Summer Winds

Andrews & Austin

2009

————

Summer Winds

© 2009 By Andrews & Austin. All rights reserved.

ISBN 10: 1-60282-120-8E

ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-120-0E

This electronic book is published by

Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

P.O. BOX 249

Valley Falls, NY 12185

First Bold Strokes printing: October 2009

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

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Credits

Editor: Shelley Thrasher

Production Design: Stacia Seaman

Cover design by Sheri ([email protected])

Acknowledgments

Dr. Shelley Thrasher has been our editor for so long that working with her is not only comfortable but comforting. She is always there to compliment or correct, delete or delineate, improve or impress.

We owe her much. Special thanks to our dear friend and publicist, Connie Ward. Applause for the lovely bookcover design created by Sheri. And to Rad and her entire BSB team, we tip our literary hats in thanks.

To Love… life’s greatest gift.

Change is like wind through a screen door tempting you to
open up and feel the full force.
I let go of that thought and grabbed the metal screen-door handle, stepped onto the front porch, and braced against the wind as it whistled across the prairie and bent the grass to the ground. Late May, and only a few weeks before wet, swollen pastures would dry beneath my feet, ponds would come alive with the hum of cicadas, and chilly evenings would surrender to long, hot nights. Change in the wind made me restless.

“You okay, Maggie Tanner? You look mighty thoughtful.”

Perry approached from around the corner of the house looking like someone who’d just crawled out of a mine shaft after twenty years missing. His white beard, sweat-stained shirt, suspenders, and baggy jeans belied the romance of unexpected meetings.

I ignored his question because these days I didn’t know the answer. Instead I zeroed in on work: what should have been done or needed to be done or had to be re-done. “Did you get that gate repaired so the boom can get through there and Jeremiah can start spraying the south pasture?” I held my hand up to assess the wind’s velocity and determine if we’d be wasting weed killer.

“Gate’s fixed. Jeremiah’s broken. Don’t think he’s sprayin’ or stayin’.”

Skipping further discussion, I headed to the bunkhouse two hundred yards to the south where Perry and Jeremiah shared living quarters while Perry gave me a lot of reasons why I shouldn’t start “buildin’ up a head of steam.” Ignoring him, I banged on the door, then pushed it open and blinked into the semi-darkness. Jeremiah, a tall boy in filthy blue jeans and a dirty white T-shirt, lay face down on the bed, his arms spread wide and flopping like a spastic snow angel. The room reeked of drunk-sweat.

“Jeremiah, damn your ass, pack up and get out!” I tried to hoist him by the back of his belt but he was deadweight.

Perry limped in behind me and wedged between us. “Now, Maggie, we’re short a hand as it is.” Perry half hoisted him to his feet, and Jeremiah staggered once before lurching forward onto the bed again.

“I won’t miss him, because I don’t know what he looks like, because his drunken face is constantly stuck in the mattress.” The blood rushed through my veins and my blood pressure rose.

Perry looked up at the ceiling and gave that little whistling sound he always made when I lost my temper. He used to call me a feisty widow woman, until I threatened to kill him if he ever said it again. Now after nearly two decades of ranching together, no telling what he said about me out of earshot, but he stayed, and that said something.

He caught up with me by the water well where I seesawed the tall pump handle, letting the ice-cold groundwater splatter onto my legs, arms, and face. I could have walked to the house and used the kitchen sink, but I liked the shock of the icy spring-fed water slapping me back to my senses.

“That’s three you’ve fired and the season hasn’t even got started.” Perry scratched the top of his head as if my decision had irritated his brain.

“Drunks, druggies, womanizers, and lazy asses!”

“Need to hire ourselves some monks,” he said evenly, and mopped his brow with the bandana from his rear pocket before he walked away shaking his head.

I wiped my damp hands on my pants, pulled my truck keys out of my pocket, and decided to go into town and blow off some steam.

Perry could have the last word, but I didn’t have to stand around and listen to it.

My light blue Chevy pickup bounced over the rutted dirt road for a quarter of a mile before getting traction on the two-lane highway that led into Little Liberty. I sped past miles of flat farmland with white wood-frame houses in the distance and open fields dotted with John Deere equipment.
Can’t stand up long enough to work ten
acres, much less my twelve hundred. Passed out drunk twice a week,
and Perry blames me for firing him. Old coot!

Thirty minutes later I slowed to twenty-five as I entered the city limits and turned onto Main Street, where I pulled into a graveled spot in front of the Kansas Kafe, or the 2-K, as the locals called it. Advertised as “the best coffee, homemade sweet rolls, and fried hash-brown eatery for miles around,” the 2-K had no competition an hour’s drive in any direction. I pushed open the glass door bearing the chipped, white-stenciled 2-K, made to look like a cattle brand, and scanned the room for anyone I knew.

Hiram Kendall, my neighbor on the north, his blubbery body lodged into a scarred oak booth in the back, was talking to his employee, Stretch Adams, a tall mid-fifties fellow with thinning hair and muscles as tough and sinewy as beef jerky.

Hiram gave a nonchalant wave as I approached. “Howya doin’?”

I hooked a thumb over the front pocket of my Levi’s. “Fair to middlin’.” I fell into the colloquial vernacular for “okay, but not great.” “Know anybody looking for work?” I asked casually, as if the answer didn’t matter. I’d long ago discovered when things mattered too much, people took advantage.

“Everybody I know’s tryin’
not
to work.” He chuckled and tore into a chicken leg as if the pause for conversation had nearly allowed it to escape.

“I’d be willing to come over there, Maggie, and
do a little
work
.” Stretch raised an eyebrow, undoubtedly convinced only Hiram would get his meaning, and Hiram chuckled.

“Think the payment might be a bit high, Maggie. I’d look elsewhere.” Hiram jiggled from internal mirth and wiped the chicken grease off his chin with the back of his big bear paw.

“How old do men have to get before they stop thinking about sex?” I asked.

“Dead, that’s how old.” Hiram grunted.

“How old do women have to get before they
start
thinking about it?” Stretch leered.

“If she’s in your bed, Stretch, I’d say wake her up and ask her.”

“That’s a good one.” Hiram pounded the table and, in appreciation for my adding humor to his morning, agreed to ask around on my behalf. Unspoken was the fact that men out here would do things for each other when they wouldn’t do them for a woman.

Donnetta, a big, dark-haired part-Cherokee wearing a white apron over her tight pink blouse and black stretch pants, hustled between tables and cash register. Catching my eye, she crossed the room to greet me and sang out jovially, “You annoying my diners?”

“Your diners are plenty annoying without my help,” I joked.

The breakfast crowd was clearing out, the far-too-fat farm boys hoisting up their overalls and heading out to their trucks. An elderly, bent-over part-timer bussed tables and cleaned up around us as Donnetta indicated a booth that was clean.

“Sit,” she ordered in her commanding voice and gestured with one powerful arm that could have been deemed fat, but due to her tight tan skin just seemed strong. “I need a break.” Her pie-shaped face beamed as her butt slid across the brown leather seats and her tummy grazed the table edge.

“How’s Big Valley, Ms. Stanwyck?” Donnetta had decided years ago that my starched shirts and hard-pressed independence qualified me as the star’s double. Ranching had made me tough, but beyond that, I didn’t see the resemblance.

“Big Valley needs haying, know anyone?” I asked.

“Sounds like a personal problem to me. My Big Valley needs some attention too.” She guffawed, and I wondered if the entire restaurant had a Viagra with their V-8.

“I need ranch hands,” I said.

“Well, that works too!” She doubled over with laughter and I waited for her to get serious. “This is where being married again would help you. It would be
his
problem to find ranch hands.”

Stretch Adams walked over and bent down to tell me good-bye.

“You are looking mighty fine, Maggie.” He slipped a stained business card on the table bearing his cell phone number and winked, then slid a toothpick between his lower front teeth and sucked loudly on the wooden shaft before heading out the door.

As if I don’t know where to find him in a town of nine hundred
people, or that I’d want to.
Stretch must have seen a movie where a suave leading man slid his phone number in front of a woman and she jumped his bones, because he glanced back over his shoulder at me as if he thought he was so hot he’d burn a hole in the pavement.

“Imagine ‘doing’ that one,” Donnetta said as he attempted a seductive saunter out the door.

“You imagine it, I gotta go.” I downed the rest of my coffee, jumped to my feet, and slapped a dollar bill on the table. As the glass door swung shut behind me, I could still hear her protest my paying for the java.

I turned down Main Street and drove past Benegan’s hardware store, which sat diagonal to Olan’s gas station, an old movie theater, and a tiny bakery. Down the first side street was the Kendall lumberyard, the corner bar, and directly across from it an old white clapboard house that served as the funeral home where Bea Benegan’s husband “Seller” got his nickname after he exited the pub drunk, entered the mortuary, and tried to sell a hand gun to Mrs. McRary, who’d been dead for three days. After that, whenever he walked down the street, people shouted, “Seller, Benegan?”

I approached Main and Fourth, an intersection of churches: Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, and a new one labeled Sinners Church, apparently for those who couldn’t settle on a denomination and simply needed a category.

Freedom, religious or otherwise, was hard to come by in this small town, at least the kind of freedom I’d always envisioned finding after graduation. I’d planned to be a reporter or journalist or interpreter for the United Nations but instead ended up married and living on a ranch. After all these years, I still didn’t feel like I blended with the locals. But my college education made me the country equivalent of bilingual. I could be comfortable seeing you anon or nigh onto Sunday.

My mental wanderings were simply an excuse to avoid thinking about having fired Jeremiah and leaving myself short a ranch hand.

And I was just plain nervous for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint other than the wind blowing and stirring everything up off the sidewalks and swirling it around my head. The wind set expectations, but what could you expect in Little Liberty, a town of jobs instead of careers, tasks rather than goals, and duties that displaced dreams.

I drove thirty minutes to the ranch past a landscape sprouting small barns and houses set back off the road. Just enough people to give you comfort that someone might be there when you needed them but not so many that you felt crowded. People were like weeds; a few couldn’t hurt, but too many and they choked out anything good that might “come of the ground.”

Since we were only weeks from the beginning of summer and blistering heat, I needed someone younger and stronger than Perry, who was probably seventy but guarded his age like a starlet. These days the local kids went away to school and didn’t return. Ranch work was hard, and the limping men in the community attested to the dangers of tractors rolling over on you or livestock kicking you.