Just a Cowboy and His Baby (Spikes & Spurs) (12 page)

Gemma’s cell phone alarm went off at exactly six thirty the next morning. She rolled over and whined when she realized she was hugged up to a pillow instead of Trace. She threw her legs over the side, then put her elbows on her knees and her face in her palms. She didn’t want to be awake. She didn’t want to be responsible for ten girls. She wanted to be in Ringgold visiting all her friends, helping out in her beauty shop, or else she wanted to be tangled up in the sheets with Trace after a hot bout of sex. Neither one was going to happen.

“I don’t like you!” A high-pitched Southern voice cut the silence from the front room of the cabin.

“Well, I hate you. You are nothing but a baby and you’ll never make it a whole week without your mommy.” Deanna’s Chicago accent came through strong.

Gemma wasted no time getting from her quarters to the other room before the hair pulling began. When she opened the door, Carly and Deanna were squared off in the middle of the floor. Deanna was the biggest, but Carly looked like a scrapper who could hold her own in any catfight.

Gemma got between them and said, “Okay, ladies. What’s the problem this early in the morning?”

Deanna pointed. “She woke up early and started singing stupid songs and woke us all up with her dumb voice. She couldn’t sing if her life depended on it.”

Carly piped up before Deanna could say another word. “Well, I’m not a baby and she called me a baby and she’s the one who was whimpering after we went to bed last night. I hate her.”

“I did not whimper and I hate you too!”

Gemma crossed her arms. “Okay, settle down, both of you. Any of the rest of you don’t like some member of the group?”

No one said a word. “Are you sure? Speak up right now because this is your last chance. Either tell me now or else you can’t say a word later on.”

Fiona raised one hand and pointed at Jessie with the other one. “I don’t like her.”

“What’d I do?” Jessie asked.

“You snore.”

“I do not!” Jessie declared.

“Yes you do, and it sounds like a dying frog.”

“How would you know what a frog sounds like? And I do not snore.”

Gemma held up her hand. “Enough. So Jessie and Fiona don’t like each other either. Anyone else?”

Kelsey raised her hand and pointed at April. “She thinks she’s all hoity-toity and better than the rest of us. She was humming after we went to sleep and I asked her to hush and she said that she was the best singer here and you like her better so you wouldn’t make her stop.”

“Anyone else?” Gemma asked.

No one raised their hand.

“Okay, this helps me a lot. I’m assigning partners this morning so now I know what to do. Y’all ever watch any cop shows on television?”

All ten heads nodded.

“Then you understand partners, right? That means you’ve got your partner’s back at all times. If a bobcat or a coyote comes down from the mountains and is about to eat your partner, you fight that critter and don’t even think of leaving her there to get hurt. If she falls in a gopher hole and sprains her ankle, you don’t laugh at her, but you become her crutch to get back to the cabin. Understand? It means that you will stick to your partner like glue this whole week and if I catch you more than five feet away from your partner then there will be a reckoning.”

“What about going to the bathroom?” Carly asked.

“You stand by the door until your partner comes out.”

“What’s a reckoning?” Deanna asked.

“It’s a decision that I make if it happens, and believe me, you don’t want a reckoning,” Gemma said.

More nods.

“Okay, partners for this whole week are Angie and Katy and Beth and Chantelle.”

Partners looked each other over and back at her.

“Carly and Deanna,” Gemma said.

“But I hate her,” Deanna said.

“You’d better learn to like her a little bit because if the wild critters come, she’s the one who might save your sorry butt,” Gemma said.

“Next is Fiona and Jessie.”

“I’ll go home before I partner with her,” Jessie said.

“We can make that happen before lunch,” Gemma said.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Jessie recanted.

“Good. By the end of the week you’ll be friends,” Gemma said.

“Yeah, right!” Fiona said.

“That means I’ve got to partner with her.” Kelsey pointed at April.

“Looks that way,” Gemma said.

“I won’t do it. I’ll call my momma,” April said.

“Darlin’, you won’t have to call your momma. I’ll do it for you,” Gemma said.

April crossed her arms over her chest and pouted. “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it and do it well. It’s bed-making time and then I want you all dressed for a morning in the hay field. Right after breakfast we’re having a contest to see who can bring in the most bales and get them stacked in the barn. Boys against girls. You goin’ to let those boys whup your butts this morning?” Gemma asked.

“What is the prize?” Deanna asked.

“Knowing that you won,” Gemma told her.

She tossed back her shoulder-length blond hair and shot Gemma a go-to-hell look.

“And,” Gemma went on. “It’s just a suggestion, but if I was you all, I’d get my partner to braid my hair this morning because hauling hay is hot work. And if the boys win on the first day, they’re going to rub it in your faces at supper tonight and probably all week long. You know how they act when they win. All cocky and smarty-britches, struttin’ around and crowing like roosters. You want to listen to that all week, then just let them get ahead of you this morning in the hay field. I’ll be out in fifteen minutes. I want you ready and your beds made and we’ll go to breakfast together.”

When Gemma returned, the two sets of partners who didn’t despise each other were setting at the table, their heads together plotting about how they’d whip the boys. The other six were sulking on their beds.

“We’ve got a full day ahead of us and tonight we start working on our craft. It’ll take all week to finish it. So are you three sets of partners going to sulk and pout all week?” Gemma asked.

“Five feet? Really?” Jessie asked.

“That’s the rule,” Gemma said.

Jessie hopped down off the bed and looked back at Fiona. “Come on. I can’t get more than five feet ahead of you and I’m hungry, and them dumb old boys ain’t about to beat me.”

Gemma smiled and led the way to the door. “Eat hearty. You’ll need the energy, and believe me, the boys’ counselor is going to tell them that they can beat you with one hand tied behind their backs. They think they are dealing with sissies, I’m sure.”

Carly hopped off her bed and squared her shoulders. “I’m not a sissy.”

“You’ve got all day to prove it.” Gemma said.

The boys were already in the dining hall. Bacon, coffee, eggs, hash browns, grits, and gravy were on the buffet along with piles of hot biscuits, juice, and milk. Trace rolled his eyes at Gemma when she came in with her girls.

“Busy morning?” she asked.

“What have I gotten myself into? I believe this is the worst bunch of young’uns I’ve ever seen. They’re just a step up from hooligans and two steps down from gangsters,” he whispered.

“I’ve already settled catfights,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

The breakfast bell dinged and all the kids looked at the counselors and one another. The girls were huddled together against one wall shooting daggers at the pimply faced boys. The guys were grouped up together behind Trace looking at everything in the dining cabin but the girls.

“That means you can eat now,” Trace said.

“Ladies first,” one of the boys said and looked straight at Trace.

He smiled at the pimple-faced kid and nodded.

“Very gentlemanly,” Trace said.

Deanna left the group but was careful not to go more than five steps from her partner. She bowed up to the boy and said, “Today we’ll go first. But we don’t need your charity. We’re goin’ to show you how to haul hay after breakfast and pick more apples than you do this afternoon. We are meaner and we can work as hard as any of you old boys.”

The kid bowed up to her. “You wanna bet?”

“Sure. If we do better than you today then we get to go first again tomorrow morning even though it’s your day. Right, girls?” Deanna said.

All nine of the remaining girls lined up beside her and nodded.

“And if we beat you, what do we get?” the kid asked.

Carly stepped up beside Deanna. “You get to go first for breakfast.”

“But we already get that.”

“Okay, then you can come over to our porch and sing with us tonight. But if we win, and we will, buster, then you don’t get to.”

“Deal!”

Trace chuckled. “How’d you get them whipped into shape so soon?”

“I called their bluff.”

“Breakfast is getting cold and we’re burnin’ daylight, kids,” Lester yelled from the table where the buffet was laid out.

***

The race was on as soon as Trace showed them how to load and stack hay. The boys finished the first pickup load and taunted the girls as they sat on top of it for the ride back to the barn.

“We’re better than you are. When we get back we’ll show you how it’s done,” the oldest boy yelled.

The girls huddled up heads down, butts stuck out, and reminded Gemma of a football team. They joined hands, whispered and pointed, and then did a yell that sounded like, “Beat boys.”

Evidently they’d worked out a system because they had two pickup trucks loaded and ready to go to the barn by the time the boys got back with one truck.

“You guys cheated. Miz O’Donnell and Mr. Coleman helped you, didn’t they?”

“No, they did not! We just let y’all get ahead so you’d get all cocky and lazy. And you did. Now we’ll show you how it’s done. We’re going to get our two hundred bales in the barn and have time to sit on the porch and drink sweet tea while y’all are still working,” Jessie said.

Two more trucks rolled into the field and six girls stayed behind to load while four went with the trucks to unload them. And at the end of the day the girls loaded and stacked two hundred small bales of hay half an hour faster than the boys. The guys grumbled around all during lunch but they’d learned their lesson. When it came time to go to the apple orchard they’d worked out their plan to unite and conquer.

When Trace rang the cowbell to give them the green light, the smaller boys climbed the ladders like monkeys and tossed apples down to the bigger boys who put them in baskets and then handed them off to Damian and Tyrelle to carry to the flatbed trailers.

“Guess they learned to stop boasting and get their butts to work,” Trace said when the competition was finished and the boys won by three bushels.

“Momma says the hardest lesson a kid ever learns is when to shut their mouths and get to work. They did good learning that the first day,” Gemma said.

The boys won the apple-picking contest and had a whole new swagger to their walk as they followed Trace back to their cabin. At supper they came into the dining tent with their hair combed, their hands washed, and smiles on their faces.

“We beat you!” Damian told Jessie.

“That was just plain old apples. We beat you at the hard job. We can haul hay better than you can and that’s supposed to be a boy job. You’re going to have to work hard to overcome that,” Jessie answered.

“Oh, yeah, well, we just let you win so you wouldn’t cry like little babies,” Marty declared.

“And we let you win at the apples so you wouldn’t pout around the rest of the week like you did at lunchtime,” Fiona put in her two cents worth.

“Don’t it just make you itch for a big family?” Gemma whispered to Trace.

“Oh, yeah! I’d send the boys to military school and the girls off to a convent,” he answered.

“If y’all can stop bickering long enough to eat, supper is ready.” Lester grinned.

“Do we get to sing?” Marty asked.

“Sure you do. It was an even tie today. Girls won in the hay field. Boys won in the orchard, so everyone gets to sing right after supper,” Gemma said. “But the girls get to choose the songs.”

“Well, shit! I mean sugar.” Damian blushed.

“You already calling me sweet names.” Jessie giggled.

“No, I am not. I wouldn’t call you anything sweet as sugar. You are a bitch.” He clamped his hand over his mouth and looked at Trace.

“That’s two. On three you get to go back to the cabin and think about cleaning up your speech,” Trace said.

“I am not a bitch, anyway,” Jessie said.

Gemma stepped between them. “You want to be each other’s partner the rest of the night?”

“No, ma’am,” Jessie said seriously.

“Huh-uh!” Damian shook his head.

“Lester has called supper. Let’s get with it. Boys first tonight,” Gemma said.

“Thank you for coming up with the idea of name tags. I swear it’s the only way I can remember their names,” Trace said.

“We do that at Bible school at the Ringgold church. It works,” Gemma told him.

Fiona and Jessie got the job of choosing the songs that evening. They argued. They fussed, but they worked together and twenty voices blended together as they sang the banana song again.

Trace had followed Gemma’s lead and assigned partners with his guys. Damian griped that his partner, Marty, couldn’t sing and he wanted a new partner, and Marty declared that Damian’s voice was changing and he couldn’t sing either.

“You sound like your momma callin’ in the hogs,” Marty said.

“Don’t you be dissin’ my momma, boy. You don’t know nothing about my momma,” Damian told him.

“Well, then your sister,” Marty said.

“You are asking for a bruising, boy.”

“Bring it right on. I’m not a boy, man, and I could beat your skinny”—he paused and looked at Trace—“hind end with one hand tied behind my back and a”—he looked at Trace again—“Big Mac in the other one.”

“You got the five-foot rule yet?” Gemma asked.

Trace raised an eyebrow.

“Jessie, darlin’, come tell Mr. Coleman about the five-foot rule.”

Jessie raised her voice over the boys and began to explain it. By the time she was finished, all twenty kids were as quiet as if they’d been sitting on the front row in a church during a funeral.