OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)

Chapter 52: Ruminating (Garrison) -- WARNING! Offensive/Racist Language

She....

Cattle bellowed and blew to both sides of Garrison, but his buckskin mare could avoid them horns just fine on her own.

He....

The dust of thousands of beeves billowed around him in the sunshine, good reason for everyone to keep their mouths shut. Grit stuck to his wet hair, his damp undershirt. A fly buzzed annoyingly at his ear, but he took a considerable while before shooing it away.

That....

Tarnation. He was plum at a loss.

Never had Jacob Francis Garrison been more in need of the simplicity of hard work. Thankfully, even as his head spun, his body knew how to fork a horse and draw abreast of the herd they meant to cross. Even ignoring the afternoon's crises, he could focus on whacking a big, brindled steer on the shoulder with his lariat as the Trail-G crew alternately eased the cattle across the creek, then bullied them away from it. He could whistle sharp encouragement for a straggling heifer to move on, without having to understand it.

Garrison could herd cattle in his sleep.

Over the years, he often had.

The familiarity of it—the stench of big animals, the squeak of leather and thud of hooves—eased his muddled thoughts until he could piece together what had just happened.

Seems he loved his wife. He feared that would complicate his life to no end—not that she had not done so already. When Elizabeth went under the muddy water of the creek, again and again, he'd felt himself turning stupid from worry. Panic had muddled his ability to help the men who looked to him for leadership.

Good foremen could not afford to care. But since a man had to play the cards he was dealt, Garrison reckoned he might ought to put more responsibilities on Juan, to make up for his own shortcomings. That would require paying the vaquero better wages....

Then again, turns out he'd married himself a rich woman. Likely he could afford it.

That thought did not help settle his ruminations.

The men had seen his wife's bosoms. That could not be helped neither. It weren't her fault—other than her jumping in the water in the first place. Everyone would just pretend it had not happened and go on about their work like the refined saddle tramps they were.

But Amos....

Garrison expected trouble over Amos. Bad trouble. Likely he ought to be more het up about that part himself. His white wife had planted her lips over the mouth of a colored man. He'd known of negroes being lynched for less, for bumping into a white woman, for looking at a white gal the wrong way... or just being suspected of as much. Yes, the momentary consideration of Elizabeth kissing the old darkie, with the same lips that kissed her husband, made him queasy. But he also knew full well, that was not what had happened. He knew Elizabeth's kisses, even if his boys would not, and what she had done with Amos weren't kissing.

She had saved him.

She had brought Amos back to life. Somehow, as surely as she had known how to search under the muddy water, she had known how to breathe life into a drowned man, like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Garrison knew what he saw. It had not been mere good fortune. She had talked herself through it, deliberate, methodical – and it had worked.

Where could she possibly have learned to do something like that?

Hoofbeats approached. "Boss, you should come."