Chapter 4
“Did you hear that?”Looking up from her knitting, Jess reached for the radio, turned down the volume at the same time old Burl was winding himself up about not knowing if there’d be snow, and twisted on her stool toward the barn door. “I heard something.”
“Yeah?” Randall Cobb was trembling now; her tail was kinked the way Judd’s dad said it always did, and the hay around the cow’s hooves was wet. That calf was coming anytime now. “What did you hear?”
“Sounded like a scream. Way far off.”
He shot a glance at Carson…if there’d really been something, his dog was nearly as good as radar…but the shepherd was snoozing and deep into dreaming from the looks of those twitchy paws and that nose. “North or south?”
Jess thought about it. “North.”
Black Wolf Mountains then. “Boy scream or a girl scream?”
“There’s a difference?”
“Of course.” You’d think the woman had lived her whole life in a condo in the middle of New York where the only chickens anyone ever saw came wrapped in cellophane. Pulling his new Packers watch cap down over his ears, he said, “A girl scream, then it’s probably a mountain lion or a bobcat, but to carry this far, I’m thinking mountain lion. A boy scream, well…then it was probably a person.” All his time in ’Nam, seeing men holding onto their guts to keep them from slopping onto the ground or looking for that leg they didn’t have anymore, he’d heard a lot of screaming.
“Oh.” Jess looked troubled. “I couldn’t tell. It was only the one. Could’ve been a girl-girl screaming.”
“Maybe. If there was only the one, I guess we’ll never know.” Cobb was really huffing and puffing now. Another pinkish stream of liquid squirted to course down the cow’s back legs. A second later, there came another, more intense gush.
“That calf sounds like it’s in a hurry,” Jess remarked.
“I’m thinking so.”
“Good. I’m thinking some eggnog afterward might be nice.”
“Long as you hold the nog,” he quipped.
“Oh, you,” she mock-scolded as if he hadn’t said that same line every single Christmas of their marriage and for the season before when he’d courted her. “That’s all we need, you with a snootful dancing around the kitchen.”
They laughed, and he thought how it was a damn fine life, yet another fine Christmas. He was where he ought to be: in his barn, with his girls mumbling at their feed, the seven calves he’d helped birth suckling at their mother’s teats, Jess’s knitting needles going click-click-click, and the promise of eggnog without the nog and a warm kitchen and an even warmer bed with this woman who had earned every wrinkle and all her beauty.
Yes, he thought, pulling on gloves and squaring himself to help turn the calf if it was breech (or back the heck away fast so he wouldn’t get himself kicked if it wasn’t), it was like that movie with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reeve and Old Clarence. Even though he’d seen it every Christmas for well over half a century, he never tired of it. Always got kind of choked up and misty because, my, they just didn’t make them that way anymore.
“Turn up the radio, would you, Jess?” He got himself ready to welcome this new little life to his ranch and this world. “I love that song.”
