Just a Cowboy and His Baby

by Carolyn Brown

  Partners looked each other over and back at her.

  “Carly and Deanna,” Gemma said.

  “But I hate her,” Deanna said.

  “You’d better learn to like her a little bit because if the wild critters come, she’s the one who might save your sorry butt,” Gemma said.

  “Next is Fiona and Jessie.”

  “I’ll go home before I partner with her,” Jessie said.

  “We can make that happen before lunch,” Gemma said.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” Jessie recanted.

  “Good. By the end of the week you’ll be friends,” Gemma said.

  “Yeah, right!” Fiona said.

  “That means I’ve got to partner with her.” Kelsey pointed at April.

  “Looks that way,” Gemma said.

  “I won’t do it. I’ll call my momma,” April said.

  “Darlin’, you won’t have to call your momma. I’ll do it for you,” Gemma said.

  April crossed her arms over her chest and pouted. “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it and do it well. It’s bed-making time and then I want you all dressed for a morning in the hay field. Right after breakfast we’re having a contest to see who can bring in the most bales and get them stacked in the barn. Boys against girls. You goin’ to let those boys whup your butts this morning?” Gemma asked.

  “What is the prize?” Deanna asked.

  “Knowing that you won,” Gemma told her.

  She tossed back her shoulder-length blond hair and shot Gemma a go-to-hell look.

  “And,” Gemma went on. “It’s just a suggestion, but if I was you all, I’d get my partner to braid my hair this morning because hauling hay is hot work. And if the boys win on the first day, they’re going to rub it in your faces at supper tonight and probably all week long. You know how they act when they win. All cocky and smarty-britches, struttin’ around and crowing like roosters. You want to listen to that all week, then just let them get ahead of you this morning in the hay field. I’ll be out in fifteen minutes. I want you ready and your beds made and we’ll go to breakfast together.”

  When Gemma returned, the two sets of partners who didn’t despise each other were setting at the table, their heads together plotting about how they’d whip the boys. The other six were sulking on their beds.

  “We’ve got a full day ahead of us and tonight we start working on our craft. It’ll take all week to finish it. So are you three sets of partners going to sulk and pout all week?” Gemma asked.

  “Five feet? Really?” Jessie asked.

  “That’s the rule,” Gemma said.

  Jessie hopped down off the bed and looked back at Fiona. “Come on. I can’t get more than five feet ahead of you and I’m hungry, and them dumb old boys ain’t about to beat me.”

  Gemma smiled and led the way to the door. “Eat hearty. You’ll need the energy, and believe me, the boys’ counselor is going to tell them that they can beat you with one hand tied behind their backs. They think they are dealing with sissies, I’m sure.”

  Carly hopped off her bed and squared her shoulders. “I’m not a sissy.”

  “You’ve got all day to prove it.” Gemma said.

  The boys were already in the dining hall. Bacon, coffee, eggs, hash browns, grits, and gravy were on the buffet along with piles of hot biscuits, juice, and milk. Trace rolled his eyes at Gemma when she came in with her girls.

  “Busy morning?” she asked.

  “What have I gotten myself into? I believe this is the worst bunch of young’uns I’ve ever seen. They’re just a step up from hooligans and two steps down from gangsters,” he whispered.

  “I’ve already settled catfights,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

  The breakfast bell dinged and all the kids looked at the counselors and one another. The girls were huddled together against one wall shooting daggers at the pimply faced boys. The guys were grouped up together behind Trace looking at everything in the dining cabin but the girls.

  “That means you can eat now,” Trace said.

  “Ladies first,” one of the boys said and looked straight at Trace.

  He smiled at the pimple-faced kid and nodded.

  “Very gentlemanly,” Trace said.

  Deanna left the group but was careful not to go more than five steps from her partner. She bowed up to the boy and said, “Today we’ll go first. But we don’t need your charity. We’re goin’ to show you how to haul hay after breakfast and pick more apples than you do this afternoon. We are meaner and we can work as hard as any of you old boys.”

  The kid bowed up to her. “You wanna bet?”

  “Sure. If we do better than you today then we get to go first again tomorrow morning even though it’s your day. Right, girls?” Deanna said.

  All nine of the remaining girls lined up beside her and nodded.

  “And if we beat you, what do we get?” the kid asked.

  Carly stepped up beside Deanna. “You get to go first for breakfast.”

  “But we already get that.”

  “Okay, then you can come over to our porch and sing with us tonight. But if we win, and we will, buster, then you don’t get to.”

  “Deal!”

  Trace chuckled. “How’d you get them whipped into shape so soon?”

  “I called their bluff.”

  “Breakfast is getting cold and we’re burnin’ daylight, kids,” Lester yelled from the table where the buffet was laid out.

  ***

  The race was on as soon as Trace showed them how to load and stack hay. The boys finished the first pickup load and taunted the girls as they sat on top of it for the ride back to the barn.

  “We’re better than you are. When we get back we’ll show you how it’s done,” the oldest boy yelled.

  The girls huddled up heads down, butts stuck out, and reminded Gemma of a football team. They joined hands, whispered and pointed, and then did a yell that sounded like, “Beat boys.”

  Evidently they’d worked out a system because they had two pickup trucks loaded and ready to go to the barn by the time the boys got back with one truck.

  “You guys cheated. Miz O’Donnell and Mr. Coleman helped you, didn’t they?”

  “No, they did not! We just let y’all get ahead so you’d get all cocky and lazy. And you did. Now we’ll show you how it’s done. We’re going to get our two hundred bales in the barn and have time to sit on the porch and drink sweet tea while y’all are still working,” Jessie said.

  Two more trucks rolled into the field and six girls stayed behind to load while four went with the trucks to unload them. And at the end of the day the girls loaded and stacked two hundred small bales of hay half an hour faster than the boys. The guys grumbled around all during lunch but they’d learned their lesson. When it came time to go to the apple orchard they’d worked out their plan to unite and conquer.

  When Trace rang the cowbell to give them the green light, the smaller boys climbed the ladders like monkeys and tossed apples down to the bigger boys who put them in baskets and then handed them off to Damian and Tyrelle to carry to the flatbed trailers.

  “Guess they learned to stop boasting and get their butts to work,” Trace said when the competition was finished and the boys won by three bushels.

  “Momma says the hardest lesson a kid ever learns is when to shut their mouths and get to work. They did good learning that the first day,” Gemma said.

  The boys won the apple-picking contest and had a whole new swagger to their walk as they followed Trace back to their cabin. At supper they came into the dining tent with their hair combed, their hands washed, and smiles on their faces.

  “We beat you!” Damian told Jessie.

  “That
was just plain old apples. We beat you at the hard job. We can haul hay better than you can and that’s supposed to be a boy job. You’re going to have to work hard to overcome that,” Jessie answered.

  “Oh, yeah, well, we just let you win so you wouldn’t cry like little babies,” Marty declared.

  “And we let you win at the apples so you wouldn’t pout around the rest of the week like you did at lunchtime,” Fiona put in her two cents worth.

  “Don’t it just make you itch for a big family?” Gemma whispered to Trace.

  “Oh, yeah! I’d send the boys to military school and the girls off to a convent,” he answered.

  “If y’all can stop bickering long enough to eat, supper is ready.” Lester grinned.

  “Do we get to sing?” Marty asked.

  “Sure you do. It was an even tie today. Girls won in the hay field. Boys won in the orchard, so everyone gets to sing right after supper,” Gemma said. “But the girls get to choose the songs.”

  “Well, shit! I mean sugar.” Damian blushed.

  “You already calling me sweet names.” Jessie giggled.

  “No, I am not. I wouldn’t call you anything sweet as sugar. You are a bitch.” He clamped his hand over his mouth and looked at Trace.

  “That’s two. On three you get to go back to the cabin and think about cleaning up your speech,” Trace said.

  “I am not a bitch, anyway,” Jessie said.

  Gemma stepped between them. “You want to be each other’s partner the rest of the night?”

  “No, ma’am,” Jessie said seriously.

  “Huh-uh!” Damian shook his head.

  “Lester has called supper. Let’s get with it. Boys first tonight,” Gemma said.

  “Thank you for coming up with the idea of name tags. I swear it’s the only way I can remember their names,” Trace said.

  “We do that at Bible school at the Ringgold church. It works,” Gemma told him.

  Fiona and Jessie got the job of choosing the songs that evening. They argued. They fussed, but they worked together and twenty voices blended together as they sang the banana song again.

  Trace had followed Gemma’s lead and assigned partners with his guys. Damian griped that his partner, Marty, couldn’t sing and he wanted a new partner, and Marty declared that Damian’s voice was changing and he couldn’t sing either.

  “You sound like your momma callin’ in the hogs,” Marty said.

  “Don’t you be dissin’ my momma, boy. You don’t know nothing about my momma,” Damian told him.

  “Well, then your sister,” Marty said.

  “You are asking for a bruising, boy.”

  “Bring it right on. I’m not a boy, man, and I could beat your skinny”—he paused and looked at Trace—“hind end with one hand tied behind my back and a”—he looked at Trace again—“Big Mac in the other one.”

  “You got the five-foot rule yet?” Gemma asked.

  Trace raised an eyebrow.

  “Jessie, darlin’, come tell Mr. Coleman about the five-foot rule.”

  Jessie raised her voice over the boys and began to explain it. By the time she was finished, all twenty kids were as quiet as if they’d been sitting on the front row in a church during a funeral.

  “You guys hear that?” Trace asked.

  Damian barely nodded.

  “As of right now, it’s in effect for all of you. I’d suggest you learn to get along or it’s going to be a real long week.” He grinned.

  Marty grimaced and kicked at the dirt. “Man, that’s cold.”

  “Yep, it is.”

  Gemma spoke up, “We are making a project in our cabin and tomorrow each one of the girls is to be on the lookout for something small and unique on their trip. You boys might look for something too.”

  “Are we making something?” Marty asked.

  “Of course. Wouldn’t be camp without a project. We will be making a dream catcher, so think of that while you are out tomorrow.” Trace slipped an arm around Gemma and chuckled. “If they find a horse apple, they’ll think they found a fossil.”

  “The trick is to make each one of them think they’ve found a gold nugget no matter what it is,” Gemma said.

  Lester touched her on the shoulder. “This week is all about building confidence and character. You’re already doing a fantastic job.”

  She shrugged. “I’m just using some of the tricks Momma used on us kids. It ain’t nothing special, but thank you,” Gemma said. “Look at them. They’re actually talking to each other and not fighting. Did you tell those boys that we’re having a dance on Thursday night?”

  “God, no!” Trace gasped. “They’d worry themselves to death. Let them get to know the ladies and then they’ll be ready for a dance.”

  At eight o’clock Trace took his tribe home and Gemma took her girls inside where she had ten small wooden boxes sitting on a long folding table with chairs lined up around it. Bottles of paint were scattered down the middle of the table along with paintbrushes.

  “What’s that?” April asked.

  “Projects,” Gemma said. Part of the agenda involved an hour of crafts each evening and she’d come up with the idea of making the boxes as their craft project. She’d sent Hill to town that morning with a list of what she needed and he’d brought it back while the kids were in the apple orchard.

  “Don’t look like much to me,” April said.

  “That’s because they aren’t finished. We’ll paint them tonight. Any color you want or any combination of colors,” Gemma said.

  “Who are they for? I’m not making a present for a boy,” Carly declared.

  “You are to do your best artistic work. And while you are on field trips this week, if you find a special rock or leaf or maybe an arrowhead, you could bring it back to go on your project. Make it as if you were going to take it home with you to remember this week,” Gemma answered. “And on Friday morning just before you leave I’ll tell you who it is for.”

  “Mine is going to be yellow,” Katy said. “With a hot pink lid that has swirls of yellow.”

  “Have fun,” Gemma said and sat down at the head of the table to referee in case one of them started slinging paint like they did barbs. Girls! How did her mother ever survive raising two girls? Trace couldn’t be having as much trouble with his boys. It wasn’t possible.

  At the end of an hour the table looked like a tornado hit a Sherwin-Williams paint store, but they were talking and laughing. At nine o’clock Gemma told them to get their brushes washed in the kitchen sink and put the lids on the paint bottles tightly.

  “It can’t be time for bed yet,” Angie argued.

  Gemma pointed at the clock. “We’ve got an hour every night to work on our craft and it really is bedtime. Top bunkers hit the showers first and bottom bunkers help me set up night snacks.”

  At ten thirty when she turned out the lights, Carly was already snoring and Deanna had a pillow crammed over her ears. Gemma slipped out the door to find Trace sitting in a rocking chair on the porch. He patted his leg and she sat down on his lap.

  He cupped her chin and turned her face so he could kiss her lips, sweetly at first then harder and more demanding. “So do you want ten daughters?”

  “Bite your tongue.” She gasped between kisses.

  He nuzzled his face into the soft part of her neck. “You are very good with them.”

  “I’m good with horses. That don’t mean I want ten of them right next to my bedroom,” she told him.

  “Let’s sneak off to the hayloft,” he said.

  “Not on your life, cowboy. Sure as I did, they’d get into an all-out catfight with claws bared and gnashing teeth.”

  “Honeymoon is over then?” he asked.

  She giggled. “Four nights of wild sex does n
ot make a marriage.”

  “How many does it take?”

  “A helluva lot more than four. Now kiss me good night. Six thirty comes early.”

  He bookcased her cheeks with his palms and gave her a kiss that made her wish she’d gone to the hayloft with him and be damned to the possible catfights.

  Chapter 10

  Gemma awoke early the next morning and tiptoed to the kitchen area to make a pot of coffee. While it brewed she studied her sleeping girls one at a time. Carly was tall and lanky for a ten-year-old girl, kind of like a three-month-old colt that was still all gangly legs. She really did snore, but Deanna, bless her heart, had shoved cotton balls in her ears and had turned around in the bunk with her feet toward Carly and her head where her feet should have been. Deanna was one of those blondes with dark brown eyes, heavy lashes that rested like a fan on her cheeks, and high cheekbones. Her face was triangular and her mouth wide.

  Fiona was also a blonde, but where Deanna was a diva, Fiona looked like she could take down an offensive linebacker and enjoy doing it. She was a big girl, not overweight by any means, but taller than the rest of the girls and big-boned.

  Kelsey was the quiet one of the group, but Gemma didn’t think for a minute that the short girl couldn’t hold her own against even Fiona. It was in her eyes. She didn’t have to smart off to anyone and there wouldn’t be a day when Kelsey threatened. She’d just step up to the plate and deliver.

  April, who was partnered with Kelsey, sat back and waited to see what everyone else did before she started. When they were painting boxes she was the last one to pick a color, but she was meticulous in her job. Gemma pegged her for an artist who would enjoy the solitary life if she ever had the opportunity.

  Beth and Chantelle, both brunettes, one from Detroit and one from Omaha, fit right into their partnership. They sat together at mealtime and whispered while they were working on their boxes. Neither of them had as much artistic ability as April, but Gemma would lay dollars to grasshoppers that together they could take on the world.

  Jessie was the mouthy one. Black hair, blue eyes, loud, and brassy. She’d push her way into whatever she wanted. Being partners with Carly would teach them both a lot.