Mistletoe Cowboy (12 page)

“You and Aunt Essie both are losin' your minds.”

“Call me tomorrow when you have time, and don't pay no mind to Essie. I wouldn't leave you with a serial killer.”

“That one is too big,” Creed said.

Sage walked around the enormous cedar tree and imagined it with lights and tinsel. “But it's shaped just right.”

“Look up, Sage.”

She threw her head back expecting to see something fantastic like shadows creating a phenomenal idea for a painting or maybe a ball of mistletoe the size of a church punch bowl. But there was nothing but a promising Christmas tree.

“Now look at me and compare the tree to my height. Remember the ceiling is eight feet,” he said.

“Well, dammit!”

“They look a lot smaller in the pasture than they really are. That thing would take up more than half of our living room.”

“You sound like Grand,” she said.

“Does that mean you've always wanted a tree that wouldn't go through the kitchen door?”

“I love Christmas. It's my favorite holiday and we've got tons of ornaments. When I was a little girl, I was afraid if we didn't get them all on the tree that the ones left behind would get their feelings hurt. It's crazy but…”

His big hand closed around hers, dwarfing it in size. She liked that. She'd been the tallest kid in the kindergarten class and kept that title until ninth grade when the boys started catching up. By then she'd heard all the jokes about height—
How's the weather up there? Can you see the ground? Do we all look like toys?
—and had developed a complex about it.

He led her through the crusty-topped snow to another tree. “How about this one?”

She studied it carefully. “It's four feet taller than you, which means at least three feet would have to come out of the top to make room for the angel, and it would look like a blob.”

They went another fifty yards across the pasture with the rock formation that Sage had painted so many times getting closer and closer. Finally, she stopped and stared at the rock. Answers were there. They always had been. She just had to stare at it long enough and they would surface.

“You see something to paint or are we still looking for a tree?” Creed asked.

She hadn't realized that she'd stopped or that she'd been gazing at the rock so long. Creed hadn't pressured her to go on and find a tree. He didn't tell her that it was cold and they were walking through snow that came almost to the tops of their boots. He hadn't even shifted from one leg to the other and sighed deeply. It was those things that he didn't do that she appreciated as much as all the things he had done that whole week.

“The first time Grand brought me to this spot I was about five years old. Grand and I were going to put flowers on the graves. I hated that. It made it so final that I didn't have a father or a mother like other kids.

“I saw Grandpa's profile in the eroded edges of the top rock. Even though he was dead and gone before I was born, I recognized him from the picture that Grand kept on the dresser in her bedroom. The sky was cloudless with only the silhouette of a single bird high up in the sky on the opposite side of Grandpa. There he was with his heavy eyebrows, wide nose with just a slight bump on the top, moustache, lower lip, and chin that dropped into a saggy neckline. And I told her that I was going to paint that rock someday.”

“How long was it before you actually painted it?”

“More than sixteen years. I went home that day when I was five and drew it on a piece of paper and gave it to Grand. She still has it somewhere.”

“It's quite a formation,” he said.

It rose up out of the floor of the canyon like a huge ocher-colored sand castle with a sloped side at the back where a cautious climber could make his way to the ledge. The top flattened out with a small mesa, barely big enough for a man or a dog to sit on. At the back of the floor it looked as if someone had haphazardly set a chimney stack down.

She had sold a dozen or more paintings of the rock, changing the subtle cuts and erosions to suit whatever theme she put into the picture. Her highest selling piece had been a profile of an Indian chief cut into the top layer. And then she'd painted the chief sitting on the ledge looking out over his world, meditating about the changes that were coming to his people.

Now snow hid in the deep shadows. The sun had melted most of the white cap from the top, but icicles hung from the edges like those hanging from the roof of the back porch at the house and bunkhouse.

“How many pictures have you painted of this place?” Creed asked.

“Several?” she answered.

“You going to paint one of it for your new collection?”

She shook her head. The vision she'd been given that day didn't have snow. The clouds had moved across the erosion on the side and Grandpa Presley was gone. Now it was Creed's profile and the tip of his cowboy hat. And around the base of the formation the mesquite trees had the first bloom of springtime with its minty green leaves.

She didn't even want to think about what that might mean.

***

Creed wondered if they were going to stand there all day staring at the huge formation. When he'd first laid eyes on the thing, he'd thought about what fun it would have been to have something like that in the part of the world where he grew up. He and his brothers, along with the O'Donnells and Slade Luckadeau, would have turned it into a castle or a fort or any number of things.

She pointed to a tree standing all alone about ten feet from them. “What about that tree?”

“It could work,” Creed said.

They walked around it, still hand in hand. She cocked her head to one side and then the other and they walked around it again.

“It is perfect,” she said.

He dropped her hand and pulled the small chain saw out of a canvas backpack he'd thrown over his shoulder. He fired it up and the noise bounced around in the still quietness of the snow-frosted canyon. The saw cut through the base of the tree, but it didn't fall far when he yelled, “Timber!”

Her laughter was music echoing off the canyon walls and coming back to settle in his ears, his heart, and his soul. He picked up the six-foot tree and shouldered it. The limbs knocked his hat off and snow slipped down his collar, his body's heat melting it into a cold trickle down his backbone.

He shivered. “That is some cold stuff when it gets next to bare skin.”

She picked up his hat and put it back on his head. “That should help.”

“You might have to warm me up when we get in the house.”

“Is that a come-on line?”

“Could be. I never used it before, so if it is, it's original.”

Dolly, his mother, had told him for years that he was a romantic at heart. He thought that meant he was a sissy and he fought hard against such a title. But that morning, walking in snow with a tree on his shoulder and Sage Presley at his side, he felt what his mother was saying.

He really was a romantic. He wanted a home and a wife and a whole yard full of kids to go with the kittens and the puppies. Sage had opened his eyes to that and he would always love her for it.

Love! I didn't say I was in love with her. I said that I would love her for making me consider a family.

***

Sage held the kitchen door open so Creed could maneuver the tree into the house, around the kitchen table, and into the living room.

“That is one big tree.”

“Yes, it is. That first one you picked out wouldn't have even made it through the door.”

Noel sniffed the tree then went back to her blanket. Angel peeked up over the edge of her basket and settled back down.

“I bet they think human beings are crazy,” Sage said.

“Just be glad they don't have the sense to call 911 or they'd have us both committed. In their minds cows belong outside. Trees belong outside. People and pets belong inside.”

Sage quickly moved her easel into the kitchen to make room for the tree. Creed had been right. Even though the tree looked like the smallest one in the whole canyon, anything bigger would have filled up the entire living room and edged over into the kitchen.

“There's going to be a mess when this stuff starts to melt. I tried to shake the tree good before I brought it on the porch, but there will be puddles when the snow melts,” Creed said.

“It'll only be melted water and the floor is hardwood so it'll mop right up. Now let's go to the bunkhouse and bring up the decorations. The tree stand is in the box with the lights that go around the house and the barn. We'll make sure we bring that box in first.”

“The barn?” Creed asked incredulously.

“It's no big deal. We leave the clips around the outside edge of the front of the barn and across the fence between the house and the barn. It's just a matter of putting them up.”

“Are you teasing?”

“I am not! That way there's lights to be seen from every window in the house. When I was a little girl, I'd run into Grand's room and jump on her bed. And lights would shine through the window.”

“Does each cow get jingle bells around her neck?” he asked.

Sage stared at his boots, which were dripping water onto the floor right along with the Christmas tree. “No, just the bulls. I've got a special string of red ones for you.”

Creed chuckled. “Do I get to choose where you hang them?”

Sage blushed crimson. “No, that's my decision.”

“Some days a homely old cowboy just can't win for losing.” He sighed. “Let's go fetch the box with the stand in it and get this tree standing upright.”

The decorations were stacked neatly in one of the three bedrooms in the bunkhouse. Back when Grandpa Presley was still alive they'd had all three bedrooms filled up and the hired hands did their own cooking. But one by one Grand had let them go through the following years and by the time Sage was old enough to remember, the bunkhouse was used for storage. Later, after she'd come home from college, she'd used the big living room and kitchen combo for her spring, summer, and fall work space, but it had been years since the water and gas had been turned on to the place.

She wondered if Creed would bring the whole ranch back to its original status: five or six times as many head of cattle, hay fields, and much, much less mesquite dotting the land.

Creed read the writing on the masking tape stuck to the top of the blue plastic bin. “Tree stand. Outside lights. I pictured cardboard boxes.”

“That's the right one to start with. We used to keep them in cardboard boxes, but the mice kept getting in them so we replaced the boxes with bins.”

“Okay, let's go get it upright so it can drip on the floor while we string the barn lights. Then we'll mop up the mess and start decorating,” he said.

She picked up a second box marked
tree lights
. “Mr. Organization.”

“It takes a fair amount of that to run a ranch.”

They were almost to the house when they stopped at exactly the same time and turned their ear toward the highway.

“Snowplows!” she said excitedly. “That means the electricity will be back on before long and I can do laundry.”

“Me too! I'm almost out of clean socks and there's a whole basket full of dirty clothes in my room. I dreaded washing by hand,” he said.

His
room! Grand's room!

The whole concept was so tangled up that it made Sage's head hurt, so she pushed it away. Today she was decorating the tree and putting up lights. When it was all done, she intended to send pictures to Grand. And when she saw the pictures, it would make her so homesick that she would come home, maybe even before Christmas Eve. She could bring Essie with her and Sage would look after both of them. Hell, she'd give Essie her bedroom and clean up the bunkhouse to live in. She liked to go there to paint in the spring and fall anyway, and with very little work, it could be a nice big comfortable house just for her.

“What's on your mind, Sage?” Creed asked when they reached the back porch.

“Decorating,” she said.

“You've been pretty quiet all morning. Something happened out there at the rock formation. What did you see?”

“What is probably a glimpse of the future.”

“And that makes you mad?”

“Why mad?” she asked.

“Because it did not make you happy or you would have reacted differently.”

“Not mad, but sad. I don't adapt well to change. I like my rut. I love it, as a matter-of-fact. It is my stability, my rock, and I know what's happening next.”

“That's not life, darlin'.”

“I know, but I don't have to like it.”

***

Creed fastened the tree stand onto the trunk of the tree and stood it upright in front of the window. And like the sun coming out after days and days of dreary rain, Sage's mood turned from dark to sunny instantly. She clapped her hands and kissed him on the cheek in her excitement.

“It's beautiful. It's the best one ever and I mean it. Look how perfect the limbs are and it's just the right height for the angel. She won't even hit her head on the ceiling, and we don't have to trim anything off. I wish the snow wouldn't melt off.”

Creed laughed. “Darlin', you can't have fire and ice both. Now let's go get that barn and fence ready to light up before we take off our coveralls.”

Putting the lights around the barn wasn't an easy feat in the snow, but by noon they had them in place and the cord taped down to the barn floor all the way into the tack room. Sage held her breath and plugged them in. They were old and that meant if one was shot none of them would light up. Then the painstaking job of unscrewing one bulb after another began until they found the one that was the dirty culprit with the blown filament.

She stuck it in the socket and hurried outside.

“Well, shit!” she yelled and shook her fist at the lights around the barn.

Creed was busy twining the next roll around the top string of barbed wire on the fence.