The Love of a Cowboy

by Anna Jeffrey

  “I think what upset your mother is you brought her here. And frankly, I’m a little surprised at that myself. You haven’t brought a girl here since you were a boy.”

  “Is the Double Deuce off limits to my friends?” Luke couldn’t keep his tone from being combative, though he knew his easy-going father hadn’t meant to pick a fight.

  “You know better than that, Son. Even if we do have all these family shareholders, for the most part, this ranch is yours now. I’m just reminding you of the long shadow you stand in.”

  Even if he wanted to, Luke couldn’t forget. His Scottish immigrant ancestor’s visage was embedded as deeply as his genes. “That painting of old Angus stares me in the face every day.”

  His dad chuckled and dug into his jeans pocket for his lighter. “I expect he would be proud of you. What you’ve accomplished here is not to be sneezed at. You’ve put the ranch on firmer ground for those who’ll follow you.”

  Dad always preceded criticism with a compliment. He referred to the decisive action Luke had taken a few years back that freed the ranch from the grip of predatory bankers. The Forest Service had discovered parasitic moth larvae on Sterling Mountain, including the part that belonged to the Double Deuce. Racing time, Luke negotiated to buy the affected area from the government, then hired a logger to clear the whole area and burn the diseased slash. He used the logging proceeds to pay off the ranch’s notes and to purchase the winter pastures McRaes had leased for years in the more temperate southern part of the state. Now, DAM Ranches, Inc., the Double Deuce’s parent company, ran virtually debt-free, one of the few family-owned cattle operations left in Idaho that could make that claim.

  “It was no big deal. Mostly timing and luck.”

  “I don’t think so. You had to make a hard decision I wouldn’t have made. If it had been left to me, I would’ve hesitated to log. I wouldn’t have gone toe-to-toe with the Forest Service. The bugs would’ve got the whole mountain. But I fear you’ve stepped in your own trap, Son. While you’ve made the ranch more secure than it’s ever been, you’ve also made it more demanding. Buying more land, adding stock. Selling bulls, breeding and selling horses . . .

  “We’re living in complicated times, Dad.” Luke absently scanned a stockman’s association newsletter. “We can’t afford to be standing still. Half the country wants to put us out of business.”

  His dad sighed. “I know. If they succeed, I don’t know what they think they’ll eat.”

  “They don’t like farmers either,” Luke said.

  “Guess it’s not good enough nowadays for a rancher to be just a good cattleman.” Dad pointed his pipe stem at the computer set-up on the table behind the desk chair. “Who would’ve thought you’d be using that thing to run a ranch?”

  Luke glanced at the multi-colored flag undulating across the black monitor screen. He had always been quick to use any tool that improved the bottom line. The computer had become invaluable, all the way from following market trends to keeping records of breeding history and tracking his steers’ weight gain or keeping abreast of disease and state of the art treatment. At times, he even participated in on-line bull auctions.

  “Up here on this mountain, we’re located at the end of the world,” he said. “Gotta have good communication. And gotta keep up with what’s going on. That’s what happened to the Circle K. Tuffy kept doing things the same old way.”

  His dad sighed again. And louder. “I hear the new owner’s bitching about the deer eating his rose bushes.”

  Investor. No doubt he thinks rose bushes are important. Luke had more and more difficulty hiding his resentment of the interlopers pushing into Idaho.

  Of all of them, the investors were the worse. They paid inflated prices for the land to dodge taxes and pump up their financial statements, give themselves bragging rights at some country club a thousand miles away. They had the money to buy politicians who legislated sweeping changes to an agricultural economy. Every property-owning citizen of Callister County had become the unwitting victim of out-of-state investors who didn’t care a whit about the people who depended on the land for livelihood. Then, to add insult to injury, they brought in stupid animals like llamas or emus.

  And they planted stupid plants like rose bushes next door to wilderness.

  “You can rest easy, Dad. I don’t intend to be forced to sell the Double Deuce. Or to turn it into a sub-division.”

  Luke couldn’t resist that little jab at his parents. Ten years ago, they had given up. They had come close to putting the ranch on the market. Luke had sacrificed a masters in biology to prevent it.

  “All I’m saying is when you choose your friends, I hope you use the same sound judgment you use with every other decision you’ve made.”

  As much as he hated facing it, his dad was partially right in his criticism. Anything that diverted his mental energy from the ranch, his kids and his family was unacceptable. And that made a resolution of what was going on with Dahlia more pressing. An association that went beyond occasional fun had to be a doomed one. “Okay, Dad. We’re finally to it. I know this is really about Dahlia and the Forest Service.”

  Bushy white brows pinched together. “You know as well as I do, since that ‘Wilderness’ legislation, the Forest Service hasn’t been our friend—”

  “Dahlia’s not a Forest Service spy.” Luke leaned forward for emphasis. “She’s from Texas. She couldn’t care less about government grazing in Idaho. She knows next to nothing about ranching up here.”

  The older man harrumphed and drew on his pipe.

  “She’s not political, Dad. All she’s doing is helping a surveyor for the summer. She’s going back to Texas in a few weeks.”

  “That’ll make your mother feel better.”

  That sentence sent the purpose of his parents’ trip to Salt Lake leaping into Luke’s mind. “How is Mom? What did the doctors say?”

  “Not much.”

  “Did she tell them about the stumbling, the falling?”

  His dad leaned on one chair arm, dug his knife from his pocket and worked on his fingernails. “They told her to use a cane. I doubt she will. She still thinks she’s gonna ride again. We’re going back down there in a month.”

  Luke wondered what he wasn’t being told. He knew his mother had quit riding horseback, but he didn’t know why. He couldn’t imagine her unable to sit a horse. She was lean, looked to be a good physical specimen. If it weren’t for her gray hair, most folks wouldn’t guess she would be sixty in November.

  “More tests?”

  His dad nodded. “Well, I’ve said my piece. I’m going back up to the house.” He rose and Luke followed him to the front door. “She’s waiting for you,” the patriarch said. “You might as well go on up there.”

  After his dad drove away, Luke gave himself a few minutes to think. Lord, how he dreaded the coming argument with his mother. He wished he could call back youth when she had laughed and told jokes and life for her and him both had seemed like more than hard work.

  In his childhood, a special bond had existed between him and his mother, rooted in their common love of animals. In those days, she trained horses. People brought their colts from miles away for the Claire McRae handle. His dad teased her and called her horses-in-training luxury animals that ate up, tromped down or shit on everything in sight. She argued that all horses had souls, were better than people and without them, man might still be living in caves.

  Then, the second summer of his marriage to Janet, fate had played its hand and things had changed forever. He and Matt, his brother three years older, came home from the Owyhee, bringing a mustang stallion—a superbly muscled bay, faster than the wind. At supper, they bragged he could outrun any fancy-blooded horse their mother trained or owned.

  The next morning at the barn, Mom, ever a competitor, led out her powerful palomino gelding and challenged their stallion to a race across the pasture behind the corrals. All of them should have known better. A mustang stallion was a wild anim
al, a survivor. No domestic horse was a match in spirit and cunning.

  Sensing a threat, the stallion snorted and pranced and threw his head, nipped at the palomino. Mom’s gelding squealed and fishtailed when she saddled him. Dad watched from the fence, said they were headed for a horse wreck.

  Matt tried to back out, but Luke, no stranger to a dare, went to the tack room, hauled out his own saddle and made chicken-clucking noises at his brother. That was all it took to kindle Matt’s courage. He pushed Luke aside and swung his saddle onto the stallion. Helping his brother cinch up and seeing the keyed-up stallion’s muscles quiver, Luke glimpsed a strange light in his brother’s eyes and recognized it as fear.

  Seconds into the race, the nameless stallion blew up and flipped Matt over its head. Three days later, death took the twenty-five-year-old anointed heir to the McRae dynasty and nothing or nobody had ever been the same.

  Dad shot the stallion. Mom gave the palomino to someone in town. She turned hard. Soon, Dad lost interest in the ranch, started spending his days and many of his nights in town. Like an avalanche, management fell on Mom’s shoulders, then ultimately, on Luke’s. His notion of becoming a scientist got lost in grief and necessity.

  Ambling to the far edge of the deck, Luke reached up to hang onto an overhead beam with his fingers. He watched the landscape change colors as the climbing sun burned away the haze. From here, he could look down and see the corral and the fenced twenty-acre scene of the accident. No day went by that he didn’t remember it. He and his mother had never discussed Matt’s fatal ride, but how they had goaded him into it both linked them and stood between them.

  Luke drew in a deep breath, letting the cool, crisp air clear his head. Mom. She had the strength of a Titan. Without a word of complaint, she took care of Jimmy and patiently taught him. She was always there for Annabeth and Mary Claire. A meal was ready when the time came, his clothes were washed and mended, he slept in a clean bed every night. He owed it to her to listen to what she had to say. He guessed he might as well go on up and get it over with.

  He reached inside the cabin door and plucked his cap from its wooden peg, then set out on foot. As he trudged up the hill to the Big House, he asked Frosty and Bingo if a man ever got to old for an ass-chewing from his mother.

  Chapter 16

  Returning from a full-stride, three-mile run, Dahlia staggered through the front doorway, heaving for breath. Piggy glanced up from the Boise newspaper to which they had subscribed for the summer. Piggy had to have cartoons. “Hey, girlfriend. How many miles?”

  Lacking breath to answer, Dahlia lifted a palm as she passed through the living room. She stripped, turned on the shower as hot as bearable and let the prickly spray wash off the scent of Luke McRae.

  After showering. she took a pick to her wet tangles. Her hair was no longer a flurry of black ringlets from scalp to tip. Her perm had relaxed and grown out into waves. Luke loved her hair, had begged—no, ordered—her not to cut it, so she hadn’t so much as trimmed it all summer.

  A rap sounded on the door. “You decent?”

  Piggy. “Come in,” Dahlia told her and opened the door.

  The redhead leaned a shoulder on the door facing. “You need a trim and a new perm. Looks like a two hundred dollar job doesn’t last any longer than one you get for fifty.”

  Dahlia glanced at her friend. Since yesterday morning, Piggy’s coppery hair had been cut, frizzed into a cap of tight curls and looked to be even redder. Dahlia had seen it last night, but she hadn’t been up to asking questions. “Okay, I give up. What happened to your hair?”

  Piggy tugged at a springy tuft. “I didn’t think you were gonna notice. This is the fifty-dollar job. I thought I’d save a buck or two. Two and a half hours at Dr. Frankenstein’s yesterday, better known as Tami’s Hair and Nails. Should’ve known not to get a haircut and perm in a place like Callister.”

  “Yep. Should’ve known. . . . Did I miss a call from Luke?”

  “I had the phone off the hook ’til a while ago.”

  Dahlia couldn’t hide her frustration with that. “Dammit, Piggy—”

  “We were up all night, for chrissakes, I didn’t want to get knocked off my cot by a blast from the phone. I saved you some breakfast.”

  Dahlia didn’t want food, but she followed Piggy to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee. She tamped down her annoyance at the phone being left off the hook with heaping teaspoons of French Vanilla Coffeemate. Wilting onto a chair in the sunlight at the card table, she propped her chin on her palms and watched a spider scurry across the window sill and disappear into a crevice. She wished she could follow it.

  A white paper plate scooted between her elbows. Centered on it was an orange clump embellished with something red and something green. “Eat,” Piggy said and handed her a plastic fork.

  Dahlia took a bite, then almost spit it out. “What is this?”

  “Salsa and eggs. Mostly salsa. And spices, tons of spices. It’s all we had in the larder. We haven’t bought much at the grocery store lately.”

  “I guess it’s just as well. I guess we’d just have to throw it away when we leave.”

  “Jeez, you’ve been around him so much you’re starting to talk like him. Luke does that, says ‘I guess’ before everything.”

  “I guess he does.”

  They looked at each other, Piggy’s freckled nose wrinkled, and they broke out laughing. A welcome release of tension.

  How drab her life would be if she didn’t know Piggy, Dahlia thought. “You look like Orphan Annie,” she said.

  “Thank God you haven’t lost your sense of humor, Dal. Last night, I wasn’t sure you’d ever laugh again.”

  “This is an act. I should get an award.”

  “I’ve got something to tell you, but you’re so upset, I hate adding fuel to the fire, so-to-speak.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “After Tami finished screwing up my hair, we went to the Rusty Spur. Kathleen and Dave were there, bombed and loose-tongued as usual. Did you know Beauty Shop Tami and Tennis Bum Dave are cousins? And Tami and Luke’s ex-wife are buds.”

  Dahlia’s head began to pound. “What?”

  “Why are you so big-eyed? Who’s kin to who around here is like a maze. It’s a lot worse than Loretta.”

  “What if Dave tells Tami what happened at the ranch?”

  “How would he know? And even if he did, why would he tell?”

  “Piggy, you don’t understand. The McRaes all live close together. They see each other all the time. There’s no way Luke’s whole family isn’t going to know. Luke says Dave gossips worse than an old maid.”

  Piggy pulled one side of her lower lip through her teeth. “Oh, crap. I see what you mean.”

  Dahlia massaged her aching eyes with her fingertips. “I shouldn’t have gone to that ranch.”

  “So Dave tells. What difference can it make? Luke hasn’t been married for what, five years? Nothing will come of it.”

  “It’s his kids, Piggy. Luke and his ex-wife still have some kind of fight going on over custody of his kids.”

  Silence fell between them. If anyone knew of dramas involving broken marriages and child custody battles, Piggy did. Her oldest brother had been in the middle of one for years.

  After a few minutes, Piggy sighed and stood. “Well, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. And why should you want to? I don’t see what’s wrong with sex between two grown single people who love each other.”

  “Yeah. Why isn’t it that simple?” Dahlia felt her throat filling again and swallowed. “Damn. Let’s drop it, okay?”

  “Sure. Let’s do something to get our minds off the Marlboro Man. Let’s go do laundry. The only clean shirt I’ve got is this one.” She pulled at the seams of an oversized T-shirt hanging to mid-thigh. TEXAS DIRT SHIRT was printed across the front.

  Dahlia wiped away a tear and took her plate to the trash.

  “There’s nothing on the boob tube tonight,” Piggy
said, “so we should stop by the service station and rent a couple of movies when we finish.”

  Luke had missed Dahlia. Her line had been busy the half-dozen times he had called her, now she didn’t answer. He strolled out to the deck. The calendar showed August, but the air felt of fall. The noon sun didn’t have its usual warmth. A cold front banked in the western sky. He made a mental note to hire a high schooler to split and stack firewood.

  A glance toward the barn reminded him that all summer he had put off chores that needed doing. The barn had to be treated and stained before cold weather set in, but he had spent so much time with Dahlia, he hadn’t put out a request for bids.

  He dropped lazily to sit on the edge of the deck, dug out his pocket knife and picked up a stick to whittle. Frosty lay against his thigh. Luke scruffed his hair. “Snow’s just around the corner, Frost.”

  The dog whined and hid his eyes with his paw.

  Luke wished he could whine, too, but who would listen?

  He had to make it a clean break with Dahlia and let her get on back to Texas. If she was out of his sight and out of his reach, then he could put her out of his mind. Yep, he should do that all right.

  Road noise sounded from the distance and he looked up. A late model Cadillac slowed and turned between the stacked rock stanchions at the county road. Janet, bringing Mary Claire and Annabeth home. School would be starting in another week.

  Janet’s maroon El Dorado stopped in the gravel turnaround in front of the Big House. She was the only McRae who had ever owned a Cadillac. Luke drove up from the cabin in his old Ford truck, arriving in time to help Mary Claire and Annabeth clamber out of the Caddy’s back seat.

  Dad emerged with a broad grin from behind the house. Mom and Ethel led Granny McRae and Jimmy out onto the deck. Everybody was glad to see the girls come home.

  Both his daughters hugged him, but Annabeth clung a few extra seconds. “I missed you, Daddy. I’m glad to be home.” On coltish legs, she bounded up the six deck steps, knelt in front of Jimmy and opened a plastic sack. “Look, Jimmy. I brought you some animals.”