Thunder In Her Body (33 page)

Finding the seamstress proved to be easier than finding the fabric.  The one shop in town that sold fabrics did not have the suede or shami cloth she needed, neither did Walmart.  She drove to Albuquerque, and still no luck, but a woman there told her about a store in El Paso.  So she drove her silver pickup truck over 200 or so miles into El Paso and searched throughout the fabric stores.  She couldn’t find what she wanted there either.  Fortunately, one sales lady gave her the website for a company in England that manufactured suede and faux suede.  If she was willing to pay for it, they could get it to her within three days.  That left seven days to make the dress.  That night, nearly exhausted from stress, she telephoned London, ordered 10 yards, the minimum they would ship, of off-white suede at $25 a yard.  The postage would be $65 and the package was guaranteed to her home before noon on the third day.  She would take it!

Lucinda took her to the lady who would be her seamstress.  She was Apache, known for her intricate work and known to make very authentic-looking Native costumes.  The seamstress showed Lynette and Lucinda three types of dresses suitable for the wedding.  Lynette seized upon the simple one piece shift type dress with flaps for mock-sleeves.  If the seamstress could cut the suede into thin strips and make a fringe from it, as seen in real Native dresses, she would be happy and completely indebted.  Lynette wanted the fringes to hang from her shoulders, over her arms and way down past her fingertips.  From the neckline in the back, the fringes should hang below her hips.  She also wanted fringe hanging from the bottom of the garment down to just above the top of her feet.  The most important though, was lots of fringe from the shoulders.  She had seen this dress at some of the POW WOWs in Austin, and loved the elegant way the fringe moved when the women walked. They settled on a price, however, Lynette knew that was not enough for the pressure the seamstress would be under with such a short turn-around time, so she offered to pay her $300 over her requested price.  There would only be time for one fitting and Blaze was not to know about the dress.  It would be a surprise and her wedding gift to him.  Now the moccasins.    She would wear the knee-high boots.  Whenever she saw them in books or a POW WOWs, she considered them magnificently feminine.  Those she was sure she could get on the internet.  So it was done.  She slipped a crisp $100 bill into Lucinda’s pocket for the courtesy of her time, and thanked her from the bottom of her heart for helping to make her wedding day a very special day.  “Blaze will be proud when he sees you,” she said as Lynette dropped her off at her home.  “I want to make him proud all of our days together,” she said to Lucinda.

Jewelry.  She had plenty of real, authentic silver and turquoise jewelry at home.  She loved Native jewelry craftsmanship.  For years she had been collecting and wearing these pieces.  She would have to depend on Janette to run by the house in Austin, and just pack up all of her Indian jewelry, especially the very wide bracelet with the inset turquoise stone which she purchased from the Navajo artist in Sedona, Arizona.  Janette could bring them when she arrived two days before the wedding.

Ordinarily, Lynette wore her hair pulled up, or back.  Blaze liked it down around her shoulders.  For the most part, she felt that the older a woman got, the shorter her hair should be, but that was a personal preference.  For years, she had her hair cut in short, stylish ways, but for the last year, she’d let it grow long, down past her shoulders, and she pinned it up or pulled it back into a smart ponytail.  For this occasion, she would wear it partially up in the front and sides, with the back slightly curly and hanging down.

“You look like the cat that swallowed the bird,” Blaze said to her that evening.

She was bursting with excitement, but she couldn’t tell him why.  He prodded her a bit for a reason why she was singing and dancing up and down the hallway, but she wouldn’t tell.
  He and Aaron had installed in-home stereo speakers throughout the house when the addition was built on.  From time to time, one of them turned the stereo on softly and just let it play on an easy listening station that gave news and weather, out of Santa Fe.  So when she was singing the words to some of the songs in a loud way, it was a little out of character and Blaze was more than curious.

“I bet I know how I can get it out of you,” he teased.  “I can beat it out of you,” he said, grabbing his crotch and shaking it in a totally suggestive way.

“Nope, Sweetie, the
sodium penetration
, (a play on sodium pentathol-the truth serum), just won’t get it tonight,” she snickered. She resumed her auditorium-loud singing, as she bounced down the hallway toward the bedroom.

C
HAPTER 22

¤

The Snake

T
he phone rang too early in the morning for it to be good news.  Blaze reached over and snatched the handle from the cradle.  He listened intently, and started getting out of bed before the conversation was over.

“I’ll be right down,” he said, as he hung up.

“Can you throw some clothes on real quick?” he asked Lynette, with urgency in his voice.

“You can come and see another side of ranching, if you want to.”

She bolted out of bed, threw on some underwear, grabbed a pair of jeans and pulled on the shirt she’d worn the day before.  Knowing they would be out in the grass and weeds, she made sure to put on a thick pair of socks with her tennis so ants wouldn’t bite her on her feet.  She was particularly leery of fire ants, especially living in Austin.  They built mounds in everyone’s yards, traumatized animals, and had a horrible bite, to which she was allergic.  She recalled a time when working in her front yard, one of those tiny but vicious creatures bit her in between the longest finger and her ring finger.  Within minutes her hand began to swell like a catcher’s mitt. She ran into the house and struggled to remove her rings before they cut off circulation to that finger.  It took an hour for the benedryl to reduce some of the swelling.  On another occasion, when she, her husband and children camped in the Big Bend area of Texas, two fire ants crawled up her pants leg and bit her.  Her leg swole to twice its size and they had to seek emergency services at the ranger station.  So she pulled her long socks up as far as they would go.

Blaze drove out to an area where some of the cattle grazed.  There were rocky outcroppings here and there.  The grass was good for at least another month in this spot, before they would have to move the herd to another grazing pasture.  Maurice and Hawk bent over a cow struggling to give birth.  She’d seen this on the Animal Channel, and now here it was in real life.  The heifer shook and struggled to push the calf out, but it wouldn’t come.  Only two hooves stuck out of the birth canal.

“We have to get this out of her or she’ll die, both of them will die,” Hawk said, shaking his head.

“There’s no time to get the vet out here,” Maurice added.

“Go get some axle grease from the shed,” Blaze ordered Maurice.  “Her hips aren’t wide enough.  This calf is stuck.”

While they waited for the truck to disappear and reappear again, Aaron showed up and the two men discussed the situation.  They might have been good businessmen, but they were also kind men, and neither liked to see anything suffer.

Over her left shoulder, Lynette was sure she heard the whimpering of an animal.  Then the sound stopped.

There it was again.  She left the group of men and walked carefully and slowly toward the sound.

It stopped.  No sound.

She stood still, like a lioness in wait for prey.  There it was again.

It was whimpering.

She eased toward the rocky outcrop.  The sound stopped.

Then again, this time the whimpering was different.  That’s a puppy she realized.

She eased around to the other side of the rocks, and in a small indentation lay a gruesome sight.  Her stomach contracted as she looked upon this horrible sight.  She screamed and jumped back, as there was movement.  There lay a swollen and dying mother dog.  Her face was so swollen that one eye was popping out from its socket.  The eye looked up at Lynette and she tried to move, but her body was so swollen and it appeared that all but her front feet were paralyzed.  Laying at a 45 degree angle from her was a grotesque creature.  It was a huge rattle snake trying to ingest a new-born puppy.  Lynette screamed again, and Blaze appeared instantly next to her.

“Oh, Goddamned,” he hissed, taking in this sight all at once.  He pushed Lynette back behind him, grabbed the snake and flung it to the side.  It could not bite him because its face and throat were engorged with the body of a puppy.  The snake could neither swallow the puppy nor push it back out of its misshapen mouth.

“Aw, Shit,” Blaze uttered.  Lynette stepped around to see into the opening again, and there were three other new-born pups.  One was dead, apparently bitten by the rattler.  Two wriggled and made tiny sounds.  Blaze lifted them out and laid them on the ground next to Lynette’s feet.

“She’s almost dead,” he said of the mother dog. “She was evidentally bitten several times trying to save her puppies.”

Lynette crouched down, tears streaming down her face.  “Do something.  Don’t let her suffer any more Blaze.  Do something,” she pleaded, crying out loud.

Blaze rubbed his face, reached to his side, and pulled out a knife from his sheath.  He spit to the side and reached in to grab the dying mother dog.  Crying uncontrollably, Lynette squatted down, and touched the fur of the animal.

“We’ll take care of your babies,” she said, in a shaky voice, “I promise, we’ll take care of them,” she repeated, as Blaze cut the dog’s throat.  She died instantly.  The mother dog had lived just long enough, and had used her last breaths, to ask for help for her babies.  Lynette fell back and screamed through her tears.  She looked dazed.  She was looking around, and seeing nothing.  In all her life, she had never seen anything this grotesque.

Blaze picked up the remaining two, almost lifeless puppies, and tried to hand them to Lynette.  She pushed them away, then struggled to her feet.  She dug for the biggest and heaviest rock she could pry off the outcropping, turned and walked over to the choking snake, still trying to swallow the puppy.  She brought the rock crashing down onto the snakes head.  It bounced out of her hand as the snake began to writhe.  She grabbed up the rock, and beat it upon the snakes head again.  Again and again, she smashed that rock at the head of the snake until the head split open on all sides and the dead puppy rolled to the side.  And she slammed the rock again.  Again.  Again, until Aaron grabbed her and pulled her back.  She screamed like a banshee, her face turned to the sky, soaked by tears. She cried that ugly, body-shaking cry of despair, collapsing onto the ground next to the dead snake.  The screams groaned from her throat and choked her.  The men let her cry.  No one could soothe her right then.  If they tried, she would have fought them.  She was outraged, enraged, and probably dangerous.  This was the cruelty and the manner of Mother Nature and she was viciously angry at that cruelty.  Blaze brought the tiny puppies over and laid them in her lap.  He pulled her blouse up around them so they would not fall off her legs.  It took her a minute to gather them up and she sat there rocking them.

“I’ll take care of you.  I promised your mother, I’ll take care of you, I’ll take care of you,” she said, crying and rocking.

Blaze ushered her back to the truck and half-lifted her in.  Ahead of the truck, she could see the calf struggling to stand.  The heifer was back on her feet with a stream of fluids and placenta extruding from her birth canal.  She turned her head downward and began to clean the calf with her tongue.  “It’ll be all right.  She’ll be a good mother,” he assured her.

“Hawk, have you got anything you can put some milk in?” Blaze called out.

“Got a soda bottle,” he replied.

“Wash it out.  Find one of the nursing mamas and squeeze out some and bring it to the house,” Blaze said.  “We’ve got to get these babies to the house,” he instructed.

If Lynette had to describe the two remaining puppies in a court-of-law at that time, she couldn’t.  All was a blur until they got back to the house.  Lucinda was bustling around in the kitchen when they walked in, with Lynette clasping the puppies to her chest, her bare stomach partially exposed.

“Lucy, do we have any kind of syringe?  Anything small we can use like a nipple to feed these puppies?” she asked urgently.

Lucinda thought for a second.  “No, but we have some straws.”

“That’ll work,” Lynette replied, remembering how she had often used them to drip fluids on some girl scout craft work.

“There’s bottled water in the frig.  Warm some up a little,” she directed.  “We’ll get some fluids in them until someone can bring up some milk,” she explained.

The poor little things were terribly dehydrated.  Lynette sat on the floor with her back leaning against the refrigerator.  Lucinda got down there with her and took one puppy while she fed the other.

“One drop at a time.  One drop at a time, and you’ll be OK,” she assured the puppies.  “I’ll be your mama now.”