The Cowboy's Secret Baby: BWWM Cowboy Pregnancy Romance (Young Adult First Time Billionaire Steamy African American) (6 page)

While Farris was suffering his deepest depression, Terry McGee was very surprised to see him answer the business office phone one night.  Farris spoke briefly into the receiver and then hung up, turning to McGee.

“That was Clarice’s natural father,” he explained, as though communication was normal for him.  “Pirtle’s in Lexington and plans to drive down tomorrow afternoon.  We are to expect a purple Chrysler.”

McGee winced.  “Either he got to the rental counter late, or else he wants to make sure we recognize him and let him in.  Did he say what he wants?”

“I imagine he wants us to put our heads together to establish a suitable estate for my son,” Farris replied, with more energy than he had shown among humans for ages.  “The man is a trust officer; he does estate planning. – I’ll be glad to be doing something positive for a change.”

“I was glad to hear the man had got in touch with his daughter,” McGee remarked.  “She really needed that piece of her past to help make her a whole person.”

Farris laughed shortly.  “Why do you think I’ve been reading my parents’ old diaries and letters?  I’ve started to realize I need to be a whole person, too.”

“Your problem was that neither of your parents had any siblings or much in the way of relatives,” McGee agreed.  “There was nobody to pass down the memories.  I hadn’t realized until you got started with that psychiatrist fellow how important those damn things are. – Dina and I tried to do our best by you, but there was so much we didn’t know.”

“Knowing your ancestry seems to be a bit of a mania here in the South,” Farris remarked, “but I’ve realized it has its uses. – The trouble is, most people can’t imagine their parents were ever young people.”

“Isn’t it the truth?”  McGee stood and stretched.  “And sometimes we don’t bother to ask questions until it’s already too late.

John Pirtle and the rented purple Chrysler arrived promptly at 2:00 PM the following afternoon.  “Lord have mercy!” Dina McGee exclaimed as she started for the front door.  “I’d know those brown eyes and that chin anywhere!”

To break the ice between the two men, Farris offered to take John Pirtle on a tour of the stables.

“Just show me little Courier,” Pirtle declared.  “He’s all my daughter talks about. - Apparently he used to come and sit on her front porch.”

“Courier’s full grown now,” Farris answered, “and I’ll be glad to call him to the pasture fence. – Honestly, it’s hard to look at him these days without thinking of Clarice.  Did she ever tell you about the time we both sat with him through a spell of colic?”

“Clarice doesn’t talk about things that happened up here,” Pirtle told him, “except to mention the horses.”  He looked over at Farris, sizing him up.  “I saw a drawing of you with some of the horses in one of her sketchbooks.”

Farris flushed.  “If it’s that sketch of me with Bolivia and baby Courier, I’d love to possess it.  Seeing that sketch was when I learned about Clarice’s superpower.”

“Interesting.”  Pirtle was wearing town shoes, but walked as though he didn’t care what happened to them.  “And what is Clarice’s superpower, may I ask?”

By now, they had arrived at the pasture fence.  Farris leaned against it and whistled for Courier.  “Here he comes; just a second.”  A brown adult horse trotted up and nuzzled against his owner’s shoulder.  “Courier, this is Clarice’s father,” Farris introduced, looking into the pony’s eyes.  Then he stroked the horse’s head, and continued.  “Clarice’s superpower is that she can draw the secret person who lives inside our outward shell.  That’s what she does with animals, but it can get deadly when she uses it on people.”

“So that’s why she specializes in animals,” John Pirtle mused.  “Having spent some time studying that sketch of you, I see what you mean. – I wonder if she’s ever drawn Marion,” he added.  “That would be revealing.”

Meanwhile, Courier, recognizing something familiar about the new human, wandered over and lipped the shoulder of Pirtle’s coat.  “You think I smell like Clarice?” the older man asked conversationally.  “I’d really like to think so, Courier.”

Farris turned, dismissing the young horse, and led the way to the guest cabin he had avoided like plague since the previous summer.  “Now that we’ve more or less unmasked ourselves, Mr. Pirtle, maybe we’d better sit down and talk.”

“This must be the guest cabin Clarice was so crazy about.”  John Pirtle stood in the middle of the main room, looking around.  “I can see a few pinholes where sketches were hung up.”

“She just used the log wall, not the ones where we had wallboard,” Farris told him.  “I wouldn’t spackle up one of those pinholes for the world. – This is where I spent the happiest part of my life.”

“Clarice was pretty happy, too, until Marion started sticking her horn in,” Pirtle remarked quietly.  “I understand why you’re both seeing shrinks; hopefully, eventually you can get back together again.  I know she misses you.”

“I want us to be together more than anything else.”  Farris sank down in his usual chair.  “But it won’t work if Clarice is a puppet being worked by her mom, or even with me being a solitary guy who lives with other people’s ghosts.”

“You never thought to set those detectives of yours on the trail of your own family?” Pirtle asked.

“Most people use genealogists for that,” Farris told him, “and those folks don’t get the stories that make a family real.”

“You and Clarice have both been screwed over by your kinfolk, it seems to me,” Pirtle remarked, finding a chair and opening the briefcase he’d been carrying all this time.  “But what I wanted to do – aside from having a good chin wag and sizing you up – was to see about developing a portfolio for my coming grandson.”

Farris pulled his chair closer.  “Well, I don’t know stocks, except for my horse breeding specialty, but otherwise my business head is pretty sound.  Show me what you’re considering.”

That evening, Clarice got a text message from her father in Lexington.  ‘Show that private Kentucky sketchbook of yours to Dr. Carstairs.  Farris says it’s the key to your superpower.  I agree.’

Clarice keyed in ‘will comply’ almost automatically. – She should have thought of using those drawings earlier in her therapy, she realized.  Since her deeply troubling experiences in Life Drawing class, she had been careful never to sketch human beings.  Apparently her subconscious mind worked in pictures and picked up more than anyone wanted to show.  She got out the precious Kentucky notebook from her cedar chest and put it into the tote bag she used for her visits to Nashville.

Meanwhile, Marion Saxe had used her brief spell of notoriety to shore up her bank balance and replace the income she had lost when first Clarice and later John Pirtle had defected from her control.  Now her realty business was flourishing to the point that she could command a county work crew to repair her sidewalk.  Now the traffic was beautifully snarled on the main state road, and she could easily flag down Clarice and her tame driver when they came by on the way to the interstate.

Sure enough, traffic was backed up for blocks when the puttering old brown truck chugged up outside her office window.  Swiftly, Marion ran up and grabbed the open window frame of the driver’s side door.  “Let me talk to my daughter for just a minute,” she demanded.  The driver, as she had heard, was one of the legitimate Pirtles, sent to Sewanee to help his erring half-sister.

Now Clarice leaned forward and stared around the driver.  “Hello, Mother.  You are looking well.”

“I just wanted you to know,” Marian said in a rush, “that I got a really nice price selling that old garden apartment of yours and its environs. – Somebody had seen the pictures when I did that talk show. – I also sold your car to make up for losing your income.  Business is now better than ever.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Mother,” Clarice replied gently.  The older woman quickly let go of the truck door and ran back to her shop.

Once traffic started moving again, Angus Pirtle looked over at his half-sister and whistled.  “No wonder you’ve got problems! – That back surgery after Tommy was born must have been more serious than Mom ever made out.  I can’t think of any other reason for Dad to hook up with something like that!”

Clarice sighed.  “Just remember - everybody was young and stupid once, Angus. – Really, I am glad Mother’s doing all right financially.  God alone knows what she would pull if she ever found herself destitute.”

“Well, at least we’ve gotten to the interstate now.”  Angus was already wiping sweat off his brow with his handkerchief.  “We ought to get some use of our two windows/sixty-five miles an hour air conditioning.”

Dr. Carstairs went through the sketch book thoroughly, paying particular attention to the portrait of Farris.  She stared over at her patient.  “You say that the minute he reacted to this picture, you realized you’d drawn something he didn’t want to see.”

“He didn’t want anybody
else
to see it, that was for certain,” Clarice affirmed.  “Actually, I wouldn’t have sketched him at all if it hadn’t been for the way he was handling Courier.  That was a picture I just had to draw.”

“You’ve captured some emotions Farris doesn’t want to admit to,” Dr. Carstairs observed.  “Were you surprised by his reaction?”

“Not really,” Clarice admitted.  “That kind of thing had happened to me before when I was in college.  One semester, all the art students had to do portraits of all their classmates.  I sure made a lot of enemies quickly.  Some of those kids never spoke to me again. – It was kind of sweet of Farris to tell my dad this crazy gift is my superpower.”

“It strikes me,” Dr. Carstairs responded, looking over her spectacles, “that Farris understands you a great deal better than most people do, and cares about you more. – Look, this tablet is no way near complete.  I want you to take it home and use it to draw me your life in pictures.  Include all the people and all the incidents that seem important to you.  My test battery revealed you have a very strong visual memory.  Use it.”

Angus had helped Clarice create a professional-looking website to advertise and sell her artwork, and these days, while she was feeling clumsy and uncomfortable, he served as her webmaster.

“Wow – Your announcement about the state of your pregnancy has really worked,” Angus remarked now.  “All your clients are responding by giving you one to three extra months to complete their commissions.  Some have even included advice, and all of them send their best wishes.  A few are even including you in their prayers.  I didn’t realize you had clients who were religious types.”

Clarice grinned.  “You should visit some of the liturgical churches while you’re here.  They’re all very much into ‘let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ and such. – But I’m glad of the extensions.  I feel fat and miserable, and I’ve got therapy drawing to do.”

“Therapy drawing?”  Angus, himself an art major, was always interested in some new angle about art.

“Yes,” she replied sweetly.  “I’m going to be drawing my private life, so you better keep your nose out of my notebooks.”

Memories churned as Clarice’s pencil flew across the heavy paper.  She kept her erasers handy, but, as she progressed, it was more like she was doing automatic writing.  It was almost like her mind was throwing up, she thought, just the way she had during those early months of morning sickness.  What came out astonished even Clarice.

Had she been this angry and this miserable ever since she could remember?  Clarice couldn’t seem to draw a single happy memory until she’d begun working as an animal artist.  Indeed, there were pictures of Marion pulling her away from kittens, puppies, and even baby chickens in neighboring farmyards.  The only smiling adults Clarice had drawn were a couple of school teachers.

Then she began recording her Kentucky experiences in pictures.  This tablet quickly filled with what Clarice could only consider pure porn – but at least it was porn with some soul in it.  All her love and longing had flowed out.  There were even pleasant vignettes of the McGees and other farm staff members.  Clarice started to realize that here were the people she liked and trusted.  This was her new dawn.

During the course of the project, Angus developed the habit of peeking in through the living room window before he considered knocking on the front door.  You didn’t want to disturb Clarice when she was like this.

John Pirtle’s visit had left Farris energized.  As a trust officer, Pirtle had had some experience in tracing disappearing family members, and he had given the younger man some valuable leads.  Farris spent the rest of that evening online, checking county history sites and family genealogies.  The next day, armed with the names of his paternal grandparents and some at least approximate dates, he drove to the local court house and started searching through wills and property deeds.  Within a few days, he was sending emails and even paying for online services and family association memberships.

“I’m glad you’ve started doing that ancestry business in your bedroom,” Terry McGee told him at dinner two days later.  “We don’t need that much extra paper in the business office.”

“Well, it looks like we’re a family of triers, at any rate,” Farris replied.  “Every male ancestor I’ve come across has been gainfully employed one way or another.  It looks like we’re a bunch of taciturn cusses, though.”

“Your dad was pretty close-mouthed except when it came to livestock, I remember,” McGee recalled.  “Dina and I were hired only a few months before you were born, so we barely had time to know your mom.”

“Maybe you should come with me up to the attic tomorrow,” Dina suggested.  “I remember we just boxed away all your mother’s things.  Your dad didn’t even want to go through them. – I can point you to the boxes, but I’m not as young as I used to be.  You’re going to have to heft them down; you’re strong enough.”

“Let’s get down a couple of boxes after supper.”  Farris responded enthusiastically.  “You know, I had never thought much about this ancestry stuff, but now I’m all excited.”

Later, Farris found himself sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by little piles of clothing.  “Somebody should be using all these hats and dresses,” he remarked, holding up a delicately flowered hat.  “I guess Dad was just too cut up to think properly.”

“Your mother had nice clothes,” Dina agreed, “but what you really need to see is this bunch of old letters.  Some of them are from overseas.”

Farris handled the lovely-wrapped bundle gently.  “I hope I can read these,” he muttered, untying the ribbon.  “This is Dad’s handwriting – my God, he was in Vietnam!  No wonder he never told us anything.”  He began perusing the letters while Dina sorted the dresses and underthings into various piles to go to charities.

Finally Farris put down the letters and looked up, white-lipped.  “Dad was an aircraft mechanic,” he said.  “No wonder he knew how to build and tear down stuff on a farm.  Judging from these letters, the Air Force must have kept him pretty close to headquarters.  He wasn’t out in the field, but he had to clean up plenty of mess whenever the base was hit by incoming fire. – And he knew a lot of the politics about why the whole mess was happening; you can read it in between the lines if you’re careful.  He must have really trusted Mom.”

“So now you know more about your parents and a damned dark piece of history.”  Terry McGee had come back from the office in time to hear all this.  “I was just remembering that we lugged several boxes of books to the attic, too; your mother was a great reader.”

The best find, as far as Farris was concerned, was his mother’s old address book.  Through it, he managed to find her elderly female cousin, who promptly sent him labeled photographs and multi-paged screeds.  Some of them were remarkably indiscreet; Farris learned a good deal about the Larkin branch of his family.

“This is so wonderful,” he enthused to his therapist.  “I’m not just some lonely soul plunked down in the middle of nowhere, having to learn my job from the hired hands.  I have a family, an actual family, complete with a few horse thieves and Civil War generals, and probably a few unacknowledged black relatives as well.”

“What’s probably more important,” the therapist responded, “is that you’ve learned your mother was a caring woman – a school teacher who looked forward to having her own baby.  Your father certainly felt responsible for you, but he was afraid to love you.  The grandfather you remember seems to have been a genial old coot. – That’s what’s really bothered you all this time – the feeling that they left you behind because you weren’t good enough.”

“Yes, I guess that’s about the sum of it.”  Farris sank back in his chair.  “I guess at the back of my mind I always felt like I just wasn’t good enough, so they all upped and left me.”

Meanwhile, Clarice was facing rather more difficult truths.  Dr. Carstairs was flipping methodically through her filled tablets.  “Did you ever try to draw your mother before?” the doctor asked.  “Like when you were just learning, I mean.”

“No!” Clarice found herself almost physically pushing the thought away.  “She was the nearest thing to God in my world, and she was never happy.  I would never have dared.”

“Actually,” Dr. Carstairs said considering, “I don’t believe I’ve heard of any other artist who attempted to portray their parents.  It must be a built-in inhibition. – Still,” she added thoughtfully, “these drawings show that you were angry with and afraid of your mother from early childhood.  Is that how you remember things?”

“I guess I didn’t really realize it,” Clarice responded, “until I started letting the pencil flow as it would. – I guess when I went to Kentucky I was ready to jump into the arms of anybody who accepted me.”

Dr. Carstairs smiled at her.  “Do you realize how many people over the years – male and female – you’ve pushed away from you because your mother wouldn’t like them?”

“Doing that was really the easiest way to live and have the kind of mental freedom I wanted,” Clarice admitted.  “If I kept Mother happy and didn’t get in her way, I could do pretty much what I wanted to. – That other sketchbook is pure pornography,” she added hurriedly when Dr. Carstairs started to open it.

“So I see,” Dr. Carstairs remarked.  “It does tell me why you started to step out of your broken eggshell. – I suggest you only share that with Farris.”

Having researched all the details of the accident that took his mother’s life, Farris promptly had a panic attack.  He called John Pirtle after dinner one night – devil take the expense – and expressed himself vehemently.

“Believe it or not,” we’ve already thought about those possibilities, Farris,” Pirtle responded patiently.  “Sewanee isn’t quite the back of the beyond, of course; there
is
a hospital there.  Clarice is coming up here to St. Thomas, though, because that’s where her obstetrician takes all his patients.  You can check that hospital’s reputation online.”

“The hospital itself doesn’t bother me.”  Farris tried to possess himself in patience.  “How’s she going to get there in time?  Clarice’s old two-seater, 10-year-old truck is just not going to cut it. – What if Angus has stop and deliver the baby on the road?”

Pirtle chuckled.  “We’re way ahead of you. – I do have four legitimate children, you know.  I’ve already made a deposit with a local ambulance company in her area to get her here any time, day or night.  I’ve even paid the extra fees to have EMTs aboard; they’ll be in radio contact with St. Thomas all the way once they get in range. – If I thought it would do any good, I’d have Angus bring her here to the house three or four days ahead of time – but that’s not the way it works when a baby’s coming, especially a first child.”

“I guess that’ll have to do,” Farris grumped.  “Remember, though, I’m always up for sharing those expenses, whether Clarice allows my name on the birth certificate or not.”

“I know that,” Pirtle assured him gently.  “Farris, I do know what happened to your mother and how upset you must be feeling right now.  We’ll take Clarice and the baby home either in an ambulance or a hired limousine, with all the personnel we can muster to see they arrive safely.”