Saviours of Oestend Oestend 2 (3 page)

It may have been cold outside, but it was downright hot on the second floor of the big house. It seemed Cami was making good use of the fireplace in her bedroom. Dante wondered if she was burning through their entire woodpile. He would have opened a window if it hadn’t been night.

At another point in his life, he might have been annoyed, but now it amused him more than anything. He thought he’d enjoyed having the house to himself, but he found that he liked knowing she was there. Occasionally, he heard a bump or a door closing. He heard her wandering the hall, going upstairs to the third floor, checking the other rooms, taking stock of the closets. He found her presence comforting. He hadn’t quite realised how lonely he’d been.

When he rose the next morning, she was already in the kitchen. The entire room was rich with a scent that was sweet and warm, and yet so simple and familiar. It made Dante’s stomach grumble. “What’s for breakfast?”

Just oatmeal
. Dante thought he’d never been so happy to hear those two words in all his life. For the last few weeks, it seemed they’d mostly been living on baked beans and salt pork. Yes, there’d been the pickles, and once, two weeks prior, Frances had brought up some jars of carrots, which they’d eaten cold. But more often than not, it was baked beans and salt pork. The thought of eating anything that
wasn’t
baked beans and salt pork was a relief.

“I’m still taking stock of what’s here,” she told him, “and there wasn’t much I could do on such short notice. I guess I could have stayed up all night—”
“No need for that.”
She smiled at him. “Glad we can agree on that. Anyway, there wasn’t time for bread to rise, but I made some biscuits, and I found some jam in the cellar.”
“The boys will love you for it. Assuming I leave them any.” At that moment, he thought he could eat everything she put in front of him, and to the wraiths with those other men.
She’d changed her clothes. She still wore her dark sweater over her blouse, but the skirt she had on was different. It was some kind of heavy dark fabric that looked thick and warm. “Looks like the clothes will work.”
She was in the process of pulling a cast iron pot from the fire, but she smiled sideways at him. “I’ll have to alter most of them but these fit.” She laughed. “Well enough, at any rate.” She nodded downwards towards her feet, and Dante followed her pointed glance. The skirt stopped a bit short of where it should have. At least four inches of ankle showed below her hem, revealing a pair of heavy boots she’d found somewhere.
“Can you fix it?” he asked. Seemed like she probably could, but Dante sure as hell didn’t know the first thing about sewing.
“I could, but honestly, this way seems better. I don’t have to worry about the hem dragging in the mud. The sleeves are a different story.” He couldn’t see the sleeves of her blouse because of the sweater, but he could imagine that they ended a bit short of her wrists. She shrugged. “I’ll fix them once I have a few minutes. I’ll either pull them off and start over, or add cuffs to the cuffs.” She said this in a lighthearted way that told him it was a joke, although he wasn’t sure he understood why it should be funny.
He didn’t have time to ask, though, before the door burst open, and eight men came crowding through it, hurrying in from the cold. Frances was at the front of the bunch, and the eagerness on his face as he tried to see what they were having for breakfast was enough to make Dante laugh out loud.
Then it was time for the day to really begin.
It hadn’t actually snowed in the night. It seemed more as though water had poured from the sky and frozen on everything it touched, blanketing Oestend in ice. It covered each and every tree branch. Green leaves were held captive, still and fragile in its grip. Evergreen branches drooped against their trunks. The barbed wire fences sagged under the weight. The sky was low and grey, and it was still bone-chillingly cold. Dante treaded carefully on his way to the barn, at least an inch of solid ice under his feet. On the bright side, the wind wasn’t blowing, which was a rare blessing on the Oestend prairie.
“Can you believe this?” Frances asked as he came across the compound towards him. He slapped his hands against his arms for warmth, smiling like a kid. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”
Dante had seen it before, but not often and never quite to this extreme. He shook his head, but the movement caused him to lose his footing on the ice and he had to flail his arms to keep from landing on his ass, which made Frances laugh. “It’s something, all right,” Dante agreed once he’d regained his composure.
“I had ice skates back in Lanstead. Kind of wish I had them with me.”
“Ice skates?”
“Yeah. You know…”
No, Dante didn’t know, and Frances must have seen the confusion on his face.
“They’re like boots, only with blades on the bottom, like a sleigh.”
“Sleigh boots?” Dante tried to picture such a thing. He couldn’t imagine why anybody would want them. Sure, sleighs were useful things for hauling hay or coal, but on your feet? The ice was slippery enough with plain old boots on. Putting sleigh runners on your feet had to make it worse. Just went to show how crazy those fools on the continent were.
Dante had a bitch of a time breaking through the ice on the troughs in the barn. The animals stood huddled together, snorting and blowing steam in the frigid air. They turned their mournful eyes on him, as if cursing him for being human.
“Don’t look at me,” Dante said. “I ain’t the one decided you don’t get a fire of your own.” In the towns, some barns were kept warm with coal furnaces, but the livestock on the prairie had no such luxury. Coal was heavy, and a pain in the ass to cart so far into the wild. What they did have was kept in store for the generator. And checking the generator was his next order of business.
Like most Oestend ranches, the Austin ranch had only one windmill, large enough to protect the buildings nearest to it—the main house, the barn, and the barracks. The BarChi was the only ranch Dante had ever seen to have multiple generators, but that was because Deacon and Jeremiah weren’t men who left things to chance.
The windmill of the Austin ranch was situated between the big house and the barracks, and it towered over them all. Its gears had frozen up in the night. Icicles hung from the unmoving propellers. The generator stored excess power during the day, so the ranch residents had slept safely, but only a fool would depend on reserve power two nights in a row.
“Better check the coal,” Dante said to himself. “And the wood piles.”
But it turned out the coal and woodpiles had already been stocked. In truth, Dante wasn’t surprised. Simon had taken on the role of foreman without ever being asked, and as usual, he’d set the hands to work early that morning, without having to ask Dante what needed to be done. Dante found himself shaking his head. He thought of Deacon, back on the BarChi, who’d always run the ranch. Deacon may have acted as if Jeremiah was in charge, but everybody knew who the real boss was. There’d never been room for any of Jeremiah’s sons. Of course Brighton and Jay hadn’t cared, but Dante had. He’d always dreamed of running the ranch with Deacon, side by side with the man he loved.
Side by side. And yet, with their love somehow held secret.
Now Deacon really did run the BarChi with the man he loved. But that man wasn’t Dante, and there was nothing secret about the way he lived or about how he felt about Aren. The ugly but familiar sting of jealousy throbbed deep in his chest as it always did when he thought of Aren. Dante remembered with painful clarity the day Deacon had kissed Aren in front of everybody. Dante had already known the two were sleeping together, but nothing had hurt him the way that kiss had. Up until that moment, he’d convinced himself Deacon was just using Aren—scratching an itch—but kissing him as he had, right there for all of the BarChi to see? That spoke of more than sex.
That spoke of love.
So now here he was, running a ranch that reeked of death. Aren had Deacon, and Dante was left with nothing so tangible. Sorrow and regret were his constant companions. He grieved for his brother and for the loss of his marriage, if not for the loss of Daisy herself, and he grieved with every fibre of his being for the loss of Deacon.
Of course, he realised now that Deacon had never belonged to him in the first place. Maybe that was the fact he grieved for most of all.
Dante pushed his fingers hard into his eyes, swallowing hard against the familiar lump in his throat. He hated being lost in the past.
He turned and slammed his fist into the cold metal at the base of the frozen windmill. It hurt, but that was the point. It distracted him from his heartache and from the treacherous sting behind his eyes. It was better when he managed to stay busy. Maybe he’d see if Cami needed anything.
He hung his head as headed for the Austin’s big house. That was still how he thought of it. The Austin house. The Austin ranch. The big sign over the far gate still had the Austin brand on it, as well as the Austin name.
It wasn’t really Dante’s ranch, any more than the BarChi had been. It sure as hell didn’t feel like home.
Well
, he thought with a sigh,
maybe it does
. He hadn’t ever been needed back home, and he was hardly needed here either. He’d never been needed anywhere, and the only person who’d ever really wanted him at all had been Daisy. Too bad he hadn’t been able to return the favour.

Cami wasn’t in the kitchen. The room itself smelt heavenly, in a way it hadn’t since he’d taken over the ranch. A thick vegetable stew simmered over the fire, and balls of dough sat rising on the counter, so fat and round and tempting Dante had to still his hand from reaching out to pinch them as he’d done when he was a boy. He wondered if Cami would smack his hand with a spoon the way Olsa had.

“Shit,” he grumbled to the empty room. “I’ll have to thank Aren for sending her.” The idea irked him immensely. Yes, Aren had sent Cami. But Aren had Deacon. No matter how well she cooked, it hardly seemed like a fair trade. Dante would have swapped places with the boy in heartbeat, if only Deacon would have had him.

He found Cami on the stairs, trying to manoeuvre an oversized chair he knew had come from her bedroom down the stairway by herself. The passage was narrow, with a ninety-degree turn at the midpoint landing, and she’d somehow managed to wedge the chair in sideways, right where the stairs turned. No matter how much she tugged, it didn’t seem inclined to move.

“Why didn’t you get one of the men to do that for you?” he asked, as he moved up the stairs to take the chair.
She looked a bit frazzled, her hair flying loose all around her head. Her cheeks were flushed. She stood up and wiped her hand across her brow. “I’m not helpless.”
“I didn’t say you were. I asked why you didn’t ask for help.”
“Everybody else was busy. I didn’t want to be a bother.”
“I was raised on the BarChi,” he told her as he grabbed the chair and began to try to yank it free. “It may be true that women had their chores and men had others, and they rarely overlapped, but you better believe if one of those gals needed something, all she had to do was ask. The hands are hired to work. Whether that means working for the ranch owner or working for the wives, it makes no difference.”
“I’m not your wife.”
“You’re missing my point by about a mile.” The chair finally came free, and Dante dragged it to the bottom of the stairs. “Where the hell you want it now?”
“Outside, on the front porch.”
Why in the world did she think anybody would want to sit on the porch? It wasn’t as if they’d be having a nice glass of ice tea or a cool mint julep anytime soon. “You have any idea how cold it is out there?”
She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head back and to the side, the same way Tama always had when he’d challenged her. “You want me to fix the smell or not?”
He knew better than to argue with a woman when she gave him that look. He took the chair to the porch as instructed. The chair from his own room was already there.
“Are there more?” he asked.
She shook her head. “The others are just wood. It’s the upholstery on these that’s holding the smell. I’ll put some saleratus on them and let it sit for a while. That’ll help.”
“Saleratus? I thought that was for stomach aches. And baking.”
“It helps with odours, too.”
“How do you know that?”
Her gaze slid away from his, and she pulled the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands and hugged her stomach. “Everybody knows that,” she said. He recognised evasiveness when he saw it. Interesting that such a simple question would make her feel threatened. “At any rate, I’ll take the curtains down and launder them in it too eventually, but”—she gestured out at the frozen world—“may as well wait until I can hang them out to dry.”
“Fair enough. You need help with anything else while I’m here?”
“No, thank you.”
“Are you lying?” Partly he was teasing but partly he was thinking how helping Cami would probably mean working in the nice, warm house, which sounded far less miserable than working outside in the freezing cold.
She laughed. It was a sweet, light sound, and once again he was reminded of Tama. “I promise, I’m not.”
It figured. She didn’t need him either. He tried not to be bothered by it and went back to the barn. There was always shit to be shovelled from stalls, and the barn was the only building on the damn ranch that didn’t reek of death. Even manure was preferable to the smell of decomposing bodies.
Once there, he fell into a rhythm that was both familiar and depressing. His daddy had always said that cleaning stalls was a good way to clean one’s mind, but Dante had long fostered a love-hate relationship with barns.
As boys, he and Deacon had been inseparable. Jeremiah had raised them as brothers, whether Old Man Pane approved or not. They had shared everything, and so it had seemed only natural that eventually, they shared themselves as well. As boys, they’d discovered each other in the BarChi barn. That was exactly the way Dante labelled it when he looked back— discovered. It had been so innocent, and so pure. Just two boys, two brothers, sharing everything and learning what they each had to give. It had seemed like the most normal thing in the world. Up until his mean old granddad had caught them at it.
The aftermath had been horrible. He’d been so ashamed for so long, and yet he’d never quite understood why. The wounds were old, nothing to show now but a few scars on his back, but barns were the worst. They were all the same—the quiet nicker of horses and the snorting of cows, the soft mew of the kittens in the corner or dogs scruffing in the straw. The smell—not just animals and manure, but also hay, and saddle oil, and the leather tack hanging on the wall, and underneath it all, the earthy musk of birth and milk and new life. It was a smell others associated with warmth and comfort and safety, but for Dante, it meant secrets and shame. If he was busy, birthing a colt or talking with the hands, he could keep his mind on the present. But if he was alone, if he allowed himself to fall too deep into the rhythm of his work, his mind would begin to wander. And inevitably, it would turn to the past, whether he wanted it to or not.