of them.”

  Sage laughed. “They aren’t my children. I’m not even sure they’ll be my pets. When the storm clears and they can go outside, they could easily go right on down the road on their journey.”

  “I doubt that Angel will leave her babies or Noel either when she has them. Did you ever think about a husband and children?” he asked abruptly.

  Sage bit her lower lip for several seconds.

  Now why in the hell had he asked that question, Creed wondered. It was too personal and would kill the miracle that had barely gotten a foothold in her heart. Maybe she didn’t even hear him ask. Hopefully she’d been studying her art so intensely she’d blocked out everything else.

  Finally she answered. “That is a scary thought, Creed. My dad died and my mother’s heart was broken as well as Grand’s. Daddy was her only child. He and Momma were high school sweethearts and married before he went off to the Army. She went with him as soon as she could and I was born a few years later.”

  “So you have a fear of commitment?” he asked.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve heard it before and I don’t have any fears. I’m just a careful woman. Fear is one thing. Caution is another. Besides, if I had a fear it wouldn’t be of commitment, it would be of abandonment and Grand ain’t helping one damn bit in that business.”

  “Well, I’m honest enough to say that I have the big C-word fear. It’s the only thing that makes me shake in my boots. After my fiancée pulled off her stunt, I’m gun-shy when it comes to relationships.”

  “You? I don’t believe it!”

  “Believe it, darlin’. I’m a flirt but when it comes to trusting anyone enough to give them my whole heart to put through a meat grinder, well, that’s another matter.”

  “Guess we make a pretty damn good pair to get stuck in a blizzard together,” she said.

  Chapter 5

  “Well, dammit all to hell on a rusty poker,” Ada fussed.

  “Burned another pan full, did you?” Essie giggled.

  “Damn sure did. Guess we’ll only be takin’ three dozen to the canasta game tonight.”

  “I reckon that’ll be plenty. Everyone else will bring cookies too. You wouldn’t burn them if you’d stop your worrywartin’.”

  Ada tucked her salt-and-pepper hair behind her ears. She and Esther had been born in southern Oklahoma to a father with Chickasaw blood and a red-haired Irish mother. Esther had gotten the red hair and green eyes, but she was as mild tempered as a gentle southern breeze. Ada inherited the dark hair and dark eyes and had a temper like a tornado and a hurricane meeting head-on with a Texas wildfire.

  Essie had just passed her eighty-sixth birthday and Ada was over seventy. They hadn’t grown up together or known each other as sisters until later in life because Essie married when Ada was only two years old.

  It had been love at first sight between Esther and Richard Langston. He had come to Ravia, Oklahoma, for Christmas dinner with one of his buddies on the WPA project. That afternoon he’d met Esther who was literally the girl who lived next door to his buddy and three months later when he went home to Pennsylvania to take over the farm when his father died, Essie went with him.

  Sixteen years later, Thomas Presley came to Ravia from Fort Sill with a friend for a long weekend. There was a birthday party that summer for his fellow army buddy and Ada had been invited. When Thomas finished his enlistment the following year, she went with him to the Palo Duro Canyon.

  “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 Ringgol
d, 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.