Chapter 14

Jay’s turn:

The tractor’s supposed to arrive this morning before nine. Lena and I are up at seven, allowing ourselves an extra hour past the 0600 wake-ups we’d done on the project. The little trailer kitchenette yielded a breakfast of eggs, bacon, biscuits and gravy.

“Lotta breakfast, baby,” Lena warned me.

“Hang on, toodles,” I replied. “Farmer’s breakfast. For a day’s hard work.”

We cleaned up the breakfast mess and were sipping coffee in the still morning air outside the trailer when we saw the pickup truck nose into our drive, towing the tractor behind it. A signature on a form and a credit card swipe and we had a tractor to unload.

Lena and I watched the guy drive away. I turned to her. “Okay, punkin,” I said. “It’s time to learn to drive a tractor.”

“Me?!?”

“You’re the only Lena I know,” I said.

“Noooo, you drive...”

“You need to learn. We got some hot, messy work to do, tearing into those old buildings. I’ll be the guy on the ground. You be the operator.”

The first lesson was using the front end loader to smooth a few rough spots in our driveway. It’s a good place for her to get used to the transmission and the clutch and the throttle, learn a bit about the hydraulics.

Lena’s a fast learner. By late morning we’d dragged clear patches around the collapsed buildings and I’d spotted several timbers from the timber-framed construction that seemed to be good candidates for sale to some people in the antique lumber industry.

From my vantage beside her on the tractor, I had her back up to the smallest pile of detritus. “Okay, now this is entirely different. You’re going to operate the backhoe. First thing we want to do is just reach over as far as we can and curl the bucket into the top layer, and drag it back toward us.”

“I’m nervous.”

“Don’t be. It’s a trashpile right now. If you mess up, it’ll STILL be a trashpile. Take your time. Nobody’s in a hurry.”

Her first attempts were very shaky and tentative and I purred encouragement. She got better.

“Okay. Now here’s what’s gonna happen next. I’m getting over there on the pile and I’m going to wrap a sling around that big timber. When I get clear, I’ll give you a signal and you try to pull it loose.”

The removal of the first sellable timber was a good stopping point for lunch. We did a sandwich each and copious amounts of lemonade. Autumn in Louisiana is still hot.

And back to work. Lena’s confidence in her novice skills increased as the day passed. We had several usable timbers piled up and had pushed the remainder of the debris aside into a burn pile. Actual burning wouldn’t take place until we’d conferred with local forestry, fire, and law enforcement people.

The sun’s dropping below the surrounding treetops was the sign for us to quit for the day.

“Showers,” I said. We were both dusty and sweaty.

“That trailer shower’s soooo tiny,” she replied.

I looked around. Privacy in abundance comes with this location.

“If you don’t mind cold water, we can stand right out here and use the garden hose. Nobody can see us.”

“Cold water will feel good.”

“Deep well. Really cold water.”

“Let me get us some soap and shampoo and towels.”

Okay, this works, but we’re standing in the grass, showering. The cold water is brisk, to say the least. Lena naked in the daylight outdoors is enticing. Next trip to town I need to get a few things to make this idea a little more convenient – something for a floor, a bit of pipe and a valve for a regular showerhead. So we wouldn’t have to do what we did this time – sit on the steps of the trailer hosing off muddy feet.

“Uh, next time maybe we should bring clothes out there with us,” she said. “I have NEVER been naked outdoors like this before.”

“Really?” I said. Then I thought for a second. This IS my Lena, refreshingly unsullied by the shenanigans I suspect most teen girls would’ve seen. “You do it quite well. You’re beautiful in the daylight.”

We made an evening of watching a movie on one of the laptops, sending it to the medium-screened TV the trailer sported.

“Much more than that,” she said, “we might want to think of a satellite dish.”

“Good idea,” I said. “So we don’t get bored, you know...”

Her eyes flashed as she straddled me on the little sofa. “I hope you don’t find THIS boring.”

“Never. Unending magic,” I said truthfully as I peeled her nightshirt up over her head.

She’s right. TV is vastly overrated as a cure for boredom.

With sunset, the evening cooled off enough for us to benefit from opened windows. I don’t know if I like it. I’m kind of used to white noise from various fans blowing, but little zephyrs kept the air stirring in and out of the trailer. I slept.

When I woke the next morning – pain! All the jumping and climbing and twisting and tugging yesterday were making themselves felt today.

A moan from my Lena told me she had similar issues.

Amid mutual groans we managed to face each other, cuddling, for a good morning kiss.

“I should’ve known this would happen,” she said. “Just like the first week of gym in high school.”

“Me too, little one,” I said. “‘Cept it’s been a long time since high school.”

She twisted, grimaced. “Neither of us is out of shape ... darn!”

“Just not used to this stuff,” I said.

“Endorphins. I know how to get us some endorphins.”

She does. Breakfast afterward, her chuckles as she hears my whimpers and grunts.

“Buck yourself up, baby,” she smiled. “You’re the one that said we needed a place in the country.”

We topped off the tractor’s diesel tank with five-gallon cans. That’s going to give us a little break later in the day, driving off to fill them back up.

Lena wasn’t nearly as tentative at the tractor’s controls today. She and I finished erasing the first building. We had a big pile of debris to burn, a few timbers that might make us a few dollars, and some interesting artifacts of the place’s past life as a farm – old bottles, cans, tools, all of which are worth something to somebody.

We went to work on the second pile, another outbuilding, using the same tactics that worked previously. This one was a little more complex, though. The first one had an earthen floor, likely for animals. This one had solid walls and a wooden floor, perhaps a corn bin. The results, however, were identical – pile of debris destined for burning, several saleable timbers, a few artifacts.

Having no deadline to make, when we finished with that building, we stopped, showered amid giggles and gropes, and then hopped in my truck to go get a few things from town.

A trip to a lumber yard got us a few landscaping timbers, some plywood, and various plumbing things. I’m liking the outdoor shower thing enough to want to make it a little bit more of our new lifestyle.

In town, we elected to eat at a little barbecue joint instead of doing something at the trailer and on the way home we stopped and filled the diesel containers.

The next day we attacked the fallen barn. This was the remains of a real ‘working farm’ barn, not one of those cutesie things one sees so often on the properties of people who wish to present an appearance. It was huge. We spent a day pulling bits away from it, getting down to the part where the real timbers were.

In waning light I threw a chain around what was probably a roof beam, snaked it to the tractor’s drawbar, and waved Lena onward. The tractor’s exhaust took on a deep blatting note as it strained under the load. The timber twisted on the chain as she tugged it loose, a beautiful piece of clear pine, rich, silky looking without the benefit of enhancement. And as it turned, I saw letters carved into it.

I trudged along behind it as Lena hauled it to our laydown area where we stacked it on other timbers to keep it clear of the moist ground. As I worked with Lena to put it on the sacrificial timbers we were using to block it up, I could clearly make out the carving.

“Factum Est. November 12, 1854 HRS.“

Older than I thought, but then this area had been settled well before that. I can only begin to imagine what life would have been like then, fields cleared, buildings built, crops worked, all by muscle power.

I waved at Lena, drew a finger across my throat, indicating I wanted her to shut the tractor down, and motioned her over.

“Look,” I said.

“Wow! You think that’s real?”

“Might be. I guess they could’ve gotten it from an older building, but looking at the joinery, I dunno.”

“Means this place is older than you thought.”

“It does.”

“That’s history,” she said. “Before the Civil War.”

“Yep! I wish it hadn’t fallen down. That had to be a magnificent structure.”

Lena looked at me. “It was a barn. Built by people who built it to do a job. I’m sure they got their money’s worth. It wasn’t meant to be a museum piece, you know...”

“I know, but we lose something about the way our predecessors used to live, how they worked...”

“And baby, don’t you think that if they could’ve called up a steel building contractor, we’d be hauling Z-beams around today?”

“I wonder what steel buildings’ll look like in a hundred and sixty years,” I replied.

“I dunno.”

Today’s shower was a little better. I’d rigged us a showerhead and a plywood floor and a privacy screen of pre-fab lattice. It doesn’t stop the sunlight from hitting my wife and heaven help me, she’s beautiful when she’s naked and glistening wet. I commented.

She smiled. “I kinda like it myself – the open air.” She pulled me to her for a kiss. “That’s why I don’t want to clear that treeline along the road and I wanna keep that dogleg in the drive getting in here. Our place. That’s privacy, okay. If I wanna see you walking around naked and you wanna see me walking around naked, there’s privacy for that.”

“You know, I need to tell you again how perfect you are, Lena.”

“I’ll accept that,” she said as she used the chilled mist of the shower to rinse herself. I watched, then she moved aside to let me do the same. I jerked when warm fingers cupped my balls.

Giggle. “I think it’s so interesting how they change. Cold water, they just get all tight. It’s so neat.”