The donkey, Mae, was injured. As far as he could see, a minor cut above her front right fetlock. January insisted on teamwork: he took the fence because she lacked the strength to drive the post deeper past the mud, and she tended the wound. Nat hadn’t seen Mae stirred except when the jenny earned her place on the ranch driving coyotes away from the herd, but that wasn’t to say she wouldn’t kick when provoked, in pain, and startled by the electrified air. Every half-minute or so, Nat glanced back through the sheeting rain to make sure January wasn’t laid f
lat-out.
At his first glance, she stroked the cow’s neck and chin, January’s lips moving in full-on conversation with the blasted cow. At second glance, January had produced a cup from somewhere and was filling it with rain. At third glance, she crouched at a safe distance in front of Mae, one hand braced at the top of the donkey’s leg, the other irrigating the wound with rainwater. Apparently, she and Mae had become fast friends, too. January’s lips still moved, and the donkey’s eyelids were half-closed and relaxed.
Nat surveyed the sky. No break in the clouds, and they were losing daylight by the second. At this rate of rainfall, the dry creek bed that wound onto the neighboring property would swell with running water. The alternate route back to the house was at least forty minutes. Double that, leading scared livestock. They were screwed out of all options.
Trying his phone was like roping a fart in the wind. Cell tower pings in this part of the county were non-existent.
He finished tightening the fence and ran over to the other three. January had secured a rope around each animal and tethered them together. Blinding light split the sky two full counts before thunder shook the ground. The worst of the storm was two miles out. Wide-eyed, the three looked to him for further instructions.
A million and one chores awaited Nat back on the active side of the property three days before auction, but with an injured animal and lightning-rod trees everywhere, Mother Nature had made the choice for him.
“Clem had an old cabin not too far from here,” Nat hollered above the storm. Last he’d thought about the structure, someone in town had asked about it to reclaim the wood and sell it to an upscale developer in Dallas for a rustic feel to their fish-bowl, high-rise loft. Chances were every bit of it was gone, but right now, all Nat had were chances.
He could have kicked his own ass for getting January into this dangerous mess.
Howling winds made conversation impossible. January nodded and reached for the animals’ neck ropes.
“No way,” shouted Nat. “I’ve got these two. Ride Poe. Brontë will walk beside you.”
Nat led the caravan to the parcel from which Clem had worked the land when he was Nat’s age. Once a young man with dreams of becoming a pilot, Clem had left the woman he loved and a father who no longer understood him to serve on the Allied fronts in Europe. Grateful to escape war with his life and a handful of shrapnel in his knee, he returned stateside to find his love waiting for him. Clem never set foot in a plane, not even a commercial airliner, in his later years. Nat’s grandfather once told him on the steps of his original cabin that dreams should be rewritten from time to time, else life will rewrite them for you. Nat had forgotten those words until now, perhaps in the greatest rewrite of his life.
He glanced up at January. The outline of her raincoat swayed with Poe’s movements as if she had been born in a saddle, but she was a city girl when she first came to Close Call. Strands of hair webbed across her soaked cheeks. A good four inches of wet Texas clay caked atop the toes of her boots. Her face had a bloodless pallor. She should have been miserable. Ten years ago, she would have been miserable. But now—Jesus—now she returned his gaze and smiled. Fuck it all, she smiled at him, and he nearly toppled face-first into the mud from the way his axis shifted. After all he had put her through, not just today but since she had been back, she smiled, and Nat knew some rewriting had begun.
When Nat spotted the old structure, his pulse eased and it felt less like he was hauling the world’s weight behind him. A lean-to on the cabin’s south side separated pioneer-type tongue and groove construction from a broken-down tractor Clem had scrapped for parts but did little to hold back dogfennel and thistle weeds nearly as tall as the roof.
Nat tied the cow and donkey to the lean-to’s post and set to work clearing out a space for the animals. He tossed the scrap metal parts into the field and used his pocket knife and hands to clear away the overgrowth for mostly-dry bedding. January tucked in from the rain with the horses, looped their reins to the other post, fed them apples from her bag. They settled Poe and Bronte close-in and left Mae outside the horizontal frame where the angle of the roof cut off the worst of the storm and kept the weed bed largely dry.
“What about MooDonna?” asked January.
Nat surveyed his remaining options and the wind’s direction. “Tie her up on the west side. She’ll be out of the worst of it there.”
Without protest, January led the cow around the corner and out of sight.
Nat did a quick check for poisonous weeds in the lean-to then near the cow. When he returned to the lean-to, he found January scrambling back from the open field. She had laid his raincoat flat, loaded the center with rocks to form a valley, and secured the periphery with more rocks. Already, a small pond formed at the center of the yellow nylon.
“Where did you learn that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Africa.” As if a continent on the other side of the globe was the most obvious answer. For January Rose, it was. She might have ducked into the cabin to avoid the worst of the storm or watched him scramble to secure his animals and complained about how she could be back in Mona’s trailer in her knee-high socks and no bra, sleeping off the deluge, but she did neither of those things. Instead, her first thought was collecting rain to water the animals.
The realization warmed him, scalp to toes. His brain sent his heart a warning—don’t fall, she’ll leave again. Thankfully, her chatter brushed the internal crisis aside.
“I’d forgotten how strong the rain gets here. Looks like it’s letting up.”
“You can go inside,” he said. “Get dry.”
“I like it here.”
Nat wasn’t sure if her here meant Texas, a forgotten cabin from another era, or with him.
“Why did the animals come all this way?” she asked. “I mean, all their friends are miles away.”
The obvious parallel to her life clearly escaped her. “One of them probably gave the other the idea.” A certain compulsive liar father sprang to mind.
“Right, but MooDonna wasn’t injured. She could have come back.”
“Not likely.” Nat opened a package of sterile cotton gauze. “She grew up around Mae. Mae guarded her as a calf then watched over her offspring when she calved. They’re as socially complex as humans.”