Forgetting Herself

by Yvonne Jocks

“I thought of it,” insisted Dougie, almost unseated off the upset sheep. “Whoa, boy!”

  That, and the sound of Da and Kevin riding and hallooing from the northeast, waving at them with raised rifles, gave Stuart an idea. “Bite his ear.”

  “What?”

  “It's something cowboys do to quiet an unbroken horse they mean to ride. Try it!”

  He felt his brother's amazement and ignored it. He had no intention of tel ing Douglas that he'd learned that little tidbit from his wife, the rancher's daughter; nor what pleasant ear-nibbling had led to her tel ing him. He just readied his knife to ease out the bullet.

  Dougie, already using his body and his legs to hold the wether down, leaned closer to its thrashing head and, after getting knocked in the jaw, he bit its ear. Whether from shock or outrage, the animal stopped its bleating and simply lay and panted.

  This had the double benefit of calming the sheep and shutting Dougie up.

  At least until Da and Kevin reached them.

  Stuart got the bullet out, poured canteen water over the wound and sewed it shut with a hair from Pooka's tail, bandaging it tightly with strips of Dougie's shirt. He used the rest of his brother's shirt to bind the animal's feet. Da, shaking his head at the carnage, went quietly about the cruel task of skinning the dead sheep, so that Stuart and Dougie would have something to show for their investment. He might manage some mutton off the head-shot animal, as well.

  “Leave one to take to the sheriff,” instructed Stuart. “Leave the ewe.”

  His father nodded. They both knew he meant the one with her belly stil swollen from the lamb that would never be born.

  Kevin wanted to stay and listen to Dougie's tales of bravery, instead of starting to unknot the rest of the stil milling flock, but Stuart told him to work or leave, so the boy went to work.

  “It was Johnson, Da,” insisted Dougie. “I'd swear it was Johnson.”

  “You saw him?” asked the older sheepman.

  But there, some of Dougie's bravado faltered. “Only from the back,” he admitted.

  Noting the blood on his hands, the corpses beside him, Stuart felt his grasp on mere efficiency wavering under rage. “Could you identify the horse?”

  “It was too far away, and across a flooded gulch besides.” So they had nothing to truly report to the law, at al —except an unidentified gunman off their property shooting four sheep.

  “I think I scared him off,” announced Dougie—again.

  Stuart said, “You didna scare anybody off.”

  “You weren't here!” Douglas reminded him. “You were home wooing your bride—”

  Had he noticed the odd mud patterns on their clothes? Stuart glared him into silence. "I heard the gunfire. Five careful, planned shots. He shot four of our sheep in five tries, from ... how far away do you think that boulder is?" From where he kneeled, beside the fal en wether, he could barely see the rock amidst the snow-patched land across the gulch. "And he stopped wel before you started firing wild," Stuart added.

  “I was trying to protect our sheep. Your sheep!”

  “You didn't even tel the dogs what to do when you went after him,” Stuart reminded him, angrier by the moment. "You know what excited dogs can do, left on their own with the sheep! Even Kevin knows! What if they pushed the flock into the floodwaters?"

  His dogs were smart—but they were just dogs, animals with a need for herding sheep that could overwhelm any instinct, whether they knew where to drive the animals or not.

  “What would you have done?” demanded Dougie, having heard enough. "You know so much more than me; you're such a better herder. What would you have done differently?"

  Stuart knew what he would like to have done differently. He would like to have caught a sign, some hint, that a rider had come within shooting distance of their range. Surely if they stayed alert, he or the dogs could have noticed a flurry of upset birds, heard a faint whicker from the horse, something! He would like to have measured the return fire more carefully. He would like to have given the dogs the commands they needed to guard the flock during the excitement. He would like to realize that of course the gulch would be impassible before deserting the sheep.

  But of course, Stuart couldn't know if he would have done any of it.

  “I would have been here,” he suggested solemnly, and lifted the injured wether. “I'm taking this one to Mariah; I'l be back for the dead ewe.”

  Appeased, Douglas nodded.

  “I'l go with you to the sheriff, lad,” said his father. “Not that it'l do us much good.”

  Likely it would do them no good whatsoever. But Stuart honestly knew no other options, except to do nothing. And that was no option at al .

  While Mariah was stil tending the baby lamb, Stuart brought the injured wether to her, told her he was going to see the sheriff, put on clean clothes and left again.

  She looked around her lovely little home, muddied and bloodied and now housing livestock that was clearly not housetrained, and felt too numb to cry. She'd tried so hard to make this place a nice home for Stuart. For her and Stuart both ...

  “No,” she told herself firmly, looking for some last piece of clean material—a sheet or a towel—on which to wipe her face. In desperation, she chose the curtain. “It's al right.”

  Just saying that helped a great deal.

  Someday soon, the mud would dry, the wether would heal, the lamb would grow, and she could clean everything again. Stuart was safe, thank God—and Dougie, and the dogs—and Sheriff Ward would find whoever had done this awful thing and arrest him. Everything would be al right. In the meantime, she had to focus on what she could do.

  And to Mariah's surprise, she could do a great deal.

  While cuddling the lamb to her chest, she found the remedy box her mother had sent with her to her new home. Then, setting the newborn back into the box she'd made for it by the stove, she checked under the poor wether's bandages. After careful y trimming the thick, curly, dirty wool away from the area surrounding its wound, she used a smal flask of medicinal liquor to clean it—

  oh, he did kick at that!—and made a poultice to draw out any sickness. Then she wrapped it with fresh bandages, made from her sheet instead of Stuart's muddy, torn shirt, gave him water to drink in a cooking pot, and turned back to her newborn lamb.

  She remembered returning a lamb to Stuart, so long ago when they'd first met under the Kissing Bridge. She'd thought it darling. But this new baby, rescued from its dead mother's womb, won her heart. Far tinier than a newborn foal, it was similarly bony, with long, knobby legs and a surprisingly long tail, and long ears that it held back against its delicate head, as if suspicious of the world. As Stuart had instructed, she rubbed it briskly, though it had dried some time ago, and tempted it into sucking on a rag dipped in formula.

  It tried to stand, several times, but had little luck. When she held it tight against her own warmth, like she would a real baby, it kicked at her, sometimes very hard, but she didn't mind. At least it had some fight in it.

  The tight, coarse wool that covered al of it but its softer face and legs was the cleanest white she'd ever seen on a sheep, white as the winter snow. It had a wet black nose and black button eyes and long, lovely eyelashes. She thought it as darling as any kitten she'd ever seen. But Velvet, who had taken up temporary residence on the highest shelf and occasional y hissed her displeasure at these new visitors, likely would not agree.

  “Maaa?” the lamb said to her, after chewing greedily on the formula-soaked rag. She had to pry its little mouth open to get the cloth back, dip it again. Good lamb. Hungry lamb.

  “Mah?” she said back to it, giving it more food, and it snuggled warmly against her and wagged its tail like a puppy as it drank.

  She wondered if her family would recognize her, sitting on the floor with a lamb in her lap and a grown sheep lying near the bed, her clothes likely ruined. She wasn't sure she recognized herself.

  But she took satisfaction in being useful. And if she tended
the sheep carefully enough, concentrated on making a simple dinner despite the chaos her home had become, she barely worried about Stuart at al . Barely.

  Not so much that she couldn't stand it, anyway.

  But when she heard him riding back, too close to sundown, she did not hesitate to put the lamb back into its little box, near the stove for warmth, and hurry outside to meet him. Only when her feet sank into the mud, its increasingly cold wetness glooping up between her toes, did she realize she had never put her shoes back on since their play, so long ago.

  “Stuart?”

  Swinging easily off of Pooka, Stuart turned, stared for a tired moment, then opened his arms to her. When she flung her arms around him, he held her extra tight. Then everything truly was al right. She did not care how filthy they were. She did not care what chores waited on them. Stuart was back, and safe, and here with her, and she could stand in his embrace forever and not care about another thing.

  Too soon, he kissed her head and eased his hold on her. “I'd best see to the horse, lass,” he said, almost an apology.

  He sounded tired. His heavy-lidded eyes and quiet mouth seemed lax with weariness.

  She kissed his raspy cheek and stepped back from him, to give him room, and he began to pull efficiently at the buckles of his saddle.

  “The wether seems to be doing wel ,” she told him. "As far as I can tel , anyway. He stood up once, but when he saw he couldn't go anywhere, he lay back down. When I touch his nose, he doesn't seem much warmer than when you brought him to me. And I've been giving him water." Which she'd regretted, once he stood up. At least she had him on sheets. "But I didn't know what else to feed him, to get his strength up."

  Stuart smiled over his shoulder at her, but faintly, as if it took a great deal of effort. “Likely he's never had such coddling in his life.”

  “Wel he deserves it. He was shot.” She immediately regretted saying that. If Stuart wanted to talk about the shooting he would—wouldn't he?

  Instead, he asked, “The bum lamb?”

  "Oh, he's adorable! He's been drinking his formula and we've been talking. Not that I speak sheep.

  But he doesn't seem to mind."

  Stuart moved the saddle onto the wagon tongue, which, braced level on a rock, made for a makeshift rail, then began to curry Pooka's back. “It's stil alive?”

  His tone of surprise worried her. “You thought it wouldn't be?”

  “Lambing isn't for several weeks.” With a last brush stroke over Pooka's side, he braced his arms across the horse's back, leaned into them and sighed. That worried her even more.

  “I have coffee on the stove,” she told him hopefully. “And dinner.”

  Stuart nodded, stil bracing himself against Pooka, who looked back and snorted.

  Mariah did not like asking questions that scared her. But she looked at Stuart's stiff back, felt the upset flowing off him like waves of heat off coals, and she needed to ease his upset on an even deeper level than she'd needed to mother the lamb. “Are you al right, Stuart?”

  “No,” he muttered, low.

  “What... ?” She went to his side, took the curry comb from him, began to brush Pooka herself.

  “What did Sheriff Ward say?”

  “What I expected him to say.”

  She hadn't realized he'd had particular expectations. She brushed the horse and waited.

  “He said,” clarified Stuart, “that maybe it was an accident. That maybe it was a hunter, mistaking our sheep for bighorn. That there's nothing he can do about it.”

  Mariah stopped currying the horse and turned to her husband. “He said that?”

  Stuart sighed, closed his eyes. “Of course he said that, Mariah.”

  “He's not even going to ride out to the boulder and look for proof of who did it?”

  “No, lass. He's not.”

  “But... Sheriff Ward has always seemed like such a helpful man.”

  When Stuart opened his eyes, for a moment, he looked at Mariah as if she were stupid. "If you have money, he's a helpful man. If you have cattle."

  She reminded herself that he was upset. When she was upset about the mud, and losing buttons off her shoes, she'd said things she hadn't meant to. Of course, seeing three of his sheep murdered, Stuart might misspeak as wel .

  She hesitated before speaking again herself. He might not take her next suggestion wel ... but she had to ask. “Shal I ask Papa or Thaddeas to talk to him?”

  She'd been right. Stuart did not take it wel at al — even if al he said was, “No.”

  “Or... I could just ask Papa to look at the boulder himself. He's an excel ent track—”

  “I said no, Mariah!” Stuart took off his hat, looked angrily down at it, then at her. “You think I canna handle it myself? Is that it?”

  “You know I don't think that, Stuart,” she said, and went back into the wagon. It was foolish, to stand outside in the dusk and chil , giving the animals free rein of their home.

  In a little while, Stuart came after her. He'd not only washed his face and hands. He'd taken off the shirt he'd worn to town and stripped the top of his long Johns down, so the cotton arms dangled with his suspenders to his knees, and bathed the whole upper half of his body.

  “I'm sorry, lass,” he said again, wrapping her in his arms from behind as she stirred the stew on the stove. He seemed to be saying that a lot, lately. But when he held her like that with his big, bare arms, propped his chin on her shoulder, she could accept any number of apologies.

  “So if the sheriff won't help us, what wil we do?” she asked, stil stirring the stew.

  Stuart's “I don't know” sounded so forlorn, though, that she moved the stew aside and turned around into his beautiful bare chest, his loving arms, instead. She lifted her face to his, happily accepted his kisses, sank against him. And when he drew her to their bed, she lay back and welcomed him into her body as wel , even more for the relief it might bring him than the pleasure it would bring her.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Evangeline Taylor could not remember ever having a picnic, much less on a sheep farm. She sat quietly on a corner of the bright blanket young Mrs. MacCal um had spread near a bed of wild violets, and marveled at this latest luxury. The cool sweetness of lemonade; the delicacy of little sandwiches with their crusts cut off; these weren't what most amazed her.

  Garrison and MacCal um girls alike, from those too young for school to those old enough to marry, laughed and bounded in the May sunshine like Mariah's lambs. Their lightheartedness, though fascinating to watch, awed her. She wasn't sure she even knew how to just... play. But her greatest source of amazement was that she'd been invited.

  It was not as if she and Mariah, despite the delightful winter afternoon they'd spent together, were truly friends ... were they? Mariah, across the blanket and beside her mother, was four years older, after al . And married. She politely asked after Evangeline's homework, her activities, even the weather. But Evangeline could think of nothing worthwhile to relate. Final y it occurred to her to ask after Mariah—and then she was able to sit back and listen.

  Listen, and enjoy the happiness that surrounded her as surely as sunshine, softly chirring insects, and the perfume of grass and wildflowers.

  “It was amazing!” Mariah told them, continuing with her tale of her last few weeks as a sheep farmer's wife. “Lambs everywhere! And they're such sil y creatures. ...”

  “Oh are they?” Mrs. Garrison pushed the nose of Mariah's own lamb away from her sandwich once again.

  “Pet! Behave yourself! Come here and see what I have for you....” Mariah easily distracted the lamb by offering him a bottle of milk. In one bound, the lamb hopped over to her and drank

  greedily, wagging his stubby little tail so hard he wiggled.

  “Wel , of course Pet is sil y,” agreed Mariah, scratching fondly behind the lamb's cottony white ears.

  "He thinks I'm his mother—at least, that's what Stuart says. Once lambing started in earnest, Pet was to
o old to be adopted by any of the other ewes. But the other babies are very sil y, too.

  Just last Sunday, something white started to chase us—and it was a lamb! Stuart says likely it fel asleep somewhere and its mother wandered away. Can you imagine a mother leaving her baby like that?"

  “No,” said Mrs. Garrison simply.

  Evangeline could—she'd seen it happen. But she would not say so.

  "Sometimes they'l stick their heads right down prairie-dog holes, and the dirt fal s in and they get stuck that way until we rescue them. And you've seen how they hop about. No matter what mood I'm in, it always makes me laugh to watch them. Even Stuart smiles."

  “Even Stuart?” teased her mother, briefly catching Evangeline's gaze.

  Mariah ducked, blushing. "Wel ... he's been around lambs al his life. But he said that even so, spring never lasts long enough."

  Little Elise ran up to the blanket with her new playmate, Rose MacCal um, by the hand. "May I have a pet lamb too?"

  “No,” said Mariah and her mother both, at the same time.

  Mariah, thought Evangeline, managed to mention her new husband quite often. Once a woman married, her husband's interests became her own, but this seemed more than that... as if she just liked the sound of Stuart's name. She always seemed happy when she mentioned him

  Mariah even sounded happy talking about hard work.

  "Of course, it wasn't al nice. Some of the lambs died, or were abandoned—Stuart got some of the ewes without babies to adopt those. And then he and Douglas cut off every single lamb's tail! I helped, but I didn't enjoy it; I put the hot pine pitch on al that was left of their little tails. But then I could give them back to their mothers, which was better."

  Evangeline supposed it would be.

  “Stuart said it had to be done, to keep them clean, but I felt badly anyway. Especial y ...”

  But she stopped herself. Mrs. Garrison raised her eyebrows, curious. Evangeline, sensing Mariah's embarrassment, turned to look for Victoria, giving them a moment's privacy.

  “Especial y the little boy lambs,” murmured Mariah to her mother.