Jocelyn (Sewing in SoCal #2) - Sarah Monzon Page 0,4

one-hundred-and-fifty-year legacy—the weight of which I felt squarely on my shoulders.

Doc Reynolds patted the red angus heifer on her hind quarters as he slid his gloved arm from her birth canal. My thumb stroked soothing circles across the expectant mother’s jaw as she mindlessly chewed the cud rolling around in her mouth. She appeared relaxed, uncaring of Doc’s palpatations or the risk her heavy middle put her in.

With one last stroke down her wide forehead, I turned from the heifer toward Doc as he scrubbed at the sink against the wall of the barn. “Well?”

He pressed down on the faucet handle with his forearm and grabbed a towel from the peg. “It’s a good thing you called.”

Of all the times to be right, this time I wouldn’t have minded being wrong.

I squeezed my eyes shut, allowing myself a moment to sag under the stress. But only a moment. Any more and the bend would cause me to snap. Taking a deep breath in, I squared my shoulders and opened my eyes wide. The only way to face any situation, Gran always said.

“The calf is too big, isn’t it?” The possibility had been nagging me for days, ever since we’d separated those who’d be calving in the near future from the rest of the herd. Every breed of cattle on the ranch had been meticulously picked with certain requirements in mind. Natural mothers with the ability to birth calves with little to no assistance being one. Of course, feed efficiency and having a high-quality carcass were top considerations as well.

Doc lifted his Stetson off his head and swiped an arm across his brow, his wiry white hair all akimbo. “’Fraid so.”

“And there’s no way the calf can fit through her pelvis?”

He replaced the sweat-stained brim on his head, the age lines around his eyes smoothing with sympathy. “You know as well as I do that if you attempt to pull that wee thing through the birth canal then mama here will suffer nerve damage.”

I glanced back at the heifer and her wide, doe-like eyes. It seemed silly and illogical to allow attachments to animals raised for the sole purpose of feeding others. The cow’s ultimate end would be a slaughterhouse, but needless suffering beforehand didn’t sit right with me. I respected the cattle and appreciated their sacrifice to sustain life. None of them received names, of course, but neither could I treat them as commodities that didn’t possess hearts beating within their chests.

My unconventional viewpoint was smacked down by the dollar signs flashing in my mind. Doc’s vet bill. The price of the heifer. Potential profit on the calf. Feed bill. Wages. Land taxes. And on and on. Didn’t seem I had a moment to breathe before something else required me to throw money at it.

“I hear wind you have a new group coming in.” Doc picked up his vet tools and sauntered toward his customized pick-up.

I followed him, hooking my thumbs in my belt loops and squinting past the bright sun as I stepped over the barn’s threshold. “In a couple of days.”

A grin stretched across his weathered face. “City slickers, I hear.”

“Seems the wind is mighty talkative these days.” My weight pressed down into my heels.

“I reckon she is.” He hoisted his tools into their designated spots in the professional bed topper. “Corporate bigwigs, though, huh?”

All those dollar signs meant I’d had to do something to keep the family legacy alive. The Thomas family no longer lived in the 1800s, when they’d laid claim to this parcel of earth. We couldn’t keep doing things the way we’d always done them. Not if we wanted to keep our land and our cattle and our heritage. There had really only been two options: sell to the big cattle company buying up all the small operations or diversify. The decision hadn’t been mine alone, though. Thomas family land, Thomas family vote.

But I’d known the outcome of that vote, just as I’d known Doc’s prognosis of the calf before I’d called him. Gran, Nate, and Miriam couldn’t imagine life outside the Double B any more than I could. If sharing our home and heritage meant keeping them, we’d gladly welcome strangers into our life.

So far that plan had looked like women’s weekends away or homeschool groups that wanted to experience a touch of the Wild West and see what cattle drives were like. This would be our first corporate group, but it seemed like we’d all be a good fit for each other.