B00DVWSNZ8 EBOK

by Jeffrey, Anna

  "He was that, too. And he eventually became a stockman."

  By marrying lucky, Jude thought. That was what the local old-timers said and she believed them, even if Frank Strayhorn was a blood relative. She knew the story of how he came into the Campbell family.

  Grandpa's mother, Penelope Ann Campbell, had met Frank Strayhorn when she went away to school in Dallas. She was a sheltered young woman who left a devoutly religious home. Handsome and persuasive, Frank Strayhorn swept an unsophisticated girl off her feet and married her. Eventually he persuaded her God-fearing father, Roslyn Shaffer Campbell, to tell the only other living Campbell heir, Grammy Pen's aunt, Martha Alice, who had married a Dallas doctor and rarely returned to Willard County, that the family's West Texas land was worthless.

  Frank Strayhorn had then brokered a deal whereby Roslyn Campbell purchased Martha Alice's interest in the land and cattle for pennies. If Martha Alice had ever realized the fraud that had fostered the dispossession of her hereditary right, she never acknowledged it. After the sale, she never returned to West Texas again in her life.

  Upon Frank Strayhorn's death, Penelope Ann Campbell Strayhorn stood as the sole heir to the 300,000-acre Campbell ranching empire and its thousands of cattle and horses.

  And now, as Grammy Pen's only offspring, Grandpa had inherited all of it.

  This story had been told to Jude by none other than their cook, Windy Arbuckle, and embellished by a few of the other older hands who had worked on the ranch for years. Not holding herself above the people who were loyal to her brought benefits and one of those benefits was that they felt free to talk to her.

  "But Grandpa, how can you know Brady Fallon has no resources?"

  "I know his mother and his father, Judith Ann."

  At some point in the course of this conversation, a dawning had crept up on Jude. Now she realized why the Lubbock banker had been so nervous about her attempting to buy the 6-0. His anxiety had nothing to do with fearing she might make a financial blunder with her trust fund money. It had everything to do with the fact that Grandpa intended to acquire the 6-0 himself and the banker knew it. How could she have been so naive as to not figure that out before now?

  If Brady Fallon found himself in financial straits—and Jude didn't question Daddy and Grandpa’s qualifications to make that determination—those two would be waiting to pounce like cougars. To get what they wanted at the price they wanted to pay, all they had to do was wait—wait and patiently watch Brady Fallon twist in the wind until the rope that held him broke.

  Who had spoken to her more often of the virtues of patience than the two men who had raised her?

  A sour taste formed in Jude's mouth and like a prowling cat, a slow anger began to crawl around within her. It wasn't fair. Brady Fallon had to be a good person or Jake wouldn't call him a friend. Sympathy for the 6-0's new owner planted itself within Jude, warring with family loyalty. And she couldn't explain those conflicting emotions even to herself.

  "I know the Fallon family," Grandpa went on. "Never forget, Judith Ann, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

  She leveled an assessing look at her grandfather. Brady’s family aside, remembering the many stories of Frank Strayhorn's underhanded shenanigans, she wondered just how true that old saying might be.

  The longhorns moved away from the fence and began to snuffle through hay on the ground. She and Grandpa circled the small pasture in silence, then started back toward the house.

  Her mood had changed. She no longer felt like biting her tongue so as not to offend him.

  The way Daddy had cut off the conversation at supper when Grandpa mentioned her Uncle Ike nagged at her. Curiosity about him had pricked her for years. If not for Grammy Pen, she wouldn’t even know what he looked like. No photographs of him existed anywhere in the house, but Grammy Pen kept some in a locked box. He was, after all, one of her grandsons.

  If not for her great-grandmother, Jude would have precious little knowledge of the affair between her stepmother and Daddy's brother. It was possible she wouldn't even have known the circumstances of their deaths. The locals might blather on about Frank Strayhorn, who had been dead for thirty years, but when it came to Grandpa and his three sons, they talked less freely.

  "I wish I could remember more about my uncle Ike," she said, lifting her hand and letting the breeze take the blade of grass she had been toying with from her fingers. "And my stepmother."

  Long moments passed before Grandpa spoke. "When it came to the work, when he set his mind to it, Ike was as good as there was. But he could be as bad as there was if he wanted to. He had a wildness to him. He wasn't a steady hand like your daddy."

  Jude waited for him to speak of her stepmother, Karen. Or of Jude's mother, Vanessa. Or of someone. But he kept his silence.

  "Did Daddy and Uncle Ike get along before...you know, before the—"

  "Not well," her grandfather answered before she could finish asking her question.

  No one ever answered a question or finished a sentence when it came to conversation about her uncle and stepmother.

  "They were too different," Grandpa added.

  She waited again, but he said no more.

  Dark had descended by the time they returned to the house, and the sounds of crickets had risen in a steady rhythm in the nighttime emptiness. Grandpa said good night and shuffled to his ground-floor suite. Jude checked the locks on the doors and windows, preparing for the coming storm.

  She made her way upstairs, her thoughts continuing to trouble her. What must it have been like for Daddy and Grandpa living in the same house for the past twenty-four years. Neither of them was great at communicating feelings. The death of Daddy’s wife and Grandpa’s son, occurring while they engaged in an illicit tryst, had to have caused some kind of schism between her father and grandfather. But if so, they kept it well hidden.

  No doubt they succeeded in getting along so well due to having a mutual interest in the ranch and the Campbell-Strayhorn legacy—and the fact that the family history was more powerful than they were. From what she had seen, the history had usually proved to be more enduring than any mere mortals.

  By the time she reached her room, thunder had begun to rumble in the distance. She typically spent quiet evenings reading or watching TV. This evening, she changed into her pajamas and selected a book published in the forties about the great old ranches of the rolling plains of the West Texas Panhandle.

  She settled into the overstuffed chair where she always read, but couldn't concentrate on the book. Seeing Brady Fallon, followed by learning who he was from Jake, then trying to extract information from Grandpa about Jake's father and her own stepmother—all of it had pushed into her thoughts and wouldn't relent.

  She closed her eyes and rested her head against the chair's back, letting the past take over her mind. She had only shards of memory of those days following the car accident that had killed her uncle and stepmother. She had a vague image of Grandma Ella, Grandpa's wife, weeping and screaming. Grammy Pen had taken Jude into her room and made her put on a dress and black shoes and white socks with lace on them. Jude could still see her feet in those shoes and socks but had no recollection of the color of the dress.

  Someone had taken her out of the house and given her cookies and sat with her on the back porch. All these years, she thought it had been Jake, but could it have been Brady Fallon?

  Melancholy had hung in the house like a heavy black curtain. People came and went. There had been tears and woeful cries. A service in the church in town and the preacher talking forever. Grandpa weeping.

  The clearest memory from those days was of a loud and fierce argument Daddy had with Grandpa and Grandma Ella over where her Uncle Ike should be buried. In the end, he had been laid to rest in the family cemetery. To this day, Jude knew not what the alternate choice might have been.

  Her stepmother had been buried somewhere in Abilene by her own family. Jude had never been told where and she hadn’t bothered to try to
find the location. Of course her father would know, but he had never said.

  But perhaps those grim memories were confused with those from a scant few months later. Grandma Ella, Grandpa’s wife had passed unexpectedly. Complications from gall bladder surgery. Another funeral, more weeping people and a lot of food.

  Soon after Ike's funeral, Jake and his mother faded away, almost as if they had never existed. Jude had lost touch with them until Jake returned to Lockett a few years ago. She was aware he had joined the army at a young age and later worked for the Dallas Police Department, but she knew little else about him.

  Thinking of how unforeseen events altered life in dramatic ways and sent people on irreversible courses, she drifted to sleep.

  The tempest arrived at midnight, rumbling and blowing and throwing rain against the windowpanes in great slaps. She loved storms, loved nature's display of power and might. She awoke with a start, crawled into bed and listened. She dozed, but the storm kept her adrift in a state of half wakefulness.

  The next thing she knew, it was daylight. She had missed the end of the thunderstorm and had overslept. But that didn't mean she didn't have a plan for the day.

  Expecting humidity along with the heat, she dressed in jeans and a camisole with spaghetti straps and went downstairs to the kitchen. Windy and Irene were already at work on the noon meal.

  "Mornin', Judith Ann," Windy didn’t look up from his task. With hands the size of hams and fingers that looked like sausages, he was doing something delicate with Jell-O. The creation under construction looked fragile.

  Irene came to her, smiling and wiping her hands on a towel. "Buenos dias, Yu-dee." She pronounced Jude's name as if it had two syllables, replacing the hard American J with a soft spanish Y."You want the breakfast?" Irene spread her arms wide as if encompassing the world. "Bien grande?"

  Trying to speak English was Irene's attempt to be like other Americans. She had grown up in a non-English-speaking home, so what little English she knew had come from taking lessons at the church in town and working alongside Windy. Since Windy probably hadn't gone past eighth grade and had been a ranch hand at the Circle C for more than forty years, his speech was mostly rural cowboy slang and a litany of cusswords. Exactly what Irene might be learning from him, Jude dared not guess.

  She had great affection for their Mexican help. In broken English, a Mexican housekeeper had explained menstruation to her. A different Mexican housekeeper had taught her to braid her hair. Her daily life was filled with small tasks she might not have learned to perform well, if at all, without the Mexican housekeepers who had always been employed by the ranch.

  "No, thanks," she told Irene. "I'll just have a bowl of cereal." She prepared a bowl of corn flakes with milk and sugar and backed against the counter edge to eat it. "Who's coming to eat dinner?" she asked Windy. The noon meal had always been "dinner" and the evening meal had always been "supper" at the Circle C.

  "Clary Harper and Doc Barrett got some AQHA folks coming down from Amarillo today."

  Ah, politics and horse breeding. Clarence Harper was the horse wrangler who took care of the remuda and Dr. John Barrett was the ranch's main vet. With someone from the American Quarter Horse Association present, the dinner meeting would be about quarter-horse breeding, thus artificial insemination and embryo transfer.

  The Pitchfork had a couple of highbred mares they wanted Sandy Dandy to breed with. And by now, some of the other ranches with breeding programs might have ready mares, too. Sandy Dandy was the ranch's latest superstud. He was a powerful, award-winning stallion with a good disposition except when it came to the mares. With them, he was tough and dominant and brooked no rebellion.

  Jude had mixed emotions about transferring embryos from impregnated mares into surrogate mothers. She appreciated the advancement of the science and the positive benefits, but the whole process flew so blatantly in the face of what nature intended that it made her uncomfortable.

  And it made her even more uncomfortable knowing that, usually, the motive for doing it was making more money off some horse’s bloodline.

  She often wondered if Thoroughbred horse owners were the ones who had the right idea, allowing highbred horses to be registered only if they reproduced as a result of live cover.

  Every time she had those thoughts, she accused herself of being as old-fashioned as Daddy and Grandpa. With live cover, bacteria and disease could more readily be introduced into a mare's reproductive tract. Stallions were aggressive and could be mean during copulation. If a mare resisted, live cover could turn into a violent event and cause injury to both stud and mare. Artificial insemination was safer all around.

  Though the Circle C's breeding program had produced several famous horses, money wasn't what drove it. The primary purpose had always been to produce the best and strongest ranch horses possible and maintain the ranch's remuda at approximately a hundred head. Consequently, most of the male horses were gelded and the best of the fillies were added to the herd of broodmares.

  But if a male foal had outstanding bloodlines or looked as if he might grow to be a superior animal, he was kept as a stud. The Circle C couldn't keep every horse that was born, so Daddy ad Clary didn’t balk at selling a colt or a filly for racing or cutting or rodeo, or even pleasure.

  After the breeding conversation, the men would sit at the table and smoke cigars and probably get into a more detailed discussion of breeding Sandy Dandy to some particular mare. Several of his offspring had been doing well in various cutting competitions.

  She told Windy to include her in lunch. No one had invited her specifically, but she lived here. She didn't need an invitation.

  She finished her cereal and placed her dish in the sink. Just in case someone later wondered about her whereabouts, she told Windy, "In case anyone wants to know, I'm going to town to run some errands."

  Twenty minutes later, she rumbled across the 6-0's cattle guard.

  Chapter 6

  The old Wallace house had no attached garage, but Jude saw the new owner's pickup parked under a metal shed that was rusting from the ground up and the roof down. It was located across the driveway from the house. The battered metal roof looked as if it might collapse onto the truck at any minute. She parked her own pickup near the house's sagging front porch and slid out. Thumps and thuds and loud music came from behind the house. She recognized Gretchen Wilson's voice belting out Redneck Woman.

  "Hellooo? Anybody home?"

  When no one answered, she walked through the weedy side yard toward the barn, her boots rustling through the springing grass. The morning sun warmed her bare shoulders. The month of June was a great time to be alive in West Texas.

  Brady Fallon was walking away from the barn, carrying several long, wide boards.

  "Morning," she called out, stuffing her hands into her jeans' back pockets as she ambled toward him.

  Not stopping, he continued a few more steps to a neat stack of long weathered boards similar to those he carried. He dropped his load on the ground, bent over and began to pick up the boards one at a time and lay them on the stack.

  She stood in silence, unable to not watch him—the rawboned lankiness of his body, the ripple of powerful muscle under his faded blue T-shirt, his taut efficiency and smooth agility as he worked. The whole package exuded the epitome of masculine energy and sent a shiver all the way to her toes. She appreciated physical perfection in all animals, including humans.

  He straightened. "What's up?"

  She sensed the same edginess in him she had detected yesterday. With his eyes shadowed by the bill of his cap, she couldn't seem them clearly, but somehow she knew they were focused on her like lasers. The thought left her speechless for a few seconds. "Nothing much,” she got around to saying. “I just came to talk a minute."

  He pushed his cap back, yanked a red bandana from his back pocket and wiped his perspiring forehead. "About what?"

  She removed her sunglasses and squinted up at him. "I sort of want to start over.
When I came—"

  "Hey, you've got brown eyes." He grinned as if he had discovered a secret.

  "My whole family has brown eyes, except for Jake. Does it matter?"

  "I wondered. You had on those sunglasses yesterday." He gave a nod toward the sunglasses in her hand.

  He had wondered about her eye color? What else had he wondered about her? The question threw her off track again. "Uh, when I came by yesterday, I thought you were a burglar. I didn't know Mrs. Wallace had left her place to someone."

  "What did you think would happen to it?" He clapped his cap on and readjusted it, shadowing his eyes again.

  "I don't know. I didn't think about it at all. I just saw the strange rig and..."

  And what? She was still distracted by his comment about her eye color and what it meant. She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "Anyway, we're neighbors, so..." She shrugged again, the words she wanted to say still not coming to her. So she smiled. "And now I know who you are."

  As he peeled off his leather gloves and stuffed them into his back pocket, his mouth eased into a near smile. "I have to admit, I didn't know who you were either, until you said your name. Guess I should apologize."

  She laughed, though nothing was funny. "No need. I still didn't know you at all, even after you said your name. But Jake told me."

  "Not your fault. It's been about twenty years since I was around your folks' place." He planted his hands on his hips. "You probably would've been what, six or seven the last time I saw you?"

  She couldn't say why, but she liked him. Was drawn to him by some magnetic force. And it had nothing to do with his being the best-looking stranger who had shown up in Willard County in a while. Or maybe ever. "Yeah. Jake refreshed my memory about those days."