His father looked at his watch. “Thursday afternoon. Four o’clock.”
Jeb had lost all perspective on time. The accident had happened earlier in the week. Must’ve been Monday, when Dennis was scheduled to deliver diesel for the farm equipment. Yes, because he remembered Dennis talking to him, helping him.
“You were unconscious for two days,” his sister explained.
“Two days,” he repeated. It didn’t seem possible.
“You’d lost a lot of blood,” Joshua added, his voice trembling.
Jeb glanced at Sarah and then his father. Why were they so upset? He was alive and damn glad of it.
“Tell us what happened?” Sarah asked softly. She held his hand between her own.
“The tractor stalled and I…” He hesitated when an awkward lump blocked his throat.
“You climbed down to check the engine?”
Jeb nodded. “I’d just started to look when the tractor lurched forward.” He couldn’t finish, couldn’t make himself relive the nightmare—yet he knew he could never escape it.
Luckily his reflexes had been fast enough for him to avoid getting run over, but he hadn’t been able to leap far enough to miss the sharp, churning blades of the field cultivator. They’d caught his leg, chewing away at flesh and sinew, grinding into bone. Then, without explanation, the tractor had stalled again, trapping his leg, holding him prisoner as he watched his blood fertilize the rich soil, darkening it to a deeper shade.
“Go on,” his father urged.
He tried, but no words came.
“No,” Sarah cried. “No more. It isn’t important. Jeb’s alive. That’s all that matters.”
The door opened and Dennis Urlacher peered inside.
“He’s awake,” Sarah announced, and Dennis walked slowly into the room.
He stood next to Sarah, his face tight with concern. “Good to have you back in the land of the living.”
Jeb swallowed hard, realizing that if Dennis hadn’t arrived when he did, he’d never have survived. “I owe you my life.”
Dennis was uncomfortable with attention, and rather than comment, he simply nodded. “I’m sorry about—”
Jeb watched Sarah reach for Dennis’s forearm and his friend stopped midsentence.
“He doesn’t know,” his father said.
“Know what?” Jeb asked, frowning at those gathered by his bedside.
Then suddenly he did know, should have realized the moment he’d heard his sister’s sobs and seen the agony in his father’s eyes.
That was when he started to scream. The scream began in the pit of his stomach and worked its way through him until he sounded like a man possessed. He screamed until he had no oxygen left in his lungs, until his shoulders shook and his breath was shallow and panting.
He already knew what no one had the courage to tell him.
One
It was the screaming that woke him.
Jeb bolted upright in bed and forced himself to look around the darkened room, to recognize familiar details. Four years had passed since the accident. Four years in which his mind refused to release even one small detail of that fateful afternoon.
Leaning against his headboard, he dragged in deep gulps of air until the shaking subsided. Invariably with the dream came the pain, the pain in his leg. The remembered agony of that summer’s day.
His mind refused to forget and so did his body. As he waited for his hammering pulse to return to normal, pains hot through his badly scarred thigh, cramping his calf muscle. Instinctively cringing, he stiffened until the discomfort passed.
Then he started to laugh. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Jeb reached for his prosthesis and strapped it onto the stump of his left leg. This was the joke: The pain Jeb experienced, the charley horse that knotted and twisted his muscles, was in a leg that had been amputated four years earlier.
He’d cheated death that day, but death had gained its own revenge. The doctors had a phrase for it. They called it phantom pain, and assured him that eventually it would pass. It was all part of his emotional adjustment to the loss of a limb. Or so they said, over and over, only Jeb had given up listening a long time ago.
After he’d dressed, he made his way into the kitchen, eager to get some caffeine into his system and dispel the lingering effects of the dream. Then he remembered he was out of coffee.
It didn’t take a genius to realize that Sarah had purposely forgotten coffee when she’d delivered his supplies. This was his sister’s less-than-subtle effort to make him go into town. It wouldn’t work. He wasn’t going to let her manipulate him—even if it meant roasting barley and brewing that.
Jeb slammed out the back door and headed for the barn, his limp more pronounced with his anger. His last trip into Buffalo Valley had been at Christmas, almost ten months earlier. Sarah knew how he felt about people staring at him, whispering behind his back as if he wasn’t supposed to know what they were talking about. He’d lost his leg, not his hearing or his intelligence. Their pity was as unwelcome as their curiosity.
Jeb hadn’t been particularly sociable before the accident and was less so now. Sarah knew that, too. She was also aware that his least favorite person in Buffalo Valley was Marta Hansen, the grocer’s wife. The old biddy treated him like a charity case, a poor, pathetic cripple—as if it was her duty, now that his mother was gone, to smother him with sympathy. Her condescending manner offended him and hurt his already wounded pride.
Jeb knew he made people uncomfortable. His loss reminded other farmers of their own vulnerability. With few exceptions, namely Dennis, the men he’d once considered friends felt awkward and uneasy around him. Even more now that he’d given up farming and taken up raising bison. For the past three and a half years he’d maintained a herd of fifty breeding animals. He’d learned mostly by trial and error, but felt he’d made considerable progress.
Genesis, his gelding, walked to the corral fence and stretched his head over the rail to remind Jeb he hadn’t been fed yet.
“I haven’t had my coffee,” he told the quarter horse, as if the animal could commiserate with him. He hardly ever rode anymore, but kept the horse for company.
He fed the gelding, then returned to the kitchen.
Cursing his sister and her obstinate ways, he wrote a grocery list—if he was going into town he’d make it worth his while—and hurried toward his pickup. The October wind felt almost hot in his face. A few minutes later, he drove out of the yard, sparing a glance for the bison grazing stolidly on either side. He moved the herd on a pasture rotation system. Later in the day he’d separate the weanlings and feeders from the main herd.
Buffalo ranching. He’d made the right decision. They were hardy animals, requiring less care than cattle did. The demand for their meat was growing and often exceeded supply. Business was good. Currently his females were worth more as breeding stock than meat: just last week, Jeb had sold one of his cows for a healthy five thousand dollars.
To his surprise, he enjoyed the fifty-minute drive to Buffalo Valley, although he rarely ventured into town these days. Usually he preferred to drive with no real destination, enjoying the solitude and the changing seasons and the feel of the road.
When he pulled into town, he was immediately struck by the changes the past ten months had brought to Buffalo Valley. Knight’s Pharmacy was and always had been the brightest spot on Main Street. Hassie Knight had been around as long as he could remember