Chapter 4: Construction Zone - Equipment at work

When I woke up in the morning I lay there for a moment, trying to remember if I’d had a dream last night ... or if I had really kissed Sandy? Had she come in to visit me before she went home and had she leaned over close to me, almost as if she was going to kiss my cheek? Had I actually wrapped an arm around her, pulled her even closer, then kissed her on the lips? Had she moaned softly and kissed me back?

Or had it all been a dream?

I’m not sure what the hospital fed me for breakfast, mush of some sort, something that I think was supposed to be masquerading as oatmeal porridge. Anyway, it was something in a bowl, which came along with a tiny glass of milk, cold, soggy toast, and watery, almost tasteless orange juice. I don’t recall getting a cup of coffee or even any tea, but then I wasn’t really thinking about that. I was still puzzling about last night, still wondering if I had just dreamed that scenario, or if the kiss had been real.

My doctor came to see me before nine in the morning and told me I could go home. He also told me that he’d let my mother know right away, but I couldn’t even get dressed before she got there. Oh, I could have put on my underwear and my shirt, even if they were quite dirty, but there was no way I could wear my blue jeans, I couldn’t even get the leg half way up and over my cast. So I hobbled to the lobby on my crutches, and yes, I was wearing a stupid hospital gown with my butt hanging out. All of that, just to phone home in order to make sure Mom brought me something to wear that I could get over the cast. Then I sat on the edge of my hospital bed, waiting impatiently for her to arrive.

Mom was in a great mood when she showed up almost half an hour later. She gave me a hug and said “Hi.” Then handed me a paper bag with my clothes in it and pulled the curtain around my bed. I heard her shift a chair and sit down outside.

“We almost had a mutiny on our hands this morning,” she announced.

“Oh, what happened?” I said as I yanked on my clean underwear and then my shorts.

“Well, Beth and the twins started to work in the chicken coop. First they pulled out the roosts and got mites all over them, just like you expected. Beth had warned the girls, but I guess they thought she was just kidding. You should have seen them dance and squirm.”

“And that was the mutiny?” I grinned, pulling on my shirt, but having trouble putting it on with my lower arm and hand in the cast.

“Unh uh that was minor, Beth thought she’d be nice to the girls, so she said they could take turns wheeling the manure out in the wheelbarrow while she and the other twin would load them up. I guess she thought that would give each girl some time in the fresh air.”

“And... ?” I said waiting for her to continue.

“Well, last winter must have been a good year for manure, at least if smell means anything,” Mum chuckled. “Are you decent yet?”

“I’m having trouble with these small buttons on my shirt, since I only have one good hand,” I complained, hopping out through the curtain on my good foot. “Could you help?”

“Sure, but back to the story, now that I can see your face,” Mom grinned. “Beth got about three or four good fork fulls of chicken dung into a wheelbarrow and all three of the girls came running outside, almost green. Your Dad almost hurt himself, he was laughing so hard. I’ll admit I wasn’t much better.”

“Oh boy,” I grinned and then I thought for a minute and I sighed. “I bet they’re mad at me huh?”

“I don’t think so, you see your Dad didn’t tell them that cleaning out under the chicken roosts was your idea. I think he put across the idea that the three of us felt that as a punishment for swiping your car for a joy ride they should do the next job on your job list and that just happened to be what they drew. Actually, Carissa held the jar, Corinna drew the slip, and Beth read it aloud to everyone. You should have seen her face,” Mom grinned.

“Huh, out of all the jobs in my jar, how did you arrange that?”

“Last night I and your dad stayed up a bit late,” she chuckled. “I poured all the old job slips out of the jar and we wrote up an equal number of new slips.”

“And all of them were cleaning out the chicken coop, right?” I grinned.

“Unh huh, we sort of cheated,” she nodded as she did up my last button. “Ready to go home?”

“And how! I’m starved.”

“Not to mention that you want to taunt your new slaves huh?” she laughed as we left the hospital.

“Actually, no,” I grinned. “I’m going to tell them how to do it and not get quite so woozy from the stink.”

“Your Dad already showed them that, just to get them back on the job. He has your homemade fan installed, so it’s blowing fresh air in the front window and he added another fan inside the chicken coop, which is blowing the stench out the door.”

“You mean you guys knew about that?” I laughed. “Can’t a guy get away with anything?”

“Not much,” she snorted, as she walked slowly so I could keep up with her as I hobbled along on my crutches. “I brought your car, I thought you’d want to see if you could drive it safely. Since your car is an automatic, and you broke your left foot, your Dad and I thought it should be okay.”

“Do you guys read my mind?” I laughed.

“Well, your Dad told me about the valentine, and about the red-headed nurse, so we thought you might want to get around a little bit.”

“Not one secret! It’s gotten so that I don’t have one darn secret in the whole world,” I mumbled as I got into my car.

Mom just laughed as she got into her side. I took it easy driving home because I was feeling out what I could do and what I shouldn’t do. My foot was okay, because it was just sitting still. It was my hand that bothered me, since it hurt when I tried to use it to do anything that required me to close my fingers tightly. On the way home I told Mom that I had a date for the afternoon and she snorted with laughter.

“Your Dad was right huh?” she grinned.

“Sorta,” I grinned back at her. “Only the red head isn’t a nurse, not yet, but I think she wants to become one.”

“And what’s her name? Is this the same one who found you when you were so sick and did all the right things? What was it Beth said her name was? Sandra something or other and she’s Scottish?”

“Yes, it’s Sandy, Sandy McAdam,” I sighed. “The trouble with small towns is that everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

“That’s not really a bad thing,” Mom said. “By the way, if you’re going out with Sandra, you’ll be around the town’s other set of twin girls. She has twin sisters. That’s how Beth knows Sandra, her twin sisters, Jean and Jess McAdam are in Beth’s class at school.”

“Small town again, I find a nice girl and her sisters are in the same class as my sister is,” I sighed.

Mom just chuckled and since we were just turning into the farm, she pointed. One of the twins was just wheeling a load of chicken dung out of the chicken house and dumping it in a pile outside.

“We need a camera,” I grinned at Mom. “We need a permanent record of what they look like.”

“That would be mean,” Mom said.

It would have been perfect though. There was Corinna, her hair done up in a red polka-dot bandanna, wearing a sloppy red chequered shirt, blue bib overalls, black gum boots, and wheeling a wheelbarrow load of chicken manure. She noticed me and called out to the other girls inside the coop, so in a moment the other two came out, then all of them came toward us.

“No fair getting that stink on either Chris or me,” Mom said when they were all about twenty feet away. “I don’t want to shower right now and Chris can’t shower often in those casts.”

“Aww, Mom,” Beth protested. “He could at least share the stink with us, especially since we got stuck doing his dirtiest job.”

“Well, if someone hadn’t been so darn anxious to swipe his car for a joy ride, maybe they wouldn’t have been doing it and could have pinched their noses as he went by instead,” Mom smiled her ‘told ya so’ smile.

“Actually it goes back further than that,” Corinna sighed.

“Yeah,” Carissa added. “If we hadn’t wanted to ride the horses so much, he wouldn’t have got hurt.”

“We’re sorry about that,” Beth said emphatically. “And we’re sorry about the car too.”

“Well, I’ll forgive you for both things ... when the chicken coop is cleaned out and the manure from it is spread,” I grinned. “Now, I’m starved and Mom said I can have a snack.”

“And we don’t even get a dang hug,” I heard one twin grumble as I turned and maneuvered toward the house on my crutches.

“Well, you stink,” The other twin answered.

“By now, we all do,” Beth added, giggling loudly. “We just can’t smell it because our noses are burned out by the stronger stench inside the poop coop.”

I didn’t really pay much attention for a minute or two, I was too busy trying to get around on those darn crutches and into the house, but Mom noticed what was going on. The girls had decided I wanted to be left alone and they had gone back to the job at hand.

“You know if those girls had to, they’d do okay on a farm,” she announced as we went into the house.

“Yeah, if they had a babysitter like Beth to show them the ropes.”

“Oh come now, Chris, don’t you think you’re being awfully hard on them?”

“Mom, they’d have to learn so much,” I sighed as I plopped onto a kitchen chair.

“Well, I did too,” she laughed. “After all, I was hired as a baby sitter, cum nurse, cum housemaid when I came to live here.”

“Yeah, but that was different,” I sighed deeply. “I mean...”

“Hah,” she interrupted, and surprised me by laughing. “Not all that different. Will waffles do for something to eat?”

“Sure Mom, as long as there are bacon and eggs to go with them. I’m starved and need protein,” I grinned. “Actually toast would be easier than waffles and probably faster, wouldn’t it?”

“Mmmph,” she growled. “Here I wanted to give you a special breakfast and all you want is bacon and eggs.”

“Mom, your bacon and eggs are special,” I grinned, “and you’re changing the subject on me. You started to tell me what happened when you first came to the farm.”

Mom got a distant look in her eyes and she smiled, but her face had a tinge of sadness in it, I knew the subject was dredging up memories of Kate, Dad’s first wife. So Mom sighed deeply as she began to cook.

“If anyone deserves to know the whole story, I guess you do,” she said in a quiet voice. “Wil’s mother Kate was a wonderful woman and I loved her like my sister, in fact perhaps even more than a sister in many ways. After all we were almost the same age, as well as cousins who’d grown up close, something like you and Tom. When she got sick after Wil was born, I volunteered to come and look after her. What I didn’t realise was that I was taking a step that would change my life forever.”

She paused and I think the image of her standing there at the stove with a sad, sweet smile on her face will be etched in my memory until the day I die. She might have stood there for one minute, or ten, I don’t know, time seemed to stop for me, then she seemed to quiver and she shook her head slightly.

“Sorry, I was daydreaming,” she said shortly.

Then as she began to slip bacon strips into the skillet, she began to talk in a quiet, nostalgic tone. “When I came here, I was the ultimate town kid, the complete city slicker. I knew nothing about a farm, but I desperately wanted to make Kate’s life easier. She was never really in a lot of pain, thank goodness, but she was so terribly weak and lethargic that I had to help her with everything. At first I only stayed in the house and looked after Kate and the household chores, but as time passed that changed.”

“At the same time, your Dad was such a wonderful husband to her. He would work himself almost to the point of exhaustion all day, trying to get all the things around the farm done. But, the moment he walked into that bedroom to be with Kate, you could see his shoulders lift and his face change. He never let her see the struggles he was facing, trying to salvage this farm from years of neglect. He asked me not to let her know how hard he was working either, but I think she knew.”

“Kate used to encourage me to help him a bit when I was done the things around the house. I think she asked him to take the time to show me how to do things too, but to let me try on my own first,” she paused and looked at me with a smile.

“I must have tried his patience to the max. Goodness, when I came here, I didn’t know how eggs were laid or how to milk a cow. In fact it used to embarrass me terribly to see someone actually milking a cow. For some reason the idea of sitting down and squeezing milk out a cow’s teat was enough to set me off into a state of giggles like you wouldn’t believe,” she laughed. “Somehow it was embarrassing and yet tantalising at the same time. I knew that the sexual connotation was just in my head, but it still got to me.”

“Sexual connotation? I don’t get it?” I questioned.

“Typical farm boy,” she snorted. “Think about it. A cow’s teats correspond to a woman’s nipples and her udder corresponds to her breasts. Actually if it wasn’t for my weird hangup about milking cows, you might never have been born.”

“What?” I said in surprise, staring at her.

“Just wait,” she held up her hand. “I need to explain a few other things before I get to that part of the story.”

“Okay,” I just shrugged my shoulders, watching her flip the bacon to one side of the pan and drain off most of the bacon fat as she talked.

“So, back to my memories of first getting involved with the farm and all the chores,” she smiled again. “Before I first came here, I’d bought everything at a store, even vegetables. When I came here and had to actually look after a garden as well as try to look after Kate and the baby, along with the cooking, and the cleaning, and the laundry, and everything else, I felt completely overloaded. Then to have Kate suggest that in my ‘spare’ time I’d really be helping your Dad if I did a few of the easier chores, I think I was almost at the point of giving up. I know now that Kate had no idea how much extra work a baby and an invalid can add, actually neither she nor I did then. Looking back on it, I haven’t a clue how I did all that I did, but somehow I managed.”

“Toward the end of that year, I was looking after everything in the house and doing most of the barnyard chores too. Then at the very last, Kate had to go into the hospital and I still did all those things, but on top of that I made sure I had the time to drive into town to see her once a day.”

Mom paused then, since she was putting my eggs and bacon on a plate and setting them in front of me. As she handed me toast and a cup of coffee, I saw tears in her eyes, but she sat down and continued her story.

“One morning, I talked your Dad into taking me in to see Kate. When we got there, she looked so tiny and frail that I knew she wasn’t going to last long, but then she saw your Dad and me. Her eyes lit up and she smiled, then she almost floored me. She said: ‘Hey, it’s my whole family at once for a change; my son, my hubby, and my hubby’s next wife too.’ I was carrying Wil and I darn near dropped him,” Mom chuckled and it seemed strange because her eyes were still brimming with tears. “Your Dad’s and my reaction must have been classic. I mean, I’d been trying to fight off my attraction to him for months and I found out afterward that he had been fighting the same feelings for me. Now you have to understand we hadn’t let it out in the open at all, not even to each other, but Kate realised what was going on.”

I had stopped eating and was staring at her. “You mean she...”

Mom smiled and nodded slowly. “Yes, she pushed us together at the last. She never said anything more about it, but after she had said that, it was on both Willard’s and my mind. Actually, when we got back here, it seemed to me that every time I looked his direction he was just turning away from looking at me.”

“We still had the farm to look after as well as everything else, but with Kate in the hospital there actually was less for me to do. Even after taking the time to go see Kate in the hospital that day, we were done the chores earlier than usual that night. We only had the milking left, but you know cows, they have a schedule of their own, so we actually came inside to have a coffee break before milking. Well it was going to be a coffee break,” she chuckled.

“Actually, your Dad poured himself a glass of your Grampa Bender’s ‘home squeezins’ and offered me one too. For once I took him up on it and I had a little glass, but I thinned it down with water. To make a long story short, it didn’t take long before I got up the nerve to say something about what Kate had alluded to, about us getting together and it was a trigger. What each of us felt came pouring out and, before either of us realised what was going on, suddenly we were in each other’s arms. Later when we were milking the cows, I actually got the giggles and when he asked me why, I told him about my hang-up about milking cows. I guess the combination of that and the drink we’d had, in addition to Kate’s opening the subject earlier ... he’d been standing right behind me and his hands came to rest on my shoulders, then...” she sighed and paused, her face a study of contrasts. “We did finish milking the cows, but we never ate supper that night.”

“It was strange, but the fact that we’d revealed that we cared for each other made life both easier and harder for the next while. You see Kate only lived for a few days after that, her last words to me were that she loved me and that she wanted me to ‘look after Wil and Willard.’ There I was, feeling guilty about having made love to your father and not daring to admit it to her, while she was telling me in her own way to do exactly what bothered me the most.”

“After she died, I just fell apart. I admit it. In a couple of days I was a mess and your Dad wasn’t much better. By the time the funeral was over, we were walking zombies. Your Granny and your Uncle Leonard came over to spend a few days in order to help us out. That meant both your Dad and I had even more time on our hands. They stayed for about two weeks which sort of let us get our feet back on the ground, but you couldn’t say we were back to normal, not in any way. For the next while, it was almost as if we blamed ourselves for Kate’s death. Or you could turn that around, we were blaming her death on the fact that we cared for each other. We both were walking around in a cloud of guilt.”

“To make matters worse, my period didn’t come and it didn’t come. Finally, when I was about a month late, I went over and talked to your Aunt Alice and told her the whole story. There I was feeling guilty and she started to grin like a darn Cheshire cat. In short order she had Wil and me in the car and we were on the way to see a doctor. Even if the doctor wasn’t busy, I still don’t know how she got me in to see him so fast,” Mom laughed almost sadly.

“Not two hours later, I knew I was pregnant with you and I knew that I had to come home and tell your Dad that I was pregnant, but I didn’t really want to have to do that. Your Aunt Alice knew what kind of problem I was going to have, so when she drove me home, she walked right up to your Dad, looked him in the eye and said ‘All right, you’ve gotten this sweet innocent little gal pregnant, now what are you going to do about it?’ I just stared at the two of them and your Dad didn’t know what to do or what to say. He just stood there gawking back at the two of us with his mouth wide open,” Mom sighed. “Twenty minutes later Alice had half of your Dad’s family and half of my family sitting around the kitchen table making marriage plans. Two months after that we got married.”

“You know, I just had a thought; at that time I wasn’t much older than the twins are now,” she smiled. “So, I think your assumption that the twins would be lost on a farm has holes in it. In fact after these few days that they’ve had with us now, they’d have a big advantage if they had to go through what I went through.”

“Maybe,” I sighed as I polished my plate clean with the last bit of toast. “But somehow, I don’t think they’ll ever end up on a farm.”

“That may be, but I think that’s going to be a matter of who they decide to marry rather than anything else. You do realise that both of them think you’re the best thing since sliced bread, don’t you?”

“Oh Mom,” I just sighed softly.

Mom held up a hand and grinned at me. “Your father told me about the Valentine and about your Empire State Building analogy. Do me a favour and forget both of those ideas as best you can. I know that you’ve met another girl too, so that complicates things, but I’d like you to at least let the twins become friends.”

“Mom, their idea of friendship right now...” I fell silent and she just grinned even wider.

“They do seem rather physical, don’t they?” she laughed. “You do realise that’s partially because of their biological age don’t you?”

“Biological age?” I frowned.

“Their bodies are primed and ready for motherhood,” she smiled. “Unfortunately, I think their parents have sheltered them from reality far too much. You should have heard the questions they asked late yesterday afternoon and you’d understand what I mean. In actual fact I’m extremely glad they came out here to the farm when they did.”

“What happened yesterday?” I asked.

“Oh, one of Beth’s mares was in season and Beth let your stallion cover her,” Mom actually giggled. “I’m glad no men were around, Beth and I had our hands full trying to explain everything to the twins.”