On Her Way Home by Sara Petersen

Author:Sara Petersen [Petersen, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

The day moved along rapidly like the fast click of a train down the rail lines. This afternoon, Mac was taking the whole family to the town’s celebration marking thirty years since its establishment. There was to be a community picnic with games, contests, and delicious food, followed by music and a dance later in the evening.

Jo had rushed through all her chores this morning, except the chore of bottle-feeding two calves that were in the back pen. She thoroughly enjoyed that chore, sharing it with Sam. Every morning for the last week, they had laughed and played with the two greedy calves while they shoved, slurped, and slobbered over the bottles of milk. Not even the excitement of a trip to town and an afternoon free of work could entice Jo to speed up the pleasurable morning in Sam’s company. Every day she fell more in love with him and his mussed downy hair and humorous antics. This morning, giggling and screaming, he had run around the stall, trying to avoid being licked to death by the anxious calves, and the whole scene was delightful to Jo, especially when he tripped in the hay and the calves lapped him up like buttermilk. Kirby walked in on the scene, and hamming up his acting, Sam crawled across the hay, his eyes shiny and playful. “Hep me, Kirby, hep me, the calves are getting me,” he cried, while making croaking sounds and rolling his eyes back in his head for effect. Jo was impressed and amused by his acting skills, and the chore had taken longer than usual, as Sam perfected his performance.

After lunch she had the responsibility of fixing up the pigpen and finding the two wily pigs that had escaped during the night. Finding them was the easy task, whereas getting them back to the pen proved chaotic torture. They had been wallowing in a mud hole created by a year round spring at the edge of the field and hadn’t been eager to leave it. The stupid animals would snort and squeal, running on their stubby legs in all directions through the muck until they got tired. Then they would plop on their pink backsides waiting until Jo caught up with them. When she did, they would squeal and snort, and start the whole ridiculous chase all over again. After pursuing them for an hour, Jo was hot, puffing, and furious. Adopting a better strategy, she filled a pail with oats and bribed them back to the pen, one handful at a time. Shutting the pen gate, she glared at her fat nemeses, picturing them as delicious bites of bacon and ham.

After the pigs were wrangled, Jo rode out to locate a big black bull, the one she’d had a near miss with on the cattle drive. Next week, they were going to bring him and another bull closer to the house “for a little sport,” as Mac had put it, and “for breeding,” as Kirby had clarified, to her extreme embarrassment.

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