The Scent of Rain and Lightning

  “Get into town and make those bank deposits,” he commanded his third-born, Chase, who had driven in early with Hugh-Jay to get that day’s orders. Chase had made the mistake of offering his parents an amiable good morning when he ambled into the kitchen looking for breakfast to complement the eggs and sausage his sister-in-law already served him in town.

  His father barked at him, “You were supposed to do that yesterday.”

  “Dad!” Chase raised his arms in humorous defense. “I was working the pens with you yesterday!”

  “You can’t accomplish two things in one day?”

  If Chase had been with his friends instead of his parents, he might have joked, Only if one is blond and the other brunette. Instead he half grinned at his mother, who put a forefinger to her lips to warn him against arguing or getting fresh with his father that morning. “Just do it,” her finger said. Chase was smart enough to know good advice when he saw it. Grabbing the deposit envelopes with their checks made out from cattle buyers to High Rock Ranch, he sacrificed a second breakfast for the sake of peace in the family.

  Then it was their oldest child’s turn when he came into the kitchen.

  “You’re going to Colorado tonight,” his father informed Hugh-Jay.

  They had a ranch there, and a third property due north in Nebraska.

  “Why?” Hugh-Jay made the mistake of asking, in a perfectly respectful tone of voice. He was, in his mother’s opinion, the best natural cowman in the family, not to mention also being the nicest of any of her four children. Hugh-Jay was kind to everybody, good with cattle, even better with horses. His father seemed determined, however, to keep him away from cattle and buried in paperwork and accounting, which was the sort of business for which he had no aptitude at all. Chase and Belle were the ones with the heads for numbers. Hugh-Jay was the diplomat and animal lover, and Bobby … well, nobody quite knew what Bobby was good for.

  “Dad,” Hugh-Jay said calmly, “I want to take that lame horse to the vet.”

  “He can limp for another couple of days.”

  Hugh-Jay looked startled at his father’s cavalier words. He frowned at his mother, an expression she read as both concern for the horse and confusion at his father’s apparent hypocrisy about the welfare of their animals. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then merely asked, “What’s going on in Colorado?”

  “That’s what I want you to find out. Something’s funny about the bills. You get out there and see if he’s hiding anything from us.”

  The “he” to whom he referred was their ranch manager.

  “Dad.” Hugh-Jay’s protest was a gentle rebuke. “He’s a good man.”

  “Maybe he is, but it won’t hurt to prove it.”

  Behind Hugh Senior, Annabelle made small sweeping motions with her hands, her way of telling her son to go, get out of here.

  “Yes, sir,” Hugh-Jay said with a sigh, “but I can’t leave until this afternoon.”

  “Why not?”

  He smiled at his father, then at his mother, as he pulled a red feed-store cap onto his wheat-blond hair. He had a plain, pale face that radiated his bighearted nature, and which only burned—or blushed—and never tanned.

  “Believe it or not, Dad, I have a life outside this ranch.”

  He was the only Linder sibling who was married, and with a child.

  “We won’t any of us have a life if we don’t attend to this ranch,” his father retorted. The elder Hugh Linder was a beefier, more handsome version of his oldest son; he exuded a natural leadership quality that none of his children had yet grown into for themselves.

  Instead of arguing, Hugh-Jay winked at his mother and started to leave the kitchen.

  “Hugh-Jay?”

  He looked back at Annabelle, who asked him, “Are you all right?”

  He gave her a friendly, puzzled look. “Sure. Don’t I look all right, Mom?”

  After an instant’s hesitation she nodded, saying nothing more.

  His father backed down for a moment, at least about one thing. “Don’t worry about that horse, son.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll get it to the vet myself, if I have to.”

  Hugh-Jay smiled his gratitude, gave his parents a wave, and continued on toward the front door, which they heard him thoughtfully close, not slam as any of their other children might have done.

  Belle almost escaped as she ran out of the house on her way back to her fledgling museum. She’d only come home to shower and change clothes. But she didn’t make it out the front door in time to avoid hearing her father shout, “Belle! What time did you get in last night?”

  Belle backed up, stuck her head in the kitchen and said, “I didn’t, Dad. I stayed in town, and I’m twenty-three years old, for heaven’s sake, so why are you still asking me questions like that?”

  Her expression, more than her words, said he’d insulted her.

  “Because you should be thoughtful to your mother.”

  “What did I do to Mom?”

  “She fixed a plate for supper for you, and you never showed up.”

  “I never asked her to do that, Dad, did I, Mom?”

  “You’ll be late for work,” he said, changing tack.

  “What? You don’t even think it’s real work, Dad.”

  “Anything worth doing is worth—”

  “Mother, tell him to stop.”

  She sounded pent-up with resentment.

  Annabelle smiled at her daughter, who had the blond, big-boned look of her father and her oldest and youngest brothers. If Annabelle could have, she would have waved a magic wand to make Belle, her second child, as pretty and as happy as she was serious and sensitive. Too serious, in her mother’s opinion, and too sensitive to slights, but maybe that’s what happened to a girl who grew up with younger brothers who constantly teased her unless somebody else sat on them. It had never seemed to be in Belle’s nature to give as good as she got, except when she was misunderstanding what was said to her. Short of that, she was more likely to run away, slam a door, and simmer until she eventually exploded out of all proportion to the remembered crimes. Annabelle said lightly, “No, you didn’t ask me to set a plate, but you might just as easily have shown up and complained if I hadn’t done it.”

  Belle rolled her eyes.

  Her mother observed that but held onto her own temper. In a light, teasing tone, she said, “Tell your dad that if he doesn’t like the hours you keep, he can buy you a little house in town, Belle. Then he won’t have to know what fathers shouldn’t be knowing anyway.”

  “You know I don’t earn enough to pay him rent!”

  “Who said anything about rent?” Annabelle joked.

  “Don’t treat me like I’m irresponsible,” Belle shot back.

  “What? Belle, I would never call you, of all people, ir—”

  Belle interrupted. “Dad, I got that buffalo head I was after, so if you could write me a check and leave it in my room?”

  And then she was gone.

  “I can’t say anything to that girl,” Annabelle complained to her husband when Belle was gone.

  “I don’t know why she rushes to get there,” Hugh grumbled back. “That museum is going to get five tourists a year and most of them will be friends of ours from out of town. I think she’s only doing it to make me spend money on it.” He was bankrolling his daughter’s project—which seemed mostly hobby to him—in the hope that it might lead to an actual job for her and her history degree. “Now she wants me to pay for a mangy old buffalo head?”

  “Oh, stop it,” Annabelle shushed him, but halfheartedly. “She’s right. You complain it isn’t a real job and then you expect her to act like it is. You offer to finance it and then you complain when she takes you up on the offer.” She tugged on her husband’s shirtsleeve. She thought Hugh was growing quite distinguished-looking now that he was in his fifties and his thick blond hair was turning silver. She also thought that their children would be shocked—Belle, especially, would be hor
rified—if they knew how much their mother still loved to be alone in the master bedroom with their father with the door locked. When he turned toward her, she smiled and said, “Why is it that we can’t seem to get rid of our kids?”

  Chase, Bobby, and Belle still lived—mostly—on the ranch.

  He grinned down at her and said, “Well, I’m doing my best here to run them off.”

  When she laughed, he leaned over and kissed her mouth.

  “Have I ever mentioned that you’re the prettiest woman in town?”

  “Just the town? Not the whole county?”

  Annabelle, whom he’d married and brought up from Dallas, was the one from whom their son Chase had inherited both his good looks and his charm. In their family of blond giants, only she and Chase had dark hair and blue eyes and tawny skin; in a family of accomplished and confident people, the two of them carried themselves with the air of people who had always been especially well-loved and admired, and for whom good things came more easily than they did to most people. The fact that Annabelle was also nice was a source of some pride throughout the county. People bragged about her, about the whole Linder clan: “Good people, lot of money, but they don’t put on airs, ’cept maybe that girl Hugh-Jay married.”

  Hugh Senior moved in for a longer and deeper kiss with his wife.

  She slid her hands around his waist, and he put his arms around her, too.

  When she felt the effect of it in his body, she murmured, “No wonder you’re so cranky.” Annabelle laughed. “You’re just horny.” He laughed, too, and lifted her hair to kiss the side of her neck. Gently, Annabelle pushed him back a little. “Are you in a mood because of Billy Crosby?”

  He didn’t get a chance to answer because Bobby, their youngest, wandered in at that moment, looking for breakfast. “Stop that,” he commanded his parents, with a look of exaggerated distaste for their show of affection. Then he raised his hands in self-defense and said to his dad, “Don’t yell at me like you’ve been yelling at everybody 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.

  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.