Deborah Camp (15 page)

“Ummm …” She glanced up, searching for the right word. “Haw?” She smiled triumphantly when the mules veered left. “I did it!”

“Very good,” he said and his voice was light with laughter. “We’re nearing the end of the row. You want them to stop and make a sharp right.”

“Yes, yes.” She concentrated mightily as the mules came to the end of the row. “Whoa-gee, gee, gee, gee.”

“Hiyup,” Grandy called softly to set the mules at a straight line once they’d completed the turn. “Good, Zanna.” He laid one hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I think you’ve got the hang of it, so I’ll go hitch up the other two and be back in a few minutes.”

“Okay. Oh, this is so wonderful! We’ll have this field ready for planting in no time! I love farming.”

He chuckled ruefully. “Right. Let’s see how much you love it at the end of the day.”

*     *     *

Zanna fell back on the carpet of grass, making Grandy laugh warmly. He bent his knees, crossed his arms on them, and let his heavy head fall forward.

“I thought you loved farming,” he said, unable to resist a chance to rub her nose in it.

“I did … do.” Zanna closed her eyes. Never in her life had she been so bone-weary and soiled. She knew that her bathwater would be gray tonight after she stepped out of it. “If it weren’t so hot, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Don’t you get hot and tired riding the range?”

“Yes, but not like this. When you’re riding, you create a breeze, but out here …” She raised her head long enough to stare at the furrows of earth. “There’s no breeze and no shade. Only sun, sun, and more sun.” She removed her straw bonnet to use as a makeshift fan. Sighing, she sprawled again under the sheltering oak. “My arms ache, my shoulders ache, and my back! Even my
hands
are sore.”

“Poor little darlin’,” Grandy mumbled with little sympathy.

Zanna rolled onto her side and propped her head in one hand to look at him. Huddled under the huge tree as he was, Zanna could almost picture him as a small boy on a farm. Precocious, she thought, but a hard worker. She looked from him to the field and wondered why he despised what he was so good at doing.

“Where’s your family?” she asked and realized she’d struck a nerve when his head bounced up and his hazel eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason.” She shrugged, then winced when her shoulder muscles burned. “I was just wondering if they knew you’d been in jail.”

“They’re all dead.”

Zanna sucked in her breath, knowing the pain of being
alone in the world. “So are mine. What happened to your family?”

“My mother and three sisters died in a house fire,” he recited tonelessly. “My father and two brothers died during the war.”

“How terrible for you!” Zanna ducked her head to see his distant gaze. “Did your mother die when you were a youngster?”

“No. I left the family when I was just a few weeks shy of my fourteenth year.”

“So young!” She checked the urge to reach out to him. “Why so young?”

“It was my decision.” Again he looked out over the field and his gaze hardened. “I couldn’t stand it another day there. I had to leave.”

“Jumping fences,” Zanna murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “Tell me about that farm and why you hated it so. What was so terrible to make a young boy leave his family?”

He extended one leg and leaned back against the tree trunk. “What do you care?”

“Please. I want to know.”

He turned to look at her and Zanna let him, refusing to avert her gaze even though he made her breathless. She nodded, trying to assure him she was sincere in wanting to know him better. The hard glint in his eyes softened.

“My father,” he said simply.

“What about him?”

“I hated him.”

“Oh, I see.” She sat up, looping her arms around her knees.

“Do you?”

“Yes.” Oh, yes, she thought. She knew the dark emotion intimately. It had been her most constant companion for many years.

“My father was a bully,” Grandy said, plucking a long-stemmed
weed and placing it between his parched lips. The tip twirled like the spokes of a parasol. “He picked on those weaker than him—my mother, my brothers and sisters, me. I can’t begin to tell you the times I stepped in to take a beating so that he’d leave my mother alone.”

Zanna pressed her knuckles to her lips as horror gaped wide within her. A connection formed until she felt bound to Grandy by bloody, tarnished chains.

“I used to like working in the fields because it was peaceful,” Grandy continued. “Oh, once in a while my pa would blow up and cuff me, but mostly he was too busy to bully anyone during the day. It was at night after he’d had a few swallows of rotgut that he got mean and looked for something to beat. He prided himself on having a short fuse, as if his failure to control his temper made him more manly.”

“Yes, I’ve known men like that.”

“Stupid, isn’t it?” He shook his head as he continued to chew on the weed and twirl it with the tip of his tongue. “One day he really blew his stack over something … I can’t remember what exactly. All I remember is that he was so mad at my mother he was going to kill her. He chased her from the house out to the field where I was planting cotton. He had a pitchfork and he kept stabbing the air with it. Ma begged me to keep him away from her. I knew she was really frightened because she’d never asked me to do that before. She’d always tried to keep me from getting hit by him, but that day she was pleading with me to stand between them. She was so scared … so terrified of him that I … well, I’ll never forget how she looked.”

The tears shimmering in his eyes and roughing his voice sent a wave of tenderness through Zanna. She inched closer and laid a hand on his forearm, feeling everlastingly grateful when he didn’t protest or pull away from her, but accepted her offering of sympathy. A knot formed in her throat as she watched him struggle with his memories.

“I stood up to him. I told him he wasn’t going to lay
one hand on her. He backhanded me.” He shook his head, dislodging some of the tears. They rolled down his cheeks unheeded, mixing with droplets of perspiration. “He was a wild man. I remember I was scared. I was just a kid, no match for a full-grown man on a rampage, but I had a lot of guts in those days. He got a few good licks in and I knew I wasn’t long for the world if I didn’t do something quick. I got my hands on the pitchfork and gave him a swift kick between the legs. He doubled over and I aimed that pitchfork at his black heart. I wanted to end it—him—forever.”

She squeezed his forearm, sensing his anguish, feeling his pain and desperation.

“But Ma stopped me,” he said, his voice bitter.

“Your mother stopped you?”

“Yes. She wrenched the pitchfork from my hands and pushed me away from him.” Hatred seeped into his voice, as poisonous as jimsonweed.

“She just didn’t want you to do something like that. Killing your own father would be something you wouldn’t be able to live with. She was protecting you.”

“No.” His hazel eyes had hardened again. “She wasn’t protecting me. She was protecting
him
. She was protecting that rotten-to-the-core bastard.”

“Maybe she just didn’t want to see anyone killed. She was probably afraid you’d only injure him and he’d
really
come after you then.”

“No, it wasn’t like that. I wish it had been.” He leaned back against the tree and his chest rose and fell with his heavy sigh. His shirt stuck to him, molding to his damp skin. “She defended him and told me to back off. She bent over him in concern and helped him back to the house.” He drew a sharp breath that was very near a sob. “She left me standing out there in the field crying my heart out because I thought I’d done something wrong. I’d tried to help her and she’d turned her back on me.” He closed his eyes, swallowing hard. “I couldn’t take any
more. In that instant I knew that living with them was either going to make me crazy or it was going to kill me. So I left. I slipped into the house, gathered up a few things, and hit the trail. I felt old and used up. I wanted to be something I’d never been before.” He regarded her with red-rimmed eyes. “I wanted to be young and carefree.”

“And were you … after you left that cotton field?”

“Yes.” His smile seemed incongruous with the sheen of tears in his eyes. “I was a brat and I loved every minute of it.” He sighed again and ran a hand down his face. “I miss it.”

She followed his gaze across the field to the purple horizon. Out there he had found his youth and she had dragged him back to the battlefields of his boyhood, she thought, and the knot in her throat tightened. She remembered his plea not to make him plant cotton and her own belief that he was merely being stubborn and lazy.

“What does a thirteen-year-old brat do to make a living?” she asked, pulling away from her guilt.

“I traveled from place to place,” he said. “Okay, I stole things. Food, clothes, whatever I needed. Sometimes I got work sweeping out stores or mucking stalls. Later on I joined up with a ranch and learned to cook. I worked on the chuck wagon for a good while until I learned I had a special talent for the sleight of hand.” He held out his hands, turning them palm up, flexing his fingers, then curling them into fists. “Look at that. Calluses, dirt, and blisters. They sure don’t look like a gambler’s hands now, do they?”

“No, they don’t, but there’s certainly nothing wrong with making an
honest
living.”

He lifted his brows. “I’ll have you know, sweetheart, that I
was
making an honest living. True, I cheated at cards when I began my career, but as my skill increased, my need to cheat decreased and finally ceased altogether. A professional doesn’t have to tip the scales in his favor
because he already has an edge by means of his higher intelligence and knowledge of the game.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“Don’t be so jaded about something you know nothing about.”

“I know enough. Men go to saloons to drink and gamble away their money while their wives and children starve.”

He rolled his eyes. “I had no family to starve. I had a good time and didn’t harm a soul doing it. What’s so terrible about that?”

She thought for a few moments and shrugged. “Nothing, I suppose.”

“Thank you,” he said, bestowing a smile. “Your concession is greatly appreciated.”

“Oh, you!” Her hand still rested on his arm and she let it slip off, aware of the bonding she felt toward him. Was it possible they could be friends? Dare she hope to build such a bridge between them? “I feel slightly guilty,” she confessed.

“Only slightly?”

“Yes.” She allowed a fleeting smile. “But your hatred for the farm, and cotton fields in particular, isn’t rational. You’re so very good at tilling the soil, working with animals, and understanding nature. Perhaps you’ve been going against your own nature in pretending to be more comfortable at a card table.”

“You might find this hard to believe, but I enjoyed my life before the law stampeded me.” His glance was as cold as stone, but softened as he shared his memories. “The music, the flash of satin, the allure of lace, the sharp bite of good liquor going down.” His chest rose and fell with his wistful sigh. “The good life.”

“That led you to ruin,” Zanna tacked on. “Landed you in a jail cell and a date with a hangman’s noose, didn’t it?”

“I was framed.”

“Ha! That’s what every outlaw says.”

“Outlaw?” He released a bark of laughter. “That’s the first time I’ve ever been called
that
.”

“Perhaps the word was poorly chosen,” she admitted, then examined him from the corner of her eye. She tried to paint a mental picture of how he must have looked in fancy clothes. “How much money did you make as a gambler?”

“More than I’m making as a farmer,” he rejoined, grinned, then lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I lived well.”

“And there were lots of women?” she asked, staring at her tightly clasped hands and wishing she hadn’t spoken the question. She felt his intense scrutiny and knew she was blushing.

“More women than I’ve had as a farmer,” he said and she knew he was grinning again, although she couldn’t bring herself to look. “I’m hungry.”

She blinked and her gaze flew to his face. Yes, he was grinning, but not with malice, only friendliness. Zanna was taken aback by his disarmingly natural smile, and she was returning it before she could help herself. “I’m tired.”

“I told you so.” He popped up to his feet and extended a hand to help her rise. “I’ll cook. You can watch. Someday, God willing, you might learn how to prepare a decent meal.”

“I am learning—truly.”

“Truly?” he mocked.

“Yes.” She tipped up her chin, taking his teasing, then his thumb caressed the top of her hand and she shivered, not realizing until that moment that he hadn’t let her go once she was standing. Zanna found herself captured by his hazel eyes, by the gold starburst around his irises. She found warmth there and wanted to get closer to the source.

“Zanna, I didn’t tell you about my family so I could soften you up and get your sympathy.”

“I know,” she said in a breathy whisper.

“I’ve never talked about them to anyone, but being out here brought it all back.” His gaze swept the field. The teams of mules stood docilely, swishing aside flies with their tails. Sarge nickered and raised his head. The others responded, their ears pricking forward, straining to catch what Sarge had already heard. “Maybe I wanted you to understand that my memories of this life are so terrible that I could never be happy here.”

“What happened back then can’t hurt you now. You can start over and—”

“I don’t want to start over. I liked what I had. I liked traveling and meeting—” A shadow passed over his face as he stared past her. “Now what the hell does he want?”

Duncan Hathaway reminded Grandy of his father. The unpleasant cast to the face, the thin lips, the cold black eyes, and the bully’s swagger. Duncan tipped back his hat to clear his face of shadow and his smile was thoroughly unpleasant.