The Love of a Cowboy

by Anna Jeffrey

  What would she do? What would mornings be like without him shuffling around the kitchen? Whose opinion would she seek when she had doubts? Who would look at her with sincere love and call her “Dally?”

  No answers came. Her mind was blank.

  She heard a car outside and a tearful Piggy burst through the front doorway. “JoAnn called and told me.”

  The met in a hug and Dahlia couldn’t hold back sobs. “It isn’t fair. My Dad has things to offer. . . . He’s a good person. . . . He’s a good citizen, he’s—”

  “He’s seventy-eight and he’s been really sick.” Piggy sniffled. “You know Loren’s right, Dal. Elton wouldn’t want to lie there and be a vegetable.”

  Dahlia pulled away and blew her nose. “He’ll never see my baby. . . . And he wanted to.”

  “I know, Dal. I know. . . . But you know what? He will see him. I believe that. And he’ll see Luke, too.”

  Dahlia shook her head. “Oh, Piggy, he’s all I have….How will I get through this?”

  “Just like you’ve gotten through everything else, Dal. You’re the strongest and best person I know.”

  Eight days later, Dahlia’s anchor left her. The VFW helped her plan a war hero’s funeral. The First Methodist Church overflowed with mourners and flowers and her father was laid to rest beside the woman he had never stopped loving and the mother Dahlia could remember only in fleeting vignettes.

  She mourned the loss of a beloved parent, but the person she buried was a virtual stranger she had watched die a little every day for more than a month. Though she had never wished him gone, in her heart, she had said good-bye sometime back when he still had been the man she had known all her life.

  In May, she gave birth to a healthy, black-haired, eight-pound, three-ounce son and named him Joseph, after her father.

  Chapter 22

  The Double Deuce

  Three Months Later

  Luke relaxed the reins on his favorite saddle horse and let him munch grass. “Lord, it’s dry, Roanie.”

  August temperatures had nudged into the nineties several times and dry lightning storms had danced all over the tinder-dry mountains and valleys. It was a wonder the whole countryside didn’t catch fire.

  From his vantage point on the miles-long ridge rimming one side of Sterling Valley, he gazed down at the Double Deuce’s home pasture that ran the length of the valley floor. Huddled at the far end, partially hidden in a grove of ancient pines, sat Donald Angus McRae’s original one-room cabin. It was a hundred-fifty years old. Like his predecessors, Luke had done what he could to prevent its rotting to the ground.

  A short distance from it, overlooking the Snake River and enclosed by a heavy, iron fence, the McRae family cemetery lay. Except for what Nature exacted, it hadn’t been disturbed in fourteen years, when Luke’s brother, Matt had been put in the ground. It would hold a new resident soon. Luke’s father’s mother was over ninety.

  The ridge faded into the horizon beyond the cemetery and he could see the modern, pine log house DAM Ranches had built for Brenna and Morgan. It had been vacant, suffering neglect, since they moved to Boise a year ago.

  He thought for the ten-thousandth time how he loved this valley and these mountains, how their beauty and his family’s history among them held him with unyielding tentacles. Though he had become their shepherd by default, he tended them with care and protected them fiercely. He would never part from them even upon his death. He would simply move from life in the Big House to a resting place right down there in that cemetery. Like all McRaes before him, his remains would become a part of Double Deuce soil.

  Swallowing the rush of emotion such thinking always brought, he scanned the western sky. Not a cloud in sight. Years of experience told him rain had to be just around the corner and snow by mid-September. He lifted his old straw hat and wiped sweat from his face with his shirt sleeve. Then, clucking to Roanie a couple of times, he nudged him over the berm at the trail’s edge and down the hillside toward home and supper.

  At the barn, he saw the hired man, Shorty, gathering mares into the adjoining lodgepole corral. He swung out of the saddle and led Roanie toward the new horse stalls. Shorty fell in step beside him. “I don’t know why you ride the fence lines, Luke. You ought to let me do it or take one of the ATV’s.”

  Luke untied his saddle scabbard, slipped out his rifle and propped it against a stall. “You got plenty other stuff to do, Shorty. I like it. Keeps me in touch with what’s going on. Nothing like riding a good horse in the high country. Reminds a man he’s just a piss-ant.”

  Shorty grinned. “See any game?”

  Luke fished piece of carrot out of his shirt pocket and fed it to Roanie. “Few deer. Cows already coming off the mountain.”

  “Uh-oh. Early winter.”

  “Suits me. Grass is dryer’n popcorn.” Luke dragged the saddle off Roanie’s back and toted it toward the tack room.

  Shorty came behind him, carrying the empty gun scabbard and hung it on the wall. “Gonna ship ’em all down to the Owhyee then?”

  “We’ll send the yearlings first. I’m still looking for hay.”

  Every year, Luke resolved to end the summer with enough hay put up for a long winter, yet every August he had to scramble.

  “How’d the fences look?”

  Luke hung up his chaps, left the tack room and scooped a helping of oats for Roanie. “That north line between us and the Forest Service is pretty bad, but it’s too close to winter to get into a fence building project. First thing after the thaw, we’ll rebuild that whole line. Keep the Forest Service happy.”

  Shorty began to curry Roanie. “I let the girls use the Jeep today. They went over to Flagg’s place.”

  Luke’s old canvas-topped Jeep sat nose in outside the barn. His daughters were too young to drive city streets, but they had been taught how as soon as they could see over the steering wheel and reach the brake, as he and his siblings had been. “What’s going on over there?”

  Shorty made a wicked snort. “Boys. Flagg’s nephews. From back East somewheres. I figured they couldn’t get into too much trouble in the Jeep.”

  Luke arched an eyebrow and picked up his rifle. “I can tell it’s been a long time since you were a teenager. I’m going to the mailbox. See ya’ at supper.”

  Luke switched on the Jeep’s ignition and country rock rattled the dash. All the horses and the two mules lifted their heads, ears pointed forward like nosy, old women. Luke snapped off the radio. He like music, but at the end of a long day’s ride, he preferred something soothing.

  Wrung out, he left the Jeep in low gear, let it creep down the gravel driveway to the county road and pulled up to the oversized mailbox. He dug out the mail and as he shuffled through it, a plain envelope addressed to him personally caught his eye. In feminine script, the upper left corner said P. Porter, Loretta, Texas. Something about the town’s name seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Had to be a horse breeder he met somewhere.

  He thumbed his hat back, tore open the envelope and pulled out a two-page note. A small photograph slid out and landed on his lap. He picked it up and saw a black-haired, wide-eyed infant. Uneasiness slunk through him. Lifting the letter’s first page, he looked for the signature. When he saw “Best regards, Piggy,” his fingers began to tremble.

  Flipping back to page one, he started to read . . .

  “Jee-sus Christ.”

  He stared at the picture again and turned to page two.

  Shaking fingers blurred the second reading. Quick arithmetic—gestation for cows and humans roughly the same . . . The kid was at least three months old. “Jee-sus Christ.”

  Stupified, he sat there, studying the picture, looking for family resemblance, pinching his lower lip with his thumb and finger. That last weekend with Dahlia flashed in his mind. Shit. And Piggy. She was a loudmouth, he recalled, but an honest person. He believed her to be a friend. She wouldn’t just up and write him a lie.

  His mind lurched to his two daught
ers and he looked up at the ranch house. They would be watching TV, arguing over the programs. After the final custody hearing last fall, when the court had decided his girls wouldn’t be spending any more time at their mother’s house, he had bought a big screen TV and a satellite dish to re place some of what they would miss about Boise. The electronic monster had ruled the household ever since. Even his dad had gotten hooked on Judge Judy and Oprah.

  He stuffed the note back into its envelope and slid it into his shirt pocket. Bypassing the Big House, he drove to the cabin to think. Frosty and Bingo rose from their naps by the front door and looked up at him with guilty eyes. They jumped up on his thighs, wagging their tails for forgiveness but he wasn’t in a forgiving state of mind. He scruffed their hair and scolded them, then shooed them off the deck.

  Thoughts stumbling over memories, he went to the bedroom dropped onto a chair and tugged off his boots, his tired muscles begging for a hot shower’s spray. Instead of relaxing him, the shower stall dredged up yet another strong memory that sent a rush of blood to his groin. Ah, Dahlia.

  He pulled on clean jeans and his boots and settled into his worn recliner and read the letter again: . . . His name is Joe . . . great kid . . . .Dahlia a wonderful mother . . .

  Luke wouldn’t expect anything less. He had never known a gentler, more caring person.

  He studied the picture again. The boy looked like Dahlia, dark-haired and exotic. Naturally he would, for that was the way of genetics. A vision of the golden-skinned woman with upturned eyes and hair black and shiny as obsidian took shape in his mind. For the past year, she had never been very far from his thoughts. Almost anything could remind him of her, from the upper meadow’s deep spring green that was the color of her eyes to Sterling Creek’s ripple that tinkled like her laughter.

  Good Lord. Had she really gone through pregnancy and given birth all alone? Why hadn’t she told him? An overwhelming urge to see the child, his child made his heart crowd into his throat. His mind sped back to the Forest Service parking lot, the day he had been such a damn fool. After that afternoon, he had gone by Baker’s rent house several times, but never found anyone at home; called, but never got an answer. Finally, some computer informed him the number was no longer in service. She had been gone two weeks before Kathleen told him she went home in a hurry because somebody in her family came down sick. That could only be a lie. She left, really, because she was pissed off at Luke McRae.

  And now he knew just how mad she had been. Only an enraged woman wouldn’t tell a father she carried his child.

  He gave himself a mental kick. No, dammit, he hadn’t made any serious effort to get in touch with her. Texas was a long way off. He knew she lived with her dad, but he didn’t know her dad’s name. The name of the little town she came from had never really registered in his thoughts until a few minutes ago. Odd, because after she left, he had gone so far as to dig out the road atlas and try to jog his memory about her hometown’s name, but with no success. He didn’t believe in omens, but he took it as one when he couldn’t easily locate her.

  Besides, didn’t the phone lines run two ways? He hadn’t heard from her either, so he figured she didn’t care so much about him after all. She never did say so.

  He had broken off with women before—one lady-friend had told him it was a pattern to avoid making a commitment—so he knew getting female out his system was a matter of self-discipline and the passage of time. With Dahlia, that method hadn’t been so effective. He went months with no sleep. Hell, after she left, it seemed like he had a bad case of indigestion clear up ’til Christmas. He got past it, finally, likening it to when he kicked chewing snoose.

  Thump-thump-thump. The sound of a cane on the deck elbowed into his thoughts and he blew out a long breath. Never a minute to call his own. “Come on in,” he called. Laying Piggy’s letter on the lamp table beside the recliner, he stood and greeted his mother.

  “Your dad found some hay. Down at Howard’s in Caldwell. He told them we’d pick it up this week.”

  “Good. Shorty can take the truck down tomorrow. I’ll get a couple of husky boys from town to come up and help unload it. That oughtta make Mary Claire happy.”

  “She didn’t come home from Flagg’s place with Annabeth. The Stripling boy brought her a little later. He’s still here. Guess he’s staying for supper.”

  “Jason? Where’d she run into him? Shorty said it was Flagg’s nephews they went to see.”

  “Jason. That’s his name. He’s putting up hay for Flaggs.”

  Luke felt his brows tug together. His over-developed sixteen-year-old daughter gave him anxious moments. “That boy must be over eighteen. What’s he doing hanging around Mary Claire?”

  His mother gave him a piercing look over the top edge of her half-glasses. “You don’t really want me to answer that.”

  The terse reply and remembering himself at that age only agitated Luke more. Back then, where his next piece was coming from dominated all his thoughts and a considerable number of his actions. The daughter under discussion had been conceived in the bed of his pickup when he was the same age as Jason Stripling.

  The thought of his Mary heaving under a young stud wasn’t a pretty picture. “She’s straining against the bit real hard, isn’t she?”

  “No worse than you and your sisters, I guess.” His mother limped across the living room and used her cane to ease down onto one of the two chairs flanking the large window that looked out at the long pasture. The late afternoon sun haloed her unruly short hair. “On those TV shows your dad watches, they call it raging hormones. Striplings are good people. She could do worse.”

  Right now, Luke didn’t want to fall into a discussion of how his mother categorized people. With a harrumph, he went to the bedroom and pulled on a clean shirt. “Supper ready?” he called, tucking his shirttail into his jeans, but he heard no answer. Returning to the living room, he saw why. His mother stood there, holding Piggy’s letter. Jee-sus Christ!

  “Small notes can bring large revelations.” Her voice trembled. “Were you going to tell us about this?”

  Dread crept through him. He hated upsetting her. After thousands of dollars worth of tests, the docs in Salt Lake had diagnosed MS. Her days had become a muddle of drugs and frustration. “I was gonna get around to it.”

  She thrust the infant’s photograph toward him. “I guess you could lay this onto raging hormones, too. I assume this child belongs to the woman who—”

  “Dahlia, Mom. Her name’s Dahlia.” He walked over and took the picture from her, folded it into Piggy’s letter and jammed the whole package back into its envelope. Just no damn privacy. “It’s my business, Mom.”

  “Oh, I don’t know so much about that. What you do affects everybody here. What does this Dahlia want? A pay-off? Child support?”

  “She’s not that kind of person. My guess is she doesn’t know Pig—her friend wrote me.”

  “You don’t honestly believe the boy’s yours—”

  “He could be.” To Luke’s astonishment, he didn’t mind admitting to his mother he could have fathered a child with Dahlia. He tried to picture Dahlia pregnant and heard himself mumble, “If only I’d known—”

  “How do you know?” Both hands braced on her cane, his mother’s chin jutted forward. “You’re a wealthy man. This could be an extortion scheme hatched up between her and that friend who was here with her. The wise thing would be to deny it, then alert Brad—”

  “No. No lawyers. I’ve had a bellyful of judges and courts telling me what to do with what’s mine. I’ve got no reason to think this boy’s not my son. If it hadn’t been for all the hell-raising and all that was going on with Janet and the girls, I might’ve . . . Well, things might’ve gone a different way.”

  Mom limped back to the window and stared out at the corral behind the barn. Luke could only guess what might be gnawing at her when she looked down at the corral. He couldn’t look at it himself without recalling his brother’s fatal accident.
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  “It still haunts me how Janet came to be a member of this family,” his mother murmured in a stage whisper.

  Christ. His chest felt as if his shirt had shrunk. It haunted him, too, if he let himself dwell on it—coming home from U of I his sophomore year, telling his parents he had married a woman from Spokane and she was due to deliver any day. It had been the most gut-wrenching confession of his life up to that moment. Then later, the painful meeting between Janet and his parents, their learning his bride was eight years older than he, a fact that distressed his mother as much as the pregnancy.

  She turned back and faced him, eyes moist. “I’ve talked until I’m blue in the face about the folly of getting outsiders involved with this ranch. What more proof do you need than Kathleen’s husband and your ex-wife?”

  “I wish we wouldn’t do this, Mom—”

  She limped over to stand in front of him. “Son, listen to me.” Her fingers clamped onto his forearm, but it was the glint of steel in her eye that held him like a vice. “It was more than tradition that made your dad give you the controlling interest in this ranch. Neither your sisters nor their husbands are capable of managing it. Nor do they want to.”

  Luke couldn’t hold back a sardonic laugh. “I didn’t want to either, Mom.”

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard him, just as she did in all of their conversations about him and the ranch. “The survival of all this”—she made an arc with a flattened hand—“rests in your hands. I don’t know what the future holds for me. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to help you. You need a life partner you have something in common with. You can’t bring an outsider here and expect—”

  “Mom, cut it out. I didn’t say I’m bringing anybody here. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. But I’m going down there.”