Mistletoe Cowboy (7 page)

When both birds were to her satisfaction, she picked up the brush to paint in the mistletoe. She glanced back at the window and suddenly in her mind's eye the mistletoe wasn't lying on the sill but was tied up together with a bright red satin ribbon and hanging from the bottom of the poinsettia valance.

She blinked and it was back on the windowsill, but Sage Presley did not argue with her visions. If the gods said that she should hang the mistletoe then she would do just that. The times when she'd done what she wanted rather than what her visions gave her, those paintings had been a big flop. When she listened, the critics went wild with what she produced.

***

Creed and Noel played tug-of-war with an old wash rag he'd found in the scrub bucket. Creed held onto the rag with his hand and Noel pulled against it with all her might using her teeth. Even while he played, he kept a steady watch on the picture's progress. He didn't know jack shit about good art versus bad art. But the canvas on the easel was alive with color and motion. Two birds on the windowsill, feathers fluffed out against the cold wind, the promise of warmth behind the thin glass, mistletoe and poinsettias and an angel floating in the background.

When Sage painted the mistletoe above the cardinal's head, Creed could actually feel the painting. He couldn't have put a single thought into words, but it touched all the senses. He imagined one hand on the outside of the window and the other on the inside. One cold. One hot. He could taste the snowflakes on his lips, and the mistletoe reminded him of the kiss he and Sage had shared.

Lots of kisses were shared under the mistletoe during the Christmas season. He'd seen posters about Jesus being the reason for the season. If he turned it around maybe the season was the reason he felt such an attraction to Sage when she was definitely not the type that usually caught his eye.

***

Sage signed her name to the bottom of the picture, removed it from the easel, and carried it across the room where she hung it on two screws in a bare spot.

“Why'd you put it right there?” Creed asked.

“That's where my work dries.”

“Now what?” Creed asked.

She pulled the rocking chair away from the fireplace and parked it in front of the picture. “I study it to determine what I could have done better. I look at it through the critic's eye and the buyer's. Then I decide if I'm going to burn it or put it with my stash to take to the gallery.”

“Good God, Sage! You've worked on that thing for hours and hours. Surely you wouldn't burn it,” Creed said.

“What would you do if you were riding a horse, one that you'd raised yourself from birth, one you'd broken to the saddle and who'd carried you through a blizzard to a warm house, and he stepped in a hole and snapped his leg bone so badly that it stuck out of the skin and it could never be fixed? Would you shoot him to put him out of his misery or let him lie there in excruciating pain?”

“It would break my heart, but I'd shoot him,” Creed said.

“That's my point. I'd rather burn it than take something that looks like a second grader's coloring book page to a gallery showing. And this picture scares me. I've never painted anything that quickly.”

Creed gave the cleaning rag to Noel and pulled his rocking chair over close to Sage's chair. He reached across the distance separating them and laid his hand on hers and together they studied the painting.

“What do you see?” she asked finally.

“I'm not a critic. I don't know how long a masterpiece is supposed to take from start to finish. Hell, my momma thinks the prettiest picture in her house is a velvet Elvis that Daddy bought for her when they visited Graceland for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It hangs above her bed and there's never a spot of dust on it.”

“Surely you see something,” she said.

Creed took a deep breath and told her the emotions it had evoked in him when she was painting the mistletoe.

“And you say you aren't a critic.” She smiled. “It's just that I've never painted snow before. I'm building a reputation as a Western artist.”

He pointed to the picture hanging above the credenza just inside the front door. “Like that?”

She nodded. “What do you see in that one?”

“I see the big rock formation over on the backside of the property. And the way the top is eroded, it looks like an old cowboy without his hat. His neck is sagging with age and his eyebrows have drooped. His face is fuller and wider than it would have been in his youth, but there's character there and lessons he could teach a grandchild.”

“Wow!” She pulled her hand from his and hugged herself.

“Do I get an A?”

“A-plus. Are there any similarities in the pictures?” she pressed on.

“Oh, yeah!” He pointed to the one above the sofa again. “That one is fall and the end of life is near for the old cowboy. The one you painted is right now and there's a beginning for those two birds if they survive the cold. He'd like to kiss her under the mistletoe, but his little beak is frozen.” Creed chuckled at his own joke.

“Then you could tell that the same artist painted them?” she asked.

Creed studied one picture and then the other. They were so different that his first thought was no one would ever know that Sage Presley had done both. But that first impression was totally wrong. It was very evident that she'd done both pictures.

“Well?”

“Give me a minute to put my words together. And while I'm doing that, Sage, you should be building a career as an artist, period, not solely as a Western artist. Paint life. It will sell because people will feel it.”

“It's just that I've never finished a picture, even a small one, this fast and it scares me. I usually do six a year, maybe eight on a very good year.”

“Okay, does size mean anything to a critic? Is bigger better?” he asked.

She giggled nervously. “Are we still talking about paintings?”

He laughed with her. “For now, we definitely are.”

“Then the answer is no. Size is not a factor.”

“You won't think I'm a sissy if I tell you my honest opinion, will you?” Creed asked.

She shook her head.

He ran his fingers through his dark hair. Men weren't supposed to see feelings or feel emotion or pain and they damn sure weren't supposed to discuss any of the above. That was women's business when they got together for a hen session.

He cleared his throat and started, “What I see is emotion, Sage. It's not just pretty pictures that you paint. It is feelings. Momma says that when she looks at her velvet Elvis she remembers the wonderful second honeymoon she and Daddy had. To her that is pure art. When I look at these two pictures, I see that old cowboy not caring that his days are up and time is short before the cold winter takes him away from this world. But there's a smile on his face and he's taking a whole passel of memories with him to the other side. In the other one I see the promise of spring, birds singing as they build a nest, and life buds once again in spite of the terrible storm. I feel warmth inside the window and sympathy for the poor little birds that are so cold. The angel promises protection if they'll remember the love of the season. That curtain thing is old so it's representative of the past. The angel is the promise of an eternal future.”

When he looked over at Sage, tears were flowing down her cheeks. “Those are the most beautiful words I've ever heard.”

Heat crawled up his back and he felt the sting of a blush on his cheeks. Creed could not remember the last time he'd blushed.

She squeezed his hand. “Thank you. I won't burn it and I'm going to paint more like it.”

Angel hopped down from the window and ran across the room, landed in Sage's lap with a thud, and looked up at her. Sage pulled her hand away from Creed's and stroked the cat's long fur while she continued to look at the picture.

“She's purring, Creed. I think she's thanking us for the milk and food,” she said.

***

Creed grinned.

Us.

She had said us.

Some miracles weren't instant. Some of them took a while in coming around.

Noel left the business of tearing up the rag and joined the family, putting her paws on the edge of Creed's rocking chair.

“Feeling left out, are you?” Creed scratched her ears.

“Didn't take them long to make themselves at home, did it?” Sage said.

“I think the children are asking you to do a portrait of them.”

Sage laughed. “They aren't my children. I'm not even sure they'll be my pets. When the storm clears and they can go outside, they could easily go right on down the road on their journey.”

“I doubt that Angel will leave her babies or Noel either when she has them. Did you ever think about a husband and children?” he asked abruptly.

Sage bit her lower lip for several seconds.

Now why in the hell had he asked that question, Creed wondered. It was too personal and would kill the miracle that had barely gotten a foothold in her heart. Maybe she didn't even hear him ask. Hopefully she'd been studying her art so intensely she'd blocked out everything else.

Finally she answered. “That is a scary thought, Creed. My dad died and my mother's heart was broken as well as Grand's. Daddy was her only child. He and Momma were high school sweethearts and married before he went off to the Army. She went with him as soon as she could and I was born a few years later.”

“So you have a fear of commitment?” he asked.

“Don't say that.”

“Why?”

“I've heard it before and I don't have any fears. I'm just a careful woman. Fear is one thing. Caution is another. Besides, if I had a fear it wouldn't be of commitment, it would be of abandonment and Grand ain't helping one damn bit in that business.”

“Well, I'm honest enough to say that I have the big
C
-word fear. It's the only thing that makes me shake in my boots. After my fiancée pulled off her stunt, I'm gun-shy when it comes to relationships.”

“You? I don't believe it!”

“Believe it, darlin'. I'm a flirt but when it comes to trusting anyone enough to give them my whole heart to put through a meat grinder, well, that's another matter.”

“Guess we make a pretty damn good pair to get stuck in a blizzard together,” she said.

“Well, dammit all to hell on a rusty poker,” Ada fussed.

“Burned another pan full, did you?” Essie giggled.

“Damn sure did. Guess we'll only be takin' three dozen to the canasta game tonight.”

“I reckon that'll be plenty. Everyone else will bring cookies too. You wouldn't burn them if you'd stop your worrywartin'.”

Ada tucked her salt-and-pepper hair behind her ears. She and Esther had been born in southern Oklahoma to a father with Chickasaw blood and a red-haired Irish mother. Esther had gotten the red hair and green eyes, but she was as mild tempered as a gentle southern breeze. Ada inherited the dark hair and dark eyes and had a temper like a tornado and a hurricane meeting head-on with a Texas wildfire.

Essie had just passed her eighty-sixth birthday and Ada was over seventy. They hadn't grown up together or known each other as sisters until later in life because Essie married when Ada was only two years old.

It had been love at first sight between Esther and Richard Langston. He had come to Ravia, Oklahoma, for Christmas dinner with one of his buddies on the WPA project. That afternoon he'd met Esther who was literally the girl who lived next door to his buddy and three months later when he went home to Pennsylvania to take over the farm when his father died, Essie went with him.

Sixteen years later, Thomas Presley came to Ravia from Fort Sill with a friend for a long weekend. There was a birthday party that summer for his fellow army buddy and Ada had been invited. When Thomas finished his enlistment the following year, she went with him to the Palo Duro Canyon.

“Momma was a worrywart. She worried about you all the time,” Ada said.

Essie tidied up a bun at the nape of her neck. It was smaller than it used to be in her youth and it was more gray now than red, but she still wore it the same as the day she put it up the first time.

“You ever wish you had done things different?” Essie asked.

“Well, hell, yeah! We all do. Right now I wish I hadn't left the ranch. I should be overseeing that young cowboy and my granddaughter. It wasn't too smart of me to up and leave them alone.”

Essie's green eyes twinkled. “Good lookin', is he?”

“I would've pushed him into my bedroom if I'd been thirty years younger.”

“That's a crock! You would've had to have been fifty years younger for him to let you push him anywhere near a bed.”

Ada smiled. “I'm second-guessing myself. Momma said that I got the vision from Daddy. I knew the night that the cancer would finally take Tom away from me. And I knew that getting out of that canyon and making Sage face up to things was the right thing, but now I'm wondering if it was my own sight.”

“Honey, there ain't no vision. It ain't nothing but common sense and intuition. Sage is a big girl, not just in size but in brains. Trust me, if she don't like that cowboy he won't even be there when you go back on Christmas Eve. And they'll never find a scrap of hair or a bone to get any of that DNA off of either.”

“You watch too much of that damned
CSI
shit,” Ada said.

“Good thing that wasn't on the television when Richard had his fling at forty or he wouldn't have lived to see forty-one,” Essie said.

Ada laid her hand on her sister's shoulder. “Those were some bad times, weren't they?”

“Yes they were, but we lived through them and the boys never knew. The last words he said when he died was that he was sorry for hurting me. I was glad the boys weren't in the room.”

“Ever wish you would have had a daughter?” Ada asked.

“I did want one but after three boys I figured all Richard could throw was boys and I stopped wishing. Maybe God knew what he was doing when he gave me boys. At least you'll get a son-in-law when Sage marries and you had a wonderful son. His only fault was that he didn't want to stay in that gawdforsaken canyon. If he had, he might have lived to see Sage raised up.”

“Grandson-in-law,” Ada corrected Essie.

“No, you raised her so she's yours. Sage is still young and this might not be the man for her. She might not be ready to settle down yet. I'm just glad you're either selling the ranch or putting it in her name when you go back. I'm not a spring chicken and I want you here with me.”

“It's the right thing to do, isn't it?” Ada said.

“Yes, it is, and Thomas would be proud. Now let's go put on blinged-out sweat suits and go over to Idabelle's for canasta. Texas can have all that snow and wind. I'm going to enjoy this forty-five-degree weather and sunshine.”

***

Creed awoke to the aroma of fresh banana bread baking in the oven. It was Christmas morning and his mother was in the kitchen making her traditional Christmas breakfast. They always had hot banana bread, cinnamon rolls, and a pumpkin roll with cream cheese filling on Christmas morning. All the nightmares about snow covering up the house had just been crazy dreams. He was in his bed at home on the family ranch. There wasn't even a real canyon that looked like a giant bomb had exploded in the panhandle of Texas.

He sat straight up in bed and realized in a split second that it was not Christmas morning and he wasn't in Ringgold, Texas. He was in a canyon fast filling up with snow, and it was not a nightmare that disappeared when he opened his eyes.

When he first drove out to that area it was the strangest sensation he'd ever known. Land met sky in every direction, and the ever-blowing Texas wind had picked up the remnants of a cotton crop on the side of the road and blew it around like big flakes of snow. He'd even gotten behind a cotton wagon taking a load from the field to the gin and then the wagon was gone, flat land was behind him, and he was following a twisting downhill road to the bottom of a big hole. It looked like someone had lobbed a nuclear bomb toward the Panhandle and it had landed between Silverton and Claude. It had been pretty that day, but the sun was shining and everything wasn't covered with almost a foot of snow and colder'n a well digger's naked butt in Alaska.

“All that cotton was trying to tell me that this was coming along pretty soon,” he muttered as he jerked on a clean pair of jeans.

He didn't even stop to check on Angel and the kittens but followed his nose straight to the kitchen. Part of the dream had been real because there was a loaf of banana bread on the table with steam still rising from it.

“I couldn't sleep,” Sage said. “Usually I paint when I can't sleep, but I had a hankering for Grand's banana bread so I made some.”

She wore tight-fitting jeans and a sweatshirt with more paint stains on the front. The mistletoe he had tracked in was tied with a red ribbon and pinned to the curtain above the window.

He moved toward her. “Smells good. I thought it was Christmas morning. Momma makes this for our breakfast on Christmas morning.”

“Grand makes it too. But I had to eat my eggs before I could have it,” she said.

He settled a hand on the cabinet on either side of her. Her eyes met his and her eyelids fluttered. Then something changed and she turned her head to the left to stare at the coffeepot.

“Creed, I don't know…”

He tucked a fist under her chin and gently turned her back to face him. He looked up at the mistletoe and grinned.

“Can't waste it,” he whispered.

His lips touched hers in a sweet, sweet kiss that ended too soon and left him yearning for more. He took two steps back and opened the drawer where the knives were kept. Before he could pick one up, her hand closed over his and forced him to shut the drawer.

“Chores first. Breakfast after.”

“You are downright mean. It'll be cold by then.”

“It will be perfect. The pecans will slice well instead of making a gummy mess on the knife, and the cream cheese will be softened to spread on it.”

“You are killing me,” he groaned.

“I'll help with chores.”

“That's a poor second choice but I'll take what I can get.” He started getting his coveralls on to go outside.

***

“Look!” Sage pointed. “I can see the outline of the barn. It's slowed down, Creed!”

“There is a God. I thought maybe He'd forgotten us and this whole canyon would be level with the rest of Texas before the storm moved on.”

“It really is the worst storm I've ever seen. Grand talked about bad ones back when she and Grandpa first married, but this takes the cake for my generation,” she said.

Going was still slow as they trudged through snow halfway to their knees. Noel bounded through it like she was running through daisies in the springtime and beat them to the barn by several minutes. The smell of hay, cows and warm cow patties greeted Creed when he opened the door. Noel dashed inside ahead of him and she ran to check on the milk cow before he could shut the barn door.

“Are you putting another big bale in the doorway?” Sage asked.

“That worked fairly well. If it quits sometime today or tonight, tomorrow I'll put the plow on the front end of the tractor and scoop any snow they haven't tramped into the ground to the sides of the feedlot so we can feed them out there. I'm just grateful for the lean-to roof that they could huddle under. If they'd been out in the far reaches, we might have lost a few.”

“Grand wouldn't have been happy about that,” Sage said.

“Neither would I. Soon as possible I'm hauling my stock out here. I've got Angus and a few Longhorns. My hope is to build up the Longhorns for rodeo stock. I've got a friend over the Red River into Oklahoma who raises them for the Resistol Rodeo down near Dallas. He makes a fair amount of money that way.”

Creed started the smaller of the two tractors and ran the front spike into a big round bale of hay. “She told me to bring this many bales into the barn right before she left. Think they'll last until we thaw out?” he yelled over the hum of the engine.

“She's a smart old girl. When we get ice or bad weather she brings the cattle into this pasture and puts the big bales in the barn. She could use the little square ones to feed but says that she'd have to come out here three times a day if she did. She knows what she's doing so I expect she knows how many bales you'll need. It's also the reason she had that lean-to built on the back of the barn,” Sage said with a smile.

“Okay, open 'em up,” he said.

She pushed the doors back and he stuffed the bale into the doorway. Before he could back away the cows were already chomping at it.

He killed the tractor engine and hopped down from the seat, picked up a clean bucket, and went in the stall to milk the cow. “How often during a winter does she do this?”

“Depends. Usually when we have a snow coming through. Maybe once or twice a winter. Sometimes not at all. Once the snow is melted, she turns the cattle back out into the whole ranch and brings in the big bales as she needs them.”

“You always keep a milk cow?”

“Not always. Grand likes one in the winter so if we get stranded down here and can't get into town for supplies we have fresh milk and butter. She even makes cheese, but I have no idea how to do that. I do know how to run the electric churn and make butter.”

“That's good. In the spring we'll be too busy to milk a cow twice a day,” he said.

***

There was that
we
business again. And she'd almost used the past tense when she talked about Grand. That was enough to depress Jesus on a good day in heaven. She grabbed a feed bucket, filled it with grain for the hogs, and headed toward the hog pen.

She yelled at the hogs to drown out the niggling voices in her head. “Hey, pigs! You're going to be happy to know that the snow is slowing down and in a few days it'll warm up and your whole pen will be a brand new mud bath,” she said, but it didn't cheer her or the hogs up. They snorted, ate the grain, and she knew they'd much rather have a big bucket of cornmeal softened up with hot water or warm milk.

The chickens were happier with their breakfast. Even the rooster flapped his wings and crowed. They gave her eight big brown eggs in exchange for the chicken scratch she'd spread out on the floor of the henhouse.

When the ranch was really Creed's, would he expect her to keep helping with chores? She'd always helped Grand and she'd miss not going out to check on the ranch every day, but when it was his, he would probably hire some help. The bunkhouse might even be full again and there could be cowboys all over the ranch.

“Dammit!” She shook her fist at the chicken coop.

She didn't want to think of Grand in the past and she wanted to think of “if” not “when” Grand sold the Rockin' C. And if Creed really did buy the property, she'd be damned if she helped do one thing. He and all his cowboy friends could feed his own hogs and gather his own eggs.

Noel bounded out of the barn and stopped when she reached the chicken yard wire fence. When she stopped moving, she sunk down until her pregnant belly was brushing the snow.

Sage let herself out the gate and secured it by turning the wooden latch crossways. “I'm okay, girl. I'm just mad. You going to be able to get out of that snow or do I need to give you a helping hand?”

Noel stuck her nose in Sage's hand.

“I'm really fine, but you'd best be getting back to the house. You'll have frozen puppies if you stay out here much longer.”

With one jump, Noel was moving toward the house and barely sinking into the snow at all. They were halfway to the house when movement caught Sage's eye. She followed the tiny tracks to the big cedar tree between the house and barn. She bent at the waist and pulled her dark hair back so she could see underneath the lower branches of the tree.

Two cotton-tailed bunnies stared up at her. They huddled together against the tree trunk, their light bodies sitting right on top of what snow had drifted under the tree. Her special paint gods had given her the next painting. It wasn't going to be the whole big cedar but just the bottom branches and the two brown rabbits surrounded by snow. She stood up and backed up slowly so she wouldn't spook them and imagined a bright red bow and a bunch of mistletoe hanging from the bottom limb right in front of them.