So Far from Spring. Peggy Simson CurryЧитать онлайн книгу.
need no help. I want you to have the best to start. I spend three days pickin’ this cow. And in spring she gives you one dandy calf.”
“Bonnie Jean,” Kelsey said softly. It was the beginning of his dream, and as he looked at her he saw her multiplied by ten, by hundreds.
“The old woman,” Vic said, dropping his tone, “I don’ know what to do with her. She is worse than she used to be. Doc Bingham, he say she is in the change. Oh, I can’t tell about a woman, Scotty! You think if it is change that works on her, maybe she be better someday, huh?”
Kelsey looked into the rancher’s brown, troubled face. “It’s a thing they go through,” he said, remembering vaguely talk he had heard around the harbor. “She’ll get over it.”
“Amie—I talk to Amie about it, and Amie say with some womans it is all in their heads, this trouble with the change. Amie say too much has been made over it by old womans tellin’ tales to young womans until young womans can’t think about it without bein’ scared. Amie, she say to her it will be a blessing.” And then Vic’s face lighted and he laughed. “Amie, it is right for her, yup, yup. No more kids, huh?”
In the damp, quiet afternoon, with the smell of the earth around him, Kelsey drove Bonnie Jean toward the Red Hill Ranch. He wouldn’t put her among the other cattle, not yet. He wanted her in the corral, where he could get acquainted with her.
As they moved parallel with the meadow he looked across the brown stubble that had a shine to it after the rain, and he thought of the haying season behind him. It was the time of noisy men in the bunk-house, the poker chips clanking at night, and the time of the early beautiful mornings when a man felt good and as if he had been born all over again and no weariness or sadness in him. It was the time of the hot noons, the smell of hay dust thick to the nose and the green-headed horseflies plaguing the horses, and the stink of sweat on the men when they stopped to eat the hot noon meal Hilder brought to the field in the lumber wagon. And there were the afternoons—the cooling breeze dropping over the hogback, and the shadows long on the mountains, and the sound of the mowing machines far down the meadow like the purring of big cats. And the going home at last, riding in from the field in the evening light that took the sharpness off everything as it rounded the hills and the peaks, filling the hollows with dusk—home, and the supper waiting, and a man gulping the food and going to bed, and quiet at last with the cool night wind playing over him in a silver caressing that was like the touch of a loved one.
Now the cattle were on the land that had once been green, and the green was heaped in browning stacks for winter, and the poles of the stackyards were dark from the rain. Quiet was over everything—a waiting quiet, as though the earth were caught between summer and winter.
“It’s like myself,” he said aloud. For the earth had aged from spring to autumn, and surely he had aged. Ah, yes! Sometimes, he thought, I believed I had never been a lad, but now I know that I was. It was this morning that those days were gone forever and I was suddenly a man, with a woman and child to think of. How quickly it comes upon us, then!
Dusk was dropping over the hogback when he came to the corral. He put the cow into it and stood there, so enraptured at the sight of her that he fell into dreaming again.
The voice cut sharply through his thoughts. “Is that a Christly camel I see in this corral?”
He turned and saw Monte Maguire come through the gate, walking with the long free stride of a man. The silvery light of her pale hair stood out in the gathering dusk. She paused beside him, almost as tall as himself. “Where’d she come from?”
“Vic Lundgren’s.”
“What’s she doin’ in my corral?”
“She’s mine.”
“Oh, is that so? You figure she’s better than Two-Bar stuff?”
“No, Mrs. Maguire. But she’s almost as good.”
“Almost?”
“Well, you might have a few better—not many, though.”
There was a long silence, and then Monte Maguire said, “And what did you figure on doin’ with her?”
He put his hand on the corral fence to steady himself. The wood felt rough and strong and cool-wet from the rain. He thought of Prim and the child that was his, the heart of it beating there in Prim’s body. “Mrs. Maguire,” he said, forcing his voice to be steady, “I have to make a start in the cattle business. Wages aren’t enough. I thought you might agree to cut some of my wages so I could run a few cows. I’d make more that way. And today—today I found out I had to make more than just a wage.”
“Why?” The word was frosty. It would have withered a strong man.
Her still, composed face was suddenly sharply clear to him there in the few feet of dusk that separated them. And he knew that she was not a woman a man lied to. He told her the truth then. And when he had finished there was such an ache in his heart he could no longer face her. He walked a few steps away and stood by himself in the corral with the wet-manure smell rising around him.
Beyond the corral, on the side of the hogback, he could see still the muted scarlet of the aspens, and he was touched with sadness. The night was coming down, night that blotted away everything, all the color and shifting light of day. Only the mind and heart kept alive what was gone. The aspen fire didn’t die with the darkness, not as long as he was there to remember. It was in him, Kelsey Cameron, that the world lived and died. And when he was gone there would be the child that was his and Prim’s—the child to speak his name when that name was no more. That child would remember him through its whole life, even as he would remember Taraleean in the silence of himself long after she had gone.
Would this strange woman never speak? Why must he stand here waiting for her temper, for the curt tongue that would tell him he must move on and find another job? And then her voice was there, with a softness in it that had been unknown to him before this moment, and her fingers were hard and strong on his arm, giving him a little impatient shake. “A hell of a man you are, going to Vic Lundgren instead of to me if you needed help. And as for cattle, Vic’s not dry behind the ears yet when it comes to learnin’ cow business. Keep your cow. Run her here, and I’ll make the cut in your wages. As soon as you have enough money, buy another cow. But get the rest of ’em from me—you hear?”
Weakness swept over him, making his knees tremble. He tried to thank her, but the words wouldn’t come out through the tightness in his throat.
“A tough break doesn’t hurt a man,” she said. “Sometimes it makes him what he is. I’ve had ’em. I know. And I can look the whole damn world in the face and tell it to go to hell and never miss it.” Her hand came away from his arm, and he heard the sharp catch of her breath.
“I’ll make this up to you, Mrs. Maguire. I’ll—Some way I’ll show you how much I—”
“There’s nothin’ you have to prove to me, Kelsey. And I’m not giving you anything, either. You’ll earn what you get. Better yank the saddle off your horse and come to supper. That cow’ll keep till mornin’. She won’t look any different come daylight.”