Page 95 of The Honorable Texan
“Word of mouth will take you far, too,” Meredith said.“Hospitals teach nutrition these days, not only to patients but to the community.Tailored beef will find a market among consumers with heart problems, who’ll pay the extra cost for healthier cuts of meat grown organically.”
Rey was listening.He finished his biscuit and poured himself another cup of coffee from the carafe on the table.“J.D.Langley pioneered that organic approach locally,” he remarked.“He and the Tremayne boys got into terrific fights with other producers at seminars for a while.Then we saw the disasters overseas and suddenly everybody else was jumping on the bandwagon.”
“They’ll be glad they did, I think,” Meredith said.
“Which reminds me,” Leo said, eyeing her.“Mrs.Lewis said her larder hadn’t been opened since you came here.So…what are you making these biscuits with?”
She gave them a wary glance.“Light olive oil,” she said slowly.
Rey gaped at his biscuit as if it had suddenly sprouted hair.“Olive oil?”he gasped.
“Listen,” she said quickly, aware of horrified stares, “olive oil is so healthy that people who live on a Mediterranean diet have only a fraction of the vascular problems we have in abundance in this country.The fat content is still there, but it’s a vegetable fat, and it’s actually good for you.Until I told you, you didn’t even know you’d given up great gobs of animal fat in those biscuits!”
The brothers looked at each other.“Well,” Leo had to admit, “they taste just as good as the others did.”
“That’s true,” Rey agreed reluctantly.
“And we’re getting older,” Leo continued.“We don’t want clogged arteries giving us heart attacks and strokes.”
“Or bypass surgery,” Rey sighed.
“So I guess olive oil isn’t so bad, after all,” Leo concluded, with a grin at Meredith.
She grinned back.“Thank goodness.I had visions of being tarred and feathered,” she confessed.
“I’m not giving up butter, though,” Rey told her firmly, dipping his knife into the tub next to the biscuit basket.“Nothing tastes like real butter on a biscuit.”
Meredith didn’t look at him.She couldn’t confess that what he was eating was not butter, but rather a lightmargarine that actually lowered cholesterol levels.She only smiled and poured herself another cup of coffee.
* * *
Leo and Reyhad started moving bulls into the lower pasture, where new forage grasses were thriving even in autumn, when a mangy old longhorn bull suddenly jerked his head and hooked Leo in the shoulder.
Leo yelled and threw a kick at him, but the aggravating animal was already trotting nonchalantly into the new pasture without a backward glance.
“How bad is it?”Rey asked, leaving the cowboys to work the cattle alone while he looked at his brother’s shoulder.
“Probably needs stitches,” Leo said through his teeth.“Drive me to the house and let me change shirts, then you can take me to Lou Coltrain.”
“Damned bull,” Rey muttered as he put his brother into the ranch truck and took off home.
Meredith was sweeping off the back steps when they drove up.She gave Leo’s bloodstained shirt a quick glance.
“Come on in here, let me have a look,” she said gently.
Disconcerted, Leo let her remove the shirt from his shoulder and bathe the blood away with a clean cloth.
She probed around the edges of the cut and nodded.“You’ll need stitches.Here.Hold this tight against the cut until you get to town.”
“I need to change shirts,” he began.
“You need to get to the doctor.Which one do you use?”she persisted, picking up the mobile phone she kept on the table.
“Dr.Lou Coltrain,” he said.
“I’ll phone and tell them you’re on the way,” she said firmly.
Rey gave her a curious glance, but he hustled Leo out the door and into the truck again.
