Page 44 of Blazing Hot Nights
I rested my hand on the pack over my shoulder. “It’s not that I forget how to find relief. I don’t deserve to find relief when Callie is lying cold and dead in the grave, Blaze. How bad my shoulder has gotten has nothing to do with the initial injury and everything to do with what happened on your ranch.”
He sat up and held my chin, a look of confusion on his face. “Heaven, I don’t understand how you think you killed Callie. I also don’t understand why you think you deserve to suffer from this injury for the rest of your life. You’ve been suffering for five years, isn’t that long enough?”
I shook my head wildly, grabbing at my shoulder to keep the heat pack from slipping off. As much as I denied that I deserved relief from my pain, when someone offered it, I couldn’t resist taking the few moments of comfort. “I deserve to suffer until the day I die because of what I did to Callie.”
He threw his hands up in frustration. “Heaven, you didn’t do anything to Callie!”
“Exactly!” I screamed back at him. “Exactly! I didn’t do anything to save her, Blaze! I just let her die in front of me and didn’t do anything to help her! What kind of person does that? A horrible one, that’s who!” I yelled, my entire body shaking with pent-up emotion.
Suddenly, I was back on that ridge, the warm sun shining down on my back as I sat at the fence line talking to Callie. She didn’t need me there to fix the hole in the fence. It wasn’t rocket science to splice in a new piece of wire to cover the hole made by a bison horn. I could have done it myself if my daddy hadn’t gotten on about it. He insisted it wasn’t our job to keep their bison from roaming into our lower pasture and using the watering hole our cattle used. If that happened, it could pollute the water for our cattle forever. I knew he was right, but I still felt bad about insisting Callie do it. So I decided to stay and keep her company. Daddy said I couldn’t rewire the fence; he didn’t say I couldn’t laugh with my friend while she did it. Her laughter rang through the air as she joked with me about how she’d have to jump into the watering hole by the time she finished the job. It was warm outside, and I turned Grover toward home, promising I’d be right back with some water for her. The words weren’t out of my mouth when the sound of hooves filled the air and then a grunt that I couldn’t mistake. Before I could make a move in either direction, a blur of brown came running at the fence.
“Callie!” I screamed, my voice frantic in the afternoon air. She had no place to go and no time to react. A bison broke through the fence, the hole she was trying to repair offering enough instability for him to get his head and shoulders through. Her tiny body was no match for his giant hooves. “Oh my God, no!” I screamed, jumping off Grover without thinking. I landed on my arm awkwardly, but I didn’t register the pain. I just scrambled to my feet while screaming at the giant animal who was now partway through the fence. He stood there, chewing the sweet, green grass, utterly oblivious to the woman dying beside him. “Oh God, I have to get to her,” I whimpered, crouched in the grass, waiting for an opening to get past the animal without getting in its way. “Callie,” I whimpered, afraid to scream again and scare the beast into moving his foot. “Oh God, Callie.”
“Heaven!” Blaze’s voice called out. “Heaven, you are not in that pasture! You’re safe here with me!”
I was shaking when my head snapped up, but after a few deep breaths my vision started to clear.
“There you go. You’re okay.” He carefully pulled me into him, his warm hand on my neck to ground me.
I couldn’t speak, so I just gulped air as I hung my chin over his shoulder. My body quivered as the emotions drained away, leaving me weak and tired again. He rubbed my back, and his warm hands reminded me I was safe while the scent of him grounded me to the room.
“You’re okay,” he promised, kissing the top of my head. A shiver racked his body, and he held me tighter. “I’m sorry, angel. I had no idea how intense the memories were for you still. I wish I could do something to help you. Does that happen every time you think about that day?”
“Most of the time,” I finally answered. “Sometimes, it’s something simple like the smell of the grass or the sun on my skin. Sometimes, it’s being by the watering hole and being reminded of the sound of Callie’s laughter.” I shuddered, and he held me closer, his hand moving up and down my back. “I didn’t do enough to help her, Blaze. I should never have decided to leave her there and go for water. If I hadn’t turned Grover—”
“What do you think would have happened if you hadn’t?” he asked, his hand pausing on my back.
“I would have been closer. I could have pulled Callie out of the way in time. Anything. Something more than I did!”
“Shh,” he whispered, resting his cheek on my head. “You couldn’t have saved her, Heaven, but you sure as hell could have died right next to her. You almost did, or did you forget that part?” He eased up on his hug so he could look into my eyes. I couldn’t hold his gaze.
“You weren’t there, Blaze. You don’t know what happened.”
He brushed a piece of hair off my cheek and swiped it behind my ear. “You’re right. I wasn’t there. But the scene I came upon was horrifying, and enough for me to know that there was nothing you could have done for Callie. You don’t win against a two-thousand-pound animal when it tramples you. Callie was gone before you could ever have gotten to her, angel.”
I threw my arm up in frustration. He wasn’t hearing me. “That’s what you don’t understand! We heard them coming. If I hadn’t turned away, I could have grabbed her!”
“How much notice did you have that the herd was coming?”
Blaze was cupping my cheek so tenderly I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t break down again in front of this man.
I closed my eyes and swallowed, trying to focus on just the animals and nothing else. “I don’t know. Seconds? We heard their hooves, and by the time we looked up, they were there. It doesn’t make any sense to me. We were joking around, so we must not have noticed them coming.”
Blaze shook his head, and the motion told me he was frustrated and sad. “Heaven, a bison runs at an average of forty miles an hour. They can cover a lot of ground in seconds, but usually, the fence stops them. All the other bison stopped when they noticed the fence. It was only the one bull who came through. I don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he was riled up or aggravated by another bull. Maybe he was just lined up perfectly with the hole in the fence. I will never know the reasons. What I do know is, Callie was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She accepted that risk when she moved to Wisconsin and married me. You did not. You weren’t even working for me that day. You were a twenty-year-old kid who was doing what her daddy told her to do, nothing more.”
My chin trembled against my will, but I forced the words out. “I had other choices, Blaze. I could have fixed the hole myself instead of letting my daddy’s anger get the best of me. If I had, Callie would be alive right now!”
“And you’d be dead! Don’t you see that?”
“We don’t know that. What I do know is that you should be mad as hell at me for not doing more to help her after I was the one who put her in harm’s way!”
“Because you couldn’t help her!” he exploded, dropping his hand and jumping up off the bed. He stood in the corner with his hands in the air, and his eyes round and wide. “You couldn’t help her! You tried. You jumped off Grover and ran to her. You grabbed the attention of that bull as you screamed my name like the devil was on your heels. I have never heard and never want to hear anything like that sound again, Heaven.” He squatted and put his head in his hands. “Oh my God, the sound haunts me to this day. You were screaming in horror and then just … nothing. Just silence. I can’t tell you how much that haunts me when I lay in bed at night. Finding you both within feet of that giant bull, Callie already gone and you unconscious …” His words trailed off, and he shook his head in his hands, a sob sticking in his chest. “My heart hasn’t beat right since.”
I scooted across the bed and knelt next to him, taking his face in my hand. “I tried to help Callie. I didn’t know she was gone already. I landed on my arm and then the bull, I think, I think …” I closed my eyes and waited, willing the memory that I never let fill my mind to flow in and around me. “I … I got to her. I couldn’t find a pulse, and I was just screaming out of terror that I was already too late. When I looked up, it was right into the eye of the bull. I locked eyes with him, and I remember he lifted his head. That’s the last thing I remember.”
Blaze raised his head and fell back on his butt, hugging his knees to his chest. “He was curious, and you know how bison sway their heads back and forth to find food. I think he did that and head-butted you. It wasn’t intentional, not what happened to Callie or you. He was doing what bison do. He may have killed Callie, but you didn’t. If anyone killed her, I did. I allowed her to be out there doing that kind of work when I knew better. I knew better, but I still let it happen.”
I fell backward and leaned against the bed. “Like you were going to stop her from doing anything with your he-man ways. Good luck with that. Callie was her own woman. She did what she wanted.”
