OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)

Chapter 52: Ruminating (Garrison) -- WARNING! Offensive/Racist Language

Garrison's head lifted, and he realized his thoughts had again strayed off from his responsibilities. He scowled an unspoken question at Jorge, who'd interrupted him.

"It's your wife, Boss. She done gone crazy."

Garrison immediately veered his buckskin away from the herd and toward the chuck wagon.

Of course she had

To his relief, Elizabeth had not in fact gone pure crazy. He had, unfortunately, seen crazy. This was not it.

She was just being Elizabeth.

This afternoon, that meant waving a ladle at Lee, whom she'd apparently treed onto the driver's seat of the chuck wagon. The mules being unhitched, she had little trouble hopping the wagon tongue whenever the redhead tried to escape the off-side, so he was stuck.

Lee's nose bled copiously.

The two of them had an audience of more than just the two invalids, Amos sitting up on his bedroll and Clayton standing. Schmidt had stopped preparing dinner to watch, and Shorty stood farther back with his arms crossed. Romero sat a black horse from his string—a gelding he'd left to replace some time back—and grinned at the goings on as if he were watching a prizefight.

Jacob reined in his buckskin and considered who to address first. Eventually, he went with Lee. "Get down."

"No, sir!" As annoying as Lee had gotten over the last month, he'd never directly disobeyed an order. Garrison felt his jaw set and his brows lower.

"She'll hit me again!" Blood from Lee's nose stained the front of his shirt.

Garrison considered his little wife. "She's got a ladle."

"That ladle hurts!"

Romero laughed, and Lee glared at him.

Garrison turned to the wife. "Elizabeth, put down the ladle."

She did not even turn to face him. The arch of her back and set of her shoulders were something to behold, even in boy clothes. "Not until he apologizes!"

Ah. Now they were getting somewhere. Garrison raised his gaze back to Lee.

"Nossir! I ain't done nothin' wron--ouch!" Elizabeth had taken advantage of the redhead's distraction to whack him on one foot with the cooking implement. He threw himself back, so that all of him now balanced on the driver's seat, even his boots.

Garrison had driven cattle all the way to California with fewer troubles than he'd seen in the last twenty four hours. Not including the bounty hunter.

In a well-practiced move, he shook loose his loop, tossed it over his wife's head, and jerked it back at just the right moment to cinch her arms to her side.

"Hey!" she protested.

"Hay is for horses," he chided. "C'mere."

"What if I don't want to?"

He wasn't about to throw her and pig-tie her hands and feet with two wraps and a hooey. Not with her in the family way as she was. But Lee was able to scramble down the other side of the chuck wagon and back away to safety, all the same.

Garrison stopped him by demanding, "What is it you ain't done."

He also shook his lasso to loosen the loop. It fell to Elizabeth's feet, and she stepped primly out of it, glaring daggers at him.

Amos said, "Ain't nothin', Mr. Garrison." Or he tried to. His voice weren't strong, and he started coughing afore he finished. Elizabeth might have brought him back to life, but he still had some healin' to do.

"He kicked dirt at Amos!" accused Elizabeth. "And then he called him the n-word!"

Some days, she made even less sense than usual. "Plenty of words start with an n."

Lee shook his head. "All I said was nigger!"

She'd hit the boy with a ladle for that? Confused, Garrison said, "Amos is a nigger."

He'd seen Elizabeth look at him in many different ways, over the last few months. But he'd never seen her face drain of color, her gaze go dull, like she did at that moment. She shook her head. "No. Don't say that."

Why? Garrison looked at Amos. "Amos, you mind me callin' you a nig--"

"Don't!" Elizabeth looked from him to the old man, almost in tears, even as Amos insisted he didn't mind. "I don't like that word!"

"How can you not like a word?" demanded Jacob. That seemed like... like not liking the word wagon, or the word coffee.

"I don't fucking know," she challenged, and planted her hands on her hips. "You tell me."

He scowled down at her – but he had to admit, to himself anyhow, that she'd made her point. Or she would have, if anyone were allowed to use the f-word in proper company, or if anybody minded the word nig--

He stopped himself. The n-word.

"I'll make a deal," offered his wife. "I will stop using the f-word if you and the guys stop using the n-word. It means something terrible, where I come from. It hurts me to hear it."

Garrison leaned off his horse some, bracing his forearm on his thigh. "You will stop usin' the f-word anyhow, Mrs. Garrison. Told me you would. Leastwise, upwind of folks."

"And you will stop using the n-word," she insisted. "In any wind. Because you don't want to hurt me. Do you?"

It annoyed him that she would even ask. "I do not."

She nodded, as if that settled the matter. Maybe it did.

Garrison said, "Clayton, did Lee hit Mrs. Garrison back?"

Lee went so pale, his freckles stood out on his face like flies in buttermilk, and he began to stammer.

Lucky for him, Clayton said, "He didn't, Boss. He just kept trying to duck her."

Good enough. "Lee, you get yerself back to work."

"Yessir, Boss." And the redhead skedaddled for a horse. Any horse.

Romero rode away as well, the entertainment over.

Elizabeth scowled at him in a far less-than-saintly manner. "But he kicked dirt at Amos!"

"Dirt never killed nobody."

But he suspected that was only the start of the ramifications from her miracle work.