Chapter 2

It had been a rough, loud night, with the kind of lightning that comes so often and so bright that it penetrates even closed eyelids and you can't shut it out to go to sleep. Thunder shook the house and rattled the dishes. There were tornado watches going on all over the place.

That morning Paul had gotten up early and gone out in it, trying to assess how scattered the herd was. He was the tallest thing on the plains and the lightning killed both him and his horse. When he hadn't come back for breakfast, Lynne and Jill had gone looking for him. Jill finished riding her part of the search pattern and found her mother, sitting on the ground, holding her father's lifeless body and rocking as she sobbed.

Her mother wouldn't answer her. Jill was old enough and smart enough to know what her father's open, staring eyes meant, so she went to the only other person she could ask for help from.

Jill had taught me to ride when I took up boarding horses. I had never ridden in a driving rain and the slicker I was wearing was woefully inadequate at keeping me dry, but I didn't think about that. Jill had been crying so hard that she couldn't talk, except to say "Daddy's dead," which almost incapacitated me. But I found the strength from somewhere to be the adult. I told her to lead me, and followed. Lynne was still there, in a puddle of water, holding her husband, beside a horse that was obviously dead too.

It took me twenty minutes - and Jill's help - to get her to let go of him. I was in good shape, and he wasn't a big man, so I was able to get his body up and over the saddle of my horse. I didn't have anything to fasten him on with, so I walked slowly, leading my horse and looking back most of the time. Jill walked beside her mother, holding her hand. Lynne had stopped crying, and was just plodding forward. We must have made a strange looking group ... three people leading three horses, only one of which had a burden to carry. I knew it would be useless to ask her if she was OK, so I just paid attention to keeping Paul's body on the horse.

I don't know how long it took us to get back to the house. It stopped raining, but the clouds were still thick and black, and I couldn't see the sun. I didn't wear a watch any more, because what time it was really didn't matter much. I worked until the work was done, and then went in the house to eat and read or whatever.

Then, when we finally got to the house, Lynne spoke coherently for the first time. Her voice sounded careful and strained.

"Take him in the house please," she said.

I didn't think that was a good idea, but wasn't willing to argue with her. She took Jill's hand and left the horses where they were.

Once inside, though, she went silent again. I didn't think putting his soaked body on their bed was the right thing to do, and besides, I didn't even know where their bedroom was. So I laid him out on the couch and closed his eyes. I hadn't seen all that many dead people in my life, but he didn't look anything like himself. He looked like a total stranger to me. I could see a bright red streak down the side of his neck, where the electricity had gone. His hat was missing and a circle of hair was burned away too. Without the rain beating down on me I could see that there was a hole in the leg of his jeans, where the lightning had burned through as it went from him into his horse.

Lynne was standing, facing half away from him as if frozen. Jill was trying to talk to her and kept darting glances at her father. I went to the phone first, and called 911, telling them what I thought had happened. I had to ask Jill what the address was and she took the phone from me. While she talked to the 911 operator, I tried to figure out what to do with Lynne.

"You're wet," I said softly. "You need to get dry clothes on."

"He's dead," she whispered, her voice broken."

"You'll get sick if you don't take care of yourself," I said.

"He kissed me goodbye this morning and now he's dead." Her dull voice broke and a wail of pain welled up out of her. All I could do was hold her as she sobbed and screamed.

Jill joined us, trying to hug her mother too, and crying again herself. I let her into the hug and we all just stood there. We were still standing there when I heard the siren and saw the flashing lights through a window. I tried to extricate myself from the tangle, but Lynne held on fiercely. Jill got loose and opened the door for the two paramedics and a deputy who was with them. Their examination of Paul was short. Apparently they'd seen it before.

They were very efficient then. After I told them who I was they tried to talk to Lynne. One of them talked on the radio and prepared a sedative that he shot into her arm. Then we carried her to the bedroom, led by Jill who showed us the way. The female paramedic shooed us out and closed the door.

I couldn't leave. Jill needed somebody there with her, particularly since her mother was going to be out for a while. The paramedic assumed I'd stay because he gave me instructions on what to do when Lynne woke up. He also gave me some pills I could give her if she woke up too soon.

I almost gave one of those pills to Jill, who had exhibited such amazing strength and control during the whole incident. Once the body was gone, and it was quiet in the house again though, she came unglued. Trying to talk to her didn't make any difference. She was shaking like a leaf, and I didn't know if it was emotional or environmental. We were both still soaked, and I felt chilled myself.

Fourteen seemed like such a young age to me, and Jill she had filled out in that healthy American girl way that clearly said there was plenty of woman in her. I couldn't just strip her down, but she wasn't responding well enough to take care of herself. So I took her to the bathroom and pushed her inside without closing the door. I instructed her to hand me her wet clothes, more to make sure they got off of her than because I was going to do anything with them. Then I told her to wrap a towel around her and get dry.

I told her to wait and went looking for her room. Finding clothes wasn't hard though I didn't think I should be choosing panties and a bra for her, so I just took her jeans and a T shirt. I was about to hand them back in when the door opened, and there she stood, naked.

She was bawling again, and seemed not to realize she was naked. I avoided looking at her by simply giving her a hug. That didn't work once I started getting the clothes on her. There was no way to avoid seeing her young, round breasts, with their small nipples. They were startlingly erect and surrounded by goose bumps. Her whole body was studded with goose bumps. I had to pull her jeans on, at first, and got my first look at a fourteen year old mons (I didn't see a girl naked until I was almost eighteen) which was sparsely covered with flat brown hair above tightly closed vulva.

Her sobs subsided to jerking gasps and sniffles and she helped me get the jeans over her hips, fastening them herself, as if she had just realized how much I'd seen of her. She was now in that place where almost no emotion showed, except hopelessness.

I found a towel and dried her hair as much as I could. There was a hair dryer on the counter and I used it to get her hair dry, brushing it with a brush that was also lying on the counter.

I didn't know what to do then. Food is comforting, so I took Jill to the kitchen with me and tried to distract her by asking where things were. I wasn't much of a cook, but I could do hamburger helper. It turned out they didn't have any hamburger helper, so I had to make do with meat and noodles, which I added spices to, hoping they were the right spices, and the right quantities of them. I also put in a couple of cans of tomato paste and a lot of cheese.

At one point I saw that Jill had sat down. She wasn't crying any more. Instead, she was just staring at me, blinking every once in a while.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I know," she answered. "Me too." Her face scrunched up again and more tears started. I turned the heat down under the pan and went to hold her. I didn't know what to say, so I just started talking about losing Vicky. I ended up sitting down, and Jill ended up sitting on my lap with her head against my chest. When I finally stopped talking I realized she'd fallen into an exhausted sleep.

I was afraid to move, for fear of waking her up, so I just sat there and held her.

An hour and a half later I was stiff and sore when she woke up. She stood up, looked at me for a few seconds, and then left the room. I hadn't turned the heat down enough on the hamburger helper and the bottom was burned, about a quarter inch thick. I scraped the rest of it out of the pan into a bowl and tried some. It wasn't the best I ever had, by a long shot, but it was at least edible.

Jill came back.

"She's still sleeping."

"Good," I said.

She came over and snuggled into my arms, needing a physical bond with someone.

"I'm going to go lie down with her," she said.

"That's probably good too," I said softly. "Call me when she wakes up."

"You're going to stay?" She sounded surprised.

"Of course," I said.

She squeezed me, and then let go, leaving the room again.

I'll leave off with the excruciating detail at this point. Suffice it to say that Lynne woke up, and needed someone there. I stayed for three days, dealing with the funeral home for her and letting Jill teach me to cook food that didn't make them gag. I got the tractor out to drag the horse off to where Lynne wanted it buried. It had already been ravaged by coyotes, but the saddle and tack were salvageable. There was a lot more that happened, but it isn't vital to the telling of this tale. Not in detail anyway.

I looked in on them every day for long enough that it just became a habit. Lynne's sister came to visit from somewhere, and some other relatives were there for the funeral. Jill actually fled from them because they made her feel sadder than just dealing with things herself. Of course she came to my place to get away from them.

Lynne sold off the cattle and rented out the pasture to another rancher. Paul's life insurance, which they had only been able to afford to keep paying because his parents bought the policy for him when he was a baby, was more than enough to take care of the funeral expenses and gave them enough to fall back on for a while.

Lynne and I spent hours sharing our grief. It was good for both of us. Jill spent even more time shadowing me, and time passed.

A year later they hit a financial snag. Lynne mentioned it in the same casual way she might have said that there were two weeks left before apples would blossom. We knew each other pretty well by then. In many ways I knew both Lynne and Jill better, and was closer to them than I had been to Vicky, and it bothered me sometimes. I had loved Vicky, and what I felt for both Lynne and Jill was very different than what I'd felt for Vicky, but the closeness we DID have was something I hadn't had time to make with Vicky.

For that reason I was completely comfortable around either of them, while feeling tense and anxious at the same time.

Part of that was because both Lynne and her daughter were handsome women. At fifteen there was nothing gawky about Jill any more. Lynne was a well built woman, and her daughter had inherited those physical characteristics. Plenty of exercise and good food had brought Jill's physical maturity on early.

Both women had the same brown hair that looked blond sometimes. Both women had freckles scattered from one high cheekbone across the bridge of the nose to the other cheek. Both women had slim, but muscled legs leading to wide hips below a narrow waist that flowed into firm, healthy breasts that nicely filled whatever they were wearing.

Of course Lynne had looked like that all along. It was impossible for a man to miss, and that was part of what made me so stumble tongued around her in the beginning. She was sunburned and windblown and still managed to make me stare whenever I was around her.

What it amounted to was that I was finally able to appreciate a woman for BEING a woman, without feeling like I was cheating on Vicky.