Emily sighed. “All I have to do is look at this house and see you are a talented, intelligent, hard working man. You just don’t know the first thing about living off the land. I’m sure I would be just as lost trying to read a blueprint or”—Emily looked around her and gestured with a wide swing of one dripping hand—“fixing up a bathroom like this. How can I tell you what to do when I have to stay away from you?” She looked back at Jake.
He knew this was the bottom line. They had to find a way to work together for Stephie’s sake, if nothing else.
“Tell me what to do?” Her voice broke. “You know I told you to learn to cry, but truth be told, I don’t do much of it myself, not since Dad died. Life is usually so easy. I can’t stand finding you hurt again. What can I do to help you?”
Jake could have shriveled up and died from the hurt in her voice. He was prepared for a temper tantrum. That he could handle. “Aren’t you going to yell at me? Come on. It will make you feel better.”
She tried to smile. “Give me some time. I’ll get around to it.”
“I’m sure you will.” They lapsed into silence.
As soon as he regained his first drop of energy, his awareness of Emily began to build. He didn’t know how to stop it. He’d been attracted to her from the first moment he’d landed on top of her. Whatever was between them had some chemical element. They reacted when they got together. But maybe, just maybe, for the first time, he’d try to control himself. “You know what I think?” Jake removed the towel from her hand.
Emily let it go without a struggle. “Nope, but I’d like to.”
Jake had the distinct impression she was starting to be bothered by their proximity, too. She sat back on the bathroom floor with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped firmly around them.
“I think you should give me ranching lessons.”
“The trouble with us working together is we end up—”
“I’m going to grow up. How does that sound? There’s enough electricity between us to power this house with no help from wires, but I’m going to behave myself. I have realized by now that I don’t have a clue about ranching. That’s one of the reasons the house is improving so fast. I’m not doing anything else. I forced myself to go out and start spading up a spot for a garden this morning. I don’t have any seeds, but I thought I could just get the dirt turned over and then maybe buy a book. Stephie made some suggestions about what to plant, but aside from corn and pumpkins, she’s not really that much help.”
Jake rinsed the towel over his face and around his neck and down each arm. His right arm was still scabbed over but it wasn’t tender anymore. Only a few of the deepest scrapes remained on his chest. The sound of the cold trickling water helped restore his strength. And he recovered enough to feel like a dope sitting in the tub, wearing his jeans.
Emily filled his glass from the bathroom faucet and he gulped it down.
He lowered the glass and admitted, “I don’t know how to get any food out of this land. I’m supposed to live off the land, but how? Where’s the food?” He looked sideways at Emily, feeling as dumb as she kept telling him he was.
She remained silent, watching him.
“So say something. What am I supposed to eat, huh?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
“What? Say it.” Jake started to goad her, then thought the better of it in the new spirit of behaving like an adult.
“Okay, ummm, I’m trying to make myself offer to help you live off the land, but living off the land is hard work. And I’m going to have to do most of it at first.”
Fourteen
“No.” Jake laid the soggy towel over his heart. “I promise I’ll help. And how about if I help with your chores. . .at 5:00 a.m.? Then you won’t be doing that much extra.”
Emily’s snort made him want to sink under the water.
Instead he sat up straighter and wrung out the entire towel over his head. As soon as the water stopped flowing and his annoyance faded, he got back to the subject at hand. “What exactly am I supposed to do that’s so much work? Explain it.”
Emily sighed deeply. “Well, you need to grow your own vegetables and meat. You need a milk cow. You’ll need chickens for meat and eggs. It’s too late to plant most of the quick-growing garden food. Peas and onions and potatoes go in early. We’re already eating those at our place.”
“Yeah, I know. They’re delicious.”
“We’ll keep sharing our spring garden with you and let you plant pumpkins and tomatoes and sweet corn over here for us.”
“Chickens and a cow? Where do I get those? I don’t want anyone to know—”
“Yeah, yeah, no one can know you’re here. Big deal.” Emily waved her hand at him. “I had a cow that lost her calf this spring. You could have milked her by hand.”
“What?” Jake sat up a little straighter in the tub, forgetting his weakness and pain in this new horror.
“I’ll show you, although I’m not too good at it myself. I could wean one of my calves early and bottle-feed it. The cows don’t have enough milk for both.” She considered it for a moment, then shook her head emphatically. “No, that won’t work. My cows are just too wild.”
“I’ve seen your cows come crowding into the yard at feeding time. They don’t seem wild to me.”
“Well, you haven’t tried to grab one by the—”
“I’m not much of a milk drinker really,” Jake interjected.
“You’ve got to have a cow to live off the land. It’s a renewable source of food that stays fresh as long—” Emily snickered. “As long as it stays inside the cow.”
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m imagining you milking a cow, that’s all. It’s not funny because I’ll probably get my head kicked off trying to train the cow to put up with it. Then you’ll get to drink all the milk.”
“They kick?”
Emily groaned and let her forehead drop onto her knees. She rested for a minute, then seemed to rally.
Jake silently scolded himself for asking so many questions. And determined that from this moment on he’d just say things like, “Yes, Emily,” and, “Whatever you say, Emily.”
“You’ll need chickens, and for them you just have to have electricity.”
“No, absolutely not. Out of the question. I’m not going to get electricity hooked up, I told you—”
“Okay, okay, let me think.” She looked up at him fiercely.
He remembered his vow of obedience. Okay, starting now.
“I know Laura Ingalls Wilder’s pa didn’t have electricity. Let me think.” She glared at him. “I don’t know how to live off the land myself, you know. The natural way would be to have a mother hen hatch some chicks, and you can do that. But what this boils down to is which comes first, the chicken or the egg. I think it has to be the chicken. I’ll buy baby chicks and you can let them grow up and you can raise your own generation of them from those chickens. But the first generation has no mother, so you have to have a heat lamp.”
“Can’t I just buy a pregnant chicken?”
Emily started to laugh so hard she let go of her knees and flopped over backward onto the floor. She rested her hands over her stomach and laughed, and as much as Jake wanted to toss the soggy towel on her face, he was beginning to get the swing of this mature-adult-in-control-of-himself thing.
“Would you mind telling me what’s so funny?” He thought his voice was the very model of respect, however totally she was failing on her side.
“Pregnant chickens?” She barely uttered the words before she was lost again.
It was hard to tell, his being so hot from a sunburn, but he thought he might be blushing. “Look, I know chickens hatch from eggs, okay? I meant a chicken ready to lay eggs that would hatch.” He sounded a bit testy, but he still had control.
“It just sounded so funny.” Emily still couldn’t coordinate herself well enough to sit up.
Jake was severely tempted to ge
t out of the tub and grab her and— He’d counted to ten for the fifth time when she suddenly quit laughing.
“What did you do to the ceiling?” From her position flat on her back she had noticed his pride and joy.
He grabbed desperately at the change of subject. “It’s pressed tin. I’m going to put it in the kitchen, too. I’m trying to blend the true Victorian style with modern amenities all through the house.”
Emily sat up, wiping tears from her eyes, and looked around some more. She ran her hand over the tiled floor. “This is real tile. You didn’t use linoleum.”
“I chose the pattern and laid it.”
“It’s beautiful. You designed it yourself? It’s so intricate it must have taken days.” Her eyes shone with pleasure.
He thought he saw the first inkling of respect he’d ever gotten from her and it helped dispel the immature desire to get her to quit laughing at him by kissing her. “It’s how a Victorian home should look. The ceiling was something I ordered from a specialty catalogue at the Home Depot in Rapid City. I’ve been to town for supplies a couple of times.”
“What do you do, sneak out before sunrise so no one sees you?”
“Yes, with the trailer. I can load a lot of stuff in it. I’m in town before the doors open at seven. Then I get home as fast as I can.”
“Someone’s going to notice you. This can’t last.”
Jake shrugged. “I’ve found a route that’s out of the way, and it doesn’t go past any houses until I get to a bigger highway. I think I am going to make my own ceiling for the kitchen. I’ve looked at this one and I think I know how to do it. I made the heavy cornices.” He pointed to the ceiling again.
“You mean the molding along the ceiling and the wall? You carved all that wood?” Emily sat with her legs crossed at the ankles, looking at all the details.
He loved it that she was impressed. “It’s not carved, though that’s the effect I wanted. I added quarter round and a small molding to the largest molding I could find, and nailed it together. The leaf pattern is plaster stenciled to match the leaves in the tin ceiling. I painted the whole thing white. That’s how a lot of Victorian houses were, so I didn’t cheat on the ceiling, but I did on the fixtures.”
Emily ran her hand across the odd wrought iron legs that held up the cream and white marble sink. “It looks ancient. It wasn’t in here before.”
“No, and it’s not an antique. It’s got all the strength of porcelain, it looks and feels like marble, and it’s really plastic. Since I got it, I found some catalogues I might use to buy antique pieces, but I wanted the bathroom to be functional. I did save the commode though. I tore out all the insides and put in new, but I couldn’t part with that cast iron lion.”
“I always loved that lion. I never missed a chance to come in here and talk to him.” Emily ran her hand over the ridiculous white lion sitting proudly, creating the base for a toilet. “It was just another way this house made me feel like a princess when I played over here.” Her eyes drifted back up to the ceiling. “The Barretts were so nice to me. When I think of how they let me have the run of this place. . .” Emily dropped her eyes from the ceiling and touched again the mosaic of earth-toned floor tiles. “I know what this reminds me of. My grandma made a quilt that looks just like this.”
He saw the sentiment in her gaze, and he was glad she had been in time to save her tree. He suspected she’d like the source of his floor motif, too. When he picked it, he had just done it to suit his own taste, but now it seemed like he’d done it to pay his respects to one of Emily’s ancestors. “I saw the quilt. That’s where I got the idea.”
Emily looked up, confused. “When did you see it?”
“The day you took out my stickers. It’s thrown over your couch in the living room. It looked just like something I’d been playing around with in my head, the squares and triangles combined in these shades.” He continued to bathe himself, feeling almost normal. He looked at the red skin of his arms and knew he’d pay for this act of idiocy for days.
She looked up to catch him studying his burn. “How are we ever going to keep you alive?”
“You’re going to help me. Starting with getting me a pregnant chicken.” He scowled at her, daring her to laugh.
She didn’t let his scowl slow down her giggling at all. “So, you know where chickens come from? That’s good. You’ll still need chicks and a heat lamp. The Barretts’ old brooder house will take some repairs to keep the rats and weasels out.”
“Rats and weasels?” The horror at having to fight off rats must have been noticeable because he saw she wasn’t impressed. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, she was trying valiantly not to start laughing again. “What kind of place is this?”
“And snakes. Don’t forget snakes. Life is hard on something as defenseless as baby chicks. The truth is you probably need a dog and a couple of cats. They keep the pests away as well as anything. Of course they like to eat chicks, too, but you can usually fence them out.”
“Dogs and cats and cows and chickens.” And suddenly through all the annoying details, Jake’s dream came back to him. He really wanted all of this. He wanted huge orange pumpkins, a friendly dog, and a cat that would curl itself around his leg while he read by the fireplace at night.
The humor that had been lurking under the surface warmed in Emily’s eyes and, for just a minute, he thought she almost shared his dream.
Then she went and spoiled everything by talking. “You’ll have to have electricity.”
“No. I told you—”
“The chicks have to have a heat lamp. It’s a substitute for their mother sitting on top of them. They won’t survive even on warm days without it.” She was trying so hard to be reasonable.
He had no intention of letting her get away with being reasonable. “No power. No way. That’s final.”
“The chicks will die.”
“We’ll skip the chickens. We’ll just do the rest.”
“But chickens are the only quick source of protein I can think of. The eggs and the meat. You can’t butcher a cow or pig without a freezer to store the meat. But you can kill a chicken and eat it all in one day, so the meat never spoils.”
“Kill it? I thought I was going to eat eggs.”
“The girls lay eggs and the boys you eat.”
Jake’s fist hit the water. “Who invented that sick system?”
“What other use are the boys? That is their purpose in life. It’s been years, but I think I remember how to chop off their heads with an ax.”
Jake surged to his feet. He was self-aware enough to know a fight-or-flight reflex had kicked in. “I’m not going to chop something’s head off with an ax.” Water swished over the sides of the tub when he stood. “What is wrong with you?”
Emily rose, dodging most of the water. “I thought you wanted to live off the land? Do you really think the chickens in the store are from noble chickens who, after a full life and a death from natural causes, donated their bodies to grocery stores?” She stepped way too close to him and about did him in when she poked him in the chest. “Just because you’re going to be intimately involved in their deaths doesn’t make them any more dead than the ones hermetically sealed on Styrofoam trays. It’s where meat comes from, hotshot.”
Hotshot really set him off, and for one tense moment he forgot his pledge to treat Emily better. His hands clenched as he stopped himself from grabbing that irritating finger.
Something blazed between them. Emily dropped her hand without his making her. She wavered a minute and he wasn’t sure if she was going to step away or lean into him.
For once he wanted to go first. He sat back down in the icy water. It was the best place for him.
When he finally glanced up, she looked relieved and surprised and maybe just one tiny speck disappointed. He went back to cooling himself off, deeply proud of his self-control.
Letting her teach him just might work. But he didn’t think he could kill a chicken. He’d wait and
give her the bad news later.
She cleared her throat. “About electricity. . .”
“No.” He loved that word. He was going to be saying it to himself pretty regularly in the coming days. He might as well bury her with it, too. For an instant he remembered his “Yes, Emily. Whatever you say, Emily,” pledge but dismissed it. A man had to have some fun. He’d start being obedient as soon as they settled the electricity question.
“How about an extension cord? I could buy a few hundred yards of heavy duty extension cords and run them from my place.”
“No.”
“A generator. I have one of those, gas powered. We’d just run it overnight for a week or two, for the chicks. Or I could raise the chicks until they’re past the age of needing heat and send them over to you.”
“No, I’ll raise them here. I’ll find a heat source.”
“Chicks don’t respond well to a wood fire,” she informed him sarcastically. “All you’ll get for your trouble is a barbecue. Let me start them. I’ll let you come over and do everything, I promise. In fact, I insist.”
He really wanted to say no again, but he was starting to bore himself. “We’ll figure something out. I’ll give you the money and you buy the cow and chicks and—”
“We’ll worry about the money later. That’s enough at first. No more gardening today. Why don’t you rest for the afternoon and come for supper tonight?”
“Can we have apple pie again?”
“I’ve got a busy afternoon.” She smiled and the words had no bite.
“But you said they were easy, remember?” And he couldn’t believe how pathetic he sounded. He couldn’t ever remember caring much about food before.
“Not a chance, bud. I have a roast in the Crock-Pot. It’s been slow-cooking since noon. It’s not no-dessert tonight, but you’ll like what I make well enough, I suppose.”
“I’m sure of it.” Jake lifted the towel to his face and breathed cool air through the soaking cloth. It was probably time to get out of the tub. His skin didn’t hurt so badly, and he had a permanent case of goose bumps.
He lowered the towel. “You’ve saved me again. This time, I promise, is the last. From now on I’ll consult with you before I start anything.”
Clueless Cowboy Page 9