One Bright Morning (36 page)

Jubal heard the awe in her voice and his
grin broadened. He was very proud of himself all of a sudden.

Annie had been sleeping hard and obviously
wasn’t convinced that waking up was a good idea. She grumbled and
whimpered and ground her little fist against her sleepy eyes. Her
piquant face puckered up and it looked like she might be winding up
for a good wail, when Maggie remembered her new dolly. She leaned
over to pick it up and rattled it in front of Annie’s unhappy
face.

“
Look, Annie, your dolly
likes it here. This will be her new home, too, for a
while.”

“
Mine,” Annie announced. She
snatched the doll out of her mother’s hand and hugged it hard to
her little chest. Then she glared at her mother, and Maggie
sighed.

“
Oh, my. I wish there were
some children around for you to play with, baby girl. You need to
learn to share.”

“
Ah, she just doesn’t want
to wake up,” said Jubal with a grin at Annie, who still looked
grumpy. “I get like that, too, sometimes.”

Maggie considered telling him that she’d be
sure to keep that in mind, but decided she’d better not. Instead,
she said, “Well, it sure would be good for her to have kids to play
with. Sadie and I used to get her together with the twins as often
as we could, but I didn’t used to have much time.”

Jubal wondered how Maggie would take to the
idea of having one or two children with him, then decided it was
definitely too soon to be asking her that. Instead, he said
thoughtfully, “Cod Fish and Beula have a couple of kids. I think
they’re about four and seven.”

“
Really? Oh, how wonderful,”
Maggie breathed. “Did you hear that, Annie? You’ll have friends
here.”

She hugged her sleepy baby tightly to her
breast as Annie sat on her lap and the wagon rumbled nearer and
nearer to their goal. As they approached, things began to take on
definition for Maggie. She saw the stream and the lacy-leafed
willows weeping on the bank. The cottonwoods had leafed out after
their winter rest and dappled the fresh spring grass with early
evening shade.

The ranch house was a one-story, sprawling
affair, built upon square, Spanish lines, with a patio in the
middle. A smaller house, fashioned of the same whitewashed adobe,
squatted to the west of the main house and it had a tidy picket
fence around it. Flowers bloomed in a little bed, and Maggie
figured that house for the home of Cod Fish and Beula.

“
Flowers,” she breathed.
“Oh, look, Annie, flowers.”

She pointed the flowers out to her daughter
and then offered Jubal a perfectly heavenly smile. He nearly died
right there when his heart quit beating for a second. The first
thing he was going to do, he told himself, was dig this woman a
flower bed. If she got that dewy-eyed over a couple of black-eyed
Susans, he couldn’t wait to see her reaction to a bed full of those
tall pink things Four Toes had told him were dahlias.

“
I don’t know how you can
stand to be away from here for so long at a time, Jubal,” Maggie
sighed as she gazed around her with rapture. It was the loveliest
place Maggie had ever seen.

“
Well,” he said with an
ironic chuckle, “I hadn’t planned on being away for quite this
long.”

Maggie looked over at him with chagrin. “Of
course not,” she said. “I don’t know how I could have
forgotten.”

Jubal laughed out loud at that. “Hell, I
don’t know either, Maggie. It turned your life right upside down
and inside out.”

Maggie gave him a soft smile that ate up the
rest of his heart. “I guess it did at that.”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Well, anyway,
I’ve got a good crew. And Cod Fish is a mean son of a buck. He
makes sure everybody does his job, believe me. Nobody shirks his
work around Cod Fish. Not even me.”

He spoke of the man with great affection in
his voice, so Maggie didn’t get worried. She didn’t like mean
people much, no matter who they were mean to. Her aunt and uncle
had cured her of any tendency in that direction very early in
life.

Jubal drove the wagon past what seemed like
miles of fences. Maggie guessed they were corrals. It looked to her
as though a whole heard of horses were residing in one green,
fenced pasture. She pointed out the ponies to Annie with a thrill
of excitement. Further away, Maggie noticed a huge meadow that
seemed to have only one big, surly-looking, long-horned beast
lodged within its fenced confines.

“
Why is there only one cow
in that pasture, Jubal?”

“
That’s not a cow, Maggie,”
Jubal told her with a laugh. “That’s Cannibal. He’s my stud
bull.”

“
Oh!” Maggie
blushed.

“
He likes his job,” Jubal
grinned, amused by her reaction.

Maggie shot him a quick look and then she
grinned, too. “I just bet he does. Why do you call him
Cannibal.”

“
He’s mean as hell. Don’t
ever let Annie get near that fence, Maggie. Any bull is
unpredictable, and that particular Texas Long Horn is about the
sorriest-disposed bastard I’ve ever seen.”

Maggie immediately imparted that important
piece of information to her daughter. “Did you hear that, Annie?
You see that bull in that field? Don’t ever go in that field,
Annie. That bull is mean and will stick you with his horns.”

Annie looked curiously at where her mother
pointed. “Boo stick Annie,” she said. She glowered at the bull as
if daring him to try it.

Jubal laughed again.

“
The bunk house is over
there by the stable. There’s a hog wallow out back behind the barn
where the smell can’t get to the house, and the chickens are back
there, too. I think you’ll like Beula. She likes to grow things,
too.”

A friend. Maggie would have a friend. Except
for Sadie, who wasn’t entirely satisfactory because her flair for
the dramatic sometimes interfered with honest interaction, Maggie
had never had a friend. She’d not been allowed friendships when she
was growing up, and Bright’s Farm was too far away from anybody but
the Phillipses to make the luxury of friendship practical.

Jubal was appalled to see a tear slide down
Maggie’s cheek when he turned to see why she’d gone so quiet all of
a sudden.

“
Are you all right?” he
asked in alarm.

Maggie turned such a glowing gaze upon him
that he would have stopped the wagon and scooped her into his arms,
except that the welcoming committee had already formed and such a
display of unmanly behavior would be too embarrassing.

“
Oh, I’m just fine. I’m just
fine. Thank you,” she whispered.

Chapter Fifteen

The first two people Maggie spotted in the
jumble of humanity that surged toward them from the front of the
ranch house were Dan and Four Toes. They were both waving and
grinning at them as Jubal drove the two tired mules to a plodding
stop in front of the white fence.

Jubal decided to show his eager ranch family
that he was fully recovered from his injuries by bracing his right
arm on the wagon and bounding out of his seat. He immediately
decided that the decision to bound had been a foolishly rash one.
His right shoulder objected like fire, and the jolt to his left
thigh when his feet hit the ground nearly made him holler. He
gritted his teeth and managed to keep from making a total fool of
himself only with great effort.

He almost got mad when Maggie, horrified at
his move, leaned over the driver’s side of the wagon and said, “Oh,
my land, Mr. Green, you shouldn’t have done that! Are you all
right?”

But she looked so sweet and concerned and
worried, that he didn’t get mad. He grinned up at her instead and
said, “I’m just fine, Maggie,” and, in spite of his throbbing
shoulder, he reached up to take Annie out of her arms.

Since Annie reached down to him at the same
time, Maggie let him have her. Then she thanked Four Toes for
helping her down. Then she stood there in the middle of a huge
welter of people and didn’t know what to do.

An ecstatic spaniel was leaping on Jubal and
barking energetically, and Jubal was smiling at Annie and pointing
at the dog. Maggie assumed that the beast was Rover. She hoped the
dog wouldn’t frighten Annie.

She didn’t have time to worry for long,
though, because she suddenly found herself crushed into the
largest, softest bosom she’d ever encountered in her life.

“
Oh, you must be Miss
Maggie!” cried the owner of the bosom. “You saved our Jubal’s life.
Dan and Four Toes told us. You’re so brave!”

Maggie was certain she was going to smother
and wondered if it would be rude to struggle. Fortunately, the
woman quit hugging her before it became imperative to make the
decision. She staggered back to behold a large female, luxuriously
padded just about everywhere, with flaming red hair knotted onto
the top of her head, and freckles everywhere. Freckles danced
across her nose and over her cheeks and down her arms and, Maggie
was sure, covered the rest of her voluptuous body as well. Right
now, her friendly, freckled face was shiny with tears which she
brushed away impatiently with the back of her hand.

“
I’m Beula Todd, Miss
Bright. I’m so glad to meet you.” She stuck out her tear-bedewed
hand and Maggie shook it because she figured she should. Actually,
she was kind of rattled.

“
Beula’s Cod Fish’s wife,
Maggie,” Jubal whispered. She could hear the grin in his voice and
guessed that this was normal behavior for Beula Todd.

Maggie smiled at her. “It’s nice to meet
you.”

Beula beamed at her. “Now you have to meet
my husband Henry.”

She tugged Maggie over to a person who, if
she had seen him on a street in El Paso, she would have guessed
must have blown in by accident on the end of a hard gale. Cod Fish
Todd looked exactly like Maggie’s idea of Captain Ahab. He was
tall, sunburned, wrinkled, and old, and had stark, thick, white
hair and a white beard. A tattered sailor’s cap perched upon his
white head, and he had a black pipe stuck in his mouth. The pipe
was, at this moment, wreathing his head with a halo of fragrant
smoke. All he needed was a sou’wester and a harpoon. Maggie figured
him for at least fifty-five. Beula didn’t look much more than
thirty, if that.

“
It’s nice to meet you,” she
said meekly, and held out her hand for him to shake.

Cod Fish paused for a moment to remove the
pipe from his mouth before he very slowly shook Maggie’s proffered
hand. Then he grinned and said, “Aeyup.” That was all.

Maggie didn’t have time to ponder this oddly
matched pair, though, because Dan caught her by the arm and swung
her around to meet the rest of the household crew. He introduced
her to Julio Mendez, Jubal’s tall Mexican wrangler, who seemed
quite shy; Jesus Chavez, another, older, Mexican man with a
wrinkled face, yellow teeth, and a kind smile, who did carpentry
work around the place; and Sammy. Sammy Napolitano was a young
Sicilian who had washed up on the shores of the United States and
found himself a job with the Army, fighting Indians in Texas. Sammy
was out of the army now and in charge of Jubal’s security
forces.

Maggie was sure she’d forget everybody’s
name. Since she’d come with Kenny to live on their farm in New
Mexico Territory, she hadn’t seen so many people all lumped
together in one place, and she felt almost dizzy with the
introductions.

Beula’s, “And here are my children,” snapped
her back to attention, though.

She discovered that she had been clinging
like a vine to Jubal’s arm and glanced up at him nervously, worried
that she’d irk him with her display of trepidation. She sighed with
relief to discover him peering down at her with a very tender,
almost possessive expression on his hard face. She smiled a brief,
flickering, nervous smile at him, and turned to meet Beula’s
children.

Then she nearly laughed to behold a
miniature Beula standing before her. A little butterball of a girl,
seven years old, with red hair and freckles and a chubby little
body that foretold a buxom future, held out her hand and said quite
precisely that her name was Connie.

Henry, Jr., was four years old. He was lean
and small and he, too, had red hair and freckles. They were really
rather handsome children, if one overlooked the freckles. Maggie
herself had never found freckles unattractive, although she knew
that a proper lady would probably be aghast and advise Beula to rub
their skin with coconut milk or witch hazel or something.

“
How do you do?” She smiled
at the children and shook their hands. Connie curtsied, and Maggie
thought that was about the sweetest thing she’d ever
seen.

She took Annie out of Jubal’s arms and
introduced her to Connie and Henry. Annie looked uncertainly at the
little boy and girl from the safety of her mother’s arms. One fist
was stuffed securely into her mouth and the other gripped her dolly
tightly. She studied the two children with solemn brown eyes for a
long time before she pulled her fist out of her mouth with a moist
pop, held out her gourd dolly, and said, “Mine.”

Maggie sighed and looked at Beula, who
smiled at her and winked. Maggie appreciated that wink. She decided
she liked Beula Todd.

“
Well, I guess you’d both
better meet Rover before he busts a gut,” said Jubal with a
chuckle.

He took Annie back from Maggie and knelt
down. Annie seemed a little uncertain about the rambunctious
spaniel. When Rover gave her a huge, slurping kiss on the cheek,
she tucked her little head into Jubal’s shoulder, flung her arms
around his neck, and Jubal suddenly felt like a father.