Wild Blood

The Ranch

CHAPTER 7

Zane spent his first week on the Holloway ranch doing inventory.

Not the financial inventory — the attorney had people for that. The real inventory: what the land could bear, what the stock needed, what had been maintained and what had been let go in the years since Gerald Holloway's hip had made riding impossible and his pride had made admitting the limitation difficult.

The land was good. Better than good — the east pasture had the kind of natural water access and grass coverage that ranchers in drier parts of the state would have considered excessive luck, and the soil was deep and the fencing was, in most sections, sound. The house needed work. The bunkhouse needed more.

The stable held six horses. One of them — a gray mare named Della, whom the ranch manager said had been Gerald's personal horse for seven years before the hip — came to the front of her stall when Zane walked in and regarded him with eyes that were old and intelligent and, he thought, underoccupied.

He offered his hand. She nosed it.

"Yeah," he said. "I know."

He hired two hands in the first week. Cole Briggs — no relation to the Texas Earl, just a coincidence — was eighteen, earnest, and had the kind of natural affinity with livestock that couldn't be taught and that Zane recognized immediately as something to build around. Mae Tanner was forty-three, had been ranching in some form since she was nineteen, and spent the first three days of employment assessing Zane the way a person assesses a new situation they're not yet sure is safe.

By the fourth day she'd relaxed. By the end of the first week she'd started making suggestions, which he took seriously because they were good suggestions and because taking a good suggestion seriously regardless of its source was one of the things Geraldo had taught him, indirectly, by being the kind of teacher who took Zane's questions seriously when Zane was seventeen and didn't know anything.

He worked from five in the morning until whatever the work required. He ate simply. He slept well. In the evenings, he sat on the front porch of the ranch house with a beer and looked at the land — his land, which was still a phrase his mind kept approaching and then backing away from, the way you approach something hot to check its temperature — and thought about what to build here.

He thought about his mother, Clara, who had given him up at three and whom he had found at twenty-two, and who was a complicated woman with a complicated story that he had spent years being angry about and eventually arrived at something like understanding. She had loved Gerald Holloway and Gerald Holloway had not been available to be loved, and she had been twenty-three years old and alone with a three-year-old and the math of it had eventually produced a decision that had cost him everything and had, he supposed, been made in the belief that it was better for him.

He'd decided not to hold it forever. Not because he'd forgiven it completely but because holding it was expensive and the ranch needed his energy for other things.

On the Saturday of his second week, he drove into Millbrook City for supplies and passed the hardware store on Crane Street and remembered the woman — Scarlett, the architect with the red hair and the direct way of looking at things — and thought about the porch railing and how she'd handed him things without being asked and asked questions that revealed she'd actually been following what he was doing.

He thought about her more than was strictly warranted by a shared box of deck screws and an afternoon of porch work.

He filed this and kept driving.