“I feel that way too. Mac, you are so amazing to me. Anyone else would have thrown up their hands, declared bankruptcy and walked away from this mess.”
That wasn’t any great mystery to him. “I’ve been…I’ve been indoctrinated to be loyal to this family, this legendary thing. This land, it’s…”
“Part of you. It would be like walking away from your own arm. I get it, baby, I do, but that does not take away the fact that someone else wouldn’t have one bit of a problem walking away. Look at Wayne, and he’s a good man, but he would be fine with selling. He tried to get you to sell.”
“And he’s coming to help. He could have said no to that, Leo. I know you think he’s doing it for me, but there’s part of him that is still here too. As much as he hates it, it’s here.”
“I s’pose so. He’s a good man too, Mac. Your mother must have been an incredible person.”
Mac thought on her face, the face that wanted to fade from his memory, but he wouldn’t let it. “She worked hard, my mama. Daddy used to brag on her that she could out work any hand on the ranch, and it was true. She did her thing at the house, ya know, cookin’, keepin’ us in clean clothes and fresh towels, but when her work in the house was finished, she was out there, brandin’, herdin’. He tried to shame us with it, tellin’ us a woman was a better hand than us, but we didn’t care a bit. She was somethin’.”
A kiss to his cheek, then to his lips, Leo lingered there, chasing away demons. “I’m sure she was proud of you.”
“She was. It was a blow, her dyin’. So young, too, but she told us it was her time and she was settled with it. She had breast cancer, ya know, and she’d get that chemo treatment, but after she was done throwin’ up, she’d head out to her garden and weed for two hours or more. Said it helped, but I knew better. Stubborn to the end, she refused to let anythin’ get her down for too long.”
“Like her son.”
The following day, the air was crisp and cold as he hugged his brother, sister-in-law and oldest nephew. “Where’s your brother and sister?”
“They’re too little,” Cecil declared, proudly finishing, “but I’m here to help.”
“Good man,” Mac told him, patting his back. Black wavy hair and blue eyes, the tallness of both his parents, the smile of his mother. He took the best of Shan and Wayne, making him a handsome and brilliant kid.
“Shan’s parents are taking them for the next couple weeks ‘til we get all this mess sorted. I have off work, she does. You owe us a vacation, brother.”
“We get this resort, here, up and runnin’ and you can stay for free.”
Shan rolled her eyes to that, mocking, “Oh goody, a dusty old ranch is just the place I want to relax.” To Leo, she ordered, “Get that old shed out back of the house cleared out first thing. I can set up a table and some filing boxes up in there. I’ll start sorting out the ranch ledgers and business paperwork from the personal items, then sub categorizing it from there. You men get busy bringing it all to me, then you can start on getting the house ready for the guests.”
Wayne saluted her, getting a very nasty look in return, but it was Leo who had to jab, “When did you get so bossy?”
“Well, let’s see, you made me stop being a doormat, then I got married and had a bunch of kids, who, by the way, are better behaved than you all. See who is already on his way to the barn to get the things I’ve asked for?”
Mac turned to see Cecil walking off to the barn, and he laughed, skipping a little as he called back, “On it, Shan!”
It took three hours to get everything from the loft, the four of them working until every last piece of paper was gathered around Shan. She was already hard at work, neat stacks over the three card tables she’d found somewhere.
“This is it, right? I mean, even in the house, if you find something, bring it to me.”
Leo sighed as they left the shed. “I hate shirking my duties, but I’m really glad she’s going through those papers and not me yet. I’ll help all I can, but my head’s not in it.”
Stopping to pack some things in his truck for them to use to fix three long pieces of fencing, he understood why. It was the same reason he didn’t want to help her. “What we’re doin’, gettin’ things fixed up, we’re concentrated on the future. Can’t suffer the past.”
“That’s very poignant,” Leo complimented, blinking at him like he admired him so much, which made Mac regret his words.
“Shut up,” he huffed, turning away to keep Leo from seeing how his reaction affected him.
Leo grabbed onto both cheeks of his ass, whispering in his ear, “You’re so hot when you blush.”
“Shut. Up!”
Wayne came out of the house with a cooler, his son tagging along behind him. “I got our lunch. We can eat there, head back and start on clearing the bedrooms.”
Cecil piped, “I call the bologna.”
“What did your mom make?”
Answering his uncle, he said, “Tuna. Gross.”
Mac loved watching his nephew working. A little man is what he was, more at home on the ranch than he’d ever been, or Wayne. Like he was in his own world, without a word of prompting from the adults, Cecil knew what to do, and did it well.
Pulling his brother aside, Mac asked, “What’s he wanna be?”
“He wants to be a fuckin’ cowboy, but realistically, he wants to be a vet. He loves animals, wants to cure all their illnesses. I’m sure next week, it’ll be something else.”
Mac didn’t think so. Cecil loved his parents, and likely knew of their disdain for the ranch and of Wayne’s family history. Cecil would probably not tell them anything about his true desires to live on a ranch, but it was in the blood.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure he will.”
Mac watched his nephew, knowing what it felt like, wanting something and his parents not understanding. Guilt washed over him, knowing that no matter what, he’d missed too much time with his nephews and niece. They were important to him, and he should have seen them more.
That was one thing he could remedy in the collage of things on his wall that were stuck there with super glue. The wall in his mind, pictures glaring at him, accusing him. Looming over him like a dark, twister-filled cloud.
“You okay?” Leo was there, like he was reading Mac’s mind. “If you need me, you need to tell me. You look…a little fragile.”
“I am. A lot fragile, but I don’t have time to lick wounds right now.”
“Fair enough. Later, the camper, we’ll talk, we’ll fuck, we’ll move some of those wounds around and deal with them. You need to stop burying them all, Mac.”
He thought he should bury all of them so deep, they wouldn’t surface again in the next fifty years or more. “I’ll try.”
When they started on the house, he and Wayne took their respective rooms, but Wayne soon came into Mac’s, perching on the wooden chair that had once been in front of the little desk he’d had for his schoolwork. “Dad moved all my shit out of there. Know where it might be?”
Chuckling, Mac waved a hand over the boxes in his own room. “Here? One of the sheds? Burned it? Who the hell knows?”
“Yours too? What a prick that man was. Jesus.”
Mac pushed a box over and sat on it, hoping it didn’t collapse from his weight. The smell of the room, old papers, cardboard, mildew, and guilt. “He was, but all the money, man, where’d it go? I knew he hated me, but to leave me a mess like this here?”
“He didn’t hate you, Mac. Maybe he wasn’t your biggest fan, but dad loved and showed us the best he could. He just didn’t know how.”
“Don’t blame it on how he was raised. You were raised the same way and look at your kids. They know you love them.”
Rising from his chair, Wayne looked as defeated as Mac felt. “Let’s get a beer, big brother.”
“That’s the best idea you’ve had all day.”
Leo was carrying an armful of photo albums in his arms, and Wayne moved from his path down the hal
l. “Where’d you find those?”
“Linen closet,” he grunted. They followed him, and Mac took four off the top, Wayne a few more until they could see Leo’s face. “Thanks. Did she want the pictures out there too?”
“She didn’t say, but we need all that stuff out of here,” Mac reasoned. “Don’t we?”
Leo set the rest of his on the coffee table in the living room, then fell back on the couch. “I don’t know. With the history here, it might be cool for the guests to have them to look through, if they want. I leafed through a couple, and some of the pictures are old. Maybe civil war era.”
“For now, we need them someplace, though. Kitchen. That’s the one room we’re not fixing up so much. We’ll be doing the cooking until we can afford someone else.”
“There’s that little niche where mama used to store her sewing projects to get them off the table for supper,” Wayne said, smiling wistfully. “She always had one, too. Us boys, we put a lot of holes in our pants.”
“Daddy!” Cecil came in the room, both hands on his hips, in a perfect mimic of Shan. “Mama is gonna yell at you! We’re supposed to be working.”
“Oh, honey, come here. We are working. Leo just cleared these out of the closet.” He waved his son over and had him sit on the couch beside him. “These are your ancestors.”
“The racist ones,” he grunted.
Mac had to laugh at that. “Not all of ‘em, or at least I hope not.” He opened one of the albums to see black and white photos pasted in, a piece of brown paper at the bottom listing off the names, Houston Blaylock, Daniel Blaylock, Charlotte Coontz Blaylock. “Grandma Charlotte musta put this one together. That’s her chicken scrawl.”
“I think she did most of these,” Wayne added, pointing to the others. “They all seem to be the same age.”
“Look at Daddy,” Mac said, pointing to a picture of a young Daniel, maybe seven years old.
“He was a cute little thing. Wonder what happened to him.”
Leo pointed at the man and asked, “Could it be him that did it? Made him so angry? He doesn’t look exactly like a cuddly bear himself.”
“Eh, Grandpa Houston was a nice old guy. Course, he didn’t raise us. He coulda been different for his own kid, like Daddy to us.”
Leo opened another book and gasped, handing it to them. “That’s amazing.”
It was a generations picture. “McCully Blaylock, three months old. Daniel, Houston, and Samuel Blaylock, four generations of Blaylock men,” Wayne read. “I almost forgot they were all alive back then. Samuel died before I was born, though.”
“Yeah, I don’t remember too much o’ him, but Grandpa said I was great-grandpa’s favorite. He doted on me, he said.”
“Daddy, he looks like you,” Cecil said, pointing to Houston.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right, honey. You too, come to think of it. Only you’re better lookin’.”
Shan walked into the room and all looked up at her like she’d caught them stealing from the cookie jar. “What the heck is this?”
“We found these for ya, baby,” Wayne lied, getting up and handing her one of the albums. “Putting faces to the names, you know.”
The little twitch of her lips told Mac that she didn’t believe her husband for a second but forgave him anyway. “Uh huh, well, get them out there to the shed. In a corner, then. I don’t have time for them right now. Cecil, you start on the bathroom. Mac, you, Wayne and Leo come with me.”
Filing after her, Mac brought up the rear, nervous as to what they were walking into, but there was no need. Once they got to the shed, He was shocked at how much had been done. “Shan, damn!”
“Language, Mac,” she chided while sitting behind one of the tables. Each of the card tables held neat stacks of papers, then there was a bin filled with ledgers next to her, and another filled with smaller, scrap pieces. “I’ve gone through eight boxes so far, sorted them into stacks. I figure Leo and I can go through and try to make heads or tails of it all when you guys finish up with some of the physical work.” She set her fingers on her lips for a moment while moving her eyes from her husband to Mac. “There are diaries, not many, but some. I think those are for Wayne and Mac to look through, though.”
Wayne walked over to the table, kissing his wife on the top of her head. “Thanks for doin’ all this, baby.”
“Well, it’s not just for you and Mac. It’s for my kids. You see how happy Cecil is to be here.”
Mac latched onto that and added, “He’s welcome any time. In fact, I’d like it if he’d come in the summers and stuff.”
Wayne didn’t seem to like the idea, but Shan out-voted him. “He’d love it. He wants to learn to ride and grow things, all the things that are inside him come from this place, whether I like it or not. History is a sticky thing. There’s so much wrong, but there are good things in the middle of all that, and if we learn from this history,” she said, placing her hands on the stacks. “Well, we might just be better people for it.”
Before he could help it, Mac went to her, and pulled her from her seat, hugging her tightly. “Thanks, Shan.”
Mac took a break from tearing up the carpeting in the bedroom that was once Wayne’s, leaving that to the others so he could cook supper. He was glad they had plenty of beef, though Shan wasn’t thrilled with it. She warned Wayne and Cecil to enjoy it, they may not have red meat again in the foreseeable future.
Making stew, Mac looked out of the kitchen window, the light in the shed seeping around the door. He wondered what he’d learn from the history, the things that had been hidden away for so long. That may be the biggest mystery of all, why everything had been placed in that loft. There were so many other places they could have been stored.
Leo came in, wrapping his arms around Mac’s middle. “Smells good.”
“Should be done in half an hour or so.”
“Not the food,” he purred. “You.”
Mac spun and was face to face with Leo, who was reeking with sexual energy. “We got about five hours more work ta do. Don’t start what you can’t finish.”
“Oh, I’ll finish,” he promised, licking up Mac’s neck, then chuckling there, warming him. “You aren’t going to get much sleep the next few weeks. I hope your stamina is high.”
Mac nuzzled his neck, kissing there, squeezing him tight. “I hope so too. I don’t want to miss a second of this.”
In a now classical Leo gesture, he took Mac’s face in his hands, not letting him duck away from the stare. “How are you doing with all this, baby? Tell me the truth.”
The truth. How could he tell Leo when he wasn’t really sure himself? “I…don’t know. I think I’m hanging on by a thread. I’m terrified of what we’re going to find in those papers. I mean, why are they hidden away for all this time?”
“I’m nervous too, about that. I’m here, baby. I’m right here to catch you, so if you have to fall, if you can’t hold yourself up, don’t worry. I’m not leaving you alone to take this on.”
That helped more than he could possibly know, but his stomach was still in a knot. “There’s evil here, Leo. It’s here and I don’t know how to stop it, kill it. You said that there might be a way to cleanse this land, and in the process, help me to get past all this mess. What if there ain’t? What if it gets worse?”
“Then I’m here to fight it with you. I’m here, your brother is here. You real family is here. That man who’s nothing but dust in a jar, he’s not calling the shots anymore. I am! And I say we are going to work our asses off to make this place successful, to clean it as best we can of its racist history and make it work for everyone. I’ll take it all, baby. Give it to me, your worry.”
When his voice deepened like that, when his chin rose in defiance, Mac believed he could do anything, and Mac could, by his side, do anything. He smashed his mouth to Leo’s, leaving all the fear and worry in that kiss. Leaving it for Leo.
“I’m going to fuck you so hard tonight, you’ll forget your own name, and then yo
u’ll sleep and not worry about one damn thing. In the morning, we’ll work, we’ll make this place as you want it, not how everyone else in your family wanted it. Forward, baby, ever forward.”
“Forward.”
They sat down to supper in the kitchen, Shan complimenting his food as she crumbled the cornbread he’d made from the package of instant he’d found in the cabinet into her stew. “Meals like this, Mac, that’s what you’re going to need to do for the guests. Give them the real southwest experience. Stew, chili, tortillas, all of it.”
“He took me to this bakery that made those kolache things. It gave me an idea to incorporate advertising for the local cafes and such to boost their business too.”
“Daisy’s,” Wayne sighed. “Best kolaches in Texas. She’s a pistol, Ms. Daisy. I’m sure she’d appreciate it.”
Their trip to town reminded Mac of the other person they’d spoken to. “Did you ever hear o’ Daddy winning gold nuggets, or having some? I guess he pawned a bunch over the years to get money to gamble with.”
“Gold? Daddy? I never…” He stopped, setting his spoon to the side of his bowl. “Shoot, that’s not true. I did see Daddy with a bunch of gold once. I was just a little kid, but he was in the office and Mama sent me to fetch him for supper. He pulled it all in the desk drawer and yelled at me for bothering him, not knockin’.”
“Way back then? He was gambling that long?”
“Guess so. That’s weird, though, right? Who around here would have all that gold?”
Cecil thought this was the most exciting thing he’d heard. “If we find some, can we keep it?”
“We don’t want anything from here, Cec,” he mother scolded. “Especially if it was from gambling and backroom deals.”
He deflated and started to pick at his cornbread, so Mac thought to cheer him up. “How ‘bout we ride out tomorrow, you ‘n me, and we see if that bunch o’ wild turkey is still out on the north eighty?”
“Can we? On the horses?”
His parents exchanged looks, but Shan finally acquiesced, “Fine, but you’re riding with Uncle Mac, not on a horse yourself. Not until you get a little better at riding.”
Remember the Alamo (Legacy Book 1) Page 12