Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
Jamison passed on the last bag of feed and unlike the rest, who just walked off to another task, he stretched back and forth and swung his arms like windmills to make sure everything would work right again. Those suckers were heavy.
Buchanan walked up behind him and slapped him on the shoulder.
“Thanks for your help, son.”
Jamison was glad he hadn't stumbled beneath the friendly blow.
“No problem.” He looked back at the house. “Doesn't look like she's done yet, what else you got?”
Buchanan laughed. “Come on.”
Jamison followed him like a puppy, but what else could he do? He wouldn't leave without Skye and if he was left alone to worry about her, he'd end up breaking down the door and pissing off that female bull, Lanny. Better to distract himself with a bit of mindless work.
Two hours later, Jamison was standing in waders, butt-deep in a pit filled with things much filthier than mud, helping bring a disgusting and alien blob into the world that he was promised would turn into a calf once it was freed from the disgusting parts. A cow had become mired in a ditch and had begun calving. Thanks to some watchful Somerleds, they'd stopped her from lying down in the muddy water and eventually drowning herself and her offspring. With three men to each side of her and a sling under her belly, she'd been forced to calve standing up, with Buchanan and Jamison standing at the ready, like a couple of big league catchers.
Jamison got the nose end. Buchanan bravely wrapped his arms around the middle. Together they got Junior up out of the ditch and laid him on the grass where Buchanan took over. Jamison considerately walked away from the crowd before he puked.
The unhappy mother was exhausted and the men panicked when she started going down. The men holding the wide sling couldn't prevent it, nor could the men at her sides; her legs simply gave out.
A lone man grimaced as he held her head above the water line, but by the complaints of the cow, it didn't look as if she would put up with that for long. Behind him, others frantically scooped water and dumped it above, but the water just kept coming.
Jamison had an idea.
“Hold her up. Give me just a minute!” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran toward a pile of rubble at the edge of the field, about fifty yards from the chaos. He'd hauled something odd to that pile an hour before, and he'd only remembered it because it had been so out of place there, in the middle of a green field.
It was heavy and he probably looked pretty dumb waddling back with his knees bent and that thing on his head.
Shawn grinned at him and came to assist. Together they plunged the hood of a Volkswagen Bug into the ditch just ahead of the cow like a giant blue dam, embedding it in the soft mud beneath the water.
At first, he didn't think it had worked, but after the six large men crawled out from around the cow's middle, the water level dropped quickly and the man holding the animal's head lowered it to the ground.
Its eyes closed.
After the water had trickled away, four men jumped back in the ditch and started digging around the cow's feet, but to Jamison it appeared they were only rearranging the mud.
The animal's side barely rose and fell.
“She's not bleeding, that I can tell.” Buchanan squatted behind her and patted her side. “All right, Flossie. It's all right now.”
Jamison wondered if cows could understand such things, if coming from a Somerled, of course.
Still, her eyes remained closed. She paused a second between breaths. Jamison did the same.
Behind the wall of men standing along the bank came Junior’s pitiful wail.
The wall turned to see the calf squirming around on the grass, complaining like a spoiled and pissed off brat.
The men scattered as a determined, muddy cow pulled herself up out of the ditch—with very little help from behind—and came to stand over her calf.
“Morris? We're going to need a lot of gravel to line this ditch.” Buchanan frowned at the deep valley of mud. “I guess she's not Dutch.”
“Done.” A short man walked toward the barn.
“Jamison?”
Jamison started. “Yes, sir?”
“Your grandfather would be proud. Quick thinking.”
“Inspired,” someone shouted, and the rest of them laughed.
“Sir?”
“What?”
“What did you mean, she's not Dutch?”
Buchanan smiled. “In Holland, cows won't cross water, so they don't use fences; they just dig small ditches and keep them full. The cows stay in their fields.” He reached between his hip waders and pants and pulled out a familiar key ring, then tossed it over.
“What? All I had to do was save a cow?” Jamison grinned.
“Nah. Skye's ready to go. I'd wash real good before you let her see you.”
***
“Unbelievable.” Jamison assumed he was in mild shock, since he'd said it half a dozen times and he and Skye hadn’t gone yet a mile from the ranch house. An army in white had taken great pleasure in washing him down, with a hose powerful enough to clear dried mud from a four-by-four in ten seconds flat. Only after a few Somerleds had taken their turn and Shawn was reaching for the sprayer did Jamison protest. Then someone had had the brilliant, although belated idea that Jamison be given clean clothes to wear home.
So there he sat, driving calmly out of the Twilight Zone, girlfriend intact, wet clothes in a sack in the trunk which was nearly rusted through already so a little water wouldn't hurt much, and wearing a designer ensemble, straight from the runway of Somerled and Somerled.
It was so not fair that such perfectly fitting clothes could never be worn again—outside his own bedroom, of course. He was definitely going to be sleeping in these.
“Unbelievable.” He took a deep breath and noticed there'd been little comment from the one playing the role of girlfriend since they'd gotten in the car. After all, she was only playing a role.
Or was she?
The road straightened and he was able to take a good look at her.
Her eyes were on the road, unblinking. Her arms were folded with her hands in her armpits, as if she was cold, like Jamison often sat. But she couldn't be cold. She didn't get cold.
He checked the road, then checked her again. She mumbled something.
“What? Skye, what did you say?”
“Unbelievable.”
Skye wasn't mocking him. She didn't even smile. And he suspected she hadn't heard one 'unbelievable' word he'd spoken. When she came out of the house, alone, carrying a box full of bottled pumpkin, she'd noticed his clothes and stopped dead in her tracks.
“Relax,” Buchanan had told her. “He got dirty, not religion.”
She'd looked relieved, smiled in a dazed kind of way when Buchanan had told her he'd be seeing her, then gotten into the car without noticing Jamison opening or closing her door for her. He would have at least liked a smile from her.
Now, he'd settle for a blink.
“Skye, honey? Are you all right? Are you ready to talk about it?”
She shook her head.
“But you're all right?”
She nodded, then blinked a few times before she went back to staring.
And they went on like that for an hour; her staring, “unbelievable” sliding out of his mouth every ten minutes or so. He kept reliving the birth of the calf, the concern on the faces of all those men who had nothing to fear, but feared for a cow and her newborn.
“Unbelievable.”
He'd apparently taken quite a drink from that hose, once someone had turned down the pressure, and now he had to pee.
They stopped at the same gas station as before and he prayed the same gawking kid would have been sent home, but all his luck had apparently been used up at the ranch. The kid could hardly help his customers as Jamison walked through the store in his new white garb.
He couldn't blame him, though. It was pretty widely known that Somerleds didn’t take on new recruits, or converts, or anything. There were no expose shows about a Somerled escaping from their cult or falling in love with someone of a different...fashion persuasion.
Of course, if this kid made the right calls, and made them quickly, there might be a blurry photo of Jamison from the store camera on the cover of some news magazine in the grocery store in a couple of weeks.
Somerleds Now Recruiting. The End Is Near.
When he got back in the car, Skye's face was buried in her hands, as if she were crying, or trying to cry.
“Skye. What the hell happened in that house?” He slammed the steering wheel. The horn beeped and the people walking past the car pretended not to be interested. Or else someone had suggested they not be interested. “I shouldn't have let them take you. I should have demanded our car and gotten you out of there.”
“No, Jamie—Jamison.” She cleared her throat and sat up straighter. She even gave him a smile. “Lanny had all the answers I was looking for, actually. Going there was, um, fated, you could say. I'm just glad you went with me.”
“Oh, so now you're cheerful? Wow, you should sign up for drama next semester. Learn to act.” He took the keys from the ignition. “We're not leaving here until you tell me what's going on. And no giving me suggestions, okay?”
“Okay. No suggestions. For today at least.” She'd mumbled the last.
“Oh, no you don't. I want you to promise you'll never use it on me again.”
She looked at him then—really looked. Her brows tweaked together for a split second, then her face went blank again, and he shivered, like someone had just walked over his grave.
She forced a smile and turned away. A child in the next car had crawled into the driver's seat and was bouncing while trying to turn the wheel back and forth and Skye watched as if it was the most interesting thing in the world.
“I'm sorry, Jamison. I can't promise that. I have an assignment to do and it may be necessary.” She turned back and looked him straight...in the chin. “I can promise to never suggest you do something you wouldn't mind doing.”
He didn't like it, but there was something in her voice that warned him not to argue with her. Hell, she was probably using a suggestion on him right then, to keep him from arguing.
Well, he could wait and argue later. It wasn't as if she could erase the discussion from his memory; that wasn’t one of her personal tricks. It had been a long day and it wasn’t over yet. Jamison wouldn’t mind waiting.
He’d just helped spare two lives and he was anxious to see what God was ready to do for him.