She’d walked away from a twenty-year marriage without regret. The children were grown and gone. She still had time to find out who Marianna Kensington was. Perhaps she was no one. How frightening! But how much more frightening to deceive yourself into thinking you were complete when in fact you were nothing but a blank page waiting to be filled in! The suburbs were crowded with safe and comfortable women who were essentially blank pages waiting for a violating pen. Silence was their chief enemy. For silence could let the inner emptiness rise to the surface, like a submerged but featureless continent. Given an opportunity, silence would enter the house and sit down like a bold intruder. The intruder smiles with his superior knowledge of the little dark mechanisms of your heart. You pick up the latest Silhouette or Harlequin and try to read, but the words blur together, passion links arms with despair—jealousy, anger, spite, kink up like a bicycle chain that throws itself loose from its sprocket and the whole enterprise coasts to a dismal stop halfway to nowhere. You skip ahead. It doesn’t help. Silence slips into the bloated prose. It invades each trumped-up scene. It collects in the gaps between chapters. It waits for you at the end in the gritty dead-white paper, rustling patiently with the last word.
The Y Bar Y was all she expected and more. From the center of the huge house a stone chimney rose massive and tall. The house itself seemed anchored to the world by the girth and heft of this proud tower. Marianna knew, then, that her decision to stay had been correct after all. There was a “rightness” in the scene that defied rational expression. Some things you know only in your heart of hearts. No logic can deny such knowledge. She was shown to her quarters—a spacious second-story room with a view of the magnificent Sangre de Cristo mountains, whose snow-capped eminence seemed Tibetan. Yes, yes, she had come to the right place at the right time in her life. She knew it now as well as she knew anything. It was here she would make her stand. It was here that she would reestablish herself in the world. She shuddered, not in trepidation but in joyful anticipation.
When she had finished unpacking, there was a knock on the door. It was Jeff Granger. Though she had opened the door wide, inviting him in, he remained beyond the threshold. “Please come in.” She laughed. “I don’t bite, honestly!” Jeff filled the entire doorway. Both his shoulders grazed the frame, and his head almost touched the top. She hadn’t realized before how really large Jeff was. He smiled—shyly, Marianna thought—and once again she felt her heart surge with strange voltage. His smile, set against an angular suntanned face, sent ripples of nervous spasms along her thighs and stomach. She folded her arms across her breasts to prevent herself from shaking visibly. She felt giddy. She didn’t trust herself to speak. “I just came by to tell you that we get off to a pretty early start, Mrs. Kensington. So, I reckon—” Marianna interrupted him. “Please,” she said, “call me Marianna. Mrs. Kensington is someone I am trying desperately to forget.” Jeff looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “Marianna,” as if tasting the syllables. “I like that. My mother’s name is Marianne.” He cleared his throat self-consciously, as though he’d revealed something a bit too personal about himself. “Anyway, Mrs. Ken—I mean, Marianna, the kitchen crew starts at three-thirty a.m. The men eat at five o’clock sharp. Not a minute later. So you’d better turn in pretty early tonight.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “One other thing, Marianna,” he said, his back still turned to her. “The kitchen here looks more like a boiler factory than any kitchen you’re used to. I suggest you let Jorge give you a run-through this evening sometime.” Marianna thought, once again, that she detected a coolness in his tone. No, she told herself, it had not been Jeff Granger’s idea to hire a woman from the East to run the kitchen of the Y Bar Y.
Before he left her room, she said, “Jeff—be honest. Just whose idea was it to hire me, anyway? It wasn’t yours, was it?” He turned to look at her then. She saw something in his eyes that disturbed her. Sadness? Resentment? “No,” he said slowly. “It wasn’t my idea. It was my brother Thome’s idea. Thome thought bringing in a woman from the East would give the place some... class, I think he called it.” He left then, his boots echoing through the hallway and stairwell, leaving Marianna to stare at the large space he’d filled. She hadn’t liked the emphasis he’d placed on “class,” and yet she couldn’t help but feel that Jeff Granger liked her, in spite of his obvious prejudice...
...for if this was not meant to be, then nothing was meant to be. Sometimes strangers feel they’ve known each other forever. Jeff was such a man to Marianna. She quivered. Passion stirred her neglected loins. Was he the man she’d envisioned? Was he her type? What was one’s “type”? She had no idea. Years of careful emotions had dulled her. To know one’s type is to know one’s needs. Marianna was a desert of unknown needs that any random flood might violate into bloom....
The huge ranch-house kitchen should have been a bedlam of activity. It wasn’t. The bedlam was in her mind only. There were twelve dozen eggs and eighteen pounds of bacon to fry! There were loaves and loaves of bread to toast! Gallons of coffee to make! Tubs of hash browns! Hot gravy from last night’s ham drippings needed to be prepared! Marianna had help, of course, but the kitchen workers seemed reluctant to do anything without explicit instructions from her. They stood waiting—sullenly, she thought—for her to give commands. And yet they knew what they had to do—they’d been doing it all along! Clearly, she was resented here and the kitchen crew was letting her know it. Jorge Mendez, somehow, was at the root of the problem. He was her assistant, second in command, and yet he seemed as reluctant to help her as any of the underlings. She would ask him a question and he would stare at her as if it were the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. Then he’d answer slowly, enunciating the syllables as if he were speaking to a mental defective. The previous evening, when he’d given her a tour of the kitchen, he had glossed over the details of equipment operation, scheduling, duty assignments, and so on, so that she had had to ask the same questions several times before she understood the answers. It was infuriating, and yet she did not show her impatience. She was determined to win Jorge Mendez over to her side, to prove to him that she was going to be a fair and loyal supervisor, and that as far as she was concerned, his job was secure at the Y Bar Y. Marianna was a quick learner, however, and despite these roadblocks she managed to get breakfast served right on time, at 5 a.m. sharp. Even though some of the eggs were fried too hard, or some rashers of bacon too crisp, the food was more than just edible. Lunch was no problem, since it was the function of the chuck-wagon crew. The chuck wagon was a Mercedes-Benz diesel bus that had been converted to hold a portable kitchen. A separate crew ran the chuck wagon. Marianna’s only responsibility regarding the lunch crew was to make sure there were enough supplies on hand to stock the chuck wagon’s refrigerators. But the evening meal—supper—was an out-and-out disaster. At 4 p.m. Jorge Mendez wheeled a side of beef out of the cold locker and, with the help of two kitchen boys, hoisted it onto a massive butcher-block table. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Marianna asked. The huge, purplish-red carcass disgusted her. “Take the rib steaks and the T-bones, señora," Jorge said. “Leave the sirloin for Sunday.” He handed her a meat cleaver that must have weighed six or seven pounds. “Make sure, señora, that the cuts are even—twelve to fourteen ounces each—the vaqueros don’t like to see a bigger piece of meat on the plate next to them. They like it even Steven.” He left her then with the half-beef, a mountain of flesh that probably weighed two or three hundred pounds. Marianna had two hours to hack it into perfect steaks! In desperation she attacked the animal with the heavy cleaver. But she struck it a glancing blow that only gouged a wedge of fat and gristle from it. She tried again, harder, but she hit it another off-line blow and a shrapnel of bone bits sprayed across the kitchen. She thought she saw one of the kitchen boys smile briefly, then turn his laughing face away from her. Jorge Mendez returned with a big meat saw. “Perhaps if you cut away from the shoulder back to the center loin, then with a knife you could ta
ke it from the brisket and flank. After that it will be easy to make your cuts. Then from the sirloin you can take flat-bone cuts and wedge-bone cuts.” His instructions meant nothing to her! She made him repeat it carefully, but now she had begun to panic and it made even less sense to her! After a half hour of sawing and hacking, the intransigent beef retained its steaks. Marianna began to cry. In that huge mass of animal flesh, there were dozens of steaks—rib-eye steaks, porterhouse steaks, club steaks, sirloins—but they would not yield themselves to her amateurish hacking. Finally, after nearly two hours of futile mutilation, she managed to produce lumps of meat that looked somewhat like beefsteaks. But there were only enough for half the men. She cut what she had into pieces the size of a large man’s thumbs. These she fried on the big griddle in heavy grease. Then she ordered—too sharply, to her dismay! — one of the Mexican kitchen boys to slice twenty pounds of potatoes. The boy’s eyes widened, as if she’d slapped his face, and she immediately apologized to him. He said something in Spanish and she realized that he could not understand her! New tears streamed down her face as she showed him what she wanted in a jerkily hysterical sign language. The boy cut the potatoes too thin and when she fried them in the hot grease they immediately blackened. For a vegetable she opened twenty-seven cans of asparagus and heated them to pulp in a big kettle of boiling water. When the meal was served, the cowboys would not eat it. Trays of untouched food were returned to the kitchen. “They will not eat,” Jorge Mendez said, the light in his inscrutable eyes clearly triumphant. Marianna threw off her apron and ran out of the kitchen, sobbing. She ran away from the ranch house, through a grove of scrub pine, down a hill and to the grassy bank of a river. It was the worst moment in her life.
A lone rider followed her, though she was not aware of it. Under a sky the color and texture of hammered aluminum, she wept. The horseman walked his palomino to a point just above her on the river’s edge. He looked down on her, a tight smile on his thin lips. He tied his horse to a stunted pine and approached her. She still was unconscious of his presence, her mind occupied, as it were, with the immediate disaster that threatened to turn her life toward a bleak future. She was thinking how worthless she was, and how stupidly arrogant she’d been to have believed that she could take over the kitchen duties at a serious cattle ranch! In a sudden fit of self-hatred, she pounded her fists into the loamy bank of the river. The rider knelt down beside her. “I sense you’ve had a bad day, Mrs. Kensington,” he said. Marianna gasped in surprise. She looked up through tear-blurred eyes at a tall, dark man smiling down at her. She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand like a child and tried to compose herself, even though she could not immediately stop whimpering. The tall man looked remarkably like Jeff Granger, except that he was darker and had a thin mustache. His eyes, too, were different. They had a hard glint to them, and were set deeper in his head, making them seem shadowed with enigmatic musings. Like Jeff, this man was terribly handsome, but unlike Jeff, his chiseled features were dominated by a wry, disdainful loftiness of spirit that rose from a jaded cynicism. He had the look of a man who had seen just about everything the world had to offer and had found it wanting. A shiver of apprehension passed through Marianna so powerfully that the man noticed it. He sat down on the loam next to her and put his hand on hers. His hand was not hard and callused like Jeff’s but was soft, almost as soft as a woman’s. He removed his hat, a black Stetson, and offered Marianna a cigarette, which she refused. “I am Thome Granger,” the man said. “Jeff’s big brother. I’m sorry you had a rough afternoon. But, listen, it wasn’t your fault, Marianna.” She looked at him questioningly, wondering if he was only trying to boost her morale or if he actually meant what he said. Seeing the question in her eyes, Thome insisted, “No, really, it wasn’t your fault. Jorge was supposed to cut the beef. He’s terribly offended, you know, that I hired you over him. He was expecting to take over as chief cook when Frank Delaney—our cook for twenty-eight years—died of acute cirrhosis. Jorge’s good, but I wanted a woman’s touch in the kitchen for a change. You can understand what I mean, can’t you?” Marianna nodded, but his strangely mocking smile made her wonder just what it was she was assenting to. “In any case, I’ve disciplined Jorge. From now on he’ll see to the meat cutting and any other work that requires a man’s strength. I didn’t hire you on as a stevedore. Your job, Marianna, is strictly supervisory. I want you to oversee food preparation only—to give it that woman’s touch you just don’t get with ordinary ranch cooks.” He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently, as if to encourage her, but the pressure of his fingers promptly aroused a cautionary hesitation in her heart She looked into his hooded eyes but could not divine his intentions at all. At that moment lightning fractured the sky and hailstones began to drum the ground. Thome Granger leaped to his feet and untied his horse. He mounted gracefully and pulled Marianna up behind him. She felt nearly weightless in his powerful grasp. Then he trotted the horse into the shelter of a copse of quaking aspen. He swung her down from the horse as though she were a rag doll. When he dismounted, he took her roughly in his arms. He pulled her close, so close that the air was crushed out of her lungs. He kissed her then, smothering her weak protest under the bristles of his mustache. She felt the same surge of electrical current she had experienced at Jeff’s more gentle touch, only now the power of it was magnified a thousand times. “You are indeed very beautiful, Marianna,” he said, hoarse with contained passion. “Beauty is the only thing in the world I have respect for any longer. The rest of it can bum in Hades!” She wanted to tell him that this was no way to show respect for a lady, but his savage mouth was on hers again and he forced her backwards and down until they were lying on the soft duff beneath the blowing trees. Thome Granger’s urgent manhood throbbed primitively against her helpless thighs. “No!” she screamed at last, twisting away from him. But he caught her face in his powerful hand and kissed her once again. Then he rose away from her momentarily, regarding her with eyes that seemed both innocent and insane. Marianna was terrified—too terrified to move. He put his hands on her blouse and opened it to the waist, heedless of the flying buttons. “Good Christ Almighty!” he said, his voice hushed and trembly with the sort of reverence only the damned can feel. “They are so exquisite, my dear! ” he managed. His tortured eyes, smoldering in their sockets like coals, slaked themselves with the beauty of her breasts as a nearby flash of lightning turned them violet in the thrashing air. In spite of herself, Marianna remembered Kenneth’s torpid desire, his perfunctory lust so quickly and dispassionately spent, and she felt herself loosening under the overwhelming need of Thome Granger. Then, as if the thunder itself had become articulate, a voice shouted, “Take your rotten hands off her, Thome!” It was Jeff, dismounting from a roan stallion, running toward them, his face mottled with rage. Thome got up to meet his brother’s charge, but Jeff struck him on the jaw before Thome had a chance to defend himself. Thome got up, wobbling noticeably from the force of his brother’s punch. He tried to deliver a blow, but Jeff ducked it neatly and floored Thome once again. “Get back to the house, Thome,” Jeff said. “You’ve blown it for sure, this time.” With that, Thome Granger, visibly diminished, got up and left. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am this happened, Marianna,” Jeff said. Marianna pulled her shredded blouse around her exposed breasts as best she could. “He almost raped me,” she said. “It’s his way,” Jeff replied helplessly. “Thank you,” she said, “for coming when you did. I... didn’t—” She couldn’t finish. A weakness swept over her and she staggered. Jeff caught her before she fell. “I’m going to take you back to the house, Marianna,” he said, picking her up in his powerful arms. “You’ve been through quite an ordeal. I only hope you can forgive us.”
Borrowed Hearts Page 13
