Chapter 8
Phoebe concentrated on hitting the stake in front of her with a hammer, pounding it into the ground, and not looking at the man who was plowing the ground in front of her.
Tillman and she had marked out an area for the arena, and now they were preparing the ground for it. Tillman had said that it could take several weeks for the ground to get worked up, dried out, worked up some more, and turned into the perfect base for the rodeo activities. It was also something they could get started on without too much money invested.
They had gone around and marked out the area, and he had gotten started tearing up the ground while she put the actual stakes in to show the boundaries.
They had worked together closely over the last two days, and Phoebe had to admit she enjoyed every second. Tillman wasn’t necessarily fun to work with, exactly, but she knew she could count on him. He would do what he needed to do, and he wouldn’t stop until the job was done, even if that meant he helped her with her work.
Not that she sat around waiting for someone to help her. She just appreciated someone who jumped in and did whatever was necessary and didn’t draw lines, refusing to cross into territory that they didn’t consider theirs.
He hadn’t worried about his hours, and her initial assessment had been correct. He was going to work long and hard and not watch the clock.
Of course, sometimes folks went into a job doing a little more than what they expected to do once they settled in, but Tillman didn’t seem like that was the case.
She finished pounding the stake she was working on in, then picked up the pile, carrying it to the next X they had marked out on the ground with bright orange spray paint.
He handled the tractor like he’d been born on it, and it was hard for her not to want to just stand and watch him.
But if she didn’t watch what she was doing, she would miss the stake. She’d already done that one time, slamming the hammer into the muscle just above her knee. A little lower, and it would have really hurt. She needed to pay attention.
She had no sooner thought that than her eyes strayed once more to the man on the tractor.
Shaking her head at herself, she forced her gaze back to the stake, but she lost her balance and took a big step to catch herself.
She thought she’d be okay and lifted the hammer over her head to bring it down with a hard thump on the stake, taking some of her frustration out through the manual labor, but as she brought the hammer forward, the claw part grabbed the back of her head, and searing pain shot around her skull and down her arms.
She almost dropped the hammer, but years of working with her brothers, knowing she couldn’t show weakness or they’d tease her, kept her hands firmly gripped around the handle, although the whack that it made on the stake barely moved it at all. She’d lost her ability to put any force behind it as her body focused on dealing with the pain.
It felt like she ripped her whole skull open, but she doubted that it had done more than scratch the back of her head. Putting her hand on the place it throbbed, she couldn’t feel anything other than the sharp pain fading into a much more manageable, dull thump.
It served her right for not being able to pay attention to the job that she was supposed to be doing and wanting to make googly eyes at some guy. She was way too old for that. In fact, she didn’t recall ever going through a stage like that.
Taking a deep breath, she tried to shake it off, gripping the hammer, not lifting it nearly so high, and bringing it down with all the force she could muster, which honestly wasn’t much. Her strength would come back, once the pain faded away, but in the meantime, she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by not working. Especially over something so silly.
Taking a deep breath, she looked off to her left, away from the buildings, at the never-ending North Dakota sky. She had been born and raised in Wyoming, and she loved that state, but there was just something wild and wonderful about North Dakota that seeped into her bones, gave her soul strength, and revived her spirit.
One more breath, and then she turned back to the stake.
As she did so, she realized the tractor had stopped and...Tillman was getting out.
Not only was he getting out, his eyes were on her as he hurried over, walking with long strides across the broken-up soil.
“You’re bleeding,” he said without preamble as he got close enough for her to hear him.
“I am?” she asked, looking at her hands and legs, unable to believe that she missed something else. Had she accidentally stumbled into a stake without realizing it?
“The back of your head,” he said, pointing and then reaching around her to grab her shoulder and turn her around.
He didn’t jerk her around. In fact, if she had to say, his touch was actually rather gentle. She appreciated that. Even as she realized that maybe it did feel like something was running down her neck. She had just assumed it was sweat and didn’t think anything about it. But maybe she grabbed more than she thought she did with the claw end of her hammer.
“How did you rip up the back of your head?” he asked, and there was concern mixed with baffled incredulity in his tone.
“I cut it with the hammer. I didn’t think I’d scratched it, let alone made it bleed.”
“It’s gushing. But I suppose head wounds typically do.” He didn’t say anything else, but she heard rustling behind her and glanced back in time to see him pulling his shirt over his head. “Hope you don’t mind, but we need to get the bleeding stopped. At least enough so we can tell whether or not you need stitches.”
“You’re right about head wounds. They do gush blood, but I hardly think I would need stitches.” She didn’t mind at all, and in fact, it was nice to have someone taking care of her.
Not that she thought she ought to get used to it or anything, but since her parents had died, there hadn’t been anyone to take care of her. Not that she needed anyone. She was the healthiest out of all the twelve kids, very seldom getting sick, and when she did, it was always a milder case than anyone else had.
She definitely appreciated that, since it was typically her taking care of everyone else. But just for a few moments, it was nice to have someone’s soft touch on her, someone being concerned about her, someone...even if he was taking his shirt off and using that, at least someone making sure that she was okay.
Only for a few moments though. In just another minute or two, she was going to tell him that she was fine, and he could go back to the tractor, and she would walk to the house and figure things out.
“I’m going to put some pressure on this, just to make sure the bleeding stops. I... I think you probably ought to lie down. That’s a lot of blood.”
“I’m sure it’s okay. Head wounds are like that, truly. I’ve seen enough of them in the boys over the years to know that you think they’re going to die, and they don’t even need a Band-Aid.”
“In order to put a Band-Aid on this, you’re going to have to shave your head.”
“I guess it’s not getting a Band-Aid then,” she said, and her eyes popped wide open. She was not going to shave her head, she was not going to get rid of her hair, not even one strand of it. Whatever was on the back of her head, she was just going to have to deal with it.
“Thanks a lot for coming over. I hadn’t realized that there was so much blood. But I can take it from here.” She reached back to put her hand on his T-shirt to press it against her head.
His hand was there, and her hand pressed over top of his. He didn’t move.
She turned her head, and his hand moved with her, as she looked up into his eyes. “Truly. I’m good. Thank you for your help, but there’s no point in both of us stopping.”
“The work can wait. I understand we’re in a hurry, but we’re not in so much of a hurry that we’re going to let dead bodies lie by the road while we plow on.”
She laughed. It was just so funny. The idea that she was going to die, not because someone else did something to her, but because she hooked her own head with a hammer.
“My siblings used to tease me that it took a special kind of talent to be as clumsy as I am. I have a tendency to agree with them.”
“I have experienced twice now your proclivity toward clumsiness, as you call it, and I guess I would have to agree. If I were one of your siblings, I would enjoy making fun of you, because I’ve never seen anyone with this level of...clumsiness in my life.”
“So did you say clumsiness, but you actually wanted to say stupidity? Because that’s what it sounded like?” she said, a little bit of tease in her voice, mostly to cover the fact that she was extremely embarrassed. Obviously he never worked with anyone who was such a major danger to themselves.
“No. Never stupidity. Just in the couple of days I’ve worked with you, your mind runs circles around mine. I could never call you stupid.”
That shut her up. He hadn’t said anything like that in the times that they’d talked before. In fact, she might have thought a couple of times that he didn’t really like her at all and would rather be working with one of her brothers.
The rodeo was important, integral to the plan they had to make the ranch solvent, but they couldn’t afford to lose any of the boys’ manpower out in the field and working with cattle and the dude ranch. There were things they did that she just couldn’t do.
That’s why Tillman had gotten stuck with her. Not some kind of matchmaking on the part of Ezra, as Priscilla had suggested. Phoebe had thought about that for all of about three seconds and dismissed it completely. The idea was ludicrous. Not only that Ezra would be a matchmaker, but that he would try to match her up with someone they barely knew. Although back when he was a roommate in college, it might have been a different story. She supposed it would be hard to know anyone better than you knew someone that you lived with.
“Hold still, I’m going to look and see if it’s still seeping.” Tillman’s fingers moved under hers, and she realized that she still had her hand at the back of her head, although she wasn’t exerting any pressure on his. She was just touching his fingers.
She was impossibly ridiculous, she thought as she pulled her hand away from the back of her head and stood still as he did what he said he was going to do.
“No. It’s not gushing anymore, but it’s still seeping enough that I can’t really see how big the wound is.”
“What does it look like? I mean, can you give me any idea of how big you think it is?”
“In other words, is she going to lose her hair over it?”
She laughed. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m asking. Thank you for the interpretation.”
“No. I don’t think you need to worry about losing your hair. But I’m guessing, this is just a guess because the only medical knowledge I have is taking care of other guys I worked with who got hurt, that if you don’t go get stitches, you’re probably going to have a scar. Which,” he hastened to add, “will be hidden by your hair if you don’t shave it.”
“That’s all I needed to hear. As long as no one with a razor comes anywhere near me, I’m good. Even if I bleed to death. In fact, I would prefer to bleed to death rather than lose my hair.”
“I would not have pegged you as vain.”
“And I don’t usually think of myself as being vain either. And I don’t typically make a big fuss about my hair, I just brush it and usually throw it up in a ponytail or something, but... I want to keep it. It’s...a part of me.”
The part of her that made her feel feminine. The Bible said a woman’s hair was her crown and glory, and while maybe that made it so that it wasn’t quite as vain as she felt, it was still more a matter of her identity being tied up in the one part of her that made her feel pretty and female.
“Surely there’s something you have that you would not want to lose, that would make you feel like less of a man if you didn’t have it,” she prodded, wanting to turn the conversation away from her and onto him.
“Guess I lost that,” he said softly. And then, after a few long, drawn-out moments where she thought about what an idiot she was and how she wished she wouldn’t have said anything, he added softly, “I guess I didn’t die.”
But the idea that he felt like less of a man was still out there in the air. He didn’t deny that. Didn’t even try. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk about it, or maybe it was true. It was hard to equate losing a person’s ranch with losing their hair, but maybe it was the idea of losing something that he worked for, that made him feel masculine and gave him a purpose.
“You know what, let’s go. I think I’ll have it stitched.”
“No.” The T-shirt moved a bit and then pushed back. “It’s still seeping, but I don’t want you to lose your hair.”
“I hardly doubt they’ll shave my whole head to put a few stitches in the back of it. It’ll just be losing a patch of hair, and I’m a big girl. I can handle it. And unlike other things...hair grows back.”
They weren’t really talking about hair, and they weren’t talking about her being a big girl exactly, it was just the idea. Sometimes things got taken away from you, and they changed the way a person thought about themself. And for some reason, she wanted to prove that she could face it. Face the thing that she just said that she didn’t want to face, didn’t want to ever lose, would rather bleed to death than lose, because he probably felt the same way about his ranch.
Again, not really a comparable thing, but it was less about what they were talking about and more about what they meant.
“Are you gonna drive me to the ER? Or am I gonna drive myself in?”
“What are you going to do, park in front of the emergency doors and walk in to get yourself stitches?”
“Well, I’ve parked there before, and they don’t take very kindly to it, because you’re in the way of the ambulances, but when I’d rushed my siblings to the ER, I guess they give you a bit of a pass when it’s a true emergency.”
“Hmm. So you have some experience going to the ER.”
“I have brothers. Of course I have experience.”
“And yet, there is a man and woman here in the field, and it’s the woman who’s going to the ER. Would you like to rephrase?”
She laughed. “You are besting me at every turn today. I think maybe I just better shut up.”
“Please don’t. You...challenge me, make me laugh, and it’s been a while since I felt like laughing. Since I’ve appreciated a challenge. Since I’ve...felt like a man.”
She wished she could turn around and look at him, unsure exactly what he meant by those words, but instead he continued to talk.
“How about you stand here. I’ll go get my truck and pick you up. You probably haven’t lost enough blood to make you dizzy, but I prefer not to take that chance. Can you stay here like a good girl?”
“I might have been able to stay here if you had kept off that good girl thing, but once you said that, I will walk to your truck under my own power. I don’t care if it’s sixteen miles away.”
“Do I need to take a hammer and smack you over the head with it in order to ensure that you stay here until I come get you?”
“I don’t have to pay for my ER care if you do that.” She meant it in a teasing way, but it was just a reminder that neither one of them had much of anything. Which...normally wouldn’t be too bad, for Phoebe anyway. Her family was trying to get a business started, which was never easy and often rocky.
On the other hand, it was just another kick in the shins for Tillman, who had already admitted that losing his ranch made him feel like less of a man. Not having two nickels to rub together probably didn’t help things either.
“Hold this,” he said abruptly. “I’ll be right back.”