Thicker than Blood

by C. J. Darlington

  Chapter 2

  Blood dripped down Beth Eckert’s arm and fell off her elbow to the barn floor. May Williams stood poised beside her, ready to help as Beth sliced through the sedated but still conscious and standing heifer’s side.

  With the practiced ease of a veterinarian twice her age, Beth quickly cut through the muscle and peritoneum with sterile scissors and plunged her bare goose-bumped arms into the abdominal cavity. The scalpel was secured to her wrist to keep from losing it inside the animal. She would locate the uterus, cut through, and pull out the calf’s back legs.

  “Nice and warm now?” May joked. Beth had peeled down to a T-shirt and lined vest, and in this frigid weather May didn’t envy her.

  “Oh, you bet,” Beth grunted.

  May chuckled, glancing at Ruth Santos standing on the other side of Beth. Her bony hands stroked the Hereford’s neck.

  “Suave hija, esta bien,” Ruth whispered to the animal.

  Nearly seventy, Ruth was May’s partner in the Triple Cross Ranch. And even though May had twelve years of ranching under her belt, she still felt like a greenhorn next to Ruth, who’d lived on ranches since she was a kid. It was in times like these that Ruth’s decades of experience made a difference. Ruth woke the vet tonight. May would’ve held off and given the heifer more time in labor. In this case waiting could have meant the death of the calf, the mother, or maybe even both. Even now they could only pray the calf was still alive.

  Beth slit the uterus and pulled out the calf’s first hind foot. It hung from the surgical opening, part of the amniotic sac still wrapped around its hoof. In seconds she’d located the other and withdrew it as well. Ruth and May each grabbed a slimy leg. While Beth held the incision open with bloody hands, they lifted the brown and white calf from its mother’s side and gently laid him in the straw. Steam rose from his motionless form.

  Ruth was instantly on her knees beside the animal. “He’s not breathing.”

  “Come on, boy.” May tickled the calf’s nose with a piece of straw.

  Ruth toweled him down to increase circulation.

  The animal’s chest remained still.

  “Does he have a heartbeat?” Beth asked.

  May rested her fingers on the calf’s left side, right below the rib cage. “Yeah, he’s alive.”

  “Hold him upside down by the back legs. He probably has fluid in his air passages.”

  Together May and Ruth did as they were told, the limp calf dangling in the air between them. May was holding most of the weight and felt the muscles in her back and shoulders flex. Even though she was five feet eight and strong from years of working outside, holding up an eighty-pound calf took some brawn.

  After thirty seconds they lowered him to the ground. This time May used the towel, and Ruth coaxed the calf to sneeze with a piece straw.

  Suddenly the calf coughed, phlegm spurting from his nose and mouth all over her boot.

  “There you go, boy. There you go.” May rubbed more furiously, and Ruth cleared away the mucous with her fingers.

  The calf sneezed, then coughed again, his eyes cracking open. May never tired of watching an animal see the world for the first time.

  “He’s gonna make it.” She let out a sigh of relief, cleaning him off with the towel like his mother would’ve done with her tongue had she been birthing him out in the field.

  In a few moments the calf was breathing normally.

  “No way she could’ve had him on her own,” Beth said, sewing up the uterus. “Wouldn’t have made it past her hips.”

  When she finished, May helped load Beth’s instruments into her truck. It was two hours before dawn. “How much?” she asked.

  Beth shut the tailgate and walked around the truck to the driver’s door. She opened it, and the cab light blinked on, illuminating her face. Her raven hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and dried cow’s blood smudged her cheek. She pulled her down parka off the front seat and quickly slipped it on. “We’ll deal with that later. You’ve got enough going on.”

  “I’d rather settle it now, if you don’t mind. We don’t need any more debts hanging around.” May tried to laugh about it, even though there was no money. They really couldn’t afford this. But if the bill wasn’t paid now, it probably never would be, and May wasn’t going to owe money to her best friend. Something else would have to give instead.

  “May, let’s—”

  “How much?”

  Beth was about to protest further, but May stopped her with an upraised hand. Her friend mumbled a figure. It was much lower than May knew it should’ve been.

  May scribbled out a check and handed it to Beth. “Stay for coffee?”

  “Thanks,” Beth said, climbing into her truck. “But I’m gonna go for some sleep. You could get a couple hours yourself before sunrise.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Beth started the truck. “Try and take care of yourself.”

  “You got it.” She waved good-bye and started for the small house she and Ruth shared.

  Ruth was already inside. Their only ranch hand was taking the next shift checking the expectant cows so they could both go back to bed. They checked the herd every three hours during calving season to catch any difficulties a cow might experience, like what happened tonight. It was always a long, grueling two months.

  Ruth poured two mugs of coffee and brought them to the kitchen table as May fell into a chair. Unlike Ruth, she usually couldn’t drink coffee and go straight to bed. But tonight May knew she couldn’t sleep anyway, so the caffeine wouldn’t matter.

  They sat across from each other, silent and staring at the worn table surface. May guessed they were thinking about the same thing.

  “Can’t we do something?” She could almost repeat verbatim the bank’s demand letter they’d received two days ago certified mail, even with all the legalese. She’d read it over and over, searching for a loophole and hoping somehow she’d misunderstood.

  “Not without $250,000.”

  This wasn’t the first time the ranch had experienced financial trouble. Back when May first started working here for Ruth, things had been tight, but the insurance money May saved from her parents’ death was enough to get the bank off their backs for a little while and buy her partnership into the ranch.

  “They know we can’t come up with it.” May closed her eyes as emotion rose in her throat. Cattle prices last fall weren’t what they’d expected, and the ranch didn’t break even. No matter how hard they’d scraped, they hadn’t made the full mortgage payments for over six months. Now the bank was calling the whole debt.

  “God’ll take care of us,” Ruth said.

  “If we lose the ranch, I don’t know what I’ll do. I can’t do anything else.”

  “You could, chica.” Ruth rested her calloused hand on May’s. “I’m the one who’s too old to change.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You’re young. You could start again.”

  May leaned forward, squeezing Ruth’s fingers. “You can’t lose this place. Not after the years you and Luis put into it.”

  “Somehow the Lord will take care of us. We have to trust Him.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  The older woman stood stiffly and patted May’s shoulder. “Some sleep might help.”

  May tried to smile, but she knew any chance of her sleeping again was long gone.

  After Ruth went to bed, May dug out the bank’s letter. How could they come up with this kind of money? She snatched the calendar off the wall, the one Walker’s Feed Store gave out every year with the American landscape scenes. She set it on the table in front of her. They couldn’t. There was no way.

  Tapping her finger on yesterday’s date, she was about to start counting forward to the bank’s deadline sixty days from now when she read her own scrawled words: C’s birthday.

  May rubbed her temples at the reminder. Every year she hoped Christy would find some way to contact her, some
way to let her know she was safe. But for the past fifteen there had been nothing but silence, and she’d just about given up hope of ever seeing her sister again. Was Christy even still alive?

  She slid her chair back across the worn linoleum and knelt beside it. The floor felt hard and cold against her knees. Tears filled her eyes, and she buried her head in her arms on the seat of the chair. How could she trust the Lord when her dreams were crumbling before her eyes?

  In the silence of a house that soon might not be hers May prayed for a long time.

  ***

  This time it was a rare copy of Huckleberry Finn that was missing from Dawson’s Book Barn. Hunter Dawson tried not to think about it as he perused Ted’s cartons of books to see what the store could use, but it gnawed at him anyway. It had vanished right out of a display case, unlike the other two this month that were swiped off the shelves. The thief was getting bolder, and this one made it close to a grand sucked down the drain.

  Hunter barely glanced at the hopeful twenty-something scout’s last box of pocket paperbacks. The store didn’t buy many of them, and he gestured toward the two stacks of books he had chosen to purchase. Piled with the rest of the yet-to-be-priced recent acquisitions on the antique table in the middle of the Barn’s packed entrance room, he wondered if one of them would be the thief’s next target. “Afraid this’ll be all today,” he said to Ted, who hovered near his shoulder. “I can give you forty-five for them.”

  He’d limited his selection to hardcover copies. General fare mostly. A few popular novels, a scattering of juvenile series books like the Hardy Boys, two cookbooks, an Andrew Wyeth art title, and a few others.

  With one finger Ted nudged his glasses off the tip of his nose. “Nothing real valuable?”

  Hunter skimmed the books. Ted was just starting out. It was the second time he’d brought books into the store, and Hunter always tried to offer helpful advice to new scouts. They were an important asset to any used bookstore. They came to you, bringing books from wherever they could get them for cheap. When they got good and picked books specifically with your store in mind, they were invaluable.

  “I’m probably giving you the most for this one here.” Hunter picked up the art title. “The rest are bread and butter. Good to have around but not rare.”

  Ted stacked up the rejected boxes to take back to his car.

  “Check’ll be waiting,” Hunter said.

  A lady patron appeared, a tower of books sandwiched between her chin and arms. “I can never leave empty-handed,” she said, dropping the books in front of the register with a huff.

  “That’s the way we plan it,” Hunter said, leaving the pricing table to ring up her purchases. He’d been handling the register besides his managerial duties this morning without too much trouble. But he wished he knew where Christy was. This was her job, and she should have been in hours ago.

  When the customer and Ted were gone, Hunter reached for the phone to try Christy again, but his father walked into the room before he could dial. Hunter quickly replaced the receiver. “Hey, Pop.”

  Robert Dawson set a tweed touring cap on his white head. “I’ll be out till four. Think you can hold down the fort?”

  “Sure thing.”

  By now Pop trusted Hunter enough to let him oversee most of the Barn’s sales and book buying, but Pop still had the final say in everything, including employees. That’s why Hunter didn’t mention Christy’s tardiness. She had too much potential to let a few late days get in the way. The love of books was ingrained in her heart, the same way it was in Hunter’s. And it wasn’t just the enjoyment of reading. That was part of it, but he’d gotten to the point where the musty smell of old pages thrilled him. Cradling a two-hundred-year-old leather volume gave him a rush like a drug.

  Some people thought he was odd. Even Pop made fun of him once in a while, but Christy understood. That’s one of the reasons he’d hired her four years ago.

  And it was also why he was grooming her for book buying. Up until now Hunter and Pop were the only ones with that responsibility, and it hadn’t been easy convincing Pop that Christy could handle it.

  Pop had been buying estates since he’d acquired and renovated the century old dairy barn thirty-six years ago. And even though people sold their old books on eBay and other online selling sites much more now, the Barn still got calls to make offers on entire libraries. Hunter used to go to them by himself, but in the last few months he’d been taking Christy. He always enjoyed it when they had a job together, and he found himself looking forward to each one. She’d learned quickly, and he knew she was ready to tackle an appointment by herself.

  Her first was scheduled in a week. She’d be evaluating the books, making an offer, and if it was accepted, packing them out. All without him. He hadn’t seen this library, but he trusted Christy’s judgment.

  Hunter waited for Pop to leave before trying her number again. The answering machine picked up. He didn’t bother leaving another message.

  “Busy morning?” Vince’s voice boomed from the storeroom doorway behind him.

  Hunter ignored him as long as he could and returned to the pricing table. “Not too bad.”

  Vince came and stood beside him. “Your dad still here?”

  “Just left,” Hunter said without looking up.

  “When you see him, let him know I want to talk to him.”

  “He’ll be out till four.”

  “Whenever.”

  Hunter picked up the Wyeth book he’d purchased from Ted. Vince always made it a point to discredit his authority by going directly to Pop. Maybe he still thought of Hunter as the owner’s kid or his old girlfriend Abby’s kid brother. Anything but his boss.

  “Make sure those books from the Thornton estate get online,” Hunter called as Vince walked away.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “They’ve been sitting up there for a month.”

  Off limits to the public, half of the second floor of the Barn was devoted to the online department, and all quality volumes were cataloged there first before making it to the shelves. The goal was to keep the charisma of antiquity while staying with the digital times, so all computers were kept hidden as much as possible.

  “Got it,” Vince said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  Hunter removed a sharpened pencil from his back pocket and neatly wrote a price of forty dollars on the flyleaf of the Wyeth. “Make sure of it.”

  Vince swung around to face him again in Columbo-like fashion. “By the way, Christy won’t be in today.”

  Hunter met the man’s granite eyes. “Why not?”

  “That flu thing’s been getting around. She wasn’t feeling well.” Vince paused, then added, “She was still sound asleep when I left.”

  Knowing that last statement was meant to surprise him, Hunter didn’t give Vince the satisfaction of a reaction. He lifted the nearest book, a red spiral-bound Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, like he didn’t care.

  But he did. When Vince disappeared into the bowels of the store, Hunter whacked the cookbook onto the table. He thought Christy left Vince weeks ago.

  ***

  May pushed her key into the lock of Great-aunt Edna’s front door, and a frenzy of barking exploded from inside. Peering through the door’s textured glass, she could barely make out Scribbles, Auntie’s black and white terrier mix, jumping at her. May opened the door, stepped inside, and stooped to pet the twirling dog. He rolled onto his back at her touch. “Miss me, boy? Where’s Auntie?”

  The tiny old woman appeared at the top of the staircase in polyester pants and a sequined sweatshirt. When she saw May, every line in her face turned up, and she let out a cute squeak as she slowly started down.

  May stood and gave her a big hug as soon as she reached the bottom. She breathed in the old woman’s familiar scent of Downy fabric softener and facial cream, glad Ruth had encouraged her to take the morning off for this visit. Just seeing Aunt Edna made her feel better. And the two-h
our drive up to Monument had provided plenty of thinking time.

  “What a wonderful surprise!” Auntie said, cupping May’s chin in her hands. “But is everything all right? You look troubled.”

  May cracked a smile. “I never could hide anything from you.”

  Auntie glanced down at Scribbles. Laughing, May scratched the dog again. She’d surprised Auntie with Scribbles three Christmases ago. At least she thought she did. Later she found out Auntie’s Bible study leader volunteered at the animal shelter and had accidentally revealed her secret.

  Aunt Edna’s voice turned serious. “It’s the ranch, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. And Chris. I wanted to talk to you about her.”

  May wrapped her arm across Auntie’s bony shoulders, and together they walked into the kitchen where a teakettle was just starting to sing on the stove. This house had been her home for years after her parents died and Auntie took her in. More than one person called the woman crazy for opening her house to an angry teenager, but May thanked God she had. She wouldn’t be where she was today if it wasn’t for the kindness of Aunt Edna.

  “I love being here, Auntie. At least this place—and you—will stay the same even if nothing else does.”

  “You’re always welcome,” Auntie said, shuffling toward the stove.

  May quickly stopped her. “Let me do that.” She drew a box of Bigelow English Breakfast tea bags from the cabinet above the stove. Dried sachets of basil hung from the knobs, compliments of the greenhouse window. Auntie always did have a green thumb, keeping potted ficus and Christmas cacti in almost every room.

  Aunt Edna eased into a kitchen chair. “Christy’s been on my heart too.”

  “Hard to believe I have a sister out there somewhere.”

  “I so wish I could’ve had you both here with me.”

  What would that have been like? To graduate from high school with her sister there to hoot and holler when they called her name. To have had Chris at her baptism. May still remembered looking out at the crowd that day, her heart aching to fill the hole only her sister could.

  May took out two mugs, placed a tea bag in each, then poured the boiling water on top. She cracked the door of the fridge plastered with Aunt Edna’s collection of dog breed magnets and pulled out the 2 percent milk. “I want to find her,” she said, dribbling some milk in her tea and giving Auntie’s a pinch of sugar. She brought both cups over to the table. “But I’m scared of being hurt all over again.”