Mayfly Melodies

Thirty-Six

Stephen

It is the simple things of life that make living worthwhile, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest, living close to nature—Laura Ingalls Wilder

When it rained, Stephen could still feel pain radiate out from his left leg.

It was the leg he'd injured at the rodeo where his career had ended.  He could still remember the day with perfect clarity, right up until the moment he'd gotten hurt.  His first event—team roping with Travis—had ended remarkably well.  They'd finished second over-all and had walked away with a nice sum of money to boot.  It had been his second event, bareback bronc riding, that had done him in.

Stephen knew that it was impossible for him to forget every little excruciating detail leading up to his injury.  The crowd had been loud, the lights bright, and the arena had smelled of an odd mix of manure, mud, and popcorn.  He'd been acutely aware of the horse beneath him as he'd bolted from the chute.  And then he remembered the pain.

He still wasn't entirely sure how it had all gone down.  It was all a blur from there on.  He knew that he'd been on the horse for exactly five-point-six-seven seconds before he'd gotten thrown.  He knew that he'd landed hard on his back.  And then he knew nothing but pain.

That had been where the details had gone hazy and disorienting.  Stephen had been told of the rest but at the time the pain had been too intense for him to focus much on anything else.  The shock had kept the pain from reaching his brain right away as he'd hit the ground and broken his back.  It had all crashed into focus for him as the bronc—an intense six-year old gelding they called Yellow Fever—had slammed down onto Stephen's left leg.  His femur had been broken instantly and the pain from his other injuries had reached his consciousness.

That was when Stephen had blacked out.  He'd woken up in the hospital weeks later after the doctors took him out of a medically-induced coma.  While his head had been largely uninjured save for when he'd smacked it against the ground on the initial impact, they had been worried about him moving and agitating the break to his back. 

Stephen had been lucky, all things considered.  He was able to walk, even if it had taken multiple surgeries for him to get to that point. His leg had healed properly and even though he still had a slight limp when he walked or ran, Stephen knew that the result could have been much worse.  At the end of the day, he was just glad to be alive.

But that didn't mean that he didn't occasionally curse at his left leg in annoyance.  When there was a big weather change coming in, he always knew before the weatherman by the tinge of pain that would strike him.  That was why Stephen had known that it was raining before he'd even stepped out of bed that morning.  His leg had hurt.  That meant that the endless bout of sunny days they'd had in southern Oklahoma was coming to an end, replaced by thunderclouds and lightning.

Just because it was raining didn't give him an excuse from work.  All it meant was that work was a thousand times harder since he was slipping in mud and sopping wet like a drowned cat.  He'd started the day off helping one of his neighbours birth a calf and then he'd headed over to the Grant's.

Most of the work Rob had him doing that day was in the shelter of the barn.  He helped to fix a leak in the roof of the hayloft so that the hay didn't get ruined by the water.  He and Travis went about mucking out the stalls and feeding the horses.  It was only as Travis and Jake worked on fixing a broken window frame and Rob began sweeping the interior of the barn did Stephen venture out into the rain.

The heavy storm had vanished and a misty haze had settled over the ranch.  The sky was still grey and Stephen had a feeling that the rain was not yet over for the day.  He knew, somehow instinctively, that he was going to get caught in it again sometime in the near future but he couldn't tell when the rain would begin falling with a heavier density.