by C. S. Adler
Mel shook her head. “I can't, Mom.” Because what could she write Tanya? That being good with horses wasn't enough? That she was helpless to protect anything she loved?
Chapter Ten
After dinner on the third day, Dawn sat down next to Mel, who was curled up on the couch in their cabin. “You're taking this too hard, Mel, I bet you wouldn't take to your bed and stop eating if you lost me.”
“Leave me alone, Mom.”
“You know, you're getting a bad rep in the dining room.”
Mel looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Well, they said you were doing such a great job and you had such a feel for horses and all that. I was busting my seams with pride in my daughter. Now you're a drop-out.”
“You don't understand. Colby wasn't just a horse. He was my friend. He trusted me. And then Jeb—” Mel choked up and couldn't continue.
“Jeb feels bad that he got rid of Colby without warning you. He says he didn't realize how attached you were to that horse.”
“Because Jeb doesn't get attached. A horse is just a thing to him, just something he can use.”
“Mel, please,” her mom said. “It hurts me to see you so down. Be mad at Jeb if you want, but you can't keep hiding out here. Oh, and your pal Sally said to tell you he needs you.” Dawn reached into her pocket. “And your friend Denise must have heard what happened. Sue gave me this to give you.”
What her mom handed over was a homemade card. On the front, someone had drawn two horses' heads with teardrops on their long noses. “We miss you,” Denise had written. “Come sleep over so we can make you feel better. That's what friends are for, right?” And she'd signed it with love from Denise and Lily.
“Isn't that nice?” her mom said. “You'll go, won't you?”
Mel shook her head. “No. I'll call her and say thanks and I'll sleepover when the season's done, but I've got to go back to the corral tomorrow. Sally probably does really need me.”
“That's my girl.” She hugged Mel. “You know how proud I am of you? To be a wrangler at your age. The Davises say it's amazing how you can handle a sick horse that Jeb can't get near. And Sally—who knows horses if nothing else—says you're a regular horse whisperer.”
“Why don't you like Sally?” Mel asked in alarm.
“I like him fine. He's a nice man, but he's kind of a loser, Mel. I mean, a man his age who doesn't own anything but the clothes he has on—”
“He owns his horse.”
“Does he? Well, even so. It's easy to be good natured when your life is simple and you're not responsible for anyone else.”
Mel frowned but didn't argue. Convincing her mother of Sally's worth would take more energy than she had at the moment. By Dawn's standards, he was a no-count. To Mel he was golden, the first grown male in her life who had cared about her. One thing she did need to make her mother understand though— “You know why I decided to ride Colby, Mom?” Mel said. “It was so I could earn enough money to buy him. I need to own my own horse.”
Dawn's eyes widened. “You better not count on that, honey. No way can you or I afford to buy a horse, much less pay for its upkeep. You'll have to wait until you're grown up and earning your own living.”
Mel pulled back from her mother's embrace. “I do earn my own living. Jeb's paying me for being a wrangler.”
“But you only work a few hours a day and you don't get paid much.” Her mom looked anxious. “Please don't set yourself up for another disappointment.”
“If I had my own horse, Jeb couldn't keep taking it away from me. And I could make sure that it had a good life.” She squeezed her eyes shut against the fear of what might be happening to Hojo and Colby if whoever Jeb had sold them to wasn't treating them right.
Her momstood up. “All right,” she said wearily. “But remember, I can't help you with money because we just about get by on what I earn here. I didn't take this job because it paid well. I took it because I thought you'd be happy on a ranch, and because I haven't done a whole lot just for you in your life.”
Mel was touched. She reached out and hugged her. “Mom,” she said, “I am happy here, except when Jeb ruins everything.”
Dawn pulled away from her. “Well,” she said, “Jeb does have a short fuse, and he's impulsive. That's what got him in trouble with his girlfriend.”
“He tells you stuff like that?”
“We're friends, Mel. Like most people, Jeb needs someone to confide in, and he can't afford to talk to the wranglers who work for him, or the Davises because Mr. Davis is sort of his boss. So he talks to me.”
“And he's just a friend?”
Dawn laughed. “Don't worry. I'm not after anything more than friendship with any man. I learned my lesson. I jumped at the gorgeous life Max had to give me, and it made me miserable. It'll be just you and me for a long, long while, Mel.”
Mel was glad to hear it. She couldn't have stood Jeb having any more influence over her life than he already did.
* * * *
Early the next morning, Mel found Sally in the tack room fixing a broken bridle in the thin sunlight that seeped through the cobwebbed window. She pulled a keg over and sat down beside him. “I need your help.”
But when she told him she wanted to try and buy Colby back, Sally shook his head. “Even if you could track him down, Mel, you'd need thousands of dollars to buy him back. You'd have to work forever at a wrangler's wage to save that. And Jeb's only likely to pay you when he needs extra help in mid season.”
“Now you're discouraging me, too?” Mel said.
“I just don't want you riding for a fall, aiming for something you can't get.”
He sounded like an echo of her mother and thinking of her mom’s opinion of him, she asked, “Sally, did you ever want to be anything besides a wrangler?”
He laughed. “I used to dream about running my own ranch.”
“But that isn't why you married your wife?”
“Of course not. Clara and me understood one another. We were a matched pair right from the start.”
“I'm sorry,” she said. “I mean about Clara's father hating you.”
“Yeah, well. She made her choice between him and me.”
“You're mad at her?”
“More like disappointed. So you coming back to work then, Mel?”
“If Jeb will let me. I wasn't very nice to him when he got rid of Colby.”
“I expect he'll forgive you. My take on him is he got rid of Colby because it embarrassed him that he couldn't handle the horse and you could. So now he's feeling bad that he did that to you. He'll probably agree to let you pick any horse you want to ride at this point.”
“Maybe I'll go back to taking care of sick horses and shoveling manure for a while. I'll get up before anybody and measure out the feed.”
Sally shook his head and set the bridle aside. “You won't get full pay for those kind of jobs, Mel.”
“So what? There's no horse for me to buy anyway now. And even if I find another special one that I have a feel for and that takes to me, I don't know if—”. She stared at a spider's web as if she could see through it to the past.
“Don't know if what?” he asked, squinting at her as if he were trying to read her mind.
“Well, what if I bring them bad luck?”
“Oh, come on, Mel. That's foolishness.”
“Is it? Every horse I take to, something bad happens to it. Every one, Sally.”
“What about Lily? Lily don't look like she's suffering with your friend Denise.”
“But something bad happened to Lily before Denise got her, didn't it? Lily got hurt. And Hojo did, too. And Wonder Boy acted up in the show, and Lisa said I ruined him. And Colby acted up in the storm.”
“Things happen, Mel. You can't control everything that might happen.”
“No,” she said. “I can't. But I don't have to put myself in the way of trouble either.”
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Finally, S
ally said, “You got that idea in your head that you make bad things happen. I guess you got to get it out of your head.” He stood up. “I need to get back to work. You coming to help me?”
“First I better talk to Jeb.”
Sally nodded. “He'll be along soon.”
She sat alone in the dim light of the tack room, smelling the leather and dust and sweat. She had told Sally everything, and he had understood, and so what? She still felt jinxed. If she got attached to a horse, something bad would happen, just as it had been happening over and over this year.
Finally, Mel rose and went to track Jeb down. She found him in the big barn where he was hammering a shoe onto a horse's back hoof. She braced herself, standing next to him, and asked flat out if he'd rehire her as a wrangler. Any regrets he had about what he'd done to her didn't stop him from launching into a fifteen-minute harangue about quitting when he needed her, and that that wasn't fair, and why should the ranch pay someone who wasn't reliable and so forth. He never mentioned being sorry that he'd sold Colby without even warning her he might. It was only when he was winding down and beginning to list the duties she'd have if she resumed her job that she admitted she wasn't leading any trail rides.
He did a double take. “What? You can't be serious. What use are you if you won't do that?”
“Who else is better with horses that get hurt?”
“We don't get many injured horses.”
“Well, there are other things I can do,” she said.
“Yeah, you can take on family trail rides. That's what we need you for, short on wranglers as we are. Otherwise, forget it.” He turned his back on her and resumed hammering on the horse's hoof. Without another word, she marched out of the barn.
The bright sunlight struck her like a slap in the face. She was crying when Sally found her back in the darkest corner of the tack room cuddling the red-and-gray saddle blanket that she'd always chosen for Colby.
“You can ride Rover,” Sally said. “Rover's special. He'd eat barbed wire before he'd let you down. You could fall asleep in the saddle and stay put up there all night, and he'd just wait patiently for you to wake up.”
“No,” she said. “I don't want to jinx Rover.”
“Life is full of risks, Mel. You want to live, you got to take some.”
“No, I don't.” But she stopped crying. She'd never been much of one for tears.
Chapter Eleven
Even though she was no longer an official wrangler, Mel continued attending to any horse that seemed neglected. She cleaned wounds, bandaged legs, made poultices to draw out the infection in a puncture wound, and treated swollen joints with cold water and leg wraps. Jeb had to be aware of her volunteer doctoring, but he didn't thank her, didn't even offer so much as a grunt to show he'd noticed.
One evening the regular chitchat around the staff's supper table took an interesting turn. They began by talking about why the new beds they'd been promised hadn't arrived. It seemed the owner of the ranch who lived in Arizona was short on cash this summer. Some big family group celebrating a fiftieth wedding anniversary had cancelled because of a death in the family. And now the cook, who had been there forever, was quitting to get married.
“How'd she find a man? She never steps out of the kitchen,” Jeb said.
“That's where he found her,” Sally, who knew everything, said. “He's the guy delivers the meat.”
“No kidding,” Jeb said. “So they putting you in charge of cooking for us, Sally? Might get some use out of you that way, though I don't know as our stomachs could take it.”
Mel turned to see if her mother had caught Jeb mocking Sally, but Dawn was busy cutting her meat.
“Pasta every night if you put me in the kitchen,” Sally said. “It's the only thing I can cook. My Italian mama taught me.”
“We know, Sally,” Jeb said. “Anyone can see you're a pasta eater. Anyways, I hope your mama taught you to make good red sauce.”
“No, that was my father who came from Norwegian stock,” Sally said. “He made the best spaghetti sauce in our town. Of course it was a little town.”
“Where was that, Sally?” Her mom looked up from her plate to ask.
“In Texas,” Sally said. “My father was a farm boy who joined the navy to see the world. He married my mother in Italy and brought her back to his ranch, but he lost the ranch.”
Her mom smiled. “And then you became a cowboy.”
“Well, I had a thing for horses, like Mel here,” Sally said.
Sue, who hadn't said a word up to that point, suddenly leaned forward to get everybody's attention. She said, “You know how Mr. Jeffries lets us ride through his ranch to get to Cathedral Rock? Well, this morning I was leading a group through his fields, and you'll never guess what I saw him unloading into that big empty pasture he fenced off.” Expectant faces turned her way, and she told them. “Three mustangs! He told me he bought them at a government auction a year ago. You should have seen those wild horses race around like crazy when they were let out of the van. They were something else.”
“Jeffries got himself mustangs?” Jeb asked with a grin. “He's something else. Him and his wife only use their fancy spread weekends. I wish I had half the dough he's gotta have to run that place.”
“What's he going to do with the mustangs?” Sally asked Sue.
“Just watch them I guess,” the girl said. “They were amazing. I wanted to stay there and watch them myself.”
“Can you imagine what it'll cost Jeffries to feed them when the snow starts in a couple of months?” Jeb said.
“Want to go down and take a look?” Sally asked Mel. “You could ride double on Rover with me.”
“Or she can ride in the truck with me,” Jeb said. “Soon as I finish off this apple cobbler, I'm going down there. How about it, Dawn?” he asked Mel's mother, who was sitting next to him. “Want to see some wild horses?”
“Not especially,” Dawn said. “I have some personal correspondence to take care of tonight. You and Mel can go.”
“I'll go with Sally,” Mel said.
“I'm not going to eat you,” Jeb said. “You as afraid of me as you are of riding?”
“I'm not afraid of riding,” Mel said. “You don't understand.”
“You don't never talk to me, so how do you expect me to understand?” Jeb said reasonably.
Her mom sad, “Mel, you're hurting Jeb's feelings.”
That was how Mel found herself in the cab of Jeb's pickup an hour before sunset heading down the road to Jeffries' valley ranch.
“So,” Jeb said as soon as they got started. “What bad things does Sally say about me that makes you hate me?”
“Sally doesn't say anything bad about anybody.”
“So why do you act like you do? Won't even sit next to me at meals if you can help it. Do I smell bad or something?” He gave her a sideways grin. His thick brown hair fell in a wave over his forehead. He even had a dimple.
“Well,” Mel said, letting him have it since he'd asked her, “you get rid of every horse I care about, so how should I feel about you?”
“You think I'm picking on you, huh?” he said earnestly. “Being mean to you? No way, Mel. You're a big help around the horses, and I'd accommodate you if I could, but I can't. My job's to cull the mounts that might cause us trouble. We got dudes coming here to ride that don't know one end of a horse from the other. They need to be protected.”
Mel knew Jeb was just making excuses. Colby had been her mount, not meant for any dude to ride. She'd never been able to argue though, so she stayed silent and stared at a purple cloud with a frill of crimson sunset lying between the two mountains ahead of them.
“How about I promise not to mess with the next horse you pick no matter what? Then can you and me be friends?”
“Why should you care how I feel about you?” Mel asked.
“Wow!” he said. “You are one intense little girl. I care because your mother's my friend, and you're a good kid when you're not
moping around giving everybody a hard time.”
“I don't give everybody a hard time,” she protested, and threw her last barb at him. “But I hate when you make fun of Sally.”
He jerked back in his seat in genuine surprise. “What do you mean? Sally's my buddy. He don't mind my teasing.”
“Well, I do.”
“I guess I just can't win with you, can I?” Jeb said, as if that really bothered him.
“Look,” she said, and pointed to the huge owl with enormous wings aiming itself at a tree branch on the other side of the road. Mel had never seen an owl so close before.
“Yeah,” Jeb said without interest.
She sat in silence, a little ashamed of having come on too strong as she usually did when she expressed herself honestly.
The silence lasted until they arrived at the field. There were the horses! Immediately Mel forgot Jeb and focused on the mustangs. The three were scrubby animals, sturdy with thick necks and powerful hindquarters, not as sleek or pretty as the horses on the ranch, but wilder and more active. One was gray with black markings on its head and legs. One was a paint with a black mask slipping down over his nose. The third mustang was a mahogany colored horse with an especially long black mane and tail. The bay had turned to look at them when they got out of the pickup, and it was still watching them as they walked up to the fence.
“Pretty,” Mel said. Rays of the setting sun had gilded the reddish-brown horse, which was taller than the others.
“Yeah, that one's got a little class.” He gave a high whistle, and the brown horse sidestepped until he was facing them, head up and ears pricked toward them. “I wonder if Jeffries plans to break any of them,” Jeb added. “Wouldn't put it past him to just let them run free in his field and then sell them to the glue factory when he gets tired of them.”
“He wouldn't do that!” Mel said in alarm. “Sue says he loves horses, and Mr. Davis said he's a nice man. So he wouldn't do that.”
“Maybe not.Maybe he'll just keep them around for decoration. I wish I had his dough.” Judging by the number of times he'd mentioned being rich, Mel guessed that was his big dream. It figured he'd care so much about money being the show off he was.