On Her Way Home (22 page)

Mac cocked an eye open. “Do you like what you see?” he asked, mischief in his eyes.

Jo blushed but answered honestly, surprising him as always, “I already told you I do.”

Mac shifted restlessly on his stool. He was growing heated, sitting up late at night in a quiet barn, all alone with Jo’s wanton eyes roaming all over him. Leaning away from the wall, he rested his elbows on his knees. “Why don’t you tell me about that Will fella you were engaged to, you know…to pass the time?”

Alarmed, Jo raised her eyebrows. “There isn’t much to tell,” she grunted dismissively, picking up another piece of hay and slowly peeling strips from it.

“Do you still care about him?” Mac asked bluntly, raising his eyes to Jo’s so he could read her answer there.

“No,” she answered truthfully, “I stopped caring about him the second I saw him with someone else.”

“Was it your sister? You said they are engaged now.”

Shaking her head, she replied, “No, I don’t even know who the girl was. We went to a dance one night, and I happened upon him pawing some girl in the bushes. I never spoke a word to him after that. To this day, I suppose he has no idea that I even saw him.” Jo’s brow rose thoughtfully. “Truthfully, I’m not sure now how much I ever really cared about him. At the time I thought I was going to marry him, but when I look back on it, I realize there were other qualities about him that bothered me…that I ignored.”

“You must have cared about him if you were willing to turn a blind eye to his faults,” Mac said, doubt in his voice.

“No, I think it was more that he was the first person to really court me. As you can see,”—Jo smiled drolly, gesturing to her haphazard attire and messy braid—“I’m not the most appealing woman on earth.”

Mac slowly perused her, starting at her untied boots and moving up her tanned legs to her knees, and from there to her full, pink lips and large, round eyes. “You could’ve fooled me,” he said huskily.

Mac’s voice echoed with a tone Jo hadn’t heard since their conversation at the creek when she’d asked him to quit feigning interest in her. To her disappointment, her request had been granted, and Mac hadn’t flirted or teased her since.

“Back to pretenses again,” Jo accused him, softening her words with a grin.

Mac didn’t like her reply. It baffled him how Jo, at twenty-three years old, could be unaware of her own physical beauty. There wasn’t an inch of her that he hadn’t had an inappropriate thought about. Mac laced his hands together, staring up at her intensely. “Let’s get one thing clear. You’re the prettiest woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

Jo’s mouth gaped open, her insides warmed by his compliment.

“I can’t sleep down the hall from you without taking an icy dunk in the river first.” Mac enforced the truth of his words with a steady gleam directly into her eyes.

Jo reddened and looked past him to the cow. “At the creek you admitted you were only preten...”

“I lied.” Mac admitted, cutting her off.

Jo’s gaze shifted back to him. “Why?” she asked softly. She waited for Mac to answer, but ignoring her question, he stood up, twisting his torso to stretch his back, and walked over to the cow to check on her progress.

“So, how is it your fiancé ended up engaged to your sister?” he asked, peering over the back of the cow.

Jo noticed his quick change of subject, but decided to let it go, thinking it was enough to know for now, that he thought she was pretty and that the sparks she felt weren’t only outgoing. To have some measure of the regard she felt for him returned was more than satisfying.

Answering his question, she said, “After that night, I refused to speak to him. At first he tried to coax me, and then he bullied, manipulated, and ultimately tried to punish me, I think, by shifting his attention to Krissy.”

“I’d think a person would steer clear of a man her sister was involved with,” Mac said.

His judgment riled Jo up in defense of Krissy, a cause she wouldn’t have sided with a year ago. “Krissy and I hadn’t been close in many years. She was younger and led a more pampered life. To her, I was the uppity, schoolmarm sister, who was always ruining her fun.”

“That sounds about right,” Mac teased, with a roguish grin as he came and sat back down on his stool.

“I wouldn’t have to be uppity if people would just behave themselves!” Jo kidded back, lightly kicking his stool with the tip of her boot.

Mac chuckled lowly. “So to spite you, she took up with him?” he guessed, eyeing her questioningly.

“I don’t think she did it to spite me. Actually, I don’t even think she knew how involved we were. We hadn’t announced our engagement to my family yet. I think…she was just tired of being left behind, of being the baby of the family, caged up on the farm.” Mac listened attentively to Jo, enjoying her facial expressions and the way she bit her lip while she pondered what to say next. “When we were little girls, we loved to play dress up. Krissy was always the fancy woman from town, who was traveling through on her way to see the world.”

“Who were you?” Mac queried.

Jo smiled widely. “Well, I was always the farmer, dressed in a hand-me-down pair of my brother’s overalls, who got to drive her around town…which consisted of the barn, the chicken coop, and the pig pen,” Jo whispered to him confidentially. “She would climb in the wheelbarrow with her little white gloves and parasol, and we’d pretend it was a fancy carriage.”

Mac smiled, warmed by the image of grubby, little Jo in overalls, running her sister around the farm. “We didn’t have a town growing up,” he divulged. “We had a fort, Leif, Tom, and I. It mainly consisted of an old ram-shackled soddy that served as our hideout and a broken down fence that led to the creek. Each post was a cannon, and we’d gather up cow chips and wait for our enemies to stick their heads up.” Mac paused and cocked an eye at her. “Prairie dogs and gophers.” He grinned, enjoying the memory. “When we saw their little brown heads, we would bomb them with cow chips, making loud exploding noises.”

Jo laughed, picturing the young Mac and Leif from the mantle photograph, chucking cow chips at helpless animals.

Mac chuckled to himself remembering something. “One time we got this idea that we needed a way to guard the back entrance to our fort. So we spent a month building huge stacks of brush along the creek bank, leaving an opening about two feet wide that we could sneak through to get to the other side. We called it our ‘backdoor.’ After we did that, we collected scraps of junk, old cans and rusted up things we could find around the ranch. We strung them altogether with fishing line, and then when we would set out to bomb the prairie dogs, we would string the entire chain of scrap in the opening of our ‘backdoor’ so that nothing could sneak up on us from behind.” Mac picked up a piece of hay and rolled it between his thumb and finger. “One day, the enemy was out in force, scurrying from hole to hole. We were bombing them when we heard this metal clanking down by the creek. We jumped up and raced down the fence line to the piles of cow chips we had stored up just in case we were ambushed. We figured some small varmint was trapped in our fishing line and when he came shooting out of the brush pile, we could bomb him. As the rattling got closer to the exit, we started firing off cow chip after cow chip.” Mac’s bright eyes grinned at Jo. “I still remember the look on Kirby’s face when he came clanking out of the brush with fishing line, cans, and junk wrapped all around him. And that first cow chip smacked him right in the face.”

Jo laughed loudly, picturing cantankerous old Kirby booby trapped by the little devils.

Chuckling along with her, Mac said, “We were so caught up in our game that we kept throwing them, all of them, until we were out of ammunition. We lit out after that, with Kirby cussing and tripping after us.” The quiet night lit up as Mac and Jo’s laughter melded together and drowned out the howling coyotes. “We got a pretty good lickin’ later that night, and I remember having extra chores for a couple weeks, but it was worth it.”

Mac looked at her conspiratorially. “Sometimes when Kirby’s grouching around and flailing his arms about, I picture him twenty years ago all tangled up in that line, and it’s all I can do to keep from laughing. Leif and I actually had a little signal we’d use when we were kids and Kirby was barking at us. We’d reach up and tug on our ear.” Mac reached up grabbing his earlobe lightly. “It was a signal to the other person to remember the ‘bombing.’ Sometimes, Leif will still do it.”

Jo’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“No. It’s true. Watch him at the dinner table when Kirby gets to ranting about something or other.”

Jo grinned, hoping she would be able to catch him at it. “My pa and I had a little code like that, but instead of a gesture it was a saying. If something dangerous happened or there was a near miss or accident on the farm, he’d say, ‘I could sure use a bite of bread with strawberry jam on it right now.’ Mac looked at her, puzzled. “It’s odd, I know,” Jo said, answering his befuddled look. “One time I took lunch out to Pa in the field, and the wood pile came loose. It rolled down the hill and almost crashed into him and our horse.” Jo’s eyes shone earnestly at Mac while she told her story. “Well afterwards, cool as a cucumber, Pa picks up his lunch and takes a big bite of bread leaving strawberry jam dribbling down his chin. It just kind of became our saying for making it out of a close call.”

Jo leaned back against the wall, the familiar ache gnawing at her chest as she talked about him. “He would say it at the funniest times too. Once Pa and I had raced down the hill behind our farmhouse on bicycles he’d brought home and fixed up. Neither of us was willing to slow down, so we raced to the barn right through Ma’s fresh laundry hanging up on the line.” Jo smirked at Mac. “For the record, I won,” she boasted before continuing. “Anyway, Ma came into the yard a few minutes later and saw her clean sheets drug all through the dirt. She followed the trail of sheets out to the barn, but Pa saw her coming and shoved me into a stall and sank down next to me. We heard Ma storm in looking for the culprits. She walked right up to the stall we were hiding in but never saw us. After she left, Pa grinned at me. “Whoo, I sure would like a bite of bread with strawberry jam.” Mac chortled at her amusing story. It cleared up the mystery behind Jo’s quick wit and playful nature.

Jo dropped her head back against the wall and looked up into the loft, sighing wistfully, “I miss him.”

Mac couldn’t think of anything to say, so he remained quiet but nodded his head in acknowledgment of her grief.

Jo turned toward Mac. “I suppose it’s the same for you…missing Tom? He was Sam’s father, right? Mattie told me he died in the war.”

“Yep,” Mac answered quietly, staring down at his hands. Minutes ticked by as they sat pensively in the quiet stillness of the barn, while each of them reflected on their losses. Finally breaking the silence, Mac asked, “It seems you and Mattie talk about me quite a lot. What else has she told you?” Irritability and shortness tinged his words, signaling to Jo that Mac was shutting down, turning cold and distant like he always did when she broached a subject he didn’t care to discuss.

“Nothing,” Jo answered innocently, “just that you and Tom were as close as brothers.” Jo’s words sliced like a sharp blade to his chest.
Close as brothers, that’s exactly what we were
, Mac thought to himself.

The cow bellowed lowly reminding Mac of the looming birth. Rising from his seat, he moved to the cow. Examining her, he said, “The calf is breech.” Jo walked around to the back of the cow to see for herself, not that she would be able to tell the difference, having never helped deliver a cow before.

“Remember the tail jack?” Mac asked Jo seriously. Jo nodded. “We are going to move this cow over next to the stall door. You climb up there and lift her tail, and I’m going to get this calf turned around.”

Jo did exactly as she was told and climbed up on the stall gate. “I see why you needed me now. It seems I’ve got myself quite the reputation for this position,” she said, grinning wryly at Mac while grasping the messy tail tightly in one hand and holding it straight up over the cow.”

Mac flashed his dimples. “That’s right. You’re the best tail jacker for miles.”

Great
, Jo thought glibly to herself, not liking the addition of this particular chore to her set of skills. The cow liked it even less than Jo did, straining and pushing backward at the intrusion of Mac’s hand. Several minutes later, Mac finally got the calf in a better position and deftly tied a rope around its legs, one around its fetlocks and another knot below the knee.

“Jo, hop down and mound some hay. There…behind the cow, where the calf will drop,” he pointed with his foot. While Jo was busy doing that, Mac positioned himself on the ground, sitting with his legs spread and boots flat on the dirt. As the cow began to strain, Mac pulled down and back on the rope, joining his force with the effort of the cow. Ten minutes later a wet black and white calf slipped out and fell into the springy hay. Mac crawled on his knees over to the calf and scooped the membrane away from its nose and mouth, rubbing the calf roughly and shaking it. To Jo’s relief the calf finally stirred and kicked its hooves. Mac began untying the knots from the calf’s legs, and before he could even get them off, the mama cow turned and started cleaning her baby, using her tongue as a long wet washcloth.

“She’s a big one,” Mac said to Jo, rising from the ground and brushing the hay from his knees. Mac dragged the calf into the fresh stall, followed closely by its attentive mother while Jo poured fresh water into the trough. Amiably, they watched the mother and calf for a little while, enjoying the serenity of the barn and the marvel of new life.