Free Water and Stone by Dan Glover

right."
    Lorraine Townsend came along less than a year later and changed everything for Rancher Ford. Though the woman wasn't what anyone would call pretty—she seemed more a man than a lady and looked as if she'd run to fat as she grew older—they seemed to hit it off in ways he'd rarely done with any of the local girls.
    And she came from money.
    Despite the fact she was some years his senior, he proposed to Lorraine while necking behind the grand stands that had been erected for the county folk to all come and listen to her father give his Presidential campaign speech. They listened together under those bleachers and when he asked for her hand in marriage, she accepted.
    He didn’t like to imagine making love to Lorraine with the lights on. And though they were married in front of a thousand wedding guests he found discomfort in taking his new wife out in public. Still, when her father saw the shack where they were going to make their matrimonial home he promptly made a gift to them of a half million dollars earmarked to build a new mansion... a regular hacienda.
    By the time their one and only son came along—Billy Ford—Rancher Ford had managed to buy up close to a hundred thousand acres of land along with most of the businesses in Guthrie including the bakery where he once worked after Hank sold out and moved east during a particularly dry and hard drought.
    Some called him lucky and others called him ruthless but to Rancher Ford he merely took advantage of opportunities offered to everyone. He still remembered the old hobo's advice to him. He knew what he wanted and he went out and got it.
    His one regret was not spending time with Church Gutiérrez, his other son. He'd given the mother free use of an old shack out on the frontier edge of his property hoping his wife wouldn't catch wind of his dalliance and if she did she never said so, in words, anyhow.
    When he'd hired the boy's mother, Yani, as part of a pack of migrant workers from Mexico to help around the Triple Six hacienda it was an innocent thing. She was just another worker in a long line of them.
    Early one morning, however, Rancher Ford happened to ride down by the creek searching for a lost cow. Hearing something splashing in the water he dismounted and crept forward in order not to spook what he thought was his wayward animal.
    Yani was bathing while standing up to her knees in the cool water wearing only her panties with her long black tresses wet and cascading over a body far more voluptuous than it appeared beneath the baggy clothes she wore.
    Bending backward to wring the water out of her hair she struck the pose of a goddess, a Venus, perhaps, a girl unspoiled by time or by man, untouchable by all save the divine. Though he wasn’t close enough to see as clearly as he wished, there were some type of strange markings covering her skin which he put off to the reflection of the sun upon water and stone. He'd never know how close he was to being right.
    Standing on the shore in the high brush not wishing to reveal his presence Rancher Ford was immediately and irrevocably frozen by her beauty. He often wondered later why he didn’t notice it right off, but he hadn’t. When the other workers packed up to move on, he found himself asking Yani to stay.
    And she agreed.
    He'd stopped by the shack on an early spring evening for a drink of water. Point of fact was that his canteen was full but while he was riding down the road on his way from checking if the workers had repaired the border fences as they said Rancher Ford happened to notice Yani putting out laundry. Before she was able to hang more than a couple items the rotten clothesline snapped.
    Like a knight riding to the rescue of a damsel in distress he clucked his horse up the lane toward the tiny shack, dismounted, and taking a coil of rope hanging from his saddle he fashioned a new line upon which Yani could hang out her laundry.
    By the time he finished and with the evening still hot he was