two weeks seem so long?
Peals of shrill laughter erupted from down the hall, and he closed his eyes. That was how.
He leaned back from the sink, trying not to drip too many suds, and peered down the darkened hallway. A light was on in his bedroom at the end of the passageway.
The two children were jumping up and down on his bed, squealing with hyenalike glee.
They were twins, and though not identical, the resemblance between them was strong and striking. Both had short dark hair, though not nearly as dark as his and not as heavy. Doreen’s eyes were blue; Danny’s were the Black eyes, gray as slate. Both of them had cheekbones that only hinted at their grandmother‘s—his mother’s—Sarcee Indian blood. Tsuu-T’ina, Gumpy’s voice corrected him inside his head. Gumpy would be disgusted to know Ethan was relieved his niece and nephew would not be taunted through their school years as he had been. Called half-breed and worse. Driven, later on, to prove himself. To prove that he was just as good as anybody else. No, better. Stronger. Tougher. Wilder. More fearless.
He watched the children for a moment longer, thinking either of them was going to bounce one of their stocky little bodies right off the bed. He should tell them to settle down.
On the other hand, they weren’t fighting.
He turned back to the chore at hand. The morning and lunch dishes finally done, he shook his hands over the sink. Reminding himself the end was in sight, he went and cleared the supper dishes off the table.
“I hate this, Unca,” his five-year-old niece, Doreen, had told him a half hour ago.
“Eat it anyway.”
Her huge cornflower-blue eyes had filled with silent tears. They had the oddest way of filling, from the bottom, like a clear glass fish bowl filling up. Or maybe everybody’s eyes filled up that way before they bawled and he’d just never had a chance to see it up close before.
Thank God.
Needless to say, she had not eaten one bite of the prime T-bone on the plate. Or the baked potato, which admittedly had not been cooked all the way through. She had nibbled a single leaf of lettuce, which, from the level of energy she was now demonstrating on his bed, had sufficiently nourished her.
He dropped the dishes in the sink. He had to bend in an awkward way, right from the small of his back, to get at the dishes, and he was starting to ache from it. Of course, his aching back might also have a little something to do with a long-ago bull named Desire. His aches and scars—and there were many of them considering he had barely broken thirty—were mostly named after bulls he’d met over a seven-year stint as a pro-rodeo cowboy.
Not one moment of which had been as frightening as the moment Doreen and her twin brother, Danny, had stepped into the airport waiting area, holding hands, their names pinned to their coats, their eyes huge and frightened.
He heard a thud as one of them tumbled off the bed. He waited for the howl and felt his muscles actually unbunching when it didn’t come. A moment later the springs were again squeakily protesting each jump.
They weren’t frightened anymore. Maybe they never had been. Maybe that had just been his own fear reflected in their eyes. Imagine a man who had spent most of his youth and much of his adult life on top of two thousand pounds of writhing, raging bull getting an attack of nerves when confronted with two small scraps of humanity who couldn’t weigh more than eighty pounds combined. It was humiliating.
His sister, Nancy, and her husband, Andrew, were medical missionaries in a country called Rotanbonga. He still couldn’t pronounce it correctly. The twins had been born there, and he’d been quite satisfied to monitor their progress from a distance. His chief duty as uncle had been to remember to get their Christmas parcel in the mail by the end of September. Every year he sent a teddy bear and a doll, thanking God for the Sears catalogue, so that he didn’t have to shop for these highly embarrassing items in person.
But a few weeks ago he’d gotten an extremely panicky call from his usually unflappable sister. The connection was terrible, but he understood her to say that an epidemic, the name of which he could not pronounce, was sweeping the towns of their adopted homeland. It wasn’t safe for the kids to stay, but Nancy and Andrew felt they couldn’t possibly leave when so many lives now relied on their medical expertise.
What was an uncle supposed to say in those circumstances? I’ve got a ranch to run?
Of course, at the time when he’d said yes, he’d had no idea two five-year-olds were going to keep him from running his ranch. Keep him so busy and exhausted, he fell into bed at night feeling as if he’d wrestled, branded and inoculated several thousand head of cattle singlehandedly.
“Come on, Gumpy,” he implored the dark road.
He hoped the old truck hadn’t given out somewhere along the way. Gumpy always kept a roll of electrical tape and spare parts on hand and could bring about major miracles on that old heap of junk, but still, it wouldn’t make a good first impression on Mrs. Bishop.
She might not be happy standing in the dark on the side of the road in the biting November cold watching Gumpy cheerfully gluing his pride and joy back together.
And he wanted nothing more than for Mrs. Bishop to be happy.
Mrs. Betty-Anne Bishop was his neighbor’s cousin. Her name had come to him after he’d put out some panicky feelers to friends and neighbors.
That was three days after the twins had arrived. The laundry seemed to be multiplying on its own on the laundry room floor, the cattle needed to be dewormed, and Danny and Doreen had not yet revealed to him if they understood English.
He’d interviewed Mrs. Bishop by telephone. She was fifty-seven and had raised four children of her own.
None of whom were in jail.
Which was good enough for him.
It hadn’t fazed him that she lived in Ottawa, fifteen hundred miles away, either. He’d paid the short-notice, no-discount airfare to Calgary without blinking.
“It’s mine!” Doreen screamed.
“Isn’t!” Danny yelled back.
Ethan sighed and closed his eyes.
Now they were fighting. In some ways he’d liked it better before they decided to let him know they spoke English.
He leaned back from the sink again and looked down the hall to his bedroom. They were still smack-dab in the middle of his bed, engaged in a furious tug-of-war over his cowboy hat. Didn’t they know a man’s hat was sacred?
“Hey!” he hollered.
Doreen started, and dropped her hold on the hat. She fell on her plump bottom and looked accusingly down the hall at him. Even from here he could see her large blue eyes filling up with tears.
Wringing out the dishcloth with a little more vigor than was absolutely necessary, he said a word that would have given his sister a heart attack, and headed down the hall.
A few minutes later, Doreen tucked under one arm and Danny under the other, Ethan settled on the couch. They snuggled into him, and the opening credits of Toy Story came on.
“How
