Summer Winds (11 page)

“I’d have to stay till Christmas and you wouldn’t want that, now, would you?” She cut her eyes at me and plunked her money down. When she stood up, her black jeans came way down over the boots, revealing less lime green than I’d envisioned.

“They actually look very cute,” I said.

“Cute?” Cash recoiled as if insulted. “Ms. Benegan, do you think I look cute or do you think I look sexy?”

Bea stepped back and eyed Cash top to bottom. Obviously appreciating Cash’s deference, she’d finally warmed to the light-heartedness of the morning and the possibility of a sale. “Miss Cash Tate, I do believe these boots could qualify you as…sexy.”

Cash tilted her head and kissed Bea on the cheek, keeping her eyes trained on me. Bea immediately reddened. “From here on out, I’ll shop in your store only, ma’am.”

“You come right to me, sweetie pie, and I’ll take care of you,” Bea said as Cash ambled out the door, her old boots under her arm, and I followed, suppressing laughter.

“Think she liked it?” Cash said, sure of herself. And for some reason I found her cockiness endearing.

“I’ll pay you when we get home.”

“I like a woman who pays her bets, but keep your money. I’ll take it out in trade.” When I looked at her in surprise, she said innocently, “Barter.”

“What are you thinking of bartering, two tickets to the pond with Perry?”

We climbed into the truck and Cash immediately propped one large foot up on the dashboard where the sunlight glinted off her new boots, revealing that the green leather actually sported scales of some kind.

“Man, I feel like a gigantic lizard,” she said proudly, and the insanity of that thought made me laugh. “Fast, ferocious, flexible. Able to survive the heat, find refuge under a rock, move rapidly across the sand.” She made a slalom swish with her hands.

Glancing over at the boot top, I said, “That could be snake.”

“A little reptilian tweak and you’ve ruined the whole imagery. I can’t say, ‘Man, I feel like a gigantic green snake.’”

“Sure you can. A snake is fast, ferocious, flexible. Able to survive the heat, find refuge under a rock, move rapidly across the sand.”

“Yeah, but if I’m a big green snake I don’t have any feet. Lizards have feet.”

“Of course you have feet. You have boots, don’t you? How can you have boots if you don’t have feet?”

“Right,” she said, contemplating my words for a moment before she looked over at me and we laughed.

“You bring out total silliness in me,” I said, still chuckling.

“I love that side of you. But then I love all sides of you.”

Warmed by her tone and the loving look in her eyes, I sighed, momentarily content. Cash Tate and I were becoming friends and I liked that. I liked it a lot.

❖

Over the next couple of weeks, the heat arrived in earnest. Late June often brought with it a persistent hot wind that dried perspiration in seconds and settled dust into the creases of old men’s brows.

The hay was growing at a rapid rate and soon we’d have our first harvest. I rang Hiram, on the north, to make sure he still wanted a supply of round bales, most of his own land torn up by his cattle herd. The first cutting was usually richer in protein but contained more weeds and wind-blown debris left from the winter months.

Therefore, first cuttings were often reserved for cattle, with the second cutting being put up for horses. But the weather was so unpredictable that I liked to put aside two hundred square bales from the first harvest as insurance. For some reason I was less anal about the harvest this year, and certainly my mind spent an inordinate amount of time wandering aimlessly. Even Perry noticed it, saying I’d gone from acting like a trail boss to being, “loose as a goose.”

I’d nearly forgotten to run an ad in the
County Journal Record
so people in neighboring towns could come and buy the rounds right out of the field. Winter prices were better, but a lot of that profit could be eaten up in getting the hay ready for storage. Besides, in the very best year, haying was a break-even proposition. I was fortunate my parents had left me money and Johnny had a small insurance policy, so I only had to rely on hay to feed my animals and not myself.

Cash pulled up in the Gator, her headband sweat-soaked and her clothes dusty. Having been here a little over a month now, she was starting to blend in with the scenery, looking less and less like a city girl.

“How many did you dig out?” I shouted above the wind.

She glanced over her shoulder at the pile of thorny thistles in the bed of the vehicle. “I lost count around five hundred.”

“Chemicals sure didn’t do much to kill them out this year. I’m going over there and warn Jonas Wiley that his thistle seeds are blowing into my pastures.”

“I’ll do it. I’d
enjoy
telling him.”

People around here didn’t take to neighbors telling them things, much less strangers, so I didn’t want Cash talking to anyone on my behalf. “You help Perry do a quick check for that pipe that was out in the open. I don’t think Jeremiah put it up before he got fired and it’s laying out there in the north field somewhere just waiting to bust up the haying equipment.”

“When I find it, where do you want me to put it?”

“It’s thirty-foot lengths of three-inch OD,” I said, referencing its outside diameter. “I don’t imagine you’ll be putting it anywhere without someone else hanging onto the other end. Perry tells me he’s got another hand coming out tonight, so you two can most likely handle it. Just stack it up back of the hay shed and put a pipe flag on it so we’ll know where we’ve left it.”

She grabbed the steering wheel and winced.

“Something wrong?”

“Not a thing. See you later.” She floored the gas pedal and I thought about telling her that she wasted gas every time she hotrodded around, but I decided to forget it. From the looks of her clothes, she was working hard. Couldn’t blame her for wanting to get where she was going fast. And I liked it when she was out working and I could deal with her from afar. I was getting a little more relaxed around her and enjoying our friendship.

Just before sundown, Perry came up the front steps with a big-bodied fellow whose stringy hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a decade. But he took his ball cap off and nodded his hello in a polite way.

“This here’s Bo Nightengale, Sven Olan’s cousin. He’s looking for summer work and I’ve got him put up out at the bunkhouse.”

I shook his big beefy hand and welcomed him, silently hoping he could work faster than his body mass implied as he lumbered off after Perry.

❖

Around midnight, I awoke restless, listening to the faraway thunder rumbling across the sky and wondering if the rain was headed in our direction. A good rain would help the hay grow so long as it didn’t last more than a day or so, and then had plenty of heat to dry it out.

My mind flickered like the electricity that bolted across the sky.

Where was I going with all these crazy thoughts that ran through my head these days? Restless as the wind, my body would not succumb to sleep. I tossed the sheets back off my legs, got out of bed, and opened the shades to check the night sky. Lightning was streaking across the heavens in a wild electric display of power. No cloud to ground lightning yet, the kind that struck cattle and killed them in their tracks.

A crack of thunder made me drop the shades and head for the living room, where I turned on the computer and checked the radar.

If it was going to be really severe, I might bring the horses up out of the grove away from the trees. Silly, I knew. Most ranchers let livestock take its chances, but I feared a dawn that revealed a dead horse.

I looked up to see Cash standing in the doorway of her bedroom, sleepy and worried, her brow more furrowed.

“Storm wake you?” I asked gently.

“I couldn’t sleep even before the thunder.”

“I was just checking to see if the major part of the weather’s going to miss us.” I looked down at her hands, cupped as if they might hold a baseball, but they were empty. Something in her look made me hold out my palm and demand that she show me hers. She hesitated and I impatiently signaled her to do as I asked. She turned her hand over and rested it, skyward, in my own. Her right hand was a reddened mass of blisters, some blood-stained.

“What in hell happened to you?” I pulled her hand toward the light of the desk lamp so I could see more clearly.

“It’s not a big deal. I got over-zealous with the thistles.”

“Were you wearing the gloves I bought you?”

“I used some cloth gloves, and most of this is from the shovel.”

When I jutted my chin forward in a visual request for an explanation, she quickly complied. “I didn’t want to ruin the deerskin.”

“Ruin them? That’s what they’re for. To keep your
hands
from being ruined.” I went into my bedroom and rummaged through the medicine cabinet, looking for something that might help.

Moments later I came back with ointment. “You seem intent on destroying your hands. When animals do that to themselves, shows they’re nervous and bored and wanting food or freedom or something they can’t get to. So you might think about that.” She reached for the tube of ointment but couldn’t bend her hand to unscrew the lid.

I took it from her.

“Sit,” I ordered. She plopped onto the couch and her chin rested on her chest as she offered up her hand. I squeezed the medicine onto my fingertips, then gently rubbed it onto her palm.

“I prefer bag balm, if you want to know the truth. I’ve put it on the swollen udders of cattle, on my horses, and on people, but we’re not going out to the barn at this hour so let’s start with this.”

She jumped involuntarily every time I touched a new spot and I apologized. “I should wrap the right hand to keep the medicine on there, or you’ll rub it off in the night.”

“I’m afraid I’ll get it on the sheets.”

“Don’t worry about that.” I took her left hand and began to rub the medicine into its less-damaged surface. She stretched her fingers slightly as I applied pressure, and a tingling sensation rippled from the top of my head along my back and across my shoulders. I closed my eyes for a moment. “You have the strong hands of a woman meant for the country, if we could only get your head there,” I said softly. When I looked up, she seemed mesmerized like a pup who’d been rescued and now loved its owner. “I can’t believe you didn’t wear the gloves I bought you.”

“They’re just too nice to dig thistles in.” Something about the way she said it made me think that her upbringing probably didn’t include gifts carefully selected for her. The gloves were too precious to her, a treasure instead of a tool.

“Old leather gloves in different sizes and conditions are out in the tack room. Find a pair and wear them. But for now, baby that right hand.”

A loud crash of thunder startled us both and we physically reacted.

“Come on, let’s go out and look at the sky.” Cash jumped up and bounded onto the front porch before I could remind her that standing in the lightning wasn’t a good idea.

The cool north wind whipped our nightshirts around us and sprayed rain on our faces despite the porch overhang.

“Does this feel fabulous or what?” Cash pointed her chin skyward.

“It feels wet.”

“Then you’re in the wrong spot.” She reached for me with damaged hands, clasped me around the waist with her wrists, and jerked me back, causing me to lose my balance and fall against her.

“Wind is the breath of heaven whispering to us. Want to know what it’s saying?”

And there it was again, that riverbank moment, that electrical buzz, that suspension of time creating a window for pleasure to breeze through. And the wind whispered softly, mocking the stuffy constraints of sexual mores, allowing me for one brief moment to breathe the fresh air of sensual freedom. A gust picked up the rain and hurled it at us.

“It’s saying, ‘Idiots get off the porch, it’s raining sideways.’” I whirled out of her grasp and we ran inside, nearly soaked through.

“Your bandage is wet.” I became serious about her hand again, unwrapping it.

“I’m wet everywhere.” She panted, out of breath, and I wondered if I heard the sexual innuendo because I feared hearing it, or if a total stranger would hear it in the same way.

I quickly ordered her about. “Go dry your hair and change shirts, and I’ll fix your hand.”

She left the room and I went to mine and towel-dried my hair and put on another sleep shirt. When I returned I put more ointment on her hand and rewrapped it in gauze.

“I like the attention. I may run out in the rain again right now.”

“Don’t press your luck.”

“I’m lucky to be here in this room with you, on this ranch.

Have you ever snuggled into bed on a stormy night with someone you love or awakened on a rainy morning?”

“I can’t recall, probably,” I said, as if distracted, and moved to the computer screen, focusing intently. “Radar shows the serious part of the storm won’t overtake us tonight. If you need something, for your hand, let me know.” I turned the computer off and headed for my bedroom, feeling her eyes follow me. I sensed her whole being wanted to follow, which is why I hurried and closed and locked the door, then flopped onto my bed and let out a great sigh.

She was in love with the music on the riverbank, now enamored of rain on the roof. She’s obviously a romantic and isn’t attracted to any individual in particular, but merely the emotion of the moment surrounding that person. She needs an outlet for her romantic nature and it can’t be me, I thought. And suddenly I knew what I wanted to do for her. The thought made me smile and relax.

Despite a nearly sleepless night, I was up at dawn, had my coffee, and was on the road for Maze City. I left a note on the kitchen counter for Cash telling her to sleep in and rest her hands, that I’d be back shortly after lunch.

Perry’s note tucked in the screen door said he and Bo had toured the ranch checking to see that the cattle were all intact after the storm, then driven to town to get some more fencing wire. Since buying a roll of wire didn’t require two people, I suspected they were really going to the local bar, but even that didn’t perturb me since it left me more time to reveal my surprise to Cash.