Chapter 11: Ice Days

Elena ate Loretta's breakfast at the kitchen table in her long black coat.

Eggs. Bacon. Biscuits and gravy. A jar of peach preserves Loretta had put up in August.

I sat across from her and ate everything.

Elena watched every forkful.

"The Bennetts have been very kind," she said in Spanish. "Don't make them watch you do that."

I buttered another biscuit.

Loretta didn't speak much Spanish. But she spoke enough of tone.

"Something wrong with my cooking?" she asked Elena.

"It's delicious. Her Majesty has a schedule of meals, that's all. For the photographs."

"Ain't no photographs out here, honey. Just cows." Loretta put another biscuit on my plate. "And the cows don't care what she weighs."

Clyde, at the end of the table, choked on his coffee.

Elena put her fork down and didn't pick it up again.

The bunkhouse was a long low building behind the barn with six cots and a woodstove.

Loretta gave it to Elena, the pilot and my guard captain, along with a stack of quilts and a coffee can of kindling.

"Bathroom's in the house," she told Elena. "Knock first."

The roads were sheets of glass.

The radio said the power was out across three counties. Nobody was driving anywhere until the sun did its work.

So I worked.

Clyde gave me a pair of his father's old work gloves and a hatchet.

We drove the flatbed out across the frozen pasture with hay in the back, slow, the chains crunching.

At every water trough, the ice was three inches thick.

Cattle stood around each one, bawling, steam coming off their backs.

Clyde showed me how to swing the hatchet into the ice, then break the pieces and pull them out with my gloved hands.

The first trough took me ten minutes.

By the sixth trough, I was faster than he was.

"Show-off," he said.

"I'm bigger than you. I swing harder."

"That's what I like about you," he said, and threw a chunk of ice at my boots.

I threw one back.

It hit him square in the chest, and he staggered back, laughing, with his hands up.

In the afternoon, Loretta stood in the corral with a coiled rope and a straight back.

"Every woman on this place has learned to rope," she said. "Don't see why a queen gets out of it."

She stood behind me and put the loop in my hand.

"Elbow up. Wrist loose. You're throwing a hula hoop, not a punch."