AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chris blinked, those cagey blue eyes missing nothing. “Okay then,” he said. “I’m putting you with Billy down at the chute. We’re waiting for Peuse to handle a couple of difficult births.”
Jack nodded. He wanted to ask where Mia was, but bit back the question.
He approached the chute and a young hand, Billy he supposed, handed him tattoo pliers and ear tags. “Right ear for bulls, left for—”
For a second the hand’s voice was superimposed over his father’s telling him exactly the same thing when he was nine years old, helping out on his first calving.
“Heifers. I remember,” Jack said. And he did. Eighteen years of his life surrounded by and working cattle, he’d forgotten the rituals, but they surfaced as soon as he stepped into the chute. They weren’t unwelcome, not like the memories of his mother. His father. Those he kept locked away, never to resurface. But he’d always liked the work. Liked that it was a whole world in and of itself, while at the same time part of a cumulative whole. It felt good to turn off his head and use his body.
His muscles, asleep and stiff, woke up to the exertion and within a few minutes he was sweating and swearing with Billy.
Within a few hours the voices were silent.
Peuse came and went, treating two calves with scours, and by nightfall a good two thirds of the calves had been born. The remaining third of pregnant cows looked good to go in the next few days, at a far more reasonable pace. Jack was covered head to foot in the realities of calving.
“You stink, man,” Billy said. The good-natured cowboy had been relentlessly cracking jokes all day, and the pull of camaraderie was painful.
Because Oliver, his comrade, the great jokester, the man Jack’d worked beside more hours than he could count, was dead. Torn into so many pieces there was nothing to bury.
Jack didn’t want to joke. To shoot the shit. Not with anyone but his old friend.
He wanted to work himself into stillness. Quiet.
So it was easier to resist Billy’s efforts at chumminess. To hold himself distant and aloof.
“Go on and take a shower,” Jack told Billy, the role of boss never a tough one for him. “Get some food.”
“I better check on Mia. She hasn’t had a break all day.”
“She works hard,” Jack said, not really a question. The loyalty she inspired in her men was significant. And he was proud of her.
“There’s more work than people, and she does her share and then some.”
Jack turned to Billy, a question that had bothered him since he first stepped foot back on the ranch coming back around. “Where are all the seasonal guys?” Jack asked. “Every spring we’d hire a few extra guys. Why isn’t Mia?”
Billy shrugged. “You’ll have to ask her, but I’m pretty sure there ain’t any money to do it.”
“Come on,” Jack scoffed. “No money for spring cowboys?”
Billy nodded. “Your old man did a number on this place—”
Jack jerked. “Dad?”
Billy waved his hands. “This conversation is way above my pay grade,” he said. “You want to ask those kinds of questions, better just go ask Mia.”
Jack nodded. “Go on in,” he said. “I’ll check on her.” Billy didn’t need to hear the offer a third time. He made his way around the chute and headed for the bunkhouse.
Chris and Tim had already gone in, to get food put together, but he hadn’t seen Mia in the last few hours.
The sky was indigo against the black mountains and soon it would be fully dark, the sliver of a moon not much illumination, and he couldn’t leave her out here to finish whatever work was left.
He headed toward the far corner of the pasture, toward the hill and the trees where most of the cows seemed to go once they knew birth was close.
Cresting the hill, he saw Mia sitting cross-legged on the ground, feeding a calf from a bottle, while the dam licked the baby.
A man crouched beside her, and while Jack watched, the stranger cupped her shoulder, smiled into her face. Intimately. Mia’s laugh, weary and throaty, echoed over the small valley.
Jealousy made a sudden sad and angry puncture wound in his chest.
“Mia,” he said, as he approached and she turned, looking at him over her shoulder. The cowboy stood up and tipped back his hat.
“Hi Jack,” he said, a slow-burning smile crossing the handsome man’s familiar face. “Been a while.”
It took a second but soon the dots connected in his head. “Jeremiah Stone,” he said with a laugh. The Stones were their closest neighbors, and he and Jeremiah had gone to school together until Jeremiah dropped out of high school to be a rodeo stud. They hadn’t had a whole lot in common—some summer baseball games, a mutual crush on Helen Jones. They’d been two different kinds of boys.
