Page 1 of Clashing Moon

1

ARABELLA

My father claimed Montana doesn’t care about the men or women who try to tame her. We’re on our own under the big sky. It was up to an individual to find the grit with which to survive. During a season of harsh midwinter months, February was the cruelest of all. Short days gave way to dark evenings so quickly that one often felt they were living through one endless night.

On just such a morning, I trudged outside and headed across the yard to collect logs for a fire. Cold air stung my cheeks. My fingers numbed despite my gloves. The temperatures had dipped into the teens while I slept, freezing the fallen snow so that it crunched under my boots. I hated early mornings. Collecting wood before I’d had my coffee seemed like an unfair punishment. Regardless, we needed a fire. The furnace was out. Again.

Our farmhouse stood at the end of a forgotten driveway, surrounded by rolling hills that stretched as far as the eye could see. Tire tracks from a recent vehicle had left dark, muddy ruts in the driveway, quickly freezing over as the temperature dropped further. The sky presented as a cool bluish hue. Shadows, long and delicate, stretched across the ground in soft,blurry lines that brought a quiet serenity, a stillness that made the world feel frozen in time. Or perhaps it was only me frozen here in time, living the life meant for someone else.

I sniffed the air, which smelled slightly of woodsmoke from a neighboring ranch. But it held the promise of a storm, too. That pregnant feeling of something pent up, wishing for release, permeated the atmosphere. The forecast had added a winter advisory, predicting a blizzard would roll in this afternoon. I had a feeling it would be earlier than they thought. Snow would fall in the next hour. I’d grown up here. I didn’t need a weather report or app to predict a blizzard.

This kind of weather inevitably made me think of my mother. I’d been three years old when she disappeared on a February morning, never to return. I’d been too young to remember that day, but it seemed as if I did. I could imagine the way her taillights looked in the dark as she barreled down the driveway, away from a chilly, run-down ranch house and the man she’d married. Had it been the frigid weather and the stark, lonely landscape that had driven her away? If so, who could blame her? Leaving during this unforgiving time of year and my cruel father might have been an act of survival.

If only she’d thought to take her three-year-old daughter with her. Instead, she’d left me in the care of a man with ice in his veins.

I let out a slow breath, watching as it mingled with the frigid air before disappearing into the stillness. There was a harsh, raw beauty to my family’s land. Yet, as a child, I’d been desperate to leave. I’d worked hard in school, graduated top of my class, and headed off to college with a scholarship that guaranteed my father couldn’t ruin my chances of the future I envisioned. Yet here I was, all these years later, pulled back to the place of my roots as if my plans hadn’t mattered at all.

My father was sick. Dementia had robbed him of his reasoning and added a violent unpredictability to his cruel nature. I was all he had left—his only child. Thus, I’d come home.

He’d been diagnosed with dementia during my last year at veterinary school. In combination with my debt from school and my father’s struggling ranch, there had been no choice for either of us except for me to move home and take care of him. Doing so would have been hard enough, but combining my home duties with starting a practice made it nearly impossible. All of which made me feel as old and grizzled as the man in my care.

I’ve often heard that making plans for one’s life led to God’s laughter. I’d always thought it was an odd and inaccurate saying, as the divine creator of my faith was not the type to mock those of us who tried our best to make the most of the lives we’re given here on earth. However, a case could be made that God didn’t want me to have dared to dream of a life outside of Bluefern and the cruel tongue of my dear old dad.

When I reached the shed, I pushed open the creaky door, hinges groaning in protest as the scents of old wood and earth filled my nose. Stacks of split logs lined the wall—enough to get us through another few months. We bought our wood these days, but when I was a kid, my father had cut and chopped trees from our land. It was not only his mind that had been robbed of strength. The toll of decades of physically hard labor had weakened his body. He was an old man now. Not the robust man of my youth.

I filled our wheelbarrow with wood and headed back outside, crossing the yard to the house where my father would soon want his breakfast. If I didn’t have a fire going by the time he got up, there would be trouble.

Regardless, for a moment, I hesitated in the stillness of the morning, taking in the familiar scene. Pine trees to the weststood tall and dark against the pale sky, their branches heavy with snow, while the distant mountains with sharp and brilliant white peaks gleamed dully in the overcast light. Pastures lay dormant under a white blanket, tufts of dead grass that managed to pierce through the surface brittle and brown. Here and there, the tops of hardy sagebrush poked through the snow, their green-gray leaves dusted with frost. The creek bed was now a ribbon of ice, snaking through the property with patches of snow-covered stones marking its path. Cottonwoods that grew along its banks were skeletal, with bare branches reaching out like bony fingers.

A gust of wind sent a flurry of snow dancing across the pasture toward the remnants of the old corral and barn, reminders of a heartier time in the history of my family’s ranch.

Fortunately, I’d been able to sell off what was left of my father’s cattle to a young rancher down the road. We no longer had horses or chickens, leaving only the rickety farmhouse to manage. Still, between starting a veterinary practice and taking care of my father, I felt walloped and defeated.

I turned back toward the house, pushing the wheelbarrow through the snow as best I could. Our farmhouse huddled against the bitter cold, its weathered exterior barely visible beneath a thin layer of snow that had settled overnight. Icicles clung to the rafters and gutters, catching what little light filtered through the clouds.

My father appeared on the back porch, wearing his flannel pajamas and shouting for me. “Pudge, get in here and make my breakfast.”

I sighed and headed his way.

Our kitchen wasn’tcold enough to see my breath, but it wasn’t far off. I’d woken to a frigid house, only to discover my furnace had gone out. I’d already put a call in to Dick, our heating and air guy in town, but no one had answered at his office. I’d left a message asking if he could come out as soon as possible. God only knew how much his bill would be. I just hoped he could repair it instead of telling me I needed a new one.

“Pudge, what is this?”

Pudge. My father’s nickname for me because I’d been overweight as a child. Children at school had been equally unkind, bullying me about my weight and coming up with other names. Fatso. Whale. Fatty. When I’d gone away to college on that well-earned scholarship, I’d vowed to return only when I’d shed the extra thirty or so pounds that had clung to my person since I was a child. I’d kept that promise to myself.

Strangely enough, losing the weight hadn’t fixed all my troubles as I’d thought it would. Ghosts from the past were not so easily dismissed. As it turns out, they continued to haunt me even when the mirror told me otherwise. If bullies knew how lasting their words were, would it make them more or less likely to continue lambasting their victims? I suspected knowing how much influence they’d had on my self-esteem would give them endless delight.

I looked up from frying a pan of potatoes to see my father sitting at the table with both hands clenched into fists.

“What’s wrong with it?” I’d made him a bowl of fruit, with slices of bananas, apples, and cantaloupe, hoping to get a few servings in him before I gave him his eggs and potatoes.

He pounded his fists against the tabletop, causing me to flinch. “I wouldn’t feed this to a hog. It’s rotten. Maybe full of worms for all I know.” His face scrunched into a scowl. “Or E. coli.”

I stifled a sigh and set aside my spatula. Dementia had made a mean old man meaner as well as paranoid. He often accused me of trying to poison him.

It was early in the morning, and I had a full day of rounds ahead of me. Time off for a small-town veterinarian in a ranching community didn’t come easily. Although it was not yet eight in the morning, I felt weary. The kind of tired that seemed to have permanently seeped into my bones. Fatigue that a woman in her early thirties should not feel. At school, I’d been vibrant and quick and full of plans for my future. That person seemed like someone else. Not me. And my tired bones.

I quickly put on a pot of coffee. My father liked his as thick and dark as oil, without cream or sugar. While it brewed, I turned on a burner, placed our cast-iron skillet on it to warm, and popped a piece of bread into the toaster.

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