The Scent of Rain and Lightning (5 page)

A
FTER EVERYBODY
in her family finally left the house, Annabelle made a meat loaf and put it in the oven to bake before the day got too hot for cooking. She planned to let it cool and then serve Hugh Senior’s favorite cold meat loaf sandwiches—on homemade wheat bread, with mayo and lettuce—along with leftovers of yesterday’s potato and green bean salads. She cleaned up her kitchen, swept the front, rear, and side porches, threw a load of sheets into the machine in the basement, made calls for her church circle, checked by telephone on an elderly friend, answered a couple of calls from cattle buyers, and fed the barn cats. They had temporarily run out of mice, and were looking a little thin as a consequence of their success. She watered her inside plants—she’d given up on her poor flower garden in July. Finally, with yet another chore in mind, she ran upstairs to change into her riding clothes, which amounted to blue jeans, long-sleeve cotton shirt, boots, dark sunglasses, and a floppy straw hat to protect her complexion from the sun.

She wanted to combine responsibility with pleasure.

On her way out to saddle up her chestnut horse—named Dallas for the city of her birth—Annabelle grabbed a banana for her own breakfast.

It was late for a morning ride; the day was already heating up.

But she felt a pressing need to escape from the argumentative air in her home that day. Plus, she had things to think over, including her husband’s foul mood. Hugh Senior rarely wavered in his tenderness toward her, but overall Annabelle felt the years were turning him tougher, rather than softening him. The good principles he’d started out with, the ones that made her parents approve of him, had hardened, until now they were deep lines that people crossed at the price of never getting back into his good graces again.

It scared her sometimes, that increasing hardness.

Seeing people encounter it in him was like watching them race headlong into a steel wall and get bounced back violently. From the new distance they rubbed their noses and stared as if seeing him anew. When they attempted to get close again, they encountered a hostile formality in him that kept them at more than arm’s length. Permanently. If the ranch manager in Colorado, for instance, was stealing from them—even if only dimes—he would rebound off that steel in Hugh so hard he’d land in another state, where he’d be job hunting.

She hoped it wasn’t so.

The irony, to Annabelle, was that her husband’s toughness grew from raising three sons whom he loved with every sinew of his being, and from semiraising the boys that Hugh and she had taken under their wings over the last couple of decades. She’d been the lucky one who got to give the boys affection, a sympathetic ear, and lots of marble cake; Hugh was the disciplinarian, caring enough about all of them to say no when it had to be said, and then sticking to it. He’d been as tough on Belle, but it hadn’t worked as well on her. Their only daughter had the famous Linder work ethic, but she didn’t have the emotional resilience the boys had from being shoved down—figuratively—and expected to get back up again.

When Belle got shoved down, she tended to stay down.

The change in Hugh Senior didn’t scare Annabelle for her own sake—she believed her husband would forgive her anything—but for her children. Children—even grown ones—crossed lines. It was inevitable, sometimes even desirable, in her opinion. But it would break her heart if they ever lost their father’s respect, and she feared that Bobby was not the only one of them who might be on the path toward that disaster.

Once atop Dallas, she pointed the horse down a rut in the dirt, in the direction she wanted to go, draped the reins over his withers and let him have his head while she peeled and ate her banana.

The grass under his hooves looked worse than dormant, it looked dead.

They hadn’t had precipitation since May. Instead of depending on grass to feed the cattle, the ranch was being forced to truck in hay to some of the herds, as if it were already winter.

It was the kind of weather that her husband called expensive.

The morning had a smell of toasted vegetation, even though no sane rancher would have set a match to burn pastures in these conditions. A further fire hazard loomed out west: the threat of lightning in thunderclouds. At this point a storm would be a mixed blessing, welcome for rain, as long as there wasn’t too much of it at one time, and unwelcome for the lightning that accompanied it.

They reached a gate and she slid down off Dallas to open it, coax him through, and then refasten the gate and remount him.

She was looking for a particular group of cattle—the pregnant mamas the men had weaned from their most recent calves yesterday. Now that she was in their pasture, she was surprised not to hear any bawling from the mothers or from the calves that had been separated from them. Usually she’d have expected to find all the calves lined up on one side of a fence, crying for their moms, and the cows bunched on the other side, mooing back at their six-month-old babies.

But the pasture was silent this morning.

It was quiet enough to hear a whip-poor-will and to hear Dallas crunch small rocks under his metal shoes, still enough to hear the buzz of a small plane overhead in the distance and catch the honk of a truck horn on the highway.

An especially easy weaning this time, Annabelle thought.

And then, as Dallas led her toward the herd, she saw the reason for the unnatural calm: the supposedly weaned calves were back with their mothers! Some were nursing, some butting and bouncing around each other in play, others pressing so close to their mothers’ big red sides that they looked glued to them, as if they wanted to make sure they couldn’t be forced apart again.

“Oh, no,” she groaned to Dallas. “There must be a fence down.”

This was not going to improve her husband’s disposition.

It was going to mean another day’s worth of hard, hot work, plus the extra physical and emotional strain on the cattle, plus the expense of the hired hands. She thought of Billy Crosby at that moment and said with annoyance, “One fewer hired hand.”

Dallas’s ears suddenly perked forward, attracting her attention.

When Annabelle looked past them, she spotted what the horse had noticed first: a large mound where it shouldn’t be, a big red hump in the grass.

Dallas lifted his feet, one after the other, as if he were nervous.

She had to nudge him hard to get him to move toward the lump.

It was a cow, but it had a “wrong” look to it. Cows spent a lot of their lives lying down, but not stretched out on their sides as this one was, with her legs straight out and her head pressed sideways against the ground.

It lay as no living cow ever would.

She must have simply keeled over and died there on the spot, Annabelle thought at first. Death had to happen to all of God’s creatures eventually, and not every one of High Rock Ranch’s livestock made it to the slaughterhouse. A few went out the old-fashioned way, as this big old girl appeared, at first, to have done.

A shudder went through the big horse.

Annabelle slid off him again and walked toward the prone cow.

Dallas stepped backward. Annabelle turned to him and said, “Stay there.”

Not that she blamed him for wanting to move. The smell was terrible in the heat, because the cow had emptied its bowels and bladder, and there was drying blood …

“Blood?” Annabelle felt a touch of dread for the cow’s sake.

This was a pasture of pregnant cows that had just been weaned from their latest calves. Had this one miscarried and bled to death?

Why else would there be—

A gush of blood was pooled all around the fallen cow, as if every drop in her had poured out. The ground beneath her was so dry and hard that very little of the blood had soaked in; it remained a viscous, jellylike mass rapidly turning crusty and attracting flies, which also buzzed around the cow’s orifices.

“Oh, no,” Annabelle murmured when she got close enough to see more.

The blood had not come from the rear of the animal, as it would in a miscarriage, but from the front. It had all poured out of the head, and from a smiling gash across her throat. Coyotes were the only predators, and she knew they didn’t normally go after cattle this size. Even the calves were big for coyote prey. Maybe the drought was altering the natural order of things.

Or maybe the cow died first and then the coyote—

But why wasn’t any of the carcass torn away or consumed?

There weren’t any bulls here; what would scare away a coyote?

None of it was making sense to Annabelle as she struggled to fit what she was seeing with what she knew of life and death on the ranch. Like all the cows in this pasture, this one had been pregnant, which meant an unborn calf was now dead inside of her, so this was a loss to the ranch of two, not just one valuable life, as these things were measured in money.

And then she realized with a shock which cow this was.

It was the cow that had caused all the ruckus yesterday, the old breeder that Billy Crosby had kicked in his rage.

Annabelle had directed Dallas to this pasture expressly to check up on this particular animal, to make sure that Billy hadn’t done any terrible damage to her eye, and that they didn’t need to call out the vet to treat her. She didn’t know all the cattle by sight, not by any means—the ranch was much too big for that—but she knew some of the ones who’d been around a long time, especially the ones she affectionately thought of as “good old girls” and “good mamas.” Just like humans, or dogs, or cats, some cattle were “pretty” or “cute” or “handsome,” and some were homely ol’ critters. This one had been one of those, with a long bony face, a sway back, and knobby knees that only its own offspring could love.

“I’m sorry, old dear,” she murmured to it even as she held her breath to keep from breathing in the foul odors of its passing.

Speaking of its offspring, where was its “weaned” calf?

Annabelle looked around, but it was impossible to tell which of all the calves might be motherless at the moment, and they were too spread out for her to count. It had probably been frightened, then spent some time trying to nudge its mother to her feet, or to nurse from her, and then wandered off to graze. This was a hard way to get weaned, Annabelle thought sympathetically, but maybe—for the cow, herself—this was better, more merciful in its way, than going to the slaughterhouse, which was the fate that awaited all the cows past their breeding days.

Annabelle would have liked to place a hand on the cow, to pat its curly rough red hair and feel if its body was cool or if the death had happened recently enough for the carcass still to be warm. But she didn’t want to step into the blood, and so she didn’t get any closer.

Instead, she pulled herself back onto Dallas without the aid of any bucket or stump and rode home to give her husband the bad news.

U
NLIKE HIS WIFE
, Hugh Senior didn’t hesitate to walk into the blood, or to touch the brutal wound, which was how he came to the conclusion that no coyote had killed her.

“Annabelle,” he said, looking up at her, “somebody’s cut her throat.”

“Oh, Hugh! Oh, no! Are you sure?”

He didn’t even bother to answer, and so she knew it must be obvious. What he did say was, “And we know just who would have done that to this particular cow, don’t we?”

Tears came to Annabelle’s eyes and she felt pity.

Her pity wasn’t only for the poor cow, but also for Billy Crosby, and she thought, Oh, Billy, what have you done?

She thought of the times she’d sat down with the boy and tried to talk to him about high school diplomas and jobs and being a husband and a father. She felt sickened by the blood, and the smell, and sickened for him. Her stomach heaved and she bent over the dirt and grass, though nothing came up. It was then that she noticed the cause of the burnt vegetation smell she had noticed earlier.

“Hugh!” she called, holding her hand over her mouth. She took her hand down and pointed. “He started a fire here.”

Hugh stalked over and then walked around, examining the ground and coming to an analysis: “He tried to set a fire to burn her body … which means he didn’t care if he burned the whole ranch down, and all the animals and us with it.” He stood up straight, and was framed in front of the distant, dramatic clouds like a photograph of a rancher in his element. “I wonder why his fire didn’t catch.”

“Because her blood put it out before it could, that’s why.”

Annabelle’s pity turned to rage with these new facts.

“This is a horrible thing to do, horrible! How dare he, Hugh, how
dare
he?”

“Because that’s the kind of person Billy is, Annabelle. I’m sorry I didn’t figure that out sooner.”

A
FEW MINUTES LATER
, on their ride home, her anger weakened.

“Hugh, maybe it wasn’t Billy.” She offered up her one last benefit of the doubt to him. “It could have been anybody. Some crazy person driving by. A trespasser, an illegal hunter.”

Her husband threw her a disbelieving look.

“And this stranger just happens to find that pasture and kill that particular cow out of all of our cattle. You can’t be serious, Annabelle. You know as well as I do it was Billy. This has Billy’s fingerprints all over it, and I mean that literally. I’ll bet you that boy’s so stupid he’s left a trail of evidence.”