How to Rope a McCoy (Hell Yeah!)

 
              
HOW TO ROPE A MCCOY

          
              
  HELL
YEAH!           

                    
              
  
By    

                          
  
Sable Hunter

This
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or used factiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is
entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2014

Sable
Hunter

All
rights reserved.

www.sablehunter.com

Published
by Beau Coup Publishing

http://beaucoupllcpublishing.com

ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under the International
and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of
this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system
without express written permission from the author/publisher.

Is Texas big enough for more
McCoys
? Hell yeah! Heath McCoy, the oldest cousin of Aron
and his brothers spends his days championing his family. He is no stranger to
heartbreak, the woman he loved left him at the altar. From that moment on,
Heath developed a new attitude -
love'em
and leave '
em
wanting more. Until he meets Cato. Cato is determined to
experience all life has to offer. She is deaf, yet very adept at listening with
her heart. The moment she lays eyes on Heath, she knows he’s the one man who
will mean the world to her. But Heath doesn't want forever, he wants a fling.
So, Cato decides to give him what he wants and hope he falls in love with her
in the process. She takes a gamble on love and the stakes are high. How do you
rope a McCoy? Very carefully. How do you keep him tied? With love.

A
GLIMPSE INTO THE PAST

Our
lives are molded by a series of

 DEFINING
MOMENTS

These are told before the real story begins so you
will know the events which shaped the lives of

Heath and Cato.

Heath
– Into the Storm

           
No one expected the worst. No one ever does. Heath’s heart was hammering as he
drove back toward home. “Please let her be okay, please let her be okay,” he
prayed. The storm surge had been almost twenty-eight fuckin’ feet high. He
couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to face such a massive wall of
water. Ahead of him, it was hard to see anything familiar. There was nothing
left, everything was gone. God, he hoped Belle Chasse had been spared.

           
The home where he’d been born and raised had stood guard over Tiger Bayou since
1836. While his father’s folks now owned a good sized property in West
Louisiana, Belle Chasse had been his mother’s family home. Originally a sugar
plantation, Christian McCoy had taken it a step further—raising cattle, planting
rice, and digging oil and gas wells. He’d ushered the grand old estate into the
twenty-first century. Heath’s mother always said her parents would have rolled
over in their graves if they could see the pumping stations dotting their
historic grounds. But their father, a native Texan, considered oil wells to be
an acceptable form of landscaping.       

           
There was no going fast, no hurrying. Heath maneuvered his faithful red truck
down what used to be a well-kept highway. Now the road was washed out, trees
were down and debris was strewn everywhere. He’d known it was going to be bad.
The weather reporters had forecasted a direct hit and they had been right.
Heath, his father and his brothers, had loaded up five cattle trailers full of
purebred Angus and hauled them to higher ground. They’d made six trips each
over the past two days, struggling to save their herd from the massive
hurricane which was threatening South Louisiana.

           
Heath couldn’t believe his eyes. Slamming on the brakes, he questioned his
vision. There was a dead cow up in a tree, wedged in a fork of the trunk. Her
head hung down at an odd angle, her neck broken. “Lord Almighty,” he breathed.
As if that wasn’t enough, around the next curve his mouth hung open as he
registered what lay in front of him—a freighter sat about fifty feet from the
road, tilted at a steep angle. At this point, the huge ship was a good quarter
mile from the ocean. A sinking feeling lay heavy in his gut. “Please let her be
okay,” he prayed again.

           
Ryder and Pepper had been sent to their aunt, his mother’s sister, who lived
near St.
Martinville
and they had all traveled east
to Houston, trying to outrun the storm. He’d loved to visit St.
Martinville
growing up. His aunt baked the best oatmeal
raisin cookies. Laughing harshly, he realized letting his mind wander protected
him from the awful reality surrounding him.

           
Heath’s mother was supposed to have left also. “Please, God, help my mother,”
he murmured even as he tried to make sense of his thoughts. Carolyn McCoy had
lingered, supervising the securing and boarding up of the windows and doors.
Belle Chasse had survived several bad storms, including Camille and Andrew. But
none had borne down on Plaquemines Parish with the same ferocity as Hurricane
Katrina.

More
times than he could count, Heath had to stop the truck, get out, move debris
and cut up trees blocking the road. His chest was tight and adrenaline was
pumping through his veins like a drug. All he could hold on to was his mother’s
promise to her family that she would leave Belle Chasse in plenty of time to
escape the wind and the rain. Carolyn had assured Christian that she’d call him
as soon as she made it to Houston and met up with her sister and the girls.

Only
the call never came.

All
of Louisiana was in chaos. New Orleans was underwater—the levees had broken.
The National Guard had commandeered the region and the citizens who remained
behind. Footage of people stranded on rooftops, swimming in the streets and
suffering at the Superdome were being shown on every news channel in the world.

Heath’s
whole world was in shambles.

His
father was convinced that his wife was sitting in some shelter or had been
forced to travel farther north when she’d gotten caught up in the mass exit of
humanity from Southern Louisiana. Heath had heard of cops and townspeople
standing guard at intersections and forcing people to keep driving. All along
the way, towns were full to overflowing, resources were running short and
tempers were running high. Just the idea of some hot-head redneck with a gun
telling his mother that she couldn’t stop for help made Heath sick. So, Jaxson
and Philip were searching via the internet and telephone while Tennessee and
Christian were on the road, checking every shelter between Baton Rouge and
Atlanta. Heath had been elected to check their home, just in case.  

“Shit,”
Heath groaned when he saw a pile of boards and a smashed cupola, both painted a
familiar pale yellow. Looking around, he saw that parts of his home,
his
home
, were scattered all around. “Oh, God, she can’t be here.”

The
sugar cane fields were in shambles, the rice fields were full of mud. An alien
landscape lay before him. Trying to assimilate what he was seeing, a groan of
anguish escaped from Heath’s lips. Belle Chasse was gone—gone—razed to the
ground. Only her foundations remained.

Great
oaks which had measured twenty-one feet in circumference had been reduced to
twisted trunks like totems drawn by Picasso. Skidding to a stop, Heath
scrambled from his truck. “Mother! Mother!” He began calling, looking
frantically around. Surely she’d escaped. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing but
wrack and ruin, he hurried around, gazing off into the distance, hoping against
hope not to see his mother’s battered body lying in the mud. Taking heart
because he saw only bits and pieces of furniture, dishes and doors, stacked and
piled tree limbs and boards, he walked farther into Belle Chasse’s grounds until
a tangled heap of metal came into view. “Oh, no,” he whispered. It was his
mother’s car. Running toward it, he threw aside branches and sheets of plywood
until he could peer through the shattered glass and confirm the vehicle was
empty.

Maybe
she left with someone else? He clung to hope, until he tripped over a concrete
block and looked down, a shining bit of metal catching his eye. Kneeling, Heath
picked it up and his breath caught in his throat when he recognized his
mother’s wallet. A groan of sorrow echoed midst the desecration.

Unwilling
to give up, Heath spent hours walking and looking, but he found no other trace
of his mother. When dark was upon him, he drove back out until he reached a
filling station in Lake Charles and got a signal on his cell phone. He called
his father. “Dad, this is Heath.”

There
was a great deal of static on the life. “You didn’t find her, did you? She
wasn’t there?”

“No…”

“Good,
I knew you wouldn’t. We haven’t found her either, but we will. She’s fine, I
know she is.”

“Dad,
Belle Chasse is gone. Completely destroyed.”

He
heard his father’s
breath
hitch.

“Her
car was there and her wallet.”

“That
doesn’t mean anything.” Christian was almost defiant in his denial. “She’ll
turn up.”

His
father’s words were prophetic. Carolyn McCoy did turn up, but not the way he’d
hoped. A fisherman discovered her body near one of his grounded shrimp boats,
tangled in the nets.

Christian’s
spirit shattered. He refused to consider rebuilding. He refused to even step
foot upon the ground where their house once stood. He said it was no longer
home.

They
would have to start over somewhere else.

Cato – Four Senses Instead of Five

           
“Listen with your heart, then you’ll understand,” Cato sang as she sat in her
room and rocked her baby doll. “You’re such a pretty girl. Someday you’ll grow
up to be a beautiful bride.” Holding the doll on her shoulder, she burped her
soft back. “Uh, oh!” Cato laughed, pretending. “You pooped.” Going to her bed,
she laid the doll down and went through the process of changing its diaper,
laughing and giggling all the while. “You’re such a good girl. Mama will always
make sure you have everything you need. I will always think you’re pretty and
I’ll never ever make you go hungry.”

           
Such were the promises Cato felt a mother should make to her child.  
 

“Cato,
put up your toys. It’s time to go to Ms. Barlow’s house. Put on a clean dress
and don’t wear that red one, it’s too tight. I swear, if you don’t quit eating
so much, I don’t know what I’ll do. I was a beauty queen, for Christ’s sake.
Don’t you know it’s embarrassing for me if you’re overweight? What will people
say about me?” Her mother shouted instructions from the other side of the door.

“Yes,
Mama.” She kissed the doll and put her to bed. Cato felt sad. She didn’t want
to go to voice lessons. She’d much rather go outside and make mud pies or fish
in the crawdad holes down by the bayou. It wasn’t that she hated music, Cato
loved it. She just didn’t want to do it all the time and she wanted to sing the
songs she liked, not the fancy stuff the teacher made her learn. Opening her
closet, Cato found a dress she thought her mother would like. It was baggy and
Cato could hide in it. Sometimes she wished she could just be invisible.

“Practice
your scales while you’re changing! Your voice was stiff at your last lesson.”
Dutifully, Cato began singing. She didn’t understand why her mother pushed and
pushed. She was the real singer, not Cato. Her mother had been on television,
Cato had seen it. Edith Vincent played the tape over and over again, the day
she’d been crowned Miss Louisiana, 1980.

Going
to the restroom, she brushed her hair and her teeth, all the time avoiding
looking in the mirror. Cato was no beauty. She wished she was. Maybe her mother
wouldn’t be so mad all the time. Sometimes she longed for a brother or a
sister. Being an only child meant there was no one to make her mother happy but
Cato, and she wasn’t very good at it. Her father hadn’t stayed either. Maybe
that was her fault too.

“How’s
my baby?” She picked up her doll when she’d finished in the restroom. “Be
sweet,” she whispered so her mother wouldn’t hear. She thought it was silly for
Cato to talk to dolls. But Cato didn’t have too many people to talk to. She
usually played alone, except when she was allowed to visit Tessa. Cato didn’t
have many friends because she was chubby and the girls at school didn’t like
her. Neither did the boys, but that didn’t matter. Who wanted boys as friends
anyway? Mother said if she slimmed down, she’d be popular, so Edith watched and
measured every bite Cato ate, but it didn’t seem to do much good. The doctor
said she had a slow metabolism, whatever that meant.

“Listen
with your heart, then you’ll understand,” she sang, then hummed, hugging her
doll close before laying it on her bed. “I’ll be back.”

But
Cato didn’t do well at voice lessons that day. Her head hurt. Ms. Barlow
fussed, but it didn’t help. The next day, Cato felt too ill to get out of bed.
Instead, she stayed in her room and watched her favorite Disney movie,
Pocahontas. Cato knew every song by heart. She’d watched it over and over
again. Right now her head hurt too much to sing, but the music playing gave her
comfort.
Listen with your heart, you will understand.

           
Tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow, she would run and play and sing. But
now, her neck was stiff and she ached all over. When her mother came to check
on her, she wasn’t alarmed at first by how hot Cato was. “Maybe you’ll sweat
some of this weight off of you.”

The
words should’ve hurt Cato’s feelings, but she was too sick to care. When Edith
took her temperature, Cato wasn’t aware how concerned she became. She didn’t
know the doctor was called. She didn’t awaken when Edith took her to the
hospital, where her temperature rose to over one hundred-six degrees.

Cato
drifted in and out of consciousness. Every time she came to, she called for her
mother. Edith sat with her. She loved Cato in her own way. She just wanted to
be proud of her. To make her feel better, Edith played the soundtrack of her
movie so Cato could hear.
Listen with your heart, you will understand.

She
listened, the words dancing through her mind. Cato listened until she couldn’t
hear anymore. The growing silence confused her. Why was everything so quiet?

“Mama?”
she called when the thick stillness threatened to suffocate her. “Mama!” Cato
called again. Then, with growing horror, she realized she wasn’t really hearing
her own voice.