Calder Pride (4 page)

T
he first gray of dawn was a long brushstroke on the eastern horizon. Standing at the edge of The Homestead’s pillared front porch, Cat watched the sunrise grow and spread. Fully dressed, she had both hands wrapped around a coffee mug, warming herself with the heat from it. Sleep had been elusive, and dream-tortured when it came, finally driving Cat from her bed an hour earlier. She waited now for the sun to rise and listened to the first stirrings of activity in the ranch yard beyond the house.

Sound carried easily in the early morning stillness, bringing to her the murmur of voices, the grating rumble of heavy barn doors sliding open, and the nicker of horses. Here and there, lights came on, drawing her glance to the collection of buildings and the dark figures moving about them. Morning chores had begun. Cat downed the last of her coffee, set the mug on the top step, and struck out across the yard toward the massive barn.

The huge double doors stood open. Light from the overhead fixture in the barn’s long corridor spilled outside onto the packed earth. A buckskin mare
poked her head over a stall’s partition and nickered to Cat when she walked in. She paused in the alleyway, the barn’s warmth swirling around her, redolent of sun-cured hay and horse feculence.

Metal pails clattered together in the feed room. Cat turned toward its door as a young, lanky cowboy stepped out, his gloved hands wrapped around the wire handles to five feed buckets. He stopped when he saw her, his head lifting to reveal the freckled face beneath the brim of his cowboy hat and the wheat-colored hair around his ears.

“Good morning, Nick,” she greeted one of Repp’s closest friends.

“Morning.” He bobbed his head, his glance sliding away. “You’re up awful early.”

“So are you.”

“Yeah, well…I didn’t have much choice.” He looked down the alley at the flanking stalls. “It’s a workday.”

“I’ll give you a hand.” She reached for the buckets he carried. After a slight hesitation, he surrendered three of them to her.

Two hours later, her hands gripped a pitchfork instead of grain buckets as Cat scooped soiled straw into a wheelbarrow strategically positioned at the stall door. Intent on her task, she paid no attention to the approaching footsteps until a tall figure paused in the stall’s doorway, partially blocking her light. She glanced over her shoulder and saw her father standing there.

Cat wasn’t the least bit surprised that he had known where to find her. Her presence at the barn so early in the morning was too unusual; word of it would have spread through the ranch grapevine within minutes of her arrival. It was only logical that her father would have been informed about it.

“Good morning.” She picked up a pile of horse
manure, balancing it on the fork tines, and carried it to the wheelbarrow, feeling the strain in her arm muscles.

“Good morning.” He stepped to one side, giving her room to dump her load. “Audrey has breakfast ready.”

Food held no appeal to her, but Cat wasn’t about to admit that, not when she could feel the concerned probe of his gaze. “I’ll be up as soon as I finish here.” She knocked the last of the droppings from the pitchfork and turned back to the stall.

“Nick can take care of that,” he countered, an edge of impatience in his voice.

“I know, but I started it, and I’ll finish it.”

“Cat—” he began, no longer trying to mask his impatience.

“Dad, I need to do this. I need to work so I—” She stopped as her voice started to break on the sob that filled her throat. She tightened her grip on the wooden handle, battling to control her emotions, all the while keeping her back to him. “I need to work.”

A long sigh slipped from him, weighted with weariness. “All right,” he said, giving in. “As soon as you get this stall cleaned, come up to the house for breakfast.”

“I will.” The metal tines sliced under another pile of waste.

Unable to dissuade her, Chase walked away, fully aware of the reason for her actions. There was solace to be found in working yourself to the point of exhaustion where you are too tired to think or feel anything. No matter how much he might wish it were otherwise, there was nothing he could say or do to make her pain easier to bear. This was something Cat had to work through herself. He couldn’t help her, which was the hardest thing to accept as a parent, and Chase found it more difficult than most.

Outside the barn, he paused and ran his gaze over the ranch compound, his expression grim and tight. Morning dew clung to a spider’s web spun across a corral rail. The drops sparkled diamond-bright in the angling sunlight, but Chase took no notice of them.

Turning, he looked down the barn’s long alley as Cat came out of the stall and propped the pitchfork against its wooden side. Unaware her actions were observed, she paused and rubbed at the soreness in her arm muscles, her shoulders slumping in weariness. When she noticed him waiting outside the barn, she immediately squared her shoulders and threw off the aching fatigue to stand taller. With lithe, effortless strides, she walked toward him.

“Ready for breakfast now?” Chase asked.

Nodding her answer, Cat fell in step with him and began the walk to The Homestead. Conversation was minimal, all of it small talk to cover a silence that would have been awkward. Halfway to the house, Cat noticed an approaching plume of dust traveling along the road that came from the east gate. “Someone’s coming. It must be Ty and Jessy.”

Chase swung his gaze to the traveling dust cloud. “It can’t be, not from that direction. They stayed at the old Stanton cabin this weekend.”

Cat thought it a singularly unromantic choice. She and Repp had always planned to honeymoon in—Pain sliced through her, cutting off the thought with the cruel reminder that Repp was dead. They would never honeymoon in Hawaii. She would never lie beside him in the night, never know the fulfillment of his embrace. Anger came, anger that Repp had denied her so much because of his ridiculous code of honor and his desire to do right in her father’s eyes. She wasn’t sure she could ever forgive him for that.

Even worse, she wasn’t sure she could forgive
herself. Why had she let it happen? Why had she allowed all of them—Repp, her father, everyone—to tell her what she could do and when she could do it? Why had she allowed them to dictate how she would live her life? The injustice of it twisted itself in with the grief and the anger.

“Probably a feed salesman.”

“What?” She caught the sound of her father’s voice, but his words didn’t register.

“I said it’s probably a feed salesman,” he repeated.

Cat nodded an absent agreement, not altogether sure his assumption was accurate. Even from this distance she could tell the vehicle was a pickup, and from the humped shape of it, an old one, which was hardly the kind a salesman would drive. Still she could summon little curiosity about its occupant.

The old Chevy pickup bounced and rattled along the dirt lane, its scarred sides pocked with rust. The exhaust pipe spewed the telltale smoke of an oil burner. It mixed with the road dust churned up by nearly bald tires.

Neil Anderson was in the driver’s seat, his rheumy eyes fixed on the collection of buildings and the imposing house that grew steadily larger in almost direct proportions to his misgivings. Easing up on the accelerator, he fumbled a moment, then finally pulled the faded red kerchief from the pocket of his bib overalls and mopped at the watery discharge from his eyes. It was a simple task made difficult by the arthritis that gnarled his hands and bent his fingers at an odd angle. He hooked an end of the kerchief back in the overalls pocket and stuffed it inside, then turned a gaunt and bony face toward his wife of nearly fifty years.

Emma Anderson bore little resemblance to the stout, buxom bride she had once been. Years of hard
living and unending labor had whittled at her until she was wiry and thin. Now, her once-plump cheeks were sunken and hollow, and her fair skin was leathered and seamed with lines like an old worn-out saddle. The gleam in her dark eyes had long ago become a hard thing that too often reminded him of his failure to provide.

Her bland expression reflected none of his doubts about the mission before them. It bothered him that she could sit there like that, her callused hands calmly folded in her lap while he squirmed with uncertainty.

Unable to keep silent about his concern any longer, Neil finally voiced it. “Coming here is a mistake.”

“What other choice do we have? You know what that lawyer told us. If we want to help Rollie, this is the only chance we got.”

“It’s a waste of time,” he stated, gruff with his opinion. “He won’t listen.”

“He’ll listen,” Emma replied with confidence. “Calder likes to think of himself as a fair man.”

“Listening don’t mean he’ll help,” he muttered, then got to the crux of his unease. “I’ve never needed no man’s help before. Tough as it’s been for us at times, I’ve never had to go to any man with my hat in my hand.”

Pride. That’s what this talk was all about, Emma thought, smiling none too pleasantly. A man’s foolish pride. Life might have been easier if her husband hadn’t been so stiff-necked with it. She remembered his anger the first time she and Lath had killed and butchered a Calder steer. She also remembered that with hunger gnawing at his belly, he hadn’t been too proud to eat it, not that first time or any time since. Course, he never lent a hand to the killing or butchering, which made it all right, she supposed, her lips pursing in sour sarcasm.

“I don’t expect you to beg for his help, Neil.” If there was any begging to be done, she would do it without hesitation. Rollie, her youngest, was her baby. Where he was concerned, pride be damned. “You just explain the situation to him, tell him what the lawyer told us, and ask if he’ll help.”

“He won’t,” he grumbled.

“We’ll see.” Determination pushed the point of her chin a fraction higher.

He slowed the pickup as they entered the main ranch yard. The swirling road dust dissipated, leaving only the roll of dark smoke trailing from the pickup’s exhaust pipe. Emma sat a little straighter and took great interest in her surroundings. In all her years in Montana, this marked her first visit to the headquarters of the Triple C Ranch. She had heard it described often enough, but this was the first she had seen it with her own eyes.

She scanned the sprawling cluster of buildings—a mix of barns, machine sheds, small warehouses, welding shop, gas station, commissary store, and modern houses for the married help. All of it was neat and tidy. She thought of their own big old drafty farmhouse with its leaky roof and sides that badly needed a coat of paint. The farm was not a place she could point to with pride and say,
This is our home.
It was a place of hardship and physical labor with little monetary reward and a future that promised more of the same. She didn’t blame Lath for leaving it as soon as he could, rarely returning to visit.

Emma looked, at last, at the two-story house atop the commanding knoll. With its pillared front porch, it stood big and white and grand against the blue Montana sky. Two people approached the porch, an older man and a young, dark-haired woman.

“There’s no more need to wonder whether Calder’ll be home or not. That’s him and his daughter walking up to the house now.” Emma nodded at the pair.

“I see ’em,” Neil said, a trace of dread in his muttered reply.

Ignoring him, she studied the two, who now waited at the bottom of the porch steps, watching the ancient pickup coming toward them. Both were dressed in typical ranch gear—boots, jeans, and work shirts.

She touched the cotton fabric of the plain house dress she wore, a floral-patterned thing faded from too many washings. She had been right to wear it. She no longer had any doubt about that, although she knew Neil thought they should have worn their Sunday clothes. In Emma’s mind, her good navy dress and pillbox hat had been the right thing to wear to meet with Rollie’s court-appointed attorney, but not Chase Calder. It wasn’t something she could explain, but she was certain of it just the same.

When the pickup clattered to a stop a few yards from the house, Emma raised a quick hand to her hair, checking for any wayward wisps. Her waist-length hair remained her one vanity. Every night she brushed it the standard one hundred strokes, and every morning she plaited it into braids and wound them in a coronet atop her head. Years ago it had lost its glossy chestnut color and turned a polished pewter gray, but that hadn’t lessened the care she took of it or the pride she took in it.

She gave the stubborn pickup door a hard push with her shoulder, then climbed out and walked around to the driver’s side to help her husband. His arthritis always stiffened him when he sat too long, and with his twisted hands, opening the truck door was difficult for him. Long used to his grunts and
grimaces of pain, she paid no attention to them as she assisted him from the cab and kept a bracing arm around him once he stood upright on the ground. She stayed at his side when he hobbled away from the truck toward the porch steps and the waiting Chase Calder and his daughter. She saw, with satisfaction, the way both Calder and his daughter watched her husband, noting the effort it took him to walk and the discomfort it cost him.

“Morning, Calder.” Pain had him biting off the words and breathing in jerky gasps. Neil halted and dug his kerchief from his pocket to wipe at his watering eyes.

“Good morning, Neil, Emma.” Chase nodded the greeting to each of them in turn, an unspoken question in his eyes that asked what they wanted.

“If you have a few minutes, Mr. Calder, Neil and I would like to talk to you,” Emma spoke quietly, resisting the urge to ask to see him in private without his daughter. She had seen the grief that haunted those eyes, and remembered that she had been engaged to the Taylor boy. From all Emma had heard, the girl took after her mother. And the O’Rourkes had never been the forgiving kind.

Chase measured them both with a thoughtful glance, then nodded. “Of course. Come inside.” He motioned toward the house, then turned to his daughter. “Ask Audrey to bring us some coffee in the den, will you, Cat?”