Lone Star Woman

by CALLAHAN, SADIE

  Another half mile put her in front of the garage adjacent to the house. The ranch house had been built in 1899, before homes had attached garages. Though its size made her feel lonely at times, she loved the old house. Some people called it a mansion, others called it an albatross, some even called it haunted, but to her, it was simply home. Constructed on a bluff looking to the west over a far-reaching red rock canyon, it was a massive three-story structure veneered with red limestone quarried from the ranch’s land. It loomed like a fortress among ancient live oak, chinaberry and black walnut trees that a groundskeeper carefully nurtured. Behind it, a fruit orchard grew, as well as a garden maintained by the kitchen help.

  In the hundred and nine years since the house’s construction, it had been updated, redecorated and remodeled. Nowadays, it consisted of four three-room bedroom suites and six guest bedrooms, ten bathrooms and two living areas. There was an octagonal-shaped sunroom that had been added on to the house by Grammy Pen, a breakfast room brightened by the morning sun, a large formal dining room, as well as a large laundry room, a mudroom, a pantry and a cooling room that was no longer in use. For that matter, more than half the house was no longer in use, though in Jude’s youth, the entire Strayhorn family had lived in it.

  That had been before the accident.

  Except for the years she had been in college, Jude had never lived anywhere else, had never wanted to live anywhere else. Though she had followed in her father’s footsteps and gone to college at A&M, nearly four hundred miles away, she had never wanted to “go away to school.” She had never wanted to reside on either the East or West Coast to rub shoulders with the beautiful people and dabble in liberalism, had never wanted to wander through Europe. Even when she had traveled to Australia once on a study trip, she had been restless to return to Lockett.

  Many of her peers thought that in her devotion to the Circle C and Lockett, Texas, she was a throwback of some kind. She often heard, “If I had your money, I’d do this,” or “I’d do that.” But Jude paid those attitudes little attention. She was a Texan to the very marrow of her bones, but more than that, she was a West Texan and a part of a family that had made Texas history. From the day of her birth, she had been surrounded by that history and the power and responsibility of ownership and wealth. Through osmosis she had come to believe she was a woman of destiny.

  She arrived at home early enough to allow herself time to freshen up and change her clothing before going to the dining room. Grandpa complained if she or Daddy came to the table sloppy and dirty. The only people for whom he relaxed the dress expectation were the ranch hands he often invited to supper. If anyone in the family truly was a throwback, it was Jefferson Davis Campbell Strayhorn. In many ways, he behaved and talked as if he lived in a generation even older than himself, and he demanded respect from those younger than he.

  Entering the house through the back door, Jude heard no activity except for Windy and his Mexican helper, Irene, talking in the kitchen. The aroma of onions, garlic and Tex-Mex spices was potent and tantalizing. Supper was under way.

  Their latest house cook, Windy Arbuckle, had been a chuck wagon cook until he slipped on some ice last winter and broke his hip. The aging widower had recovered but was left with an awkward limp, and Grandpa and Daddy would no longer allow him go out on the chuck wagon to distant parts of the ranch. Now he and his limp were confined to thumping around the Circle C’s kitchen in his cowboy boots. He cooked in the chuck tent only during roundup.

  Some outfits would have let Windy go when he became unable to perform the job for which he had been hired, but generations back, it had become the Circle C’s custom to take care of its hands. Many of them, like Windy, had spent decades in the ranch’s employ. Besides that, Windy and Daddy had been friends their whole lives, and Windy had a proprietary attitude about the ranch. He had whittled wooden dolls for Jude when she was a child. Once he had whittled her a “cowboy toothbrush” from a skinny mesquite limb and taught her how to use it to clean her teeth. The Arbuckle children had been Jude’s playmates, and she still called them friends, though all of them had left Willard County long ago.

  Jude passed through the kitchen, said hello, then made her way to her second-floor suite, passing paintings of some of the Circle C’s majestic stallions hanging along the stairway. The Circle C was as well known for its fine horses as for its fine cattle.

  She changed into a brown broom skirt and a pale green sleeveless T, freshened her makeup and pulled her hair back with a leather barrette at her nape. She dabbed a few drops of Interlude behind her ears and between her breasts. It was an old-fashioned fragrance, but it had been Grammy Pen’s favorite. For as long as Jude could remember, her great-grandmother had moved through her life in a cloud of the musky scent. By wearing it, Jude could keep the only female relative she had ever known close to her.

  She added a turquoise squash-blossom necklace and silver earrings to her earlobes. She didn’t mind dressing for supper. Doing it held a kind of old-world appeal. She spent quite a lot on her Santa Fe-style wardrobe. With her lack of social life, if not to dine with Grandpa, where else would she wear the clothing and jewelry she bought?

  Jude returned downstairs to the cavernous galley-style kitchen to see Windy wreathed in a cloud of steam and smoke curling up from the grill. The mouthwatering aroma of searing meat and onions filled the kitchen. “Hmm-yum. Whatcha cooking?” she asked, her voice echoing. When the original Circle C ranch house had been built, everyone, including the ranch hands, ate in the big house. For ease of cleaning, the kitchen’s walls as well as the floors were covered with tile. That, coupled with the room’s huge size and high ceiling, created the hollow-sounding acoustics.

  “I’m grillin’ up some o’ yore granddad’s beef into the best dang fa-hee-tas you’ll ever eat,” Windy said.

  Windy was a superior cook of basic food, much of it spicy with Tex-Mex flavors. But his traditional American frontier food, like Dutch-oven buttermilk biscuits and sourdough bread pudding, had won prizes at fairs. He even kept a crock of sourdough starter in the refrigerator, to which he regularly fed potatoes.

  Jude laughed. “I don’t doubt it for a minute. They’re low cal, right?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is I’m using prime lean beef from this ranch and fresh, homegrown vegetables I picked out of the garden just yesterday. We’ve got some fine sourdough biscuits and a few fried Idaho taters and onions. You know yore granddad’s got to have his fried taters and onions.”

  “I know,” Jude said with a grin. Jefferson Davis Campbell Strayhorn ate fried potatoes and onions with every meal. An old friend in Idaho shipped him the fresh-from-the-field vegetables. Jude often teased him, telling him those two items in his diet were responsible for his long, healthy life, which was a fact as much as a joke.

  Jude had had something on her mind all week that she wanted to discuss with her father. “Is Daddy here?” she asked Windy.

  Both his hands were busy, so Windy’s head tilted toward the dining room. “He went off to fix hisself a little toddy.”

  Daddy’s custom was to retire to his study up the hall from the dining room for a drink before supper. Jude left the kitchen and made her way there. She tapped on the deep brown oak door and at the same time stepped inside the room onto rust-colored Mexican tile softened with cowhides. On the walls were heads and horns from game animals, most of them bagged on the ranch. She called the room’s emphatically masculine Western decor a wolf’s lair.

  The office had a compact but full-service bar, and sure enough, she found her father standing at it. Wearing clean Wranglers and a fresh short-sleeve snap-button shirt, he had cleaned up for supper. From his appearance, unless someone noticed the custom-made boots he wore, no one would ever guess his financial worth.

  Jude had always thought him handsome. He was a tall and sturdy man whose body, as a result of a lifetime of physical work, belied his age. His face, on the other hand, was overtanned to a permanent russet brown a
nd deeply creased around the eyes from spending every day in the Texas sun. But his forehead, constantly shaded by his hat, was pale white. His hair, once a reddish brown like hers, was now white, but it was still thick. He kept it cut short.

  Jude had wondered often whether he was lonely. She had never known of him having a female companion except for a couple of local “friends.” Occasionally he invited one of them out to dinner or to some function, but as far as Jude knew, that was the extent of his romantic life.

  The scent of cigar smoke lingered in the air, and she saw a stub in his left hand. His head turned her way and he smiled. “Hi, punkin. Just having a little Crown before supper. Want some?”

  Mentally, Jude clenched her teeth at hearing him call her by her childhood pet name. Long ago she had given up asking him not to do it. The habit was too ingrained, she supposed. She walked over to the bar, which hid behind slatted bifold doors when not in use. A hint of Aramis, the cologne she had always associated with him, commingled with the fruity aroma of his cigar. “Sure. But don’t forget to fix mine with lots of water.”

  He chuckled, dropping ice cubes into a second tumbler. They clinked softly in heavy crystal. He poured a generous portion of Crown Royal into each glass, then added ice water to hers from a stainless-steel pitcher. “Haven’t seen you since this morning, sugar. Whatcha been doing?”

  “Oh, this and that.”

  He handed her the glass of whiskey. She carried it to a large leather wing chair in front of his desk and took a baby sip, shuddering as the alcohol burned her throat and hit her empty stomach. A whiskey guzzler she was not and never had been, even in college.

  Sitting in the wingback chair put her at eye level with the credenza behind her father’s desk. There, among photographs of sleek horses and massive Hereford bulls in their curly-faced maleness, was an assortment of photographs of Jude at various stages in her life. Tucked among them and partially hidden was one from eleven years ago of her and Webb Henderson at an A&M/UT football game. Webb was a graduate of the University of Texas law school. Daddy and Grandpa had viewed him as excellent husband material. Proof of how much they thought of him was the fact that Daddy kept that picture on the credenza with his favorite bulls and horses.

  She had been introduced to Webb when she was eighteen and a freshman at A&M. Grandpa and Webb’s father, an Austin lawyer and politician, had known each other for years. Mr. Henderson had insisted that his son and Jude meet. Webb’s marriage proposal came almost at once, as if preordained. She accepted because she had been too young and too sheltered to know her own mind, and she thought that by planning marriage to a family friend, she was doing what her father and grandfather wanted. But as the engagement progressed and Jude grew smarter, she came to see Webb as a money-grubbing pain in the neck, too eager to marry into her family. Daddy and Grandpa, having spent almost no time around him, had never seen that greedy quality in him. She assumed they had been so eager for her to marry, they had been dazzled by Webb and his father’s brownnosing.

  Beyond greed, Webb Henderson had other traits that had both shocked and appalled her, among them, control issues and selfishness and a streak of willfulness. No one had ever tried to control her in the ways Webb had attempted. But her Strayhorn stubbornness had won out, and in spite of her family, she had managed to free herself of Webb.

  She didn’t think about him much these days. She had ended the relationship, to Daddy and Grandpa’s chagrin, without discussing it with them. They might not realize it, but she had saved them, as well as herself, from future pain and consternation. She had no doubt she had done the right thing.

  She steered her eyes away from Webb’s picture. She could scarcely stand to look at him.

  4

  “I was in town for a minute,” Jude said to her father. “Then I went to Suzanne’s.” Even to her own ears, her day sounded boring and empty.

  She rarely told Daddy when she visited Jake, though she knew her father didn’t hate him. The Strayhorn family had supported his run for sheriff and contributed heavily to his campaign. And Jake hadn’t turned down their money or changed his name. Still, very few words about him ever were voiced in the Circle C house.

  “How’s Truett Breedlove doing these days?” Daddy asked. “Haven’t seen him around town lately.”

  Jude swallowed another baby sip of her strong drink. The ranch had an intermittent relationship with Suzanne’s father in that he sometimes hauled Circle C cattle. “On the road a lot, I think.”

  Daddy came from the bar, sat down on a nearby chair and drew on his cigar. He shook his head as a swirl of sweet smoke encircled him. “He spends so much time in that truck, somebody’ll find him dead in it one of these days.”

  Could be, Jude thought. “It’s what he’s done all his life, Daddy.”

  But Suzanne’s father wasn’t what was on Jude’s mind. “Listen, since I’m sort of at loose ends until I have to get ready for school, I thought I might ride with you next week and help with the weaning. I could help separate the calves.”

  The weaning process would start on Monday. Calves born in February and March now weighed six hundred pounds or so. Old enough to graze, they would be parted from their mothers, loaded into trailers and relocated into their own pasture miles away. Allowing them to continue nursing was a drain on the strength and health of their pregnant mothers.

  Some of the larger ranches used helicopters to round up the cattle, but Grandpa and Daddy believed it was more expensive than manual labor and caused undue stress on the pregnant cows. With the price of fuel skyrocketing, she didn’t disagree about the cost. She had opinions that conflicted with theirs on several facets of the cattle operation, but she understood their preference for using men on the ground for roundups. She, too, liked the idea of good cowboys on good horses flushing the cows and calves out of the brush and arroyos, then driving them from remote corners of the ranch. They were preserving a practice that was more than a hundred years old. It also provided the chance to “see” the ranch. With 469 square miles under fence, there were many parts of the Circle C no one went near for months, even years.

  Daddy sipped his drink before answering. Jude had discussed ranch chores with him often enough to know he was framing a rebuttal. She had tried a dozen approaches to making a case for being allowed to play a greater role in the ranch’s operation and had made no inroads into Daddy’s and Grandpa’s thinking. But she refused to give up.

  “Why spend all day on a horse out in the hot sun?” he said. “If you need something to do before school starts, darlin’, go up to Santa Fe and go shopping. Take the plane and go over to Dallas for some R and R.”

  “I haven’t done anything to exert myself since school was out,” she said. “I don’t think I need R and R. I wish you’d let me work the cows with you. I can be of some help.”

  Her father sighed and adjusted his silver wire-rimmed glasses. “Jude, I just don’t understand why you want to do that. It’s man’s work. Most girls don’t—”

  She interrupted him by leaning forward and looking him in the eye. “Daddy, I’m not a girl. I’m twenty-nine years old. Why did you teach me to ride and rope if you never intended for me to do it?”

  His eyes lowered to the contents of his glass, an indication his mind was closed to the idea. “Most young ladies, then. Most don’t want to get on a horse and spend a day sweating in the sun with a bunch of cowhands.” He swirled the ice cubes in his drink, looked up and gave her a smile. “They’d rather get prettied up and go out on dates.”

  Jude studied her father’s profile as he tilted his head back and drained his glass. She had often wondered if that had been his perception of women his entire life. That description apparently fit the two he had married.

  His first wife and Jude’s mother, Vanessa, had spent most of her time getting “prettied up,” according to Jude’s great-grandmother, Penelope Ann. Even Grandpa had said Vanessa had an obsessive preoccupation with her appearance. The story Grammy Pen had told was that
Daddy met Vanessa O’Reilly when she came from Connecticut to interview for a teaching job. The woman took one look at the Strayhorn holdings and decided to stay. Grammy Pen also said Daddy was lucky she left. Jude’s great-grandmother had never minced words.

  If Daddy felt the same about his first wife as Grandpa and Grammy Pen did, he had never said so in Jude’s presence. If he knew where she was or what had happened to her, he hadn’t mentioned that, either. The rough life in West Texas was too much for her to bear, was the excuse he gave for Vanessa O’Reilly abandoning her husband and infant Jude forever.

  To Jude’s knowledge, the bitch had never been in touch with Daddy again. Or with Jude herself. That was just fine, Jude thought. She had grown up perfectly well without her. Daddy and Grandpa and her other grandparents had provided all the parenting she needed. Long ago she had labeled her mother an irresponsible nitwit, a coward and a panty-waist, and a few more choice names unfit for use in public.

  Then there was Daddy’s second wife, Karen. She spent her time going out on dates all right. Dates with Daddy’s youngest brother, Ike, who was Jake’s father. Ike and Karen Strayhorn had died together in a drunken, grinding car wreck on a desolate rural road when Jude was seven and Jake was fourteen. A generation later, the family was still recovering from the pain and scandal that had ensued.

  Another mark chalked up to the Campbell Curse, Grammy Pen had stated. According to her, the incident had been caused by excessive undisciplined behavior by two people who kept no check on their appetites. Jude was grown before she figured out that Grammy Pen hadn’t been talking about food.

  Water over the dam, Jude thought now. She missed her great-grandmother, who had passed at age ninety-five, just four years ago. “I want to feel useful, Daddy.”

  “But sweetheart, you’re useful. You help me buy good bulls. Your research and knowledge are more help than you’ll ever know.”