The Scent of Rain and Lightning

9

ANNABELLE FELT NERVOUS as she drove her black Cadillac out to the men working in the pastures that afternoon. She was going to have to see Billy Crosby-after the awful things he’d done-and pretend she didn’t know he’d done them. It was vital to keep Billy out here at the ranch while the sheriff did his work in town. Billy wasn’t to know what was happening there. He needed to be taken into custody out here in the country, far from his vulnerable wife and innocent son-who should be spared the trauma of watching his father be carted off to jail. Billy needed to be surrounded by strong men who would make sure he didn’t do anything crazy or violent. Hugh wanted the arrest made quickly, quietly, with a minimum of trouble. So, with all her heart, did Annabelle. It had slowly sunk in on her and, she thought, on Hugh, just how dangerous a man might be who could do such things, and so she wasn’t only anxious, she was also scared of what was going to happen next. She had never seen anybody arrested except on television or in the movies, and never dreamed the first time would be at their own ranch. As she parked on the dirt road that ran through the pasture, she sent up a prayer for everybody’s safety.

It was her job now to contribute a touch of normalcy to the scene by doing exactly what all of the cowboys, including Billy, were expecting her to do.

And so she was taking iced tea and cinnamon rolls to them, because she always took treats to them when they worked long afternoons or mornings. When her daughter Belle was younger, she’d gone along, or she’d been up on horseback herself, helping with the cattle work. On some days, Annabelle took coffee and chocolate chip cookies or lemonade and molasses crinkles. Because of the impending weather, she had also stocked her Caddy with rubber rain slickers and plastic hat protectors for any man who’d neglected to bring his own. The clouds had finally moved across the Colorado-Kansas state line, with the main part of the storm now only a county and a half away from them. The first rain had already blown through in thin, intermittent sheets, not enough to stop the work, just enough to cool and mist the cowboys and their horses, all of whom had been working ever since Hugh Senior convened them with his emergency request for assistance.

“What will you tell them?” she’d asked him.

“Same thing I told the boys, that it’s vandalism and that’s all I know.”

Going nonstop, a group of neighbors, hired hands, and Linder men had managed to repair every cut section of fence but one that still awaited mending. A tour of the ranch had revealed other fences cut, other pastures breached, and other herds mixed up with each other. The cowboys were already organizing for getting on horseback to return cattle to their proper pastures, but when they saw Annabelle park on the shoulder of the highway, they tied up their horses again in anticipation of what she’d be bringing to them.

Weather wouldn’t stop them from work, unless it turned to lightning, but the smell of Annabelle Linder’s homemade rolls could, it was widely claimed, stop a rutting bull in his tracks.

The rain slickers that Annabelle brought, some bright yellow and others black, were heavy. Several of the cowboys jumped forward to assist her in carrying them, along with a big plastic jug of sweet iced tea and plastic cups. They transferred the treats across the grass and the dirt-which was just damp enough to stick to the bottoms of their boots-and set them on the backseat of one of their trucks.

Annabelle followed under an umbrella, carrying the napkins.

She was greeted with “Hi, Mom” from her sons and with courteous, drawled thank-yous from the other men. “Sure am sorry this happened to you folks, Annabelle,” one of the neighbors said. “It’s a rotten thing,” another man commented, which produced a murmur of masculine agreement in bass tones that felt comforting to her, as if they’d put a collective, caring arm around her shoulders. “Hope they catch the sons a bitches,” asserted a cowboy, followed by, “begging your pardon, ma’am.”

“I agree,” she said, and smiled at him.

Red Bosch, the youngest cowboy there, jumped forward with an offer to assist her with the rolls.

“Be happy to carry those rolls for you, Mrs. Linder,” young Red said earnestly.

He put out both arms so she might lay the tray on top of them. The rolls, huge and warm, had dripped their powdered sugar icing down their sides into gooey, soft-crusted puddles on the waxed paper she had placed beneath them.

“Don’t you let him do it,” an older cowboy warned her. “Or there won’t be any left for the rest of us.”

“Hey,” Red joked back. “I’m just a growing boy.”

“Exactly,” the cowboy said dryly, and everybody laughed, a welcome relief.

“Here, Red,” Annabelle said, handing the tray over to him. “You pass them around where everybody can see your hands.”

Another laugh went around the group.

The biggest grin came from Red himself. The boy had flunked out of high school and was trying to earn money to buy his own truck. Annabelle often tried to talk him into returning to school, but at sixteen, and from a family where nobody had ever graduated from high school, he had a hard time seeing into the future. “Red” wasn’t a nickname; he’d been born with the red hair of his eighteen-year-old father, and so “Red” he had been officially dubbed by his fifteen-year-old mother. He was no pretty boy, people remarked of him, and no Einstein, either, but there was something about Red that made you smile.

Annabelle forced herself to look for Billy Crosby.

Fortunately, he was looking at the sky, so she didn’t have to speak to him.

She darted a glance at her husband, who looked at his watch.

Her stomach clenched as she thought of Valentine alone with her boy while the sheriff’s deputies searched through their home. She wished there had been a way to warn Val to take the boy to a friend’s house before the sheriff arrived.

Poor little guy, she thought, looking down to hide tears in her eyes.

Collin Crosby’s childhood was just the kind that produced the sort of boy that she and Hugh Senior tried to help. Boys like his father and Red Bosch. She hoped that one day they wouldn’t feel a need to put Collin Crosby to work to keep him out of trouble, or that if they did, they’d have more success with him than they’d had with his father.

Annabelle felt a painful sense of failure with Billy Crosby.

One by one her sons sidled up to her as she stood there.

“Mom,” Hugh-Jay said so quietly that nobody else could hear him. “Dad’s wrong about Billy. He did it and I’ve got the proof. I’ve tried to tell Dad but he won’t listen to me. Can you talk to him?”

“What kind of proof?”

He told her about the truck mileage.

Annabelle grabbed one of his hands and squeezed it.

“Let your father handle this,” she said.

Hugh-Jay frowned, as if to say there were things that weren’t making sense to him, but he didn’t ask about them, and Annabelle didn’t volunteer to explain anything more.

Next it was Chase who came over and stood in front of her, blocking their conversation from anyone’s view.

“I don’t know why Dad thinks Billy didn’t do it.”

Again she said, “Let him handle this, sweetheart.”

“But-”

“Trust me, Chase.”

He nodded, looking doubtful but willing to believe she knew best. “Okay, Mom.”

And finally Bobby came over. “I don’t care if he didn’t do it. I can’t stand to even be in the same pasture with the son of a bitch.”

“Is that how your friends talked at K-State?”

He made the same kind of exasperated face at her that she had made several times that day at him, but he walked away without further argument.

Annabelle hoped that whatever was going to happen would happen soon.

Her sons were now bunched together at a distance from the other men, and all three of them looked as if they were just about ready to explode at somebody, and Annabelle knew who that somebody would be with even the slightest provocation. Seeming to sense the tension in the air, Billy Crosby was keeping his own distance from everyone.

Come on, she urged the sheriff in her thoughts.

But still he didn’t come.

The cowboys gathered around the truck with the refreshments, making appreciative sounds. Annabelle forced herself to walk around to each of them, inquiring about their wives and children, or parents and siblings. She was picking up the remains of the cinnamon rolls just as her husband pushed his arms into a black slicker and called out, “One more fence in this pasture, and then we can move on. Hugh-Jay, Chase, you take care of it.”

“Yessir.” Hugh-Jay licked his fingers and dropped his empty cup into a plastic trash bag. “Come on, Chase.”

“Wait a minute.” Chase pulled out a cigarette and then patted his jeans pockets, as if looking for something in them. “I gotta have a smoke first.” It was the first break any of them had taken since starting work.

“Quit those nasty things,” his father said, looking disgusted.

Chase grinned. “Gotta have some vices, Dad.”

The other men laughed, as if they suspected Chase of more vices than he was laying claim to.

“Here.” Hugh-Jay pulled a rectangle of silver out of his own pocket and tossed it to his middle brother.

Chase caught it with the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette. When he saw what it was, his face brightened and he looked over at his brother. “Hey, it’s my lighter! Where’d I drop it?”

“On my kitchen floor.”

Chase’s grin turned devilish. “Darn, you caught us!”

“You went back there this morning?” Hugh-Jay asked him.

“Yeah.”

Their father said, “I thought I sent you to the bank this morning.”

“You did, Dad, and I went,” Chase said, with an air of humoring both of them. He paused to light the cigarette, cupping his hands over it and the flame to keep the weather from defeating him. When he looked up, after taking a long drag, he blew out the smoke and said, “Then I stopped to bum a cup of coffee off Laurie.”

“Hey, Chase,” one of the other men joked, “maybe you ought to get yourself your own wife to fix your coffee, instead of messin’ around with Hugh-Jay’s.”

Chase laughed out loud at that, and the neighbors and the hired men grinned.

Hugh-Jay, who didn’t laugh, walked off to pick up one end of a brand-new roll of barbed wire. With his cigarette in a corner of his mouth, Chase sauntered over to take up the other side of the spindle on which the wire was rolled. Together they moved toward the broken fence line, while the other men watched them.

The brothers set the roll down on the grass next to the broken fence.

With a gloved finger, Hugh-Jay lifted a strand of wire and pressed the clippers.

Instantly, the high-tensile barbed wire sprang free.

Released from its tight coil, it lunged like a vicious snake toward his brother’s legs.

Chase let out a shout and jumped back.

From a safe distance, he gave his brother an astounded look.

“Jesus, Hugh-Jay, watch it! You damn near took my balls off.”

Unapologetically, Hugh-Jay said, “Might do the women of Henderson County a favor.”

“This family,” Chase said, with a shake of his head, “is in one hell of a bad mood today.” He took a last drag off his smoke, dropped it to the ground and ground it out with the heel of a boot. Pointing to the dangerous roll of wire, he said, “Let’s try this again. A little more carefully this time, all right?”

Annabelle, witnessing the burst of ill-temper between her sons, felt her heart sink.

Cut fences and murdered cows weren’t the only problems this family had, she admitted to herself. It was time, she realized, for a visit she didn’t want to make to her daughter-in-law. She hoped it wasn’t past time to fix something before it got more dangerous than Billy Crosby or barbed wire. And she hoped she wasn’t using it just as an excuse to avoid being there when the sheriff came to arrest Billy. Deep in worried thought, she started carrying things back across the muddy grass to her Caddy, with Red Bosch helpfully following her with a full trash bag in one hand and her iced tea container in the other.

She was halfway to town before she recalled that she hadn’t even said goodbye to her husband or her sons.