Blackfeather
8 Paying the Price
“RAMIE! Get your skinny ass into my office right now!” Pa yelled at me as he pounded on my door. “Kyle! Same orders. Now!”
Kyle and I stumbled out of our apartments, pulling on our boots with shirttails flying. Pa was already back to the house and we rushed to catch up. One thing you did not want to do was cross Pa when he was mad.
And I knew why. I glanced toward the near pasture and saw the four new horses grazing peacefully with Bells and Bows. Kyle and I got back from the auction with them about midnight. We clattered into Pa’s office and stood at attention in front of his desk. Moms were sitting on the couch. I caught a glimpse of the kids just outside the door where they couldn’t be seen but could hear every word. I couldn’t blame them. This was going to be good.
“You two asked permission to go up to the Casper trail ride this weekend. Is that where you went?” Pa demanded. It was all on me.
“Um… yessir,” Kyle said.
“For a while,” I added.
“And?”
“All the riders on the trail were new, it seemed like. It wasn’t much fun, so we left,” I said. Pa looked at me waiting. I plunged on. “Well, there was an auction at the stockyards. We just stopped to have a look around. We were just looking. But then these four were led into the ring and they were kind of skinny and looking poorly. We just thought they needed a good home and no one was bidding on them.”
“Except that guy from the slaughterhouse. He offered a penny a pound on the hoof for them,” Kyle added.
“Thirteen dollars a horse, Pa!” I said. My eyes were stinging when I thought of it. “We bought the four of them for a hundred. They needed us.”
“And you just happened to trailer Shadow and Spooky up to the ride that day in the big trailer instead of the two-horse trailer. Laramie Wyoming Bell, are you deceiving your parents?” Oh shit! I blew that. Pa would tolerate about anything but lying. That’s what he was mad about. Not the horses.
“Yes, Pa. I’m sorry. But they were gonna go to slaughter.” Pa sighed. He looked at Kyle and shook his head. He knew darned good and well that if I wanted something, Kyle was pretty helpless to stop me.
“Ramie, we can’t rescue every horse that’s headed to the slaughterhouse. We already picked up two in the spring. And they can’t do anything. They can’t even be saddled. This is a working ranch. Everybody has to pull their weight. Animals included,” Pa said.
“But . . .”
“Pa, please don’t be mad at Ramie.” That was a new voice. Caitlin and Phile were standing in the door. “We know we’re not supposed to lie, and that was wrong of Ramie. But please don’t send the horses away. We gotta help them.”
Way to go, Phile! I had a sudden and unexpected burst of love and pride for my younger sibs. Over the past summer, since I begged Pa to let us go get the two Pinto draft horses, the brats had changed into… well, almost into human beings. At thirteen they were tolerable most of the time, and they’d really taken a lot of the responsibility for tending to our orphan horses. But thinking back to the way they were headed before we brought the first two home… Pa had to see the difference.
“They need us,” Caitlin jumped in before anyone could answer. “Nobody ever needed us before.”
That derailed the conversation. Phile and Caitlin got a lot of hugs. Even from me. I realized Phile was almost as tall as me now.
“Phile. Caitlin,” Pa said. “Come stand by your brother and sister since you are in on this, too.”
“Pa, it’s all my fault,” I said. “I knew it was wrong and I convinced my brothers and sister to go along with me. When I read the auction announcement, I knew those four would go to slaughter and there was something about them that just overrode my good sense. I apologize and I’ll take whatever punishment you say, but please don’t blame my brothers and sister for my lack of good judgment. And please don’t send those poor horses away.”
“It’s not the horses,” Mom Ash said as she came up beside me. “It’s the lying.” She smacked me hard on the butt, careful to hit the side that didn’t have my cell phone in the pocket. I flinched. It wasn’t that it hurt that much, but Mom Ash never hit us kids. At almost seventeen, I figured she was the only one who dared to. I hung my head.
“I’m sorry, Mom Ash,” I said contritely. “We shoulda talked to you and been honest about what we were doing.”
She went back to the couch, curled up, and laid her head on Mom Mar’s shoulder. I loved seeing my moms together. It always made me feel warm inside.
“All right you four,” Pa said. “Ramie, I don’t ever want to hear another lie escape from your lips. And that includes arranging to deceive your parents even when you do it without talking. You’re the oldest and you should know better than to lead your siblings into that kind of behavior. And don’t think you’re off the hook, Kyle. You’re supposed to have your sister’s back. Don’t you think you could have stopped her from making such a foolish decision?”
“Yessir. I guess.”
“School starts in two weeks,” Pa continued. “There will be no dates and no visits for the girlfriend for the rest of the month. You two will have to explain the situation to Aubrey and hope she doesn’t get interested in someone else while you’re grounded.”
“Pa, that’s not fair to Kyle when it’s my fault. He was gonna see her this afternoon.”
“Call and explain. You want a partnership. All partners share the blame. This is a ranch. It’s been a ranch in our family for five generations. You are the sixth. You don’t like cattle. Too bad. I raise beef. Mary Beth and Ashley are active members of the Wyoming Cattlewomen’s Association. We do not intend to stop raising cattle. It’s a profitable business. You might think we don’t need money, but it’s important to have a good business out here. It ain’t a hobby.”
“Yessir,” I answered.
“For the next two weeks, you four will be responsible for the cattle. Rafe and Jess are due vacations. They worked hard this summer. You can meet them on the cattle drive from the upper range tomorrow. You four know the operation. There’s inspections and vaccinations to be done in the next two weeks. That should keep all four of you busy enough you don’t have time to worry about dating anyway.”
I guess we all moaned at that. We knew what had to be done when the cattle came down from the upper pasture. They were coming down early because of the wolves. But Pa wasn’t done yet.
“You whelps want to raise horses. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re not just going to keep rescuing horses without some way to keep a ranch running. You need a profitable business. Our cattle ain’t going to pay for your horses. It’s a big ranch. There’s room for both if you show how you can at least start getting some revenue from your venture even if it isn’t profitable right away. Now go get breakfast ready. We’ve got cattle pens to prepare.”
That was it. We were dismissed. It was obvious that since Moms had been in our meeting, they weren’t cooking breakfast. We kids headed for the kitchen and started working. Pa wanted us to start working, today.
I fried bacon and Caitlin made up biscuits. Kyle shredded potatoes while Phile got the breakfast table set. With all seven of us sitting down at the same time, I scrambled a dozen eggs and added cheese to them. In half an hour we paused for a moment of silence to ‘consider the land’ as Pa always said. Then we tucked in.
Having Phile and Caitlin come to our defense got me thinking about the two kids. I wondered if Pa told them about time travel. Well, the way we treated him after he told us and then how Kyle reacted to me, I sure wasn’t going to say anything.
Kyle called Aubrey and after they had some ‘I’m sorry. And I love you,’ he handed the phone to me.
“You’re so bad, Ramie,” Aubrey giggled.
“I’m sorry, Aubrey. And stupid. We’ll make it up to you.”
“You sure will,” she said. “If they’ll let you use the phone, call me, or chat with me on your computer at night. Otherwise, I’ll see you at school.”
“It does suck to not get to play on Labor Day,” I said. “I promise, I’ll do something really nice for the two of you.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Pa wasn’t kidding about sending Rafe and Jess on vacation. Either he or Mom Ash was always around to supervise but they worked us from sunup to sundown. Mom Mar brought sandwiches out to the feedlot at noon for us and there was a big meal when we got back to the house. By the time we got showers and headed for bed, we were too tired to stay up chatting with Aubrey. We got a little break on the weekend. The herd still had to be cared for, but we didn’t do extra stuff like sorting, marking, tagging calves, castrating bulls, and vaccinating on the weekend.
Even Pooky and Dado were glad to just wander the fields for a while without working all the time. And working the cattle didn’t excuse us from our duties with the six rescues we had. Kyle and I spent a lot of Sunday afternoon trying to figure out how we could make a business out of rescuing horses.
We had a big picnic on Labor Day and our parents relented and let us invite Aubrey out for the day. And night. We’d all be headed to school together in the morning. With Caitlin and Phile in junior high now, there’d be five of us headed into Laramie on Tuesday morning.
We loaded the three- and four-wheelers up with all the picnic supplies and rode them up to the family plot. It was always a special place. I think it meant something different to Pa than to the rest of us. It was an odd arrangement of flat stones with no markings on them. The rows had just two or three stones each.
Pa always had a private memorial when he went up there and this year, he decided to share it with the rest of us. He pulled the family Bible out of an oilcloth he brought along.
“This first stone is where Theresa Ranae Bell is buried. Her husband was killed years before she died and we don’t know where he lies,” Pa said. He had the Bible open but he wasn’t really reading. He was just holding the pages open. He looked at each of the stones and just recited the story or the part of it that touched him. “Here lies Kyle Redtail, my ho… our ancestor. Next to him for all eternity lies Laramie Wyoming Bell. They had two children. This stone is a memorial to the son they lost as an infant. Kyle’s other wife is buried next to her husband in the Alexander plot at Green Hill Cemetery in Laramie. Arthur Senior did not wish to start a burial plot on his ranch, next door to us.”
Pa stopped and slowly caressed the stones that lay there. There were no markings on the stones themselves. Just flat, smooth granite, cut from the mountains around Centennial Ridge and the Medicine Bow. Kyle and I went over to him and touched the two stones, too. We knew that what Pa cut off was that Kyle Redtail was his host. That didn’t matter so much to us. What mattered was that these were our namesakes. Laramie Wyoming Bell and Kyle Redtail.
“Here lies our… their daughter, Kaylene Redtail Bell. And her lover, Robert Hood. They were never married, but lived together as husband and wife. Their daughter, Mildred Arlene Bell, was my grandmother. She loved a soldier before he went to war. He did not come back alive to marry her, but beside her stone lies his. This last stone is my father, Earl Thomas Bell, killed in the range war twenty years ago. Sometime in the future, your Grandma Bell will lie here beside him. Grandma and Grandpa Alexander have asked if they can lie next to her. That is good. It shows how we made the two ranches back into one. And God willing, one day long in the future, there will be three stones in the next row. Me. Mary Beth. Ashley. Before you kids came along, there has only ever been one child per generation on the Bell side. There were several others on the Alexander side but, of course, they aren’t in the Bell family Bible. There are pages for eight generations in this old book. On the page that records my birth is my marriage to Mary Beth and Ashley, we’ve also written in the births of our four children. But you will all have to decide what gets recorded on the last page. For all those who lie here, God rest their souls.”
I knew it was coming. I prepared a little better this time. I went to bed naked like I knew Kyle and Aubrey would, but I pulled a sheet up over me as I leaned back against the wall. I dreaded Kyle and Aubrey making love, but it excited me, too. I never had such strong comes as when they were making love next door. The downside was that when I came, it knocked me out and I went time traveling into the mind of Miranda Lewis. Or I dreamed I did. At least twice. I wish I could get the come without the confusion of the time travel.
I started stroking and diddling myself long before I started hearing their passionate moaning next door. When it started, though, it lit a fire in my pussy. I could just imagine how wet she was when she begged him to put it in. I could feel it as my juices flooded my fingers. I plunged my fingers in and out of my hole and was panting hard before Aubrey reached her crescendo.
Then there was a fluttering of wings next to my window. I heard Aubrey’s voice mounting higher and higher as the bed squeaked on the other side of the wall. I could feel my orgasm approaching but the raven cut it short.
Awkawkawkawk!
I was gone.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
