by Lisa Preston
I followed like a puppy trying to say ‘sorry for piddling on your slippers’ but didn’t get a chance to speak ’til we pulled up at the barn.
“Hey, I didn’t mean any disrespect. I just thought . . .” I was going to dig myself a hole here if I didn’t watch it.
Donna stood her horse silent, no eye contact for me.
Now that we’d reached her hitching rail, I was the only one swinging off a horse. Having something that was hers, I dug into my pocket and handed it over. I wished I hadn’t forgotten about the knife earlier.
“This was behind the water trough up at the shed.”
Donna stayed put, her hand around the knife I offered, though she pulled it out of the scabbard.
“Tell me something, Rainy, how long have you been here?” All friendliness had vanished from her tone. “About a year and a half?”
“Yeah, about that,” I nodded, wrapping the lead rope over the rail and giving the slipknot more time than it deserved. I didn’t know what else to do but deal with my mount, slip his bit out of his mouth, the usual stuff. I could hear the crunch of the over-dry dirt under my boots, but nothing more from this client of mine.
All we’d ridden through was yellowed grass and dried scrub branches. Fire problems are the plague of summer and, until the rains come, fall. Here was a blaze kindling I didn’t see.
No amount of kicking myself later helped.
Donna undid two clips that let her shove her saddlebags off her horse’s haunches. The part of my shoeing kit she was packing banged into the ground. Her horse flinched.
Then she tossed down the bone-handled knife, threw it right at my feet from her high horse. Not knowing what else to do and unable to stop my arm’s curiosity, I reached down in the dust and picked it up, really looking at it for the first time.
There were marks in the handle. I puzzled on them but looked back up at her before I had time to get anything sorted out.
“You, too, Rainy?” Donna spat the words with venom.
“Ma’am?”
“You, too!” Donna glared at the ground, right where she’d thrown that knife at my feet, then wheeled her horse away. Like any good Quarter Horse, hers hit high speed in about twenty feet and left me looking at dust.
I unsnapped the dry leather knife scabbard as I wondered about her sudden anger. Then I looked in my hand at that knife again, holding it away, turning it in both palms. I brought it close and looked at neat carved figures in the handle.
A heart shape and then a big old capital R.
Dust settled.
Weird, it was all so weird, her throwing this knife down in the dirt, riding off, leaving me to pack myself out of there in the dying day. One thing suddenly made a little bit of sense though, even though it was way wrong. I thought again about those younger women, those rumors.
I hollered into the eerie evening, “Donna? It wasn’t me.” But she was way out of hearing range.
Chapter 9
GIVEN MY DAYS ARE SPENT WITH horses and horse people, it’s a little unsettling for me to mix with townfolk who sometimes stare at the girl in dirty jeans, a handful of checks and a deposit slip in hand. A branch of our Savings and Loan is just across the way and up the road a piece from the Cascade Kitchen. As my work week wears on, I’ve earned hundreds of dollars, paid on the spot, and lots of it’s in checks. Managing this side of the business—deposits and bounced checks and the like—is not why anyone becomes a shoer. I’ve heard of one stiffed cowboy shoer taking the iron off a horse when a client kept making excuses about not paying. I’ve been stiffed with a bad check a time or two. Mostly, I realize it’s all in picking decent clients to work for. Folks who don’t pay up can handle their horses’ shoeing without me.
Was Donna ever going to pay me for the last six shoeings? I frowned.
Indoor air smells different than the real world, like the bank’s recycled or purified air made me stand out worse. I looked away from a stranger who wouldn’t quit eyeing me, and got back to puzzling on how on earth Donna could have thought that that knife was mine—or worse, that it had been a gift to me or from me, which was the only assumption that could explain her reaction.
How long had she wondered if her husband had stepped out with me? Donna clearly despised me when she threw down that Heart R knife.
Wish I’d looked better at the knife before I handed it over.
Wish I hadn’t casually referred to Cameron Chevigny as Cam.
Wish I’d talked to Donna about all this.
Too late now. Probably, I wouldn’t be getting a call back from Donna Chevigny. I twisted my ponytail at the itchy idea of calling her myself. Seeing if she wanted to schedule any of her horses on down the road could wait a good while. The extra ranch stock might sell before they needed new shoes.
How could Donna even think that her husband and I had . . . well, we didn’t. He was dead before I moved to town. Anyway, in the whole entire state of Oregon, Guy’s the only fella I’ve ever dinked.
Guy had worked late at the Cascade and I’d fallen asleep before he got home, and I’d been out the door for an early shoeing today, so I didn’t get to talk to my fellow about Donna and the knife thing. Should have warned him. I didn’t want to be mixed up in anything, rumor-wise or whatnot. I didn’t want anyone thinking ill of me. Didn’t want other people’s sorrow soiling me, getting me feeling bad.
But I was feeling bad. I looked around the bank.
The person in line behind me, the older fellow ahead of me, the tellers, and the customers transacting at the big counter all seemed normal enough. The other desks and offices where town folk came in and made arrangements to get in and out of debt were half-occupied, all doors open for the moment. Abby Langston’s daddy, Keith, waved to me from his desk, looking over the top of reading glasses. I put a smile on my face and waved back.
The man in front of me turned and spoke. “Hollis Nunn.”
“Right,” I said, warming palms with him. “Rainy Dale.”
I remembered him as the old guy who complimented my dog out at Weatherby’s place. The man squared himself to me, not aggressive but plain that we’d be talking. “You’re shoeing for Mrs. Chevigny, I hear.”
“You heard right.” Hollis Nunn rubbed his stubbly neck and studied the ceiling while he gave me free advice. “There’s one bull out there at the Buckeye that I want you to . . .” He shook his head. “See to it that you give way to that bull. Don’t even be in a pasture with him, hear?”
Sonny’s warning came back to me. I hadn’t gotten it then but now I did. Sonny Weatherby and this Hollis Nunn were trying to do me a favor.
I nodded.
“I mean it, girl, you keep a fence between you and him.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I didn’t want to say that I’d probably shod my last for Donna Chevigny and the Buckeye ranch.
A middle-aged teller called, “Next.”
Hollis Nunn stepped aside, making way for me. “You go ahead.”
“Thanks.”
I walked up and asked the red-faced teller to put the checks in mine and Guy’s new joint account. She kept her eyes down but handled the transaction just fine. I don’t know what the old feller’s problem with her was, but he winked at me as he strolled past to the next teller, a younger fellow. On my way out, I paused at Keith Langston’s open office door.
“Did you ever hear anything about a land deal between Cameron Chevigny and his neighbor?” I asked.
“Stan Yates,” Abby’s daddy said, nodding. “Rainy, we don’t really talk about things like that here, other customers’ banking business.”
“If we talked about people in general, Donna Chevigny would say her husband was the sort who’d do a handshake deal on something as big as a land purchase.”
Keith Langston cast a quick look around but gave me a slight nod. “She probably would say that, and she’d be right.”
“Would you think that Stan Yates fellow would buy land on a handshake?”
Langston exha
led, his lower lip pooched out and he considered his options, obviously interested and willing to entertain the question, plus its answer. Finally, he said, “Between you and me, I don’t know of anyone but Cameron Chevigny who would have bought or sold real estate that way.”
So Stan Yates could be telling Donna that Cameron made a handshake deal, and she was honoring it, but there never had been such a deal. Mulling this, I walked out of the bank right behind Hollis Nunn, thinking how weird it was that he’d avoided that first open teller for some reason that she seemed to blush about. Come to think of it, I’d about swear that my teller had pinked up even worse when she saw one of my checks was drawn on the Chevigny name. Small towns and their people harbor a special kind of weird.
* * *
Once again, I’d gone to town without getting ahold of the sheriff or Suit Fellow. Maybe I’d sort of forgotten but I was pretty well tuckered and bothered and wanted only to go home. If I’d gotten done with work sooner, I might have tried to go be a big sister or an aunty or something to little Abby Langston, see if her mood was sorting out and how she felt about getting shipped out for the best part of the fall. Once we bring Pinto Bean, the weanling, from the Langstons’ place to ours, and my Red takes on overseeing the duty of turning little Bean into a proper horse, I expected to see more of Abby at our pasture. This wasn’t my first rodeo of knowing that a little girl doesn’t want to give up the first horse she’s seen born. I was ten years old the day I saw Red birthed. When I was fourteen and my world was upside down, my daddy sold him. Finding and buying Red back was what brought me to Butte County.
Ol’ Blue rumbled down Vine Maple road and I grimaced at my good old chestnut gelding, lonely in his pasture. The muffled thud of his hoofbeats, the nicker and blowing nostrils are good on my ears. Every girl deserves a good horse and vice versa. No, Abby’s heartache was not my first rodeo with—wait. Rodeo.
Rodeo stock business.
Maybe the thread that pulled some things together around here was Hollis Nunn and Cameron Chevigny having gone in together in the rodeo stock business. Maybe there was bad blood there. I thought about the teller’s anxious manner when Hollis Nunn sent me ahead in line, which meant she dealt with me instead of him. I’d paid not enough attention to what happened next—just gone and talked to Abby Langston’s daddy. What else was I missing?
I shook my head, still bugged about Abby having to go away. Bugged about not knowing if I’d have to go to court. About a whole mess of things at the Buckeye ranch and let’s see . . .
Delmont’s colt. Maybe do something about that one.
That was making me twist my ponytail around my thumb pretty hard.
My Intended might be persuaded to help me work on the one thing that was bugging me that we might could fix. I got right to it as soon as I was in the door.
“Guy, did you ever want a Clydesdale?”
“How was your day?” His brow can wrinkle in the most interesting, topographical-map-like manner. Maybe it helps him come up with something more to say, since he finally added, “Did I want a Clydesdale to bring us beer?”
This from a guy who knows I don’t partake.
“To be a horse,” I said.
“Well, technically, no, I don’t recall ever saying to myself that I want a Clydesdale.” Guy grinned at me like I was amusing him.
Sighing over my own silliness, I squeaked, “Do you think you could manage it?”
“What?”
“Wanting a Clydesdale.”
“Rainy, is there a shortcut you could take to tell me what’s on your mind?”
So much for me finessing him to the idea of pasturing the Delmonts’ shoulder-lame young horse. Guy does like his communication served without side dishes. Hitching my wagon to his will be interesting. And no, I have no blessed idea in this world why he picked me. As a means of testing him out—and because I’ve an ornery streak at least a couple feet wide—I’ve given him guff in large, daily portions, but he keeps asking me about my day and smiling and rubbing my shoulders and asking me about my day and handing me iced tea and asking me about my day and in general being a sweetie. I expounded.
Right then, he agreed to taking on a lame Clydesdale, like it was no big thing at all. That’s being a sweetie, in any gal’s book. I didn’t even have to scare up some reasons why we should give The Kid a healing home.
Good thing, ’cause I didn’t have any reasons.
Guy saw I wanted it and that was fine by him.
I could have gone on and on, made an evening of explaining Sweeney to Guy, but the phone rang and Guy started talking in a tone that surprised me.
“Yes.” He listened hard, very quiet, brow a map again. And then after a bit, he said, “All right.”
I listened to him saying nothing while he listened to someone on the phone and then he said, “Well, sure. That’s fine.”
Another half a minute watching him listen and then he said, “Okay. We’ve been living here together for about a year and a half.”
I poked him in the ribs as soon as he hung up. “Just who were you telling about our sinning ways?” I said this as a joke, though it’s true. “Who wants to know?”
As I don’t even cuss anymore, I’m hardly a sinner worth noticing.
“Donna Chevigny.”
“That was Donna? She didn’t want to talk to me?”
“She,” Guy rubbed his jaw and ducked his head a bit, working up some answers, “wanted to know how long you’d been here. In Cowdry. In Butte County.”
I pursed my lips and knew we were both remembering when we met. We’d each thought we were looking at a lunatic.
“You saw me my first night in town,” I said. We’d met at the 24-Fuel gas station, which is not how romances generally go.
Guy’s forehead wrinkled up a good deal again. He had the makings of a confused and fussy man, but then he put away being confussed and just looked wry. “She sounded so sad—”
“Donna always seems sad to me, all wistful and worn out.”
“She’d been crying.” Guy’s voice was so soft it was hard to hear. I don’t know that I’d ever heard his throat catch like that. “I think so anyway. It sounded like she was trying not to. Trying not to let me know.”
“Crying? Really?”
He nodded. “Pretty sure.”
Ever since I left the Buckeye the day before, I’d been itching to tell Guy about a whole hayload of happy horse hockey, so I talked for about fifteen minutes straight while watching different expressions try themselves out on the territory between his hairline and jawbone.
“And you told her we’d been together a good long while,” I said slowly, thinking this mess over. “That’s good.”
“It is good.”
Oh, he didn’t get me at all. But he would.
Took a breath, then I called Donna back.
The conversation went around how she’d jumped to a conclusion that was wrong and she was sorry and she liked my work and she was sorry and she sure appreciated my help and she was sure sorry.
I said I’d help her anytime.
There was a pause.
Maybe we were both thinking about how much she had on her plate and I said—I don’t know where this came from, there’s floor scrapings in my brain that surprise me whenever I set to mild thinking—maybe I could give her a hand sorting out her tractor. The thing of it was, getting the tractor dealt with was more of a chore than she’d been able to face in a year and a half.
“I just can’t apologize enough, Rainy. I feel guilty, real bad.” Donna’s contrition wore her voice to a hoarse whisper. She berated herself some more, going into how frazzled she’d been and she just wasn’t thinking right. While I listened to Donna, I watched Guy try his cell phone and get a fail notice on some text he’d tried to send. The end of Vine Maple road isn’t a hollow, but you’d think it’s the back of beyond, so bad is the cell service here.
“It’s okay,” I said.” In letting her say her piece, we made peace. I almost aske
d about the neighbor, Yates, fixing to buy her land north of the ravine, didn’t, then wished I had. There was something I was missing here. Something I should have noticed, or I had noticed, but didn’t grab onto the significance with both hands.
Soon as I freed up the house phone, Guy tried to call someone. I heard him leave a voice mail for Biff.
“Maybe he’s avoiding you,” I joked. It was like joking about sinning with Guy. Sometimes, I’m not sure what I believe. Anyways, Guy’s only a little bit right when he says we’ve been living together for over a year and I’m a lot more right when I say it’s been a few months. The thing of it is, is I was his tenant, on account of me renting his garage as a bedroom the first night I was ever in Cowdry.
Both our faults that the renting thing slid into a sort of a boyfriend and girlfriend thing. Guy’s asked me to not get stuck in a pickle about how we started. But then I went and got into a mongo pickle—made from the world’s biggest cuke—back when I realized I’d fallen for him. Which was right after he’d fallen for me. Which was right before he asked me to marry him for the second or third time. Which was when I said okey dokey.
Or something like that.
Nights are nice here, in Guy’s bedroom—our bedroom—even come mornings when he gets up way earlier than me, smooching me and telling me to sleep in, he’ll toss hay to Red. Now that, that is a way-swell thing about a nice guy. Mornings he knows I don’t have any early clients, I get tucked in right and proper for some extra loafing while he goes off to serve his breakfast crowd at the Cascade.
Guy’s heartbreak and his joy is that diner, though we’re not supposed to call it a diner for reasons that I don’t understand or want to get into. Someday, he’ll have his own restaurant—and he calls such a thing a resto or a bistro. But then, there’s restaurant and diner people and then there’s people like Guy.
Sitting on the front steps the next morning—thinking on my Intended and enjoying the thermos of coffee he’d left for me—would have set my day fine, but a strange dark car steering up with a driver in a Butte County Sheriff’s Department uniform cracked it right away. Never mind the little tan sweater with a junior version of the Sheriff’s patch, that meant the wearer was a clerk or some such, not a sworn officer. No, draped over the driver’s seat was a jacket showing the reserve deputy patch through the window.
