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“He thinks it’s superstition to show his support?” Eva asked.
“He puts it right up there in the same category with ‘thoughts and prayers.’ He says put your money where your mouth is.”
Eva snorted. “Oh brother. Love the guy, but West needs to get over himself sometimes. I’m all for doing more than ‘talk,’ but it’s nice to know that people care, too. ‘Thoughts and prayers’ is just something that kind people say when there isn’t much they can do, but theywouldif they could.”
“Well…” Sorta, except Cole also knew there was more to it. That was just another difference between the brothers. He shrugged. “I believe in the power of prayer,” he said. “Sure, we accept God’s will in the end. If it happens to be different than ours, that’s harder, but… God also shows his love by granting miracles, too. And those come in many forms, even if it’s just comfort or strength beyond our own, or even just the knowledge of an eternal plan.”
“Oh?” she smiled, watching him like he was a rare butterfly in a field of crickets. “That is so sweet that you believe that.”
“You don’t?”
She giggled. “I don’t know what I believe, but I’ve neverseena miracle.”
He stared at her. They were everywhere if she opened her eyes. “Look in the mirror.”
Her nose wrinkled in that cute way of hers. “I’m a miracle? Cole, youaresweet!”
Cole didn’t mean for it to be sweet, but maybe it was. He grumbled out a laugh. “Life is a miracle. Hold this still, will you?”
She nodded and steadied the post as he began wrapping the wire around it.
“Listen to Hamlet’s monologue on ‘What a piece of work is a man.’ That should give you an idea,” he said.
“Ha! Hamlet now?” Her legs bent as she helped balance his work. “Can we even talk about Shakespeare when wearing cowboy boots and putting up a cattle fence?”
He chuckled and tried to remember what he’d memorized for his freshman speech class. “What a piece of work is a man,” he quoted. “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.” His eyes lifted to her perfect blue ones—they rivaled this majestic sky after a storm. “The beauty of the world,” he breathed, “the paragon of animals….” There was more, but it just went downhill from there. Shakespeare was trying to depict a man disillusioned by the murder of his father, after all.
“Oh, you’d better stop,” she said. That dimple was showing on her cheek again. “You’ll steal me away from your brother with that kind of talk.”
He grimaced out a smile. He hadn’t been trying to win her over, in the least, but one thing he was discovering—Eva was easy to talk to, even with her constant joking, or maybe because of it. Cole felt like he was out here with Hudson, talking deeply like they always liked to do.
Why not treat her the same as his brothers and give her the real Cole? After all, she was going to be a part of this family. “Well, Shakespeare was a Bible reader,” Cole said. “Everyone was back then, and I think he pulled his best work from there. Hamlet’s speech came from Psalms 8.”
“Do it,” she said, breathlessly. “Give me Psalms 8.”
He hesitated. “Give you…?” But he knew that she was asking him to quote it like he’d done Hamlet’s speech. She must think he was better than the search engine on her phone. Of course, she couldn’t know that Psalms 8 just happened to be the lyrics in one of their hymnals at church. They’d both lucked out.
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” He quoted the psalm as he clawed at another piece of wire. “And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet. All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.”
“So pretty,” she said.
But they were missing his favorite part. “Oh Lord,ourLord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, who hast set thy glory above the heavens…. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained…”
He loved that part the most because he was out here on his family’s land all dayevery day,experiencing the beauty of God’s creations for himself.
He grabbed two ends of the wire now. “Take this.” He handed her the third piece.
She took it to keep it straight while he put the rest of the fence together. “Don’t get me wrong, Cole.” She supported the post with her hip while he worked. “I still have no idea what you’re saying.”
He couldn’t help his low rumble of laughter while he twisted the wires together. Eva was definitely asking for trouble if she wanted him to clarify. She was about to get more of Cole than she wanted. “All I’m saying is that miracles are everywhere,” he said. “You just have to look around to see them!”
The birds sailed over the still pond. The reeds swayed with the long grass through the marshland, even the colors were manufactured by heaven.
“This land we’re in? It’s a miracle—butnotjust because of its beauty, even though it’sverybeautiful, but think of the wondrous way the earth works in that rare dance between life and death.”
At least that’s how his momma put it. He’d thought over her words on his long days out on the range. He’d expressed them often in his heart every time he witnessed the grandeur of a sunset or the power of a storm. The gratitude he felt always came out in a prayer on his lips.
“Everything is in perfect balance,” he said. “The chemical elements that make up the air, the tilt of the earth and the distance of the sun in every season and the organization of every cycle so that we do not burn alive or freeze to death, the geothermal makeup of our world that retains heat, the oceans and seas that regulate our climate.”
