let her sister or mother babysit, Lux thought, but Dessie held back, reluctant to ask for any kind of favor.
Then, once she found out she was expecting for a second time, Dessie wouldn’t even enter the paddock to help feed or brush down either of the horses. She said she’d heard a story about a girl in Reader who’d been kicked in the belly by a mule and lost her baby, and she wasn’t about to go taking any foolish chances. Lux had the good sense to know a good horse, and he almost told Dessie how silly that seemed. But an inner voice told him to let it go, that women who were expecting might have some kind of protective instinct, not quite rational but worth heeding. He thought back to his mother, living through so much hope and loss. How much did she know about the life inside her, even the one that eventually took her?
Lux knew that Alan Ray had his eye on Calamity Jane for some time, and he knew he would make good use of the Remington. But almost as soon as Alan Ray had loaded CJ into his trailer, Lux began to miss having that mare. CJ was a gift from his Uncle Ron. She was shy and hard to catch when Ron first bought her, but took to Lux right off, trusting in his steady hands as he rode her the four miles back home. A few months later, when she went into season, Lux rode her back to Ron’s house to breed her to Ron’s dark bay Morgan stallion. Uncle Ron was pleased with how CJ had settled down under Lux’s care. Lux was in the paddock eleven months later with CJ when she’d delivered Dakota, waiting up all night, and just after the colt was able to stand, breathing into his nostrils before he was even an hour old.
LOOKING BACK, Lux would say that those few months after his accident, the world spun faster than it ever had, life had charged past and all he could do was hang on tight, hope for the best, and give pieces of his life a nudge here and there, so they could fit like an unfinished puzzle. There was Pa, a soon-to-be reckoning about his future. There was Dessie, the promises they’d made to each other, the moments of joy at coming together, the pangs of being apart. There was bad news about his eye, a total loss, and with that, setting aside his chainsaw and beginning a new round of training as a millwright. Work days flew by, taking measure, tracking lumber, gaining more know-how and business savvy, the last man each night to leave the shop. Out in the paddock, Dakota thrived, his weight and girth increasing by the day, a dark bay colt with a snap in his step and a star on his forehead. But at his pa’s house, with each day Lux felt more chained down. He could wait to marry Dessie until late August when he turned eighteen, but why? His old man could sign legal consent for him and the wait would be over.
One evening, about a month after Dessie said yes, and a couple of weeks after he’d received the blessing of Bertram and Rose, Lux could wait no longer. After chores, he joined his old man on the front porch. The breeze picked up as darkness began to fall. The light lingered in the west for what seemed like hours. June bugs crawled up the cabin wall and darted headlong into the screen door to get at the light bulb in the kitchen ceiling. Lux settled back against the porch rail, holding out a tin of Copenhagen tobacco for his old man, taking a pinch for himself.
“There’s something I been meaning to talk to you about,” Lux said, staring at the darkening features of his old man in his slat-back rocker. Everett tugged at his cap, setting it back on his head, and reached out for the snuff. Lux waited several minutes for a response. “Ain’t that just how your ma used to talk,” Everett said, startling Lux, loneliness in his voice.
Lux rubbed the snuff between his lower lip and his gums, spit into a coffee can at his feet. It had come to this. “Truth be told, a few months back I got my heart stole by a girl,” Lux said. “I want to do it right, to ask consent and all.”
“Do ya, then?” Pa said. “So, you’ll be bringing her up here one of these days,” he said. It was a statement more than a question.
“I don’t know, I don’t know about that,” Lux said, caught a bit off guard, drawing out his words while he figured out his next thought. The tobacco put a sour taste in his mouth. He spat it into the tall grass. “I expect we’ll get us some land of our own, maybe work something out with her pa.”
In the waning light Lux couldn’t see his pa’s face well. It seemed like his eyes were shut, like he was only halfway listening. Lux wondered if his pa would ask for any more information, or if he was off in his own mind barely heeding Lux’s words. An owl hooted back in the woods, and a pair of bullfrogs called like the twangs of a banjo along the stream banks. Lux heard the creak of his father’s rocking chair on the planks of the porch.
“Well ain’t that something. Will you, then?” his pa said suddenly.
Lux nodded slowly. He stared at the tree line. He waited.
Pa spit into a Coke can. Then he cleared his throat. “Who’s the lucky girl?”
Lux winced. The air had darkened, the old man had taken his time closing in. He could walk off the porch, head out for the night, he could head for the Jeep and be gone. It could have gone like that. Lux’s legs would not let him move. His fingers gripped the porch rail beside him. His own body did not know how to dodge this question.
“Dessie, ah, Dorothy Price,” Lux said into the night air. His voice seemed too loud, like it had its own echo. He rubbed at his eyepatch.
“Taking up with that Price girl?” Everett reached down behind his chair for his knife and sharpening stone. “It’s a wonder she’ll have the likes of you.” Everett slid the old Bowie knife from its leather sheath. He stroked the edge of the thick blade with his thumb, then slid the blade along the stone, a practice so ingrained that he needed no light at all. “So that’s how it goes around here,” said Pa, his eyes cast down at the knife or possibly the round of oak he’d been resting his feet on, or maybe the planks on the porch. “Why you just go on then. You always did follow that son-a-bitch coach of yourn like a pup. You’re to be eighteen in a couple months. Ain’t nothing I can do about it.”
Some things do not change, Lux knew. Bertram had gotten the better of Pa, and the old man was never going to let it go. Lux had the sudden awareness that he had just stepped across the enemy lines, that both he and Dessie, and Bertram and Rose, too, would stand forever behind a closed a door in his old man’s thoughts. Lux had stepped through that door, he had chosen, and his old man had latched that door behind him. “Well, good riddance to all of you’ns,” his pa said, breaking the silence. Lux wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Reckon I can sell them horses once I’m shed of you for good.”
His old man never made anything easy. Lux shifted, started to speak, and held back. That ain’t how it is, he wanted to say. It don’t have to go like this. But then he thought, Yes, old man. There ain’t a damn thing you can do about it. Everett moved his feet. He sat forward in his chair, spat into the Coke can, and stabbed the thick-bladed knife into the oak log. A bat circled and wheeled just past the roofline. The steel blade and rivets on the smooth handle of the Bowie knife glinted in the darkness.
THOUGH HE did not speak of it that night to his old man, Lux had other plans for CJ and Dakota. There was a scrubby quarter-acre section of hayfield on the Price property that was too steep to cut with the tractor, and Lux had already mentioned to Bertram that he would sure appreciate it if he could bring his horses over and set them up on that strip of pasture. Dessie had added that she’d wanted to learn to ride, too. Bertram hadn’t considered keeping horses, but he suggested that if he and Lux made a paddock large enough maybe they could both make use of it, and that way he could also raise a calf for meat.
Lux gathered some men from A-1, and in no time they dropped off a truckload of locust posts and poplar boards from the mill. With the help of Alan Ray and Bertram, and Uncle Ron’s posthole digger, in a few weekends they built a corral with an open tack shed at the back of the Price property. The paddock was close to where Lux and Dessie soon would set their trailer, and it was easy to drive over to with a bale of hay in the back of the Jeep. The horses moved onto the Price homestead even before Lux did.
Dessie had taken to riding like a natural. Her long arms and legs made it easy for her to reach up to the pommel and hoist herself into a western saddle, and Calamity Jane responded to Dessie’s steady hands and the light pressure of her knees. Soon Dessie was cantering across her father’s hayfield, her hair in a ponytail