else, okay? I’m just here for bacon, and I can fix it myself.”
“You’d better fix it yourself,” his father snapped back at him as he and Annabelle released each other from their embrace. Hugh Senior turned his back, to hide from his son any visible effect of his desire for the boy’s mother. At the sink, making a show of washing his hands, he said, “Any child of mine who can’t even make it through one year of college had better learn how to fend for himself, because I’m not going to support you all of your lazy life.”
“Hugh,” Annabelle rebuked him, “don’t be mean.”
He muttered, “Worthless,” as he grabbed a towel to dry his hands. Then he strode out of the room, brushing roughly against Bobby’s shoulder, causing the eighteen-year-old to exclaim, sarcastically, “Excuse me, Dad!”
Annabelle took over the bacon-cooking for her son, to make up to him for his father.
“What’s eating him?” Bobby asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said, although she hoped she did.
She hoped Hugh’s foul mood was due to Billy Crosby, or to nothing more serious than too long between times with her in bed. She prayed that it didn’t have anything to do with the thing that had her worried, the thing she had not confided in him and, with any luck, would never need to say.
A few minutes later she sat down across from her youngest as he forked fried eggs into his mouth.
“Bobby, will you at least think about applying to Emporia State?”
When mother and son sat across from each other at the kitchen table at High Rock Ranch, arguing about college, it was seven-fifteen in the morning. They were less than twenty-four hours away from tragedy, and what their family didn’t know had already begun to hurt them.
5
AFTER EVERYBODY in her family finally left the house, Annabelle made a meat loaf and put it in the oven to bake before the day got too hot for cooking. She planned to let it cool and then serve Hugh Senior’s favorite cold meat loaf sandwiches-on homemade wheat bread, with mayo and lettuce-along with leftovers of yesterday’s potato and green bean salads. She cleaned up her kitchen, swept the front, rear, and side porches, threw a load of sheets into the machine in the basement, made calls for her church circle, checked by telephone on an elderly friend, answered a couple of calls from cattle buyers, and fed the barn cats. They had temporarily run out of mice, and were looking a little thin as a consequence of their success. She watered her inside plants-she’d given up on her poor flower garden in July. Finally, with yet another chore in mind, she ran upstairs to change into her riding clothes, which amounted to blue jeans, long-sleeve cotton shirt, boots, dark sunglasses, and a floppy straw hat to protect her complexion from the sun.
She wanted to combine responsibility with pleasure.
On her way out to saddle up her chestnut horse-named Dallas for the city of her birth-Annabelle grabbed a banana for her own breakfast.
It was late for a morning ride; the day was already heating up.
But she felt a pressing need to escape from the argumentative air in her home that day. Plus, she had things to think over, including her husband’s foul mood. Hugh Senior rarely wavered in his tenderness toward her, but overall Annabelle felt the years were turning him tougher, rather than softening him. The good principles he’d started out with, the ones that made her parents approve of him, had hardened, until now they were deep lines that people crossed at the price of never getting back into his good graces again.
It scared her sometimes, that increasing hardness.
Seeing people encounter it in him was like watching them race headlong into a steel wall and get bounced back violently. From the new distance they rubbed their noses and stared as if seeing him anew. When they attempted to get close again, they encountered a hostile formality in him that kept them at more than arm’s length. Permanently. If the ranch manager in Colorado, for instance, was stealing from them-even if only dimes-he would rebound off that steel in Hugh so hard he’d land in another state, where he’d be job hunting.
She hoped it wasn’t so.
The irony, to Annabelle, was that her husband’s toughness grew from raising three sons whom he loved with every sinew of his being, and from semiraising the boys that Hugh and she had taken under their wings over the last couple of decades. She’d been the lucky one who got to give the boys affection, a sympathetic ear, and lots of marble cake; Hugh was the disciplinarian, caring enough about all of them to say no when it had to be said, and then sticking to it. He’d been as tough on Belle, but it hadn’t worked as well on her. Their only daughter had the famous Linder work ethic, but she didn’t have the emotional resilience the boys had from being shoved down- figuratively-and expected to get back up again.
When Belle got shoved down, she tended to stay down.
The change in Hugh Senior didn’t scare Annabelle for her own sake-she believed her husband would forgive her anything-but for her children. Children-even grown ones-crossed lines. It was inevitable, sometimes even desirable, in her opinion. But it would break her heart if they ever lost their father’s respect, and she feared that Bobby was not the only one of them who might be on the path toward that disaster.
Once atop Dallas, she pointed the horse down a rut in the dirt, in the direction she wanted to go, draped the reins over his withers and let him have his head while she peeled and ate her banana.
The grass under his hooves looked worse than dormant, it looked dead.
They hadn’t had precipitation since May. Instead of depending on grass to feed the cattle, the ranch was being forced to truck in hay to some of the herds, as if it were already winter.
It was the kind of weather that her husband called expensive.
The morning had a smell of toasted vegetation, even though no sane rancher would have set a match to burn pastures in these conditions. A further fire hazard loomed out west: the threat of lightning in thunderclouds. At this point a storm would be a mixed blessing, welcome for rain, as long as there wasn’t too much of it at one time, and unwelcome for the lightning that accompanied it.
They reached a gate and she slid down off Dallas to open it, coax him through, and then refasten the gate and remount him.
She was looking for a particular group of cattle-the pregnant mamas the men had weaned from their most recent calves yesterday. Now that she was in their pasture, she was surprised not to hear any bawling from the mothers or from the calves that had been separated from them. Usually she’d have expected to find all the calves lined up on one side of a fence, crying for their moms, and the cows bunched on the other side, mooing back at their six-month-old babies.
But the pasture was silent this morning.
It was quiet enough to hear a whip-poor-will and to hear Dallas crunch small rocks under his metal shoes, still enough to hear the buzz of a small plane overhead in the distance and catch the honk of a truck horn on the highway.
An especially easy weaning this time, Annabelle thought.
And then, as Dallas led her toward the herd, she saw the reason for the unnatural calm: the supposedly weaned calves were back with their mothers! Some were nursing, some butting and bouncing around each other in play, others pressing so close to their mothers’ big red sides that they looked glued to them, as if they wanted to make sure they couldn’t be forced apart again.
“Oh, no,” she groaned to Dallas. “There must be a fence down.”
This was not going to improve her husband’s disposition.
It was going to mean another day’s worth of hard, hot work, plus the extra physical and emotional strain on the cattle, plus the expense of the hired hands. She thought of Billy Crosby at that moment and said with annoyance, “One fewer hired hand.”
Dallas ’s ears suddenly perked forward, attracting her attention.
When Annabelle looked past them, she spotted what the horse had noticed first: a large mound where it shouldn’t be, a big red hump in the grass.
Dallas lifted his feet, one after the other, as if he were nervous.
She had to nudge him hard to get him to move toward the lump.
