Big Sky River

by Linda Lael Miller

  He remembered seeing the old man around Parable over the years, always in the company of a dog. Zeb had gotten most of them as pups, one at a time, raised them and walked them and, when they grew gray-muzzled and teetery, he made allowances, slowing his own pace, cooking up special food for them. When the end came, he buried them in the lot behind his house and marked each one of their graves with a stone carried up from the riverbank, on which he had stenciled their names.

  “Zeb?” Griffin asked. “That’s the man who died? The one Scamp used to live with?”

  Scamp looked at the water bowl, hesitant, then tottered over and drank, lapping slowly at first, then with growing thirst.

  “Yes,” Boone answered. Zeb’s warm, animal-loving heart had been hidden from the rest of the world behind a cranky temperament and stacks of tattered magazines, years of newspapers and junk mail, and other assorted garbage.

  “He’s drinking a lot,” Fletcher said, sounding worried as he watched the dog lap up water. “What if he wets the bed?”

  “Dogs don’t wet the bed,” Griffin said with a sort of benign contempt.

  “I don’t want him to get in trouble, that’s all,” Fletcher persisted.

  Boone crouched, so he was face-to-face with this child he and Corrie had made together out of their love. “Nobody’s going to get in trouble,” he said quietly. “Not the dog, and not you.”

  Fletcher studied him earnestly. Swallowed. Then, suddenly, he flung his small arms around Boone’s neck, nearly toppling them both.

  Boone held the boy, closed his eyes for a moment, overwhelmed by emotion. Look at them, Corrie. Just look at them. Our boys.

  Soon enough, Fletcher pulled away, wary again, though not quite as on guard as he’d been before.

  They made a bed for Scamp in the little room the boys shared, folding an old blanket in quarters and setting it on the floor. Scamp ignored the bed and headed back to the kitchen, stood with his nose pressed against the back door.

  “He wants to go home,” Griffin observed.

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” Boone replied.

  They took the dog outside, waited while he did his business, gave chase when he lit out down the road, probably headed for town, caught him and brought him back to the double-wide.

  Clearly, Boone and the boys weren’t the only ones with some adjusting to do.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GETTING TWO KIDS and a dog ready for a new day was like trying to herd weasels, as far as Boone could see. He’d barely gotten them all out the door when Scamp took off at warp speed, zigzagging through the knee-high grass like a bullet ricocheting from one boulder to another. Griffin raced after him, and Fletcher took advantage of the chaos to make a mad dash of his own, darting in the opposite direction, then making a one-eighty, bolting toward the county road.

  Boone, freshly shaved and showered, wearing his best jeans and his last clean shirt, went after the boy, swearing under his breath as he sprinted along the driveway. Fletcher, most likely Missoula-bound, might break a leg if he didn’t slow down for the cattle guard.

  He managed to scoop up the little boy at the last second. “Whoa,” he said, whirling Fletcher around with a low, gruff laugh born of relief, not amusement. “What’s the hurry?”

  Fletcher, furious at being thwarted, set his back teeth and refused to answer.

  Boone, still holding his son, pointed to the cattle guard spanning the base of the driveway. It was essentially a deep hole in the ground with heavy planks of wood set in sideways, having four to six inch gaps in between. “You want to look out for these things,” he said mildly. “In Montana, they’re everywhere.”

  “I caught Scamp!” Griffin called from up in the yard, and Boone grinned when he looked back to see his eldest holding the squirming dog in both arms and beaming with pride.

  “Good job,” Boone replied, setting Fletcher back on his feet and taking a firm but gentle grip on the kid’s shoulder, lest he make another run for it—this time he’d have skirted the cattle guard, quick study that he was, though he’d still have been caught.

  Fletcher didn’t try to pull away, and Boone didn’t ask where he’d thought he was going because he already knew.

  Missoula. Back to Molly and Bob, Ted and Jessica and Cate. His family.

  Weary sadness washed over Boone, but he shook it off immediately, as usual. It was a new day and there was work to be done.

  Once the boys were buckled into their booster seats in the back of the squad car and Scamp had resigned his small dog-self, for the moment, anyway, to riding shotgun, Boone all but collapsed behind the steering wheel. He hadn’t done a lick of work yet, and he was already starting to sweat.

  He made a mental note to stop off at the dry cleaners in town first chance he got and pick up the batch of shirts he’d left there to be laundered nearly a week before. That way, if necessary, he could put on a clean one when he got to the office.

  “It’s miles and miles to Missoula, you dummy,” Griffin informed his brother, lowering his voice in the vain hope that it wouldn’t carry to the front seat and Boone’s ears.

  “I was going to take a bus,” Fletcher responded matter-of-factly, causing Boone to bite back a low chuckle.

  “You can’t just get on a bus and go somewhere,” Griffin said. “You’d have to buy a ticket first, and you don’t have any money.”

  “I have thirty-five cents,” Fletcher answered. “From my allowance.”

  Allowances, Boone reflected. Yet another thing to figure out. Should he just hand them a few bucks once a week, or give them chores to do in return for the money?

  Griffin gave a small, disdainful hoot in answer to Fletcher’s statement. “That isn’t enough to do anything, butt-face,” he told his brother.

  “Cool it with the name-calling,” Boone put in, without much hope that the order would stick. As a little kid, he’d called Molly by a dozen different names, the more annoying the better, and she’d returned the favor. Maybe it was just the way siblings interacted, a natural thing.

  Still, it smacked of bullying, and that was something Boone wouldn’t, couldn’t tolerate, as a father, as a man or as sheriff. In fact, he worked closely with the local school board to nip that kind of orneriness in the bud whenever and wherever it happened to sprout.

  He was still deliberating over the allowance thing as the squad car bumped and jolted over the cattle guard, and Boone signaled a left turn onto the county road, even though he knew there were no cars behind him. It was force of habit.

  “Doesn’t Scamp want to live with us?” Griffin inquired presently, just when Boone was getting used to the silence. “Is that why he tried to run away?”

  Boone glanced over at the dog, now standing on his hind legs, with his front paws resting on the edge of the window and his snout pressed to the glass, making a smudge. He figured there was no point in trying to pretty things up; the truth was always best, even when it stung a little.

  “Yep,” Boone answered. “Scamp’s lonesome and confused, and he doesn’t understand why he can’t stay at the old place, with Zeb.”

  “Same as Fletcher,” Griffin observed.

  “Shut up, Griff,” Fletcher said.

  “Same as Fletcher,” Boone agreed, but kindly, as one corner of his mouth twitched upward in a reflexive grin. By then, they were passing Tara Kendall’s driveway, which was a rutted, twisting dirt road, no fancier than the one leading to his place, for all her lofty opinions on the upkeep of private property.

  There was even a cattle guard, a twin to his, right next to the mailbox. A valuable deterrent to stampeding chickens, he thought wryly. Except that they could fly, of course. But, then, you couldn’t expect a city slicker to remember everything.

  Boone had always enjoyed making fun of Tara’s chosen vocation, if only in his own head, but today there wasn’t much juice in it. Damned if he hadn’t begun to like the woman—a little.

  The boys exercised their right to remain silent the rest of the way i
nto town, and even Scamp dropped his paws from the window’s edge to curl up on the passenger seat, a disconsolate little lump of dog.

  The Parable peace accord came undone when they pulled in at the community center, however. Fletcher dug in like a mule knee-deep in the thick mud Montanans call gumbo, folding his skinny arms tightly across his chest, ducking his head and repeating the word no over and over again, in a stubborn monotone.

  Boone unbuckled the kid’s seat belt and unloaded the board-stiff little dickens as gently as he could. In the unguarded meantime, Scamp jumped into the back and then shot through the open door, disappearing into the bushes with Griffin in hot pursuit.

  “Let him go,” Boone called to Griffin, trying not to sound exasperated. “I’ll pick him up after we’re done here.”

  Slowly, sorrowfully, Griffin ambled back to the parking lot. The stooped set of the boy’s shoulders just about bent Boone double.

  That was when Shea, Slade’s stepdaughter, appeared, striding out of the community center’s main doorway and smiling warmly at Fletcher. Shea was a pretty eighteen-year-old, college-bound in the fall, and she definitely had a way with kids.

  “Hey,” she said to Fletcher, her dark hair gleaming in the sun, her nearly violet eyes twinkling with welcome and the promise of mischief. “Remember me?”

  Fletcher, still about as flexible as a crowbar, stood beside Boone, nodding glumly. She’d been the boys’ babysitter, on occasion, during their visits to Parable, and part of most social gatherings. “You’re Shea,” he murmured, not looking at her.

  “And you’re Fletcher,” Shea said, casting a don’t-worry-I’ll-handle-it glance Boone’s way. She put out a hand to the little boy. “I’m volunteering at the community center this summer,” she explained when Fletcher reluctantly allowed her fingers to close around his. “Thing is, if somebody runs away, that’ll make me look bad, and I might even be out of a job.”

  Fletcher blinked up at her, concerned at the looming specter of teenage unemployment.

  Silently, Boone blessed the girl.

  Griffin joined the circle. “What about Scamp?” he fretted, looking toward the bushes that had swallowed the dog.

  “He’ll be fine,” Boone said. “I promise.”

  Shea greeted Griffin with a dignity kids her age normally reserve for their friends. “How do you feel about swimming lessons?” she asked. “They start tomorrow.”

  Griffin lit up at the announcement, and even Fletcher looked a tad less likely to bolt, whether it made Shea look bad or not.

  “Can we sign up, Dad?” Griffin asked.

  “Sure,” Boone said.

  “Let’s go inside,” Shea told the boys with another glance at Boone. “There’s some cool stuff planned for today, and we don’t want to miss anything, do we?”

  With that, she led away Griffin and Fletcher, one on either side of her slender, blue-jeaned frame.

  Neither of the boys looked back.

  Even though he was already fifteen minutes late for work, Boone made good on his pledge to find the dog right away. Not surprisingly, he found Scamp sitting on Zeb Winchell’s back porch, waiting patiently to be admitted to the only home he knew. Since there was a strange car parked in the driveway, Boone knocked, watching the dog out of the corner of one eye.

  No sudden moves, he thought.

  A slender woman appeared on the other side of the screen door, wearing work clothes and rubber gloves, with her hair tied back under a bandanna.

  Boone recognized Zeb’s daughter, Nancy, even though she’d been about five years ahead of him in school and left town to get married around the time she got her diploma.

  She smiled, though a long acquaintance with grief showed in her eyes. Rumor had it that she’d hitched herself to a series of losers before giving up on love. “Hello, Boone,” she said. She noticed the dog then, and looked surprised. “Dad’s?” she asked, making no move to unlatch the door.

  Boone nodded. “Name’s Scamp,” he said.

  “Poor little thing,” Nancy replied. “I suppose I’d better take him over to Paws and ask Martie to find him a good home.”

  “My boys and I would like to keep him,” Boone ventured. That was surely the understatement of the week. “If you wouldn’t mind?”

  “The last thing I need is a dog,” Nancy answered, though there was no meanness in her tone or her expression. She was simply stating a fact. “You’re welcome to him.”

  “Thanks,” Boone said.

  “I’d ask you in,” Nancy went on, “but the place is a wreck. I’m trying to get this dump cleaned up so I can sell it. The money would come in real handy.”

  “That’s all right,” Boone replied, scooping up the dog in one arm, much as he’d done with Fletcher when he was making straight for the cattle guard at home.

  “The funeral service is Saturday,” Nancy said, looking as though she expected him to make polite excuses. “Over at Sunrise-Sunset. Two o’clock.”

  “I’ll be there,” Boone said, only then remembering to take off his hat. His manners, he reflected grimly, seemed to be in the same sorry state as his yard.

  The dog had gone still in the curve of his arm, evidently resigned to capture.

  Nancy tried to smile, and failed. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Your dad was a good man,” Boone told her quietly, with a slight nod of his head.

  Something lightened in Nancy’s time-weary face. She looked older than she was, and tired; life had ground her down and taken the shine off the few bright hopes she’d probably had in the first place. “He was—different,” she allowed, with another wobbly attempt at a smile.

  Boone nodded again. “No law against being different,” he said in parting. Then he turned around, Scamp drooling on the front of his shirt, and returned to the squad car.

  He heard the hinges squeak on Zeb’s screen door, and turned his head to see Nancy standing on the porch. Her expression was tentative, fretful.

  “Did he suffer?” she asked, in a shaky voice. “Dad, I mean?”

  Boone shook his head. “I don’t think so. According to Doc Halpern, it probably happened fast.”

  Nancy’s narrow shoulders sagged with bleak relief. “Good,” she said, opening the door to go back inside and resume cleaning up her father’s house.

  Boone was pulling away from the curb, Scamp riding shotgun again, when he saw Opal drive up in front of the Winchell house in the big station wagon, at the head of a caravan of other cars. There must have been a dozen church ladies in those vans and subcompacts and pickup trucks, and it was immediately apparent that they were ready for action, dressed in old clothes, armed with cleaning buckets and scrub brushes, brooms and buckets and mops and all kinds of other supplies, including a couple of picnic baskets and three jugs of sun-tea.

  Onward, Christian soldiers, Boone thought.

  He smiled, raising a hand in greeting as he passed. Classic Parable, he thought. When there was a need, large or small, people pushed up their sleeves and waded in to help out.

  It was a welcome indication that the world might not be going to hell in a handbasket, after all.

  * * *

  “WE NEED OVERALLS if we’re going to be dealing with chickens,” Elle announced at breakfast without preamble.

  Tara and Erin paused between bites of scrambled eggs to absorb the implications of the statement. Tara, who hadn’t slept well because she kept thinking about the way Boone Taylor looked in a pair of jeans, wasn’t quite with the program yet. She’d done her chores in a sort of stupor.

  “You’re afraid of the chickens,” Erin challenged her sister at some length, adjusting her glasses with a practiced jab of one index finger. “You told me so, Elle Lennox, just last night, before we went to sleep.”

  Tara hid a smile, and suddenly she was time-traveling. When she’d first taken possession of the farm—it had been sadly run-down back then and she’d looked at it numerous times before finally making an offer—she’d bravely ordered chickens from the f
eed store in town, and they’d arrived in stacks of cardboard boxes with airholes in the sides, chirping masses of yellow fluff. Faced with the reality of it all, she’d been terrified of hurting the little birds somehow, maybe stepping on them. Making a mistake.

  It was, she supposed, even possible that the tiny birds might turn on her, harmless and cute as they seemed, and peck her to death like the hapless victim in some horror movie. Starting at ankle-level.

  Fortunately, one of the local women, an earth-mother type named Darlene Jennings, had taken note of Tara’s fear-paled face while a couple teenage boys carried the boxes into the feed store parking lot, stacking them beside her tiny sports car and exchanging doubtful, amused glances.

  Darlene, who, as Tara later learned, raised gloriously colorful flowers—peonies and zinnias, daisies and roses, and clouds of tulips and daffodils in the early spring—to sell at a roadside stand, took pity on the newcomer.

  “You boys load those chicks in the back of my truck,” she’d commanded good-naturedly, through her rolled-down window, before shoving open the door and stepping out onto the gravel.

  Tara had looked at her gratefully, walked over to introduce herself.

  Darlene, dead just six months later of a pulmonary embolism, had not only delivered the chicks to Tara’s place, she’d stayed to help her unload them in the ramshackle coop. They’d set out shallow pans of water—“You’ve got to keep an eye on these little fellas, or they’ll drown themselves sure as taxes are due in April,” Darlene had warned—and then she’d shown Tara how much feed to give them, and when. “Keep them inside the coop till they’re bigger,” the older woman had added. “Otherwise, they’ll be bait for hawks and coyotes, among other things.”

  Tara had taken in every word, nodding constantly.

  After Darlene’s departure for home, Tara had sat down on the top porch step, cupped her chin in her hands and cried, completely overwhelmed by the enormity of what she’d gotten herself into.