“Uncle Harold,” Burt objected, “you’re a better businessman than that. You never start negotiating by giving somebody everything they want. Besides, she’s demanding half the ranch.”
Harold Patterson seemed suddenly very interested in the cleanliness of his fingernails. “So?” he asked innocently.
“So what about Ivy?” Burton demanded suddenly, his eyes alight with sparks of anger. “What about the daughter who didn’t run away from home? What about the one who stayed on and helped you look after the ranch? The one who took good care of her mother? Is this the thanks she gets?”
Angered, Burton let his voice rise in volume “And what the hell good is half a damn cattle ranch the size of the Rocking P? Half isn’t going to be enough for both of you to make a living or even for Ivy by herself, for that matter. And which half does she get? The part with the house and the well so she’ll still have a damn roof over her head? Or does Holly expect her sister to pitch a damn tent somewhere up on Juniper Flats?”
One of the few pleasures Harold Patterson found in being old was the ability to abandon an unpleasant current of conversation in favor of drifting back over the years. When the lines of the present became too harsh and glaring, when he tired of the bright colors and loud noises, he some times immersed himself in the cool, dim shadows of the past.
He did it again in that moment. When he looked across Burton’s desk, he didn’t see an angry forty five-year-old professional lawyer with a loosened silk tie knotted halfheartedly around his neck or the monogrammed cuffs of the stiffly starched white shirt. What he saw instead was a shirtless, towheaded seven-year-old boy barefoot child wearing nothing but a pair of Oshkosh coveralls cut off just above the boy’s scrawny knees.
Both of those bare knees were scraped raw and bleeding, as was the boy’s nose. There was a deep gouge on his chin, a cut Harold suspected was serious enough to require stitches, one that was going to result in a permanent scar.
It was summer. The boy and his uncle stood in the cool, gloomy barn. They faced each other in silence while a cloud of sunlit dust motes danced gaily around them. Dangling from the man’s hand was a thick, supple leather strap. The boy’s fists were clenched.
His chin trembled, and tears glistened in his eyes, but his head was unbowed.
“Burtie, your aunt Emily says you won’t tell Holly you’re sorry you hit her with the rock.”
“That’s ‘cause I’m not,” Burton Kimball declared fiercely, sniffing and wiping away the trickle of blood that had dribbled over the lump of his swollen upper lip. “If she ever does it again, I’ll hit her harder next time.”
Harold Patterson took a deep breath. He wanted desperately to impart this needed lesson to the boy, to make it stick. As his Christian duty, he had taken in his dead sister’s orphaned and abandoned son, had taken him to raise, but Harold was determined Burton not grow up to be like his no good, worthless father.
“Look, son,” Harold explained patiently. “This is important. It’s something you got to learn and understand once and for all. Men don’t go around hitting women. Ever. No matter what.”
“Holly was tickling Ivy,” Burtie countered. “She was tickling her, and she wouldn’t stop, not even when I asked her nice.”
“Tickling’s not bad,” Harold said. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Yes, she did, too,” Burton insisted. “Holly did it until it hurt, until Ivy cried, until she peed her pants.”
He blushed then, embarrassed that he knew about Ivy wetting her pants, humiliated by having to talk about it to Uncle Harold, and outraged that Holly had laughed at Ivy, pointing at her muddied garments and calling her a stupid cry-baby.
Burton sniffed again, but he straightened his shoulders. “Give me my licking, Uncle Harold” he said, swallowing hard. “But please don’t make me say I’m sorry.”
“Doc Winters sure did a good job of sewing up your chin that time,” Harold said suddenly shifting with a time- warping jolt back to the present. “Scar hardly shows at all.
Looks more like a dimple. Who’s that movie actor? The good-looking one with the dimple?”
“Kirk Douglas,” Burton answered mechanically “But don’t change the subject, Uncle Harold, I want to hear you tell me exactly what you think will happen to Ivy if you go through with this fruitcake idea.”
Remember that time I had to give you a licking in the barn after you chucked Holly over the head with a rock?”
“I remember,” Burton Kimball answered grimly.
“You were right back then, you know,” Harold said, “Holly was the one who should have had her butt whupped over that one. I used the strap on you because your aunt Emily insisted, but I didn’t hit you all that hard, not as hard as I could’ve. And here you are, all these years later, still sticking up for Ivy.”
“It seems to me,” said Burton Kimball, “that I shouldn’t have to. Her father should be the one looking after her instead of her cousin.”
There was another momentary lull in the conversation.
“I reckon this means I’ll have to change my will,” ‘ Harold ventured. “I already talked to Milo Davis’s girl about changing the beneficiary agreements on my life insurance.”
Maybe, in the interim, Burton Kimball, too, had been caught up in a remembered glimpse of that long ago scene in the barn; of that determined and unrepentant little boy standing his ground in a swirl of spinning dust motes.
“You’re changing the life insurance, too? Dear God in heaven. I don’t believe it. What’s gotten into you?”
“I’ve got two daughters,” Harold said. “The way it was setup wasn’t fair. One was in;one was out. I’ve thought about it all week. I’m going to talk to Holly about settling this thing with the understanding that she’ll have half the ranch, and Ivy will have the rest. Beyond that, I’m going to treat ‘em fifty-fifty. That’s fair.”
Rolling his chair away from the desk, Burton Kimball got up and stalked over to the window.
He stared silently out through the glass, studying a sudden burst of sunshine that glinted, blinding and silver,
