HT02 - Sing: A Novel of Colorado (10 page)

“Bryce,” Odessa said, from over by the sink where she was washing dishes. “What is it?” she asked tentatively. “You barely touched your breakfast. Are you feeling all right?”

“Fine, fine,” he mumbled. He hated the tone in her voice, the distance between them, but could not seem to find the way to bridge it, not with what he had to do still before them.

She turned around and dried her hands on the towel. “Tell me. What does the telegram say?”

“It’s Robert,” he said.

“Your brother? He’s well?” She sat down beside him, around the corner of the table.

He forced a small smile to his face as he dared to look at her. “Well enough to come for a visit.”

Odessa smiled, her eyes widening. “That is wonderful news!” Her smiled quickly faded. “You are not … pleased he is coming?”

He rubbed his temples. “Dess, there is something I need to tell you. Something I’ve been considering.”

“Then tell me. Out with it. No more silences, no more secrets, Bryce. There’s been enough of that lately between us.”

“My brother is coming, but I might be gone.”

She lifted her chin a bit, as if bracing for what was to come. She was so strong, his wife. Maybe strong enough to endure this—

“I must go to Spain, Dess, and bring back a hundred head of horses—fifty to sell at a profit and fifty to strengthen the herd and breed for next year.”

She stared at him with those lovely blue-green eyes for a long moment and blinked slowly. Above them, they could hear Samuel begin to stir from his morning nap, but she ignored it.

“We’ve lost too many, Dess.” He reached out a hand to cover hers, but she pulled away. “The blizzard. The strangles. There is no way to recover. Our cash is all in the land. Your own inheritance is in the new land … I won’t see it sold. Any of it.” He shrugged. “And we can’t make it through another winter. There’s simply not enough.” He rose and paced alongside the table. “Robert will review our books. He’ll want to see how the family’s investment is faring, and he’ll see the errors I made. Buying that land last year instead of investing in snowbreaks.” He ran a hand through his hair in agitation. “I need him to see that I’m rectifying the problem, not ignoring it.”

“Sell the land,” she said, looking up at him. “I don’t care if it was my money or yours. It’s ours, together. Sell some of it.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s unwise, Odessa. There isn’t a man in this valley who could pay us half of what we paid for it a year ago. Everyone’s lost too much this past winter. That’s how things work.”

She searched his face, desperation making her own look drawn and weary, and Bryce felt another pang of guilt. “There are years of plenty and years of famine,” she said. “I am willing to accept that risk, as a rancher’s wife. But I am not about to risk your life.” She rose and walked to him. “Think about it,” she said, putting a hand on his forearm. “It was your voyages to Spain that first brought you low with the consumption. We’ve been without disease for three years, Bryce. Breathing free.” Samuel’s full-blown wail brought her head up and around. “I have to go to him. But please, think about it.”

“You think I haven’t?” he said. “You think I’ve made this decision lightly?”

She turned on the stairs to face him again.

“Everything I do, I do for you and Samuel, Dess.”

“Not this,” she said, shaking her head and crossing her arms. She pointed at him. “This … this is something different. Pride? Fear? What is it? You can’t face your older brother in the midst of a hard year?”

“Stop, Odessa,” he warned.

Samuel coughed, he was crying so hard, but Odessa still stared at Bryce, now shaking in anger. Never had he seen her so furious, until just a couple of nights ago when she learned that he’d known Reid Bannock had been released and had not told her. “You would leave us here? To run the ranch—”

“Tabito can run the ranch.”

“You would leave us here, when Reid Bannock might show up again? How is that caring for me and Samuel, Bryce?” She shook her head. “No, this is not about us. This is about you.”

“Regardless, I must find a way to supplement the herd and help us through the year. You don’t seem to understand that there is not enough to make it through.”

“Can we borrow from the bank?”

He shook his head. “Not this year.”

“Maybe … maybe your brother can lend us money.”

He looked up at her and frowned. “You know how it is with us. I don’t want him in my affairs any more than is absolutely necessary.”

She looked to the window, arms crossed, thinking for a moment, then back to him. “Then cash in on the gold bar we found in Louise’s cabin.”

His frown deepened and he brought a finger to his lips, shushing her. Harold Rollins was sick in bed, in the parlor below them, but the man still had ears. “We agreed to not speak of it again,” he whispered.

“No, that was how you wanted it, and I went along with it for a time. Since we couldn’t find the rest, it hardly mattered. But Bryce, that bar could see us at least partway through another winter, help us get our feet under us again.”

Bryce rose and walked over to her. “You’re the one who fears that Bannock will return. If he hears we have conquistador gold, he
will
find a way back to us, Dess. And he won’t be alone.”

She lifted her chin and her eyes grew more defiant. “Then let’s melt it down here so there are no markings and divide it into smaller, less obvious pieces. You can take them to California, if you have to, to exchange it for cash. California won’t kill you; Spain might.” Her eyes softened and she came over to him. “Don’t you see, Bryce? This could be God’s provision, His way of seeing us through a trying year. Why not utilize what He has given us?”

8 April 1887

Our visitor, Harold Rollins, has moved to the bunkhouse. The men are under strict orders to treat him with respect, but none can avoid the fact that he remains only because Sheriff Olsbo has forebade him to leave; he must remain three more weeks to make sure that his remaining eight horses are free of disease and will not infect any other ranchers as they have ours.

Three of our yearlings and two mares are showing signs of the strangles. I can feel the swellings along their jaw lines. Bryce is beside himself, since we must begin the breeding process, and yet he hesitates, not wishing to risk the health of either dam or foal if strangles occurs. But which to breed? Which to segregate? Put down the ill or hope for recovery? I notice he is not as eager to put down our horses as he was Harold’s, and this seems to trouble him too.

Odessa walked with the baby down to the stables, intent on looking in on the twelve young foals that had managed to survive the blizzard. Not one of them showed signs of the strangles, and she had taken to looking in on them each day, finding hope, vision for their future, every time she gazed at them across the stable doorway. They were already bored, seeking to leave the close confines of the small stalls they shared with their mothers, but Odessa knew it would be some time before Bryce risked their tender lungs. As it was, he only allowed the hands to take them out once a day, to the farthest corral, for exercise.

She looked about, wondering at her nervousness at the thought of encountering her husband. Odessa didn’t know what to make of this new mood in him. And she alternated between frustration and fear. Was this to be their relationship from here on out? Why could they not draw together to fight this new battle? Why did it seem to divide them when they needed each other most?

Odessa smiled as she spied the first foal, a lovely chestnut colored imp that tossed his head when he saw her, as if in greeting. She lifted Samuel up to get a better look, and the baby gurgled and kicked excited fat legs in pleasure. She moved on to the next stall, glimpsing Bryce approaching them, but ignored him. She felt too angry, too hurt to speak to him. He’d left without waiting for her to retrieve Samuel, left without even trying to find resolution. The ranch hands all appeared to be elsewhere this morning; at least none were inside at the moment.

“Odessa,” he said, from over her left shoulder.

“Bryce,” she said, not turning.

She stiffened as he wrapped his strong arms around her waist and leaned his head in to kiss her shoulder and then her neck. They stood there for a minute in silence. To Odessa, it felt strange, almost as if she were getting to know her husband again. “I need to tell you what is on my mind,” he said.

“I’ve been waiting for that …” She turned to him and he took Samuel from her, bouncing him in his arms for a moment. “Is this about why you seem so … distant?”

“Most likely,” he said grimly. He lifted his free hand up to pinch his forehead, as if massaging away pain there again. Together, they walked to an open window, one that gave them a view of an empty corral and beyond it, the wide fields and towering mountains that bordered their ranch. “I was already worried, before the strangles. We were late in breeding.”

She nodded. She knew there was always pressure to breed sooner rather than later. The earlier a future racehorse was born in the spring, the better chance he had in his age group. The better he performed, the better his breeder did in future sales. While none of the ranch’s horses had gone to racehorse buyers recently, in years past up to a third had. And that third was so valuable; it doubled their annual income. This year the yearlings, having been born late, would not be as highly sought after, and they’d lost half of them in the storm. Another two were now quarantined for strangles. And they were already a month behind in breeding for the next year’s sales due to the blizzard.

She wrapped her hand around his waist. “We are not God, Bryce. Only the Lord controls the weather. The light. The mares will not begin their cycle until there is enough light.”

He swallowed hard and stared out. “Last fall Robert suggested I build the snowbreaks, and also three new barns and stable units, dividing the men to care for subgroups of the horses through the winter. He asked me to do it, outright. He’d read about breeding operations that bring their breeding dams in early, and light many lanterns throughout, day and night, so the horse thinks it’s later in the spring than it really is.”

“You thought it foolish,” she said quietly.

“I thought it meddlesome. I told him to mind his own business, to pay attention to his ships rather than my horses. I thought,
Why do mechanically what God does naturally?
We’ve done well in the last decade on this ranch. The expense of those new barns and stables, let alone the increased number of hands we would’ve had to hire, feeding them—and you with a new baby—I thought it ludicrous. Greedy. And the new land … we’d already pushed as far as I was willing to go.”

Odessa sighed heavily. She leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “You made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time. I know how it must feel, how you are beating yourself. But what if you had agreed to it? Undertaken the task, the expense? We might have only had ten, twelve mares already impregnated? That wouldn’t put us so much further ahead.”

He lifted his chin and stared up at the roof of the stables. His demeanor was easing, his shoulders more relaxed as he shared his burdens with her.

“Will I like your brother, Bryce?” she asked carefully.

He laughed then, a quick snort of air through his nose. A mare edged her nose over a stable stall and he stepped over to give her a good rub. Samuel closed his eyes and opened them wide in surprise, then turned his head away as if it were all too much to take in. “You’ll like him. Most everyone does. Truth be told, I do too.”

She moved over to him. “I want us to remember where we’ve been, Bryce. Four years ago, standing here together, just holding our child would’ve seemed impossible. Ever since that day with Reid, I committed to trust God, with whatever breath I had left, with as many breaths as I had left. He holds our lives in His hands, Bryce. Our past. Our present. Our future.”

Her husband nodded. “I know it.”

“And this has been a terrible month. We’ve suffered terrible losses. But we are here. We are alive. We are healthy. Think of it! Neither of us has even had a consumptive attack since we left the sanatorium!”

“It’s you,” he said softly, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her close. “You are my medicine.”