Since I was five, I had been well acquainted with a man who called himself Robert Johnson. Some children had their imaginary friends, I had Robert J. He was a curious man, preferring his dark, dusty attic to the breezy rooms that made up our modest house. In all the years I had known him, Robert Johnson was still a man of mystery. There were three things I knew about him. The first was that he was a gentleman, the second was that he loved his blues, and the third was that purgatory suited him just fine. I suppose there were many names for a man like Robert Johnson. Ghost, spectre, poltergeist...I preferred friend. He had never once thought to take to haunting the corridor at night, nor had he ever moved any of my things by way of a mean spirited trick; he had been brought up better than that.

Although my father lived with us also, he and the people-shy Robert Johnson had never met. My father was a hard working kind of man, hands callused from ranching and making enough just for us to get by. It wasn’t easy for him to be a single parent. Occasionally, his sister, who hailed from the next town over (a place that was far enough to warrant her visits every week, but not every day), popped in and offered her two cents. We didn’t get visitors much as Seven Acres was a bit out of the way. Aunt Cecie had been the only visitor to the ranch for three years running. As far as I was concerned, she was a formidable woman to be avoided—all angles and bones, floral dresses and sharp words. She also had a penchant for discipline, and was of the firm belief that children should be seen and not heard. It was that kind of belief that often got me into trouble. My father let me run wild and free, so it was not in my nature to be quiet.

Not only had I been a noisy child but a curious one also. It was at age ten, that I first asked Robert Johnson about his life, and why he was the way he was. He had been made an offer too good to resist, he had said. When I asked what he had been offered, the answer was always the same, "An awful lot." At ten, when "just 'cause," was an acceptable answer, "an awful lot," was equally sufficient. I had always been a simple country girl from Hazlehurst, Mississippi, USA and simple country girls from Hazlehurst, Mississippi, USA like their answers simple. Then, as my world burst open and Hudson McCormack barraged his way into my life, “an awful lot,” simply wasn’t enough.

I met Hudson McCormack when I was sixteen. He was the son of the mayor and the local deputy, and so, as far as people went in Hazlehurst, he was one well-connected boy. Seeing as how he had fancy, rich parents to send him to the best school in the state, I had never seen the spoilt brat. Until the summer of ’03.

"Hot, hot, very hot." If I had understood all those make-over shows correctly, then red and bloated was about a great a look as it felt. I fanned myself furiously with my hat. Moving fast out of the sun that was trying, and succeeding, in beating me with its burning rays, I sighed as I reached the shade that our porch was so kindly offering.

"You! Hey, you!" I had a name, and it was nice for people to use that name. "You," certainly wasn’t my name.

I turned around, to be greeted by a lone figure walking up our dusty driveway. "I have a name, you know?" I called out, drawling more than usual. The heat was getting to me.

The lone figure stopped at the first step of our porch. "I don't know it."

I eyed him suspiciously. He clearly didn't come from around here; his accent told me that.

"You're lost." People who ended up here often were lost.

"I’m not." His smile—wait, no, smirk—was grating. It was three parts gloating and one part just plain annoying, like it delighted him to disagree.

"Oh." I wracked my brains. "Why are you here?"

"Haven’t you been waiting for me?"

It sounded like the beginning of a particularly bad pick-up line. "If you mean have I been waiting for you my whole life, then no." Benny the bum had tried that one on me last month. It hadn’t been funny.

His face creased in confusion. "What?"

I was going to explain but thought better, my Southern hospitality kicking in. "Never mind. So what brings you to Seven Acres on a fine day like this?"

"I'm helping with the horses."

His answer made me freeze. "The horses?"

"Yes, the horses. Four legs, one nose, two nostrils, one tail, a mane, make a neighing sound." He smiled.

"I know what horses are." His smirking face said that he was inclined to disagree, even if his mouth didn't. His expression always seemed to be stuck in one mode: amused. It was strange.

He continued anyway. "My father said you were looking for someone."

"Your father?"

"Deputy Sherriff McCormack."

"Oh," seemed like the correct response. It seemed to be word of the day.

"Your father hired me yesterday. Didn't he tell you?" his head tilted.

I was very confused. “A job?” Why, the only job we had going was for a stable boy. Hudson McCormack wasn’t a stable boy. He was some paper pusher in a stuffy lawyer's office, not a stable boy.

“Yeah. A job.” He enunciated each word like I was too stupid to understand his City accent. I really hoped he was joking about the job. I had my summer planned out, and if he was in it, it was not going to be good.

“I’ll...er, I’ll...” Being put on the spot was never a good thing for me. It tended to bring my stuttering out. “My daddy...he... He’s in the barn right there.”

I pointed to the furthest barn, where Daddy was tending to Smokey, our faded green tractor. My father had named it when he was twenty, and twenty years later, it wasn’t hard to see why. Smokey was old, but he was reliable. It was also something that applied to my father.

“You go see him. He’ll sort you out.” I was parched and dying for a drink.

Hudson smiled. "Okay. Hey, thanks...” There was a pause as he wracked his brains. “I don't think I got your name."

I offered him a hand, my smile certainly not as wide and most definitely a lot more forced than his. "Callie, Callie White."

He shook my hand, our eyes locking. "Nice to meet you Callie White." The smirk was still there.

As he turned to walk off into the distance, my mouth couldn't help itself. "What's so funny?" I called, as he just looked back and smiled again.

I never did get an answer.

Heading into the house, where the temperature was certainly more tolerable, rehydration was top of my list. I settled on our sofa with a cool coke.

My skin was sticking to the sofa, which was covered in plastic. It was a compromise my daddy and my aunt had come up with after she had declared the both of us ‘slovenly’ for having TV dinners and bad coordination. Apparently, couch material and food didn’t mix. Personally, I hadn’t seen what was wrong with having a few spills now and then—after all, a couch was designed for comfort, not looks—but my dear aunt Cecie had disagreed.

Aunt Cecie and I often disagreed, particularly on the subject of female influence in my life. I strongly suspected that her not so discreet hints on how having a woman around the house would do me the world of good were attempts at getting my father remarried. To my father, there was only one woman in the world for him, and she had long gone and taken his heart with her. I defended my father, telling her that perhaps her having a man around her house would do her the world of good as she’d have someone else to nag, but that hadn’t gone down so well. Anyway, I didn’t see what was wrong with my upbringing. I was a perfectly happy, healthy girl, and I loved Seven Acres.

I wasn’t the only one who shared that feeling.

“Seven Acres has never been so beautiful.” Robert Johnson—never Robert—walked through a wall, presumably from his attic. I called it his attic, because he’d been so kind as to move up there to give me and my father some privacy since we’d moved in eleven years ago. Occasionally, he’d come down and stretch his ancient legs out a little, but apparently that never helped much.

Robert Johnson, being of the immortal ghost breed, had seen a lot, and as such, was quite wise. But there were times that he was wrong. This was one of them. I snorted, as my shirt rode up and the clammy skin of my back stuck to the plastic. Urgh.

“You don’t think so?” Robert Johnson stroked his chin, making him look every inch the wise man as he perched on the edge of the sofa.

“You try keeping cool in this weather.” Of course, Robert Johnson was a ghost and didn’t feel all the things we mortals did.

“Hmmm.” Robert Johnson looked at me with his deep brown eyes. He got this way sometimes, all quiet and such. I called it his broody time. He called it being old.

“I,” I was cut off as the door to from the porch swung open, and Robert Johnson hastily did his disappearing thing. Asides from his vast knowledge of all things blues, Robert Johnson possessed one other talent: disappearing.

It was, I confess, a surprise to see Hudson McCormack walk in wearing my father’s spare cowboy hat and sporting a pair of cowboy boots. Had he…?

“Were you just talking to yourself?” My mouth made words, but none came out. “Never mind.” He collapsed against the counter separating the kitchen and the lounge. “Drink, Cal.” Hudson was parched, tall, hot and very, very sweaty. I just stared. “Please?” His smile, I suppose, was charming, but it took a more than that to win me over.

I was still just staring. Hudson McCormack... cowboy. It was a frightening thought.

"You've got your hat the wrong way around."

He decided to help himself to a drink in the fridge. I was behind the counter now, my forearms resting on the cool marble top.

There was a sigh of relief as his first swig of Cherryade went down. “Aaah." He adjusted his hat. “Thanks.”

"I take it you found Daddy."

"Yeah." He took another swig. "He’s great, your old man. Very... Southern.” I wasn’t sure if that was high praise or not.

“And Daddy offered you a job.”

“Sure did. Said he was, and I quote, ‘Impressed with my way with horses, even if it did stem from some high-falutin' polo club.’” I took his word for it because that did sound like something my father would say.

“And you’re good with horses?”

“I’m very good with horses.” From Hudson, that sounded like the truth, not a boast. He smiled as I just looked at him, not knowing what to make of this stranger. Sure, he was cute, but that didn’t explain the strange feeling at the pit of my stomach. Something about him put me on edge, and I didn’t like it one bit.

From the looks of it, he had been worked hard. I wondered if he would last. “How were the horses? Did Bolt kick some sense into you?” Bolt was the notorious bad boy of the eight horses my father and I owned. He had a thing for kicking and disliked strangers. If there was one horse that would give Hudson McCormack hell, it was Bolt.

“You’re cute.” The feeling in my stomach intensified. I was most certainly not cute. I had spent all my life trying to not be cute. “To answer your question, no, I didn’t get kicked. Bolt was very sweet.”

I eyed him with suspicion. Bolt sweet? He’d only ever tolerated me, and that was through sheer determination and an obscene amount of sugar cube bribes. I said nothing, letting Hudson finish his drink in peace, deciding to see if he was telling the truth or not.

I checked up on him in the afternoon, watching him croon to the horses as he cleaned their stables. Here, his smirk had evaporated as he looked serene and totally at home. I felt jealous. I understood why we needed him; it was neigh on impossible to keep all eight horses clean and watered single-handedly. I understood why my father had hired him; he was the son of good friends. I understood that it was totally stupid for me to be jealous, but I was.

“Now, here you are. You come runnin’ when you hear some city boy’s looking after your babies.” My daddy was laughing at me, his eyes crinkling up as he snuck behind me.

“Daddy!” While I may not have been a girl’s girl, I was still a daddy’s girl. My complaints with Seven Acres’ newest employee were lodged immediately. "Seriously?” I searched for confirmation as to why Hudson McCormack had been in our kitchen, drinking our cherryade, and frightening the dead daylights out of poor Robert Johnson.

We had a father-daughter showdown in the stables our staring contest determining who was the toughest of the two. I think he let me win.

“You be nice now. That’s Hudson McCormack.”

“I knew that.”

“Well, then you’ll recall he’s mighty good with horses.” There was some vague recollection of that sort of talk. “He was on the polo team at that fancy school of his. Got full scholarship and everything too.”

Well, whoop-de-doo. Polo. Golf on horses. I was unimpressed.

“That still don’t explain why he’s here, when you know perfectly well I wanted an experienced stable person.” Unlike my father, I liked being politically correct. It had been him who had advertised for a stable boy.

“Darling, ain’t no better experience than five years looking after your own horse. Hudson’s got that touch with those animals. His father was right; I ain’t never seen anything like it.”

For the first time in my life, I, Callie White felt the feeling that was jealousy.

“What d’ya mean by that?” I asked.

“I mean, if horses were gonna take over the world, Hudson McCormack would be the boy I’d want on my team.” While daddy was unaware of the state his daughter was in (green-eyed was a good way to describe it), I had no answer to that comment. I stroked Seven’s nose absentmindedly as she nuzzled my hand.

“Well, I’d best get back to Smokey then. Still gotta change that carburettor.” Daddy patted Seven on the neck. She liked that. “Oh and honey, do me a favour, would ya?”

I nodded, my hand running up and down the side of Seven’s snowy face. It was a soothing action to my inner green-eyed monster. “Sure.”

“Show Hudson around, please." It was too late to take it back. Damn.

I sat on an upturned bucket in one of the empty stables, plastering a smile on my face. The moment Daddy had gone out of sight, it dropped. So what if Hudson was blessed with great shoes, and horses loved him? I’d been blessed with Seven Acres. I wouldn’t hate him just because horses liked the funny way he smelt. Besides, I was sure he was a great guy, and come fall, I’d never see him again. He’d disappear back to wherever it was he had come from. I could no longer hear Hudson clanging about in the stables. Presumably, he’d taken one of the horses out to stretch their legs. I hoped it was Blossom. She liked having a good gallop around mid-day.

Retreating to the house once again, I called out to an empty room as I walked through the door. “I’m back!” Immediately, Robert Johnson’s head popped from the ceiling.

“Has that boy gone yet?”

There was the dull thud of glass hitting wood, and then sloshing as a freshly opened bottle of Cherryade hit the floor and spilled over. Hudson McCormack was staring at the translucent head dangling from the painted ceiling. He was shocked.

Robert Johnson swivelled to look at Hudson and then turned back to me.

“Oops.”

Oops indeed.