Chapter 1

My name is William Walker Garrett and this is my story of how I came to know and fall in love with a girl by the name of Honey.

That’s her real name too, not a nickname.

I laughed at her, hurting her feelings the first time we met, because I thought she was joking with me. When I saw her face looking like she was about to cry, I felt lower than a pile of worm turds.

I don’t know if worms even shit, but if they do, that’s how low I felt.

“Honey Bee Sweet.” She told me proudly with a big smile that day.

Let me go back just a bit and tell you why I’m here in Northwest Iowa anyway.

My Mom divorced my Dad cause he used to yell and threaten her, and me too. I was afraid of him, to tell you the truth. I had been a skinny kid since I can remember and he used to tell me that I would never amount to anything.

I saw him slap my Mom one day and I flew into him like I was a bulldog ... of course he slapped me all the way across the room, knocking my glasses off and breaking them. When I landed against the wall I was determined right then to do something about being a skinny kid.

Mom had to buy me some more glasses and I felt bad about that, but she told me she was proud of me for standing up to someone who was a bully.

I saw an ad in an old magazine about how a skinny kid could become a big healthy boy and not have sand kicked in his face at the beach by the bullies.

I cut that ad out and laid it on my dresser ... just the thought of ordering something that would make me big and strong, made me feel better about myself.

I never did send that ad off to buy what ever it was that Charles Atlas, the strongest man in the world, had to offer.

I did see a Bull Worker at a yard sale a few weeks later, and bought it for $1.50.

It was still in the box and had all the instructions too. I ran like bat out of hell back to my room to look it over.

I read all the instructions and looked at each of the drawings of how to do the many different exercises. I had pictures in my head of being big and strong over night.

The Bull Worker is a spring loaded – shiny steel cylinder which has small plastic coated cables along both sides, connected to the ends, and when you pull the cables out, like pulling a bow string, it compresses the cylinder’s inner spring.

Simple enough I thought and pulled the cables the first time.

It must be locked someway ... I couldn’t move it. I did finally make the thing compress a little, and over the next three years, I spent every free minute of my time in my room pulling on that Bull Worker in some way or another.

I was going through a growth spurt, Mom called it when my legs seemed to outgrow my jeans overnight.

“Billy you sure are growing like a weed and you’re getting muscles all up and down your arms and chest too.” I remember her telling me, but when I looked in the mirror, all I could see was a tall skinny kid with a big nose and long hair.

When Mom divorced my Dad and he left town. Mom said he went to California to live. I never saw him again. He had to send the child support checks to the court so the money was deposited into an account in my name.

I still had my three friends Tim, Paul and Butch – who were all as skinny as me, but not as tall. We never played sports because we didn’t want the other kids teasing us about being so skinny. The three of us had kinda drifted together because we didn’t fit in with the girls or boys our age.

We would spend hours just walking and talking about things we knew nothing about, and we would throw rocks at tin cans down by the garbage dump.

I got to where I could throw a rock and hit a tin can nearly every time. One day Tim lined up ten of them up on an old couch that had been dumped there, and I hit all ten of them, one at a time, never missing.

I had found something I was good at and kept throwing and hitting my target every time.

I would wind up and throw, like the baseball pitchers I saw on TV, throwing as hard as I could, tearing a hole in the can when I hit it.

Tim told me one day that I should play Little League Baseball and I told him that they would never let me play, I was too tall and skinny.

I was sixteen years old when Mom and I left Texas, moving to Iowa to live on my Granddad’s farm with him. I’ll be seventeen the middle of December.

My Mom’s Mother had a died a few years earlier and we had gone back for the funeral. That was the second time in my life for me to meet my Granddad.

Granddad had fallen off a combine while harvesting corn, and broke his back. This had happened a year before Grandma died, and Mom took her vacation time and we went to spend two weeks there, helping my Grandma get him back and forth to the doctor.

He was all stooped over and could never even look up. His back was still humped and his head was always looking down, even when he walked with his cane.

I can look back now and remember him as he walked, all stooped and his back hurting so bad there were tears in his eyes – but he never once complained.

Mom told me when her Mom died, that the extra strain on her helping her Dad is what had finally killed her.

My Mom was strong like that, she could see things that I could never see and she always took time to explain things to me too.

So anyway, we took off again to go see how her Dad was doing now that Grandma was gone. We got to Iowa in late spring just after school let out for the summer in Texas.

Mom told me that her Dad wasn’t going to be able to take care of himself much longer.

It never really sank into my mind what she was saying until one day she told me to sit down, that she wanted to talk to me. We sat at Granddad’s kitchen table, and she looked sad but determined.

Mom had made the decision to quit her job at the bank back in Texas and we were going to move to Iowa and live on Granddad’s farm, to take care of him.

Then it sunk in real fast, and I felt like my safe little world I had become so comfortable in was coming to an end.

I didn’t have but three friends in the whole world and they all lived in Texas. I’d never get to see them again because Mom was going to leave me in Iowa while she went back to quit her job, get a moving company to load our stuff and bring it all back here to Iowa.

As I sat and listened to Mom talk, I could feel the tears in my eyes, but what’s worse ... I could see Mom’s big tears run down her face as she talked slow and steady to me.

“It’s hard on me too, Billy ... but I have no choice, I promised my Dad I would never let him live in a nursing home. I can’t go back on my word. You and I both will like it here once we make new friends. You’ll see and you’ll be in a smaller school so you’ll meet lots of new friends.”

“I’ll take care of Granddad Mom. You go back and get all our stuff moved up here. Would you please go by and tell Paul, Tim and Butch, I said goodbye.” I was about to really cry, but Mom gave me one of her rare hugs and said she would.

“Thank you Billy, for stepping up and helping me like this. We’ll be alright, you’ll see. I know you’ll take good care of Granddad while I’m gone.”

Mom was gone a little over a week, and in that time, I learned a lot about taking responsibility. I learned to cook breakfast for Granddad and me ... how to cook his eggs just like he liked them without breaking the yellow and letting it run all over the skillet. I liked my bacon just like he did, cooked crisp, not hard, but all the fat meat done.

I didn’t know how to make biscuits so Mom bought us a lot of canned biscuits before she left. Granddad fussed at first about not liking canned biscuits ... then I told him I could try to make him some homemade biscuits ... and he quit fussing.

I helped him in and out of bed and into his wheelchair. Once he was in that chair, he could go all over the house, even use the bathroom by pulling himself up on the rails in the bathroom.

He and I never really talked much, but I guess he was about the smartest man I ever knew, now that I look back. When he did tell me something or when I would ask about something, he could tell it so that I knew exactly what he was saying.

Lot’s of times we just sat on the front porch and looked across the fields at all the corn, waving when somebody would drive by and blow the horn. I felt like I was privileged just to do that with him.

One day just before Mom was to be back, we sat out there after breakfast and Granddad told me that he didn’t want his farm to be sold when he died.

“Billy I know you don’t know the first thing about farming, and it’s hard to learn in a short time, but I’d really like to know that you’d take this farm and make it your home one day. If you think you’d ever do that, I want you to tell me now.”

“Granddad, I’ve never even been on a farm except this one. I like it out here where it’s so peaceful and quiet. I’ve never had but three friends all my life that really mattered, so it’s not like I’m giving up a lot. If you’re sure about this and you don’t think I’d mess up all you worked for, then I think I would do my best and hire some good help and keep it going for you.”

“Billy, all you got to do now days is find a good farmer to rent it to. You don’t have to farm the land yourself ... that is unless one day you wanted to.”

“Then I can do that Granddad.”

“I feel better now Billy. You and your Mom’s all I got left, and I don’t want to lose all this. It belonged to my Dad and his Dad before that.”

“Thank you Granddad ... I’ll take care of it.”

We shook hands and never even told Mom about the conversation we had. One day when Mom took him to the doctor up in Council Bluffs, he went to see his lawyer too and made the changes in his will, that we’d talked about. He told me when he got back what he had done and we never mentioned it again.

The man that had rented Granddad’s farm had a hired hand that came by once a day and milked the cow for Granddad, when she hadn’t gone dry they called it.

I would be out at the barn every morning, rain or shine, cold or hot, when Gus got there. He took up a lot of time with me and showed me how to milk a cow so she wouldn’t have an udder full of milk.

I will never forget the first time I took hold of a warm cow’s teat and squeezed as I pulled down like Gus showed me.

I had jacked-off a few times and it felt almost natural to me.

I squirted a stream of warm cow’s milk right in my own face, the first time.

Gus just grinned and told me to aim at the bucket next time.

I got to where I could milk as good as he did, and I loved to squirt milk right in the old barn cat’s face as she looked at me licking her face.

‘Stinky’ as Granddad called her, was black as coal except for a white streak down the middle of her back like a skunk. She got to where she would open wide and I would squirt milk in her the mouth.

I took over the milking from Gus before school started and he’d stop by to check on me once in a while.

One morning just before school was about to start, Gus came by and asked, “Billy have you met your neighbors down the road, to the west?”

“No, I haven’t met anyone up here since we’ve been here, Gus. Why?”

“You need to make a trip over there. You’re a tall good looking boy and there’s a pretty girl about your age, who lives over there.”

“Gus, I wouldn’t even know what to say to a girl. I’ve never been around girls except in school and they all giggled and acted like monkey’s to me.”

“This one ain’t no monkey, Billy. You need to go meet her.”

“Maybe I’ll walk over there one day.”

“Good, you’ll never be sorry Billy. She’s as pretty a girl as there is in Iowa.”

I knew that Gus more than likely had different ideas than I did, as to what pretty meant. Not that I ever thought a pretty girl would even look at me. I was too tall and gangly and my hair was long and I always thought I had a big nose and buck teeth. Yeah, I did look at myself.

Mom always told me I was the handsomest young man she knew, but then I reckon all Mom’s are supposed to say that to their ugly kids.

The next morning, after the milking and feeding, and after I gathered the eggs ... I told Mom I was going to go for a walk and would be back before lunch.

We called it dinner and supper in Texas ... up here it’s lunch and dinner.

Now that we live out in the country, I had started wearing some cut-off jeans that Mom had cut off for me. I had them on and my hiking shoes. I knew my legs were long, but I could see some muscles beginning to show up. I was still using the Bull Worker and had even figured out the leg exercises with it.

I walked out to the paved road and walked west ... up and down the rolling hills that made the road look like a roller coaster ride.