Mud

She dropped the shovel and stood with her hands on her hips. The dirt was hard as rock, thanks to the drought. The creeks were all but dried up, and with dried up creeks comes hard work. Taking care of twelve horses on a dwindling ranch with no help from her dried up husband, Jocelyn was used to strong-backed labor and was accustomed to being covered in dirt. She hoisted herself out of the hole, blonde ponytail sticking to her sweat-drenched, dirt-smeared forehead. Even in the dead of night the summer humidity was enough to suffocate on. She sat her dusty Wranglers on the edge and dangled her feet into the cavity. A weeks’ worth of digging. She was down-near covered in dirt. She grabbed the water bottle from behind her and got a swallow’s worth of lukewarm water to quench her dry throat. She ran her gloved hand across her dried lips and tasted salty earth as she slid her tongue across them. The cool mud it created across her lips almost felt like a balm.

Jocelyn took her gloves off and rested them beside her. Barehanded, she touched the place above her right cheek. It was still tender, but dirt and darkness helped cover it up. In some way that made her feel better, made her feel stronger, like the darkness swept her up, like it held her. Just that morning, just for a moment, life seemed normal.

His chest had risen slowly as his dreams kept him someplace else. The space between them felt cavernous. His full lower lip hung slack, his thinner top just visible under the rust colored mustache. As he’d slept, Jocelyn saw the ghost of him there. He had lines around his eyes, his face tanned from years outside with the horses. Dusty, almost, like the arenas he rode in. But still young and strong and warm. His eyelids fluttered slightly. With a sigh, he turned their brown depths on her face. She had a sudden urge to reach out and touch his bottom lip, kiss him fully awake like she used to, but felt the hair rise on her forearms as if with cold and pulled them closer to her chest.

Sawyer had exhaled and rolled over towards her. His innocence in sleep was lost in the deadness of his eyes. He lay there and looked at her for a few moments. She did not avert her gaze as she usually did, and stared at his dark, enviable lashes. His once molten russet eyes that used to warm her when she looked in them had hardened and hollowed. His golden hair was ruffled and fell just above his dark brows, sticking up against the white pillow case. His beard needed trimming. He shifted and stretched his hand across the whitespace. She thought perhaps he had the inclination to reach out and touch her, as she had had a few moments before. Jocelyn’s resisted the urge to pull away, steeling herself for his touch. He flattened his palm against the smooth, clean sheets and pushed himself up against the headboard. She looked down at the stark white sheets, embarrassed. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and she rolled over and crossed her arms against the chill. His weight lifted from the bed and, with it, any semblance of the ghost she slept with.

Jocelyn coughed into her glove and tried to get rid of the warmth attempting to take hold in her heart. All she had now was this hole and this dirt and this failing ranch. She wasn’t sure why she decided to start digging the hole by hand, but once she started she found it hard to stop. Each night after Sawyer passed out drunk on the couch she changed clothes and came out to escape in her sweat and aching muscles. She liked being covered in dirt. Something about it made her feel clean.

The first time Jocelyn was covered in dirt, the pony had bucked off and kept on going like she was still on his back. She had come up sputtering velvet mud from streaked teeth. The dirt was pillowy because her father had drug the arena that morning. Even though she was only six and the fall had knocked the breath out of her, she didn’t cry. She wiped the dirt out of her blue eyes and stood up, blonde ponytail swinging. She considered the cowboys on the fence, who watched silently. Her father, perched on a fence rung, leveled his gaze on her. Even at six she understood he expected something of her. She wasn’t sure what, but she knew it wasn’t tears, so she wiped her hands on her dusty pant leg and straightened her tiny button-down.

The fat pony had bucked himself to the other side of the arena. The reins snaked through the dirt as he dragged them, trying his might to reach his pony lips through the bottom rung to pick grass. When she came near his side he halfheartedly pinned his left ear and took a couple of miniature trots away from her, never taking his nose away from the sweet grass. Jocelyn approached him again, waited until he was reaching for one long blade sticking through the wooden fence, and grabbed the reins. He had unwillingly followed her back to the middle of the pen, only following when she reached the end of the reins and tugged him on. She looked up to her father one more time before climbing back on. His hat cast a shadow across his face and she couldn’t see his expression, but she had hoped he was proud of her.

As tradition decreed, Jocelyn’s father had promised her that one full lap around the arena on the habitually frisky pony would grant her first pick of the spring foals. Any one she wanted to raise and be hers before he claimed them for himself or sold them as rodeo prospects. She had heard her two older brothers, Beckett and Weston, talk about taking the same challenge during the spring of their seventh birthday year. It was a tradition.

Jocelyn felt a fleeting pang as she thought about her brothers. She picked up a wad of dirt and chucked it into the hole. Beckett had won the challenge but chose bulls instead of the foal. Bulls had always held the fire for him. He made it big time riding in hoakie towns and then at the big places, like Houston and Vegas. Now he was somewhere over in Oklahoma with a lot of land, a lot of PBR bulls, his high school sweetheart and a brood of children. Weston, on the other hand, had tamed Freckles in under five minutes and had his foal picked out in the sixth, so he’d always claimed. He had had a way with horses, though, that Jocelyn admired. She learned most of what she knew about working horses just from watching him. He was calm and quiet, patient, stern when need be, but always knew just when to release the pressure. He died too young when he got ahold of a crazy one with a fiery hatred for men and anything that tried to climb on her back. It down near crushed his skull in two.

Jocelyn had tamed Freckles that spring, as her brothers had, and chosen her foal. Hawk came out of one of the older broodmares her father was setting to pasture after the baby came. She wasn’t the prettiest mare, but Jocelyn had hung onto her father’s words like maple syrup in those days and she knew that the old mare had a knack for throwing wildcard babies. She had good bloodlines, her father always said, and paired with the right stallion, anything could happen. Jocelyn hadn’t known what bloodlines meant back then but admired her father, his yellowed Stetson and pressed shirts. The way he always smelled like Old Spice, Ivory, and the sweet dusty perfume of horse.

Between Hawk and her father, she almost hadn’t noticed when their mother ran out on them when she was thirteen.

Her mother was the middle school math teacher and her affair with the principal seeped through town like the spring rains in the hard winter ground. People soaked it up and spread it wide. A formerly respectable woman in the community and the church left her three young kids and doting husband for the squeaky clean younger principal. They ran off and moved two states over to escape the buzz. That didn’t stop the hum of the affair through the halls of the middle school that stopped just before reaching Jocelyn’s ears. The quiet, pity-filled stares from teachers were equally matched with hardly hidden sniggers behind her peers’ hands and were somehow worse than outright acknowledgment.

Pity and veiled teasing had driven her into self-consciousness and she often walked the halls behind a curtain of blonde hair and a chest full of books. The further she receded into herself, the less people noticed her until she finally felt invisible. She spent most of her time reading books, riding horses, and learning the ranch from her father. It worried her father that she didn’t spend any time with other teenagers, but the only place she felt alive, the only place she she felt anything at all, was on the back of her horse or in her father’s arms. That’s why, even now, she couldn’t blame her father for introducing her to Sawyer Hudson at seventeen. Fresh out of high school, shy as the pure white virgin she was, and him all tan and blonde with a wide crooked grin and cowboy hat, innocent looking, except for his muddy brown eyes. She didn’t have any other choice but to fall head over for him.

Sawyer had been one of her father’s students, a wannabe rodeoer looking to learn from one of the best heelers in Texas. He worked the ranch in exchange for a little cash, a place to sleep, and a few lessons. He hit the dirt a lot at first when he rode the real rope horses, but he always got back on with a grin. As soon as he could stay on and sling a rope, he hit the road every weekend, San Antonio and even Forth Worth, eventually Houston. Jocelyn guessed that’s why she agreed on that first date to the steakhouse after a hot day of working horses. No matter what, he got back up. He strode right up to her, ran his hand down Hawk’s slick black neck and asked her right there in front of her father and all the other cowboys on the fence. Her stoic father agreed to the date because Sawyer was charming and hardworking and somehow made everyone like him, even if they didn’t want to.

For the first time in her life she felt like somebody hadn’t looked right through her. She’d spent two hours getting ready. He’d seen her in dirty Wranglers, ball caps and sweat-soaked t-shirts and she had never thought a thing about it. Ever since he’d asked her on a date, she became conscious of her frizzy hair and makeup-free, dirt-dusted face. She picked out one of the sundresses that her mother had left behind. The robin’s egg blue was her favorite. It was a little big and the straps slipped off her shoulders if she didn’t stand the right way, but it was the best she had. Living with a father and three brothers hadn’t left much need for sundresses. Afternoon light came through the window and softened her image in her great-grandmother’s large antique wooden floor mirror. She smiled and smoothed the fabric. Her hair was as straight as she could get it in the humidity and she had a bit of a farmer’s tan on her arms, but for all that she’d actually felt pretty.

When she came down the stairs in the blue sundress, she was surprised to find her father sitting over the kitchen table pouring over the numbers for the month. He looked up and she noticed a dull pain sweep across his eyes, but his smile was nothing but warmth. He told her that he’d never seen someone so beautiful. She went to him and hugged his neck. He patted her cheek and gently pushed her away, told her not to get that pretty dress dirty. He rubbed his chest with his right hand and ran his fingers through his peppered brown hair with the left. He was sweating and looked tired, but smiled at her as she went out on the front porch to wait for her date.

Jocelyn remembered how Sawyer had tipped his hat before he grinned all wide and crooked and opened the truck door for her. Those muddy brown eyes turned chocolate in the setting sun off their tin roof and that’s all it took. On the way to Barker’s Steak House, he drove with one hand on the wheel and talked about getting kicked out of the house the night of his high school graduation because his momma and step-dad were caught up in drugs. He said it with an easy smile, like it was no big deal. He said he knew his momma did it for his own good, she was handing him his future. He saw the ad her father had put in the paper a week later, went to Goodwill and picked himself up a cowboy hat and a pair of Wranglers, and had the job as soon as he hitchhiked his way onto the property. Told her it was dumb luck and confidence. He told her about how he’d been there a month before her daddy had introduced them. Said he’d watched her riding Hawk and thought she was beautiful.

Over dinner he asked only about her, wanting to know every detail of her life up until that very moment. She told him with an ease that made her flush. Her mother leaving, being invisible, about the only true freedom she felt being on the back of Hawk. He listened intently, smiling when appropriate. When he reached across the table and covered her fingers with his own and told her how sorry he was about her mother, but she’d hit the jackpot with a father like hers, she thought her heart might hit the floor right there. Sawyer drove them back to the ranch, and as the late summer sun settled in the cab, it wrapped her up in its warmth. She let him hold her hand all the way back. He drove slow and relaxed. With his window down, the warm breeze tossed his honey hair across his forehead. Jocelyn blushed and looked at their hands between them on the seat, right beside his Goodwill cowboy hat. He captivated her with the slow, soothing way he spoke.

When they returned to the ranch, they found her father face down in the dirt five steps away from the front porch steps. Jocelyn screamed and hit the dirt beside her father, blue sundress splayed around her like some helpless fainted lady in an old western. Sawyer had dialed 911 and hit the dirt right there with her. He rolled her father over and started CPR until the ambulance came. When the ambulance came and they rushed to the hospital, he held her and rocked soothing words right into her ear. Just like he would when they had to put Hawk down for a broken leg and when she miscarried their baby for the first time, and then a second and a third.

Jocelyn looked back towards the direction of the house. Moonlight flooded everything in a silver blanket. Sawyer was passed out on the couch, the empty bottle of whiskey dangling out of his right hand onto the floor, mouth open and snoring. She could just make out the flickering light of the television through their living room window. He probably had it on the news even though he never made it through the weather. When she had come outside she made sure to not wake him up, like she did every night for the past week. He never hit her when he was drunk, like it was the only thing that quieted the demons in his head.

After her father’s heart attack, Jocelyn spent the majority of her time caring for him at home and learning how to take over the ranch. The heart attack had left him nearly dead in their yard. The EMT’s told her if they had arrived only a few minutes later he would have been completely gone. If not for Sawyer’s quick thinking and level mind, she would have lost the most important person in her life. Beckett was away making it big in the PBR circuit and Weston had died two years before. The fate of the ranch and her father’s health rested mostly in her hands. She was supposed to attend college that fall, but with Sawyer’s support she decided to stay and help her father get back on his feet. Despite everything, despite the stress and the sleepless nights, the slack he picked up in her father’s absence, Sawyer still found time to pursue her.

One afternoon later that summer he found her poring over the books at the kitchen table, hair frizzed and balled in both hands. Her father rested in his recliner, lightly snoring in tune with the television. She was determined to figure out the feed overheads, gas totals, earnings and travel expenses for the past month and incorporate them into their dwindling budget without his help. Without her father’s influence out in the arena every day and his inability to ride and earn a winning paycheck, the budget shrunk considerably. She heard Sawyer come in, but was one glance into his eyes from a breakdown. She hid behind her fists. He sat down beside her and gently untangled her fingers from her blonde rat’s nest. He pressed her knuckles to his full lips and let them linger until she met his gaze.

He had pried her away from the books and convinced her to go swimming with him in the creek that her father had dammed up on the edge of their property. Years before, she and her brothers spent entire summers in the swimming hole before they both moved away. Jocelyn sighed and laid down on the edge of her hole. She had planned on digging for another hour, long enough that Sawyer would stumble up to bed, but the weight of the stars seemed to press down on her shoulders. She closed her eyes and tried to recall what the sunshine had felt like that afternoon on her bare skin. Her arms prickled with ghostly chill bumps. With Sawyer’s creek cooled skin beside her and his promise to rodeo every weekend to help pay the bills, she believed his amorous declaration to always take care of her. He encouraged her to enroll in business classes at the community college to learn about taking over her father’s business. What Jocelyn loved hearing the most was his promise that they would do it all together.

Over the next three years, Jocelyn attended classes at the community college and eventually took online courses at the university to earn her degree in business management. Her father got back on his feet and slowly took over things at the ranch once more. He couldn’t rodeo on the weekends so he delegated his horse, Tundra, to Sawyer. True to his word, Sawyer hitched the horse trailer up every weekend and entered into as many roping events as he could. When he heard that the best header in the county was looking for a new partner, he did his research and sought him out the very next weekend. It didn’t take Sawyer long to convince him that they could be a profitable team. Together they worked to become the number one earning team-roping pair in the southwest of the state.

The years rodeoing were some of Jocelyn’s favorite. Every weekend she piled up in the dusty Ford and traveled with Sawyer from dinky backwoods arenas to lavish high paying ones. Wherever the jackpot was, they went. While Sawyer rode and earned a paycheck, Jocelyn wove herself through rows of horse trailers and horse-people, looking for the next prospect, the next earner. With her father’s knowledge of bloodlines and confirmation in the back of her mind, she sought those willing to sell or trade, any horse they could take home, train, and sell for a profit. Where there were horse-people, there were horse-people willing to sell. They never stayed put very long, but familiar faces eventually popped up in every place they went. As Sawyer’s reputation abounded in the arena, Jocelyn’s fared just as well out in the cramped rows of horse trailers between handshakes and cash deals.

Jocelyn thought that every important milestone in their lives may have just happened at a gritty arena. She cracked her knuckles and stared into the night sky. He first told her he loved her in the chair lift over the fair at Houston’s Livestock Show and Rodeo. They weren’t there to compete, but her fingers buzzed with the opportunity for a business deal. They brought a couple horses they wanted to sell. Let a couple cowboys run them and wound up selling one they trained and competed on for twenty-five grand. He had pulled her close in the lift and whispered the words into her ear. They had their first fight over an overstuffed trashcan outside the bull shoots at the Freeman Center while the announcer rolled times and profiles off his tongue faster than they could argue. Sawyer had been drunk and full of himself after a first place finish and flirted with the girl at the concession stand right in front of her.

She had her first miscarriage at twenty in the stall of one of the grime covered restrooms at B.L. Event Center. She’d had her suspicions for a month, but she’d only taken the pregnancy test a week before in a similar restroom stall of a different loud, dusty arena. She hadn’t told Sawyer about the positive test. She had left the restroom with a racing heart and disposed of the box with the paper towel she dried her hands off with. Then, sitting there a week later with the flushed opportunity she hadn’t come to terms with yet, she wanted nothing more than to be in Sawyer’s arms and hear his caramel words in her ears. When she found him rubbing down Tundra back at the trailer, the burden of the past month streamed down her face, steaming in the night.

Jocelyn spooked when a shadow flitted across her peripheral vision. Smokey, their barn cat, sidled up next to her, his gray fur vibrating under his fingertips. She sweated now, not from the work or the humidity, but from the memories that haunted her in the night. Almost subconsciously, she lay a hand over her flat, empty abdomen. She had miscarried again a few months after they got married and then again after her father died from a second heart attack. The third time she had been three months along and wound up in the hospital for four days. That one almost killed her. They stopped trying after that, planning to be content with each other and rebuilding their lives after her father’s death.

One spring morning, a week after the third miscarriage, she walked out on their back porch, a steaming cup of coffee between her bone-chilled fingers. Out under the only tree in their yard, two white crosses rested beside one another. She almost dropped her coffee when she saw them, but stepped out in the prickly grass with bare feet. They weren’t fancy. Constructed of rough-hewn, barely painted branches, but they were enough, they were perfect. She sat down in front of them and just watched. The smaller one rested a little in front of the larger one, like the larger one held it, protected it. The smaller cross had three copper wires wrapped around the middle. She didn’t notice that tears streamed down her face until the front of her pajama shirt soaked through and clung to her chilled chest. When he sat down behind her, she instinctively fell into his chest, letting his warmth envelope and his soft lips on the nape of her neck spread peace through her like she hadn’t known in years. She closed her eyes against his chest and let the tears pour until she woke up back in their bed, his eyes watching her every breath.

After she found the crosses, she determined to pick herself up and put the pieces back together. Sawyer held a strength for her when she hadn’t had any of her own. She decided that her grief, her broken pieces, wouldn’t destroy them. They took back to the road, back to what they knew to keep themselves afloat. Two years after her father’s death, she went with Sawyer up to Fort Worth to one of the Saturday night rodeos. Jaxon Williams, a wiry cowboy with a bad temper, wanted Sawyer to try out a muscular gray mare he’d just bought off a cowboy needing quick cash. Jocelyn could tell the mare was young and temperamental by the way she held her ears and looked at them all with contempt. All the men were full of themselves, and alcohol, after the fevered excitement of the night, so when Jocelyn asked him not to get on, he just looked at her with that crooked grin and gave her a long, soft kiss. When the mare bucked him off, he shattered his right shoulder and knocked his head on the fender of a parked trailer. Jocelyn had never felt so empty as she did waiting for the ambulance as her husband lay unconscious and bleeding out on hay littered ground.

The surgeon repaired the shoulder as best he could, but worried more about the swelling in Sawyer’s frontal lobe. They monitored him closely for three weeks in the hospital, but eventually the swelling went down and they released Sawyer to travel home. Jocelyn remained in a constant state of anxiety. Fussing over him, waking in the middle of the night to check that he was breathing. Sawyer didn’t seem to feel anything at all. Jocelyn spent months taking care of the ranch with help from the few ranch hands they had left. There were still horses to be sold and new ones coming in for training. Foals being born, bills to be paid. Sawyer kept his shoulder immobile for six weeks after being released from the hospital and spent his days on the couch watching daytime soap operas flit across the screen. More rarely, he walked through the barn in his sling giving sharp instructions here or there. Mostly he kept to himself. Even when it was just the two of them. Eating dinner, dressing for bed. His gaze was lifeless, his kisses brief and rigid.

It was like that fall had knocked all the confidence right out of him. Long after his six weeks were up, he remained as immobile as his shoulder had been. She had tried getting him out, getting him to ride a horse or speak to the men. She cooked for him, she dressed up for him. He played along sometimes. He’d take her hand and lead her to the bedroom, tell her the things she needed to hear, but light never seemed to touch his brown eyes. A few months after he finished rehab, she caught him trying to rope the dummy in the front yard. He couldn’t, though, not like he used to. He was slow, stiff. She stood watching him, leaned up against the only shade tree in the yard, the crosses at her feet and the breeze at her back. The sun shone off his golden head and she felt sad for him. She pushed off the tree and went to his side. Tears pooled in his brown eyes and he kneeled in the dirt. She sat beside him and held him like he’d always held her. She told him that he only needed to give it a few more months, he was trying too soon. He needed practice, to get on a horse. Then those soft brown eyes turned to mud and he slapped her hard across the cheek. He’d got up and left her sitting there in the dirt.

After that, he seemed to despise her attempts to make him feel better, to make him happy. The more she tried, the harder he slapped. Eventually, they lost the few ranch hands they had left. Without Sawyer’s influence in the barn they gave up, despite Jocelyn’s attempts to keep the ranch afloat. She knew enough about horses and enough about training to pick the prospects, but the men respected Sawyer and his techniques, his name, not hers. They left for other ranches where the wife didn’t show up to the barn with bruises across her cheek they had to pretend to ignore. Where the wife wasn’t desperate to save a dying ranch and a lifeless husband. In a way, she was glad they left. She didn’t want them seeing Sawyer this way. Didn’t want their whispers, their pity. Didn’t want them to see her father’s ranch dwindle until nothing was left. No, she’d rather bear that burden alone.

Now they were down to a few horses that needed to be sold off before they lost their potential. One old broodmare on her last leg that needed to be buried. Stacked up bills. Unbalanced books. Two weathered crosses in her yard. A barn cat. A husband on a couch with an empty bottle dangling in his limp hand. Jocelyn wiped her arm across her forehead and thought about the dead light in Sawyer’s eyes. He’d wake up tomorrow morning and have to put the mare down and it’d dull him out a little more. Jocelyn stood up and grabbed her gloves, looked up to the sky. She wanted the blackness to break open and spill all those stars into her hole. She wanted to swim in their light and soak up their warmth. She wanted to drown in it. She’d already dug the hole. All they’d have to do was cover her up.