Rainsinger (15 page)

Daniel’s voice cut through her reverie.

“You can’t sit over there alone, letting me make a fool of myself, lady.” He grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet.

“Oh, no,” she protested, pulling back. “I don’t dance. I’ve never done it well. I’m so clumsy.”

He laughed. “Lighten up, honey.”

Giselle grabbed her other hand. “He needs a partner!”

Joleen slipped over to the stereo and quickly donned her dowdy glasses. Her face was sober when she looked at her older sister, and Winona felt a thud in her heart. It wasn’t El Durazno that was affecting her cure. It was Daniel.

Given that bit of information, Winona knew she had to safeguard Joleen even at the expense of her own desires. Joleen was a child, with no one else in her corner. She was so fragile at the moment that a betrayal might cripple her forever. Winona couldn’t risk it.

Firmly she removed her hand from Daniel’s. “I really have some things to do.”

She didn’t miss the bewilderment in Daniel’s gaze or the speculation in Giselle’s alert gold eyes. It was only Joleen’s expression of gratitude that made any difference, and it made
all
the difference.

With an ache she didn’t dare identify, Winona went upstairs, hearing the laughter and music resume as soon as she reached the kitchen.

W
inona dried the counter and glanced around the kitchen one last time to make sure it was spotless. The top to the sugar bowl sat next to the bowl; she put it back in place. A scrap of paper lay next to the trashcan; she picked it up and threw it away. A tiny spatter of grease from this morning’s eggs marred the stovetop; she wiped it off.

As she performed each task, her annoyance grew. She was not neat or tidy by nature, and this constant attention to detail was beginning to drive her crazy. Daniel never seemed to leave a room without putting everything into military order. Even now, she knew she could peek around the corner to the living room and the keyboard would be regimentally aligned with the edge of the desk. The papers would be filed. Not a stray pen or paper clip would be found—there was a place for everything and everything was in its place.

Some evil impulse made her want to go in and rearrange all his books while he was outside, playing a game of horseshoes with the girls. Percival happily ran circles around them, yapping with excitement every so often.

Watching through the window, Winona sighed. The sun blazed in a sky the color of robins’ eggs, a dark, rich blue without a trace of moisture in it. A dazzling puff of white cloud chugged by over a stand of cottonwoods, whose leaves didn’t shine in the light as they ordinarily did. She frowned. If cottonwoods, notoriously drought-resistant, were feeling the effects of no rain, the orchard would be in trouble. There might be no crop of peaches at all this year.

Percy barked fiercely, running after Daniel as he strode over the dusty ground to retrieve the horseshoes he’d thrown, and Winona felt a familiar pinch at the easy way he moved. She ignored the restlessness it brought with it.

It had been a week since the night he had kissed her outside, and she’d managed to keep herself aloof ever since, giving him up to the children, who obviously worshiped him. Even now, they jumped at him and vied for his attention with jokes and the coquettish little tricks girls seemed to know from birth. The first day or two there had been a competition, but Daniel had managed them easily, soothing the tender egos of both girls without wounding either one.

Moving closer to the window, she watched him, and the restlessness, which had nothing to do with the drought or having to keep a tidy house, swelled. He wore the turquoise-colored cotton tank top that brought out the deep reddish hues in his brown skin and made his hair seem even darker by comparison. Over the past week he had spent a lot of time outside, and she noticed he had sunburned cheeks and threads of hair streaked in the sun to a burnished copper.

It made him even sexier.

She knew he noticed her avoidance of him, but he seemed to respect her need for it. Perversely, that irritated her even more. Sighing again, more heavily, she glared at all three of them.

This way lay madness. She had to do something. In a sudden fit of movement, Winona went to her room and changed into a pair of ancient jean shorts, sturdy shoes and a cotton blouse. In a bag, she found a pair of work gloves. She carried these from the room with her, hearing the voices of the others in the kitchen.

The kitchen she had just cleaned up. The girls had food of all kinds spread over the table as they made sandwiches.

“Winona!” Joleen said. “Can we hike over to the river, me and Giselle? Daniel said to ask you.”

It was a hike of about two and a half miles each way, but Winona knew the picnic place they had in mind. A great-grandfather of a cottonwood, with twisting branches perfect for climbing and perching, stood on the riverbank. The river meandered by. At the best of times, it was little more than a creek. With the lack of rain, it was bound to be less than a trickle.

“It’s quite a walk,” she said. “Are you sure you feel like going that far?”

The girls exchanged a look that said adults were so dull as to be practically dead. “We’ll be fine—and we’ll be together, to watch out for each other.”

Winona glanced at Daniel, who winked and nodded.

“I don’t mind, if you take plenty of water. And you can wade, but don’t swim.”

“Like we could swim in that tiny brook,” Joleen said with a snort. “You worry too much.”

“It’s my job.” Winona checked the food they were packing into small, brown bags. Sandwiches, chips, granola bars, apples. “Take some carrots, too. And who has a watch? I want you back at—” she glanced at the clock “—four o’clock.”

It was more than they’d hoped for. With little squeals, they agreed. Winona smiled, remembering when she’d spent entire days in the branches of that cottonwood.

“Can we take Percy with us?”

The puppy slumped by the wall, his tongue out in a hard pant. “No, sorry. He’s too little. You’d end up having to carry him, and he’s too heavy.”

They agreed to that. Within minutes, they were smeared with sunscreen, hats over their heads to protect against the hard desert sunshine and their bags tucked into a single, battered backpack Daniel produced from a closet. Chewing gum and giggling, they set out on the path toward the river. Winona watched them wistfully, tapping her work gloves on her leg.

“They’ve become good friends,” Daniel commented.

Winona suddenly realized the departure of the girls left her entirely alone with Daniel. “I guess they have,” she said. “It’s very good for Joleen.”

“She’s really coming out of her shell. Maybe you should go to town and talk to the drama teacher one day soon.”

“I don’t know where I’ll be come fall.”

He said nothing. Winona slapped her gloves on her thigh again. “Would you mind if I went up to the bluff and dug yucca to plant around the house?” She pointed at the dust around the back stoop. “We need something to hold the soil here.”

“I’ll go with you. Let me get the wheelbarrow.”

“No,” Winona said, then realized how rude it sounded. “I mean, I don’t need help if you have something else to do.”

His face showed nothing. “I don’t have anything else to do. I’d like to go with you.” A tiny quirk of his mouth, not quite a smile, gave his eyes mischief. “I’ll be the snake watch, eh?”

Her stomach, right on cue, flipped. It annoyed her, but she agreed. “Okay.”

He fetched the wheelbarrow, and they walked toward the bluff that overlooked the orchard on one side, providing a windbreak. As they passed the orchard, Winona examined the trees, seeing, with not a small measure of sorrow that the leaves had a less-vibrant color. “If we don’t get some rain, the fruit will start dropping,” she commented.

“Which means no harvest.”

“Exactly.”

They both fell silent, and Winona wondered if Daniel had the same thought she did—
how would they solve this ownership quandary?
The details had been fuzzy when they had made their agreement, but it was more and more evident that one of them would simply have to relinquish claim to the other.

Which of them would be the first to give in?

“It’s more complicated than we thought at first, isn’t it?” he asked quietly.

“What?” Winona said, even though she knew.

“One of us has to give it up.”

“Yes.” The sun was hot on her head, and Winona wished she’d remembered a hat. “I suppose we will. I have a lot more to lose than you do, however.”

He made a noise. “How do you figure?”

She gestured toward the land spreading around them. “I forget exactly how many acres there are to this ranch. It’s about 400. That adds up to quite a bit of money.”

“It’s 440 acres,” he said in a harsh voice. “Good ranch land, except you don’t have the water rights to go with it. Not worth a wooden nickel without water.”

They were both breathing hard with the incline. “This isn’t the best time to talk about this,” she said.

He nodded. Winona concentrated on the path, which took a sharp upward slope as they neared the top of the bluff. Piñon trees and prickly-pear cactus stretching in patches as wide as a city garden edged the path. The bottom of her tennis shoe connected with one flat, round cactus and a bristling of tiny spines bloomed on her rubber sole.

Daniel grunted as he shoved the wheelbarrow in front of him. Winona scrambled to the top of the bluff, then grabbed the edge of the wheelbarrow and yanked it to the level surface at the top. Sweat trickled down her back and itched on her face. She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist.

Daniel joined her. “There has to be a better way down. I don’t want to take a load of yucca over that lip.”

Winona nodded, still catching her breath, and pointed to the other side of the high bluff. “If we go down over there, it’s longer, but it’s a much easier slope.”

From the high vantage point, the land spread around them like a quilt made of burlap and silk and rope ties. The house and dilapidated barn stood alone in the midst of the cottonwood trees. The orchard stretched from the edge of the bluff like a mythical cloud, and to the east was an expanse of land that ended at the creek, with its sentinel trees, two or three miles distant.

“Do you see the girls?” she asked with a smile, pointing toward the small figures moving in the distance.

Daniel smiled. “Yeah. They’re taking their time.”

Here and there on the vast prairie, lonely clusters of juniper and piñon trees stubbornly grew amid the flatness. Hands on her hips, Winona absorbed the beauty, her heart aching with the open work of dark green and sage and dun, brilliantly contrasted by the mountains on the horizon and the dazzlingly blue bowl of sky.

“Dear God,” she said quietly. “I can never quite remember how incredibly beautiful this is from up here.”

Daniel came to stand beside her. “It’s not about the money at all, is it?”

“No,” she agreed. “When I die, I want to be buried here, so my body will nourish the land.”

“Somewhere here, my great-great-grandmother lies in her grave,” he said, and his tone was hushed. “Sometimes I think about her, and I wonder how she kept the soldiers from burning her trees. No one ever says. I wonder what she traded.”

Winona looked at him. His rich, dark eyes were trained on the treetops, on a day very distant in time, but obviously very close to him at this moment.

He said, “She died right after. I think she traded herself.”

“Not herself,” Winona said quietly. “Maybe her body. But her soul is still here, her heart.”

He turned. “It would be easier for me, Winona, if you cared only about the money—if you were just some Anglo coming in here for a profit.” His mouth was a hard line. “But you’re not. You love it like an Indian.”

The remark was meant as a compliment. Winona had heard similar comments in the past. More or less, it said, “You aren’t like other white folks.” Not really a compliment, because it denied who
she
was.

And in this instance, when everything she was seemed tied to this particular stretch of earth—all her far-distant, exploring ancestors who’d come from Europe to escape whatever they’d run from, and her Uncle Jericho who’d taught her basketball and a love of peach trees and a passion for the high desert—it seemed particularly important not to let that be denied. She was who she was because of
her
people, just as he was a product of his.

There was no possible way to bring all those feelings into words. Turning away and picking up the shovel she’d carried up, she said only, “You don’t have to be Indian to love the land.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No? Tell me what you meant, then,” Winona said. “You’re determined to misunderstand me. There’s no point in having this conversation.”

She jammed the shovel into the giving earth, a few inches from the base of a small yucca not yet in bloom. “The fact is, you keep coming back to the ownership problem as if there were some great social or political relevance to who gets it.”

“There is.”

“No, Daniel.” She tossed a shovelful of dirt from the shallow hole and dropped to her knees to see if she could feel the roots of the plant. “This is about two people who love this land—that orchard in particular—for different reasons. It’s that simple.”

“It isn’t that simple!” He never shouted, but there was vehemence in his words. “This is my last chance.”

She paused, putting her dusty hands on her knees, and looked at him. Agitation showed in the soft curse he let go, before turning away, one hand in his pocket, to gaze out over the tops of the peach trees. “Your last chance?” she echoed.

His jaw tightened and he brushed his free hand over his chin, and she saw his fierce struggle to remain in control. It seared her. An old proverb ran through her mind...Still waters run deep.

“Never mind that,” he said finally, and turned back to her. “Look, I’m not asking you to
give
me the land. I can give you back the tax money, and maybe get a loan for a solid down payment, so you and Joleen can get a place to live. I’ll pay you whatever is fair.” He knelt, his expression as earnest as she’d ever seen it. “And it really isn’t worth much to anyone else without the water rights.”