Chapter 1: Inheritance

American Primitive. You probably don’t recognize the term and will confuse it with Native American. Don’t.

Don’t confuse it with pioneers, either. Those were migrating families in groups of families. Wagon trains of families. Of course, their efforts and exploits are admirable. The trailblazers, the first to enter and explore new territories are more admirable. Eventually some American Primitives became founders of families and dynasties, a scant few of them. That didn’t define them. The men deserving the title American Primitive, all and each began as a solitaire. Alone. A loner. They weren’t part of anything. Neither a member of an armed band nor involved in a movement. They didn’t follow along or behind. They created the legends and the dreams of far away paradises the hordes later followed them into.

Why did these intrepid men go alone into unexplored, untamed, hostile wilderness? They explained themselves. They don’t like being around people.

Today, we would call them sociopaths. They left corpses in their wakes. Later, I’ll introduce you to a modern one.

My dad was a wood carver. Created intricate clocks with wooden gears movements, lifelike wooden duck decoys, and totem poles.

Both my parents were artistic types. My mom played the violin in municipal orchestras. They both went nuts. They had the good life, and deliberately threw it away. Moved to the hills. Joined a loosely knit artist’s colony of talented people seeking a simpler lifestyle.

It was not a commune. Each family owned it’s own small subsistence hobby farm. They owned high priced replicas of antique gadgets. Apple corers and corn shellers. Hand cranked meat grinders for sausage making and hand cranked ice cream freezers for making ice cream soup. That’s all it ever produced. Dad had all the patience in the world devoted to his art. Explains why his patience was on empty with that handmade ice cream maker.

Back to the landers. A lifestyle invoking an earlier time and culture when life was gentler, kinder, simpler, neighborly, more reflective, self sufficient, self indulgent poverty, and damned HARD!

Home remedies are in, doctors and hospital on the out. Way out there. Far out, man! Too far away to be of assistance in emergencies.

My parents took sick. Dad first. Mom wore herself out fretting and worrying over him, and soon joined him. Sharing their hand turned and elegantly simple four poster sickbed, dad created in happier days. In it their togetherness outlasted life itself.

The neighbors helped all they could. Herbal teas and plasters were not cures. My sister Ellie and I are orphaned.

We are heirs. Heirs to home schooled educations, mom lost interest in administering about grade six for me and five for Ellie. Besides, lessons interfered with accomplishing my chores. Dad needed time for his art. I shouldered the work of the homestead so he could craft art masterpieces.

We are also heirs to the farm, outbuildings and house. Such a house! An amateurish homebuilt and designed geodesic dome. Our four acres of hobby farm with ugly dome, remote from any village, accessed by dirt and clay roads, has almost zero resale value.

What are Ellie and I to do? Too young to enlist in the military, and the days when undereducated young men were welcomed in the military are long past. Too much competition among unemployed graduates, seduced by the government benefits in government service.

My family isn’t religious. Our nearest neighbor, a widow with six daughters, is quite religious. She has convinced her church elders to take an interest in our misfortune. The daughters, some older, most younger than Ellie, are Ellie’s only close friends. I’m on speaking terms with them. Friendly but not a confidant.

The widow’s claim to artistic fame, is quilt making. She is successful at it. Her beautiful quilts fetch high enough prices, that together with gardening and raising small types of livestock, her family survives.

We are surviving, by eating our livestock, one by one. Leaving, is the ultimate plan, when there are no animals left to abandon. Where shall we go? Someplace I can find work. Where’s that? (shrug)

The widow, and it’s time to name her, Mrs Duerte, first name Ruth, has offered to take us in. My labor will more than recompense any extra burden on her finances. She feels and claims.

Her churchmen agree it solves many problems, while creating another. The impropriety of a sixteen year old unrelated male living under the same roof as a thirty four year old widow and seven adolescent girls. They’re including my sister Ellie of course.

A solution is found. Marriage. Ruth and I are to marry, with the church elders permission, acting as ad-hoc guardians of Ellie and myself. The homesteads are to be combined into one property. Ellie and I are to quitclaim the property in favor of Mrs Duerte, and I promptly regain more than I gave away, as her new husband.

Ellie thinks it would be delightful to have her friends as sisters. Sister-in-law Ruth conferring sisterhood with her own daughters, my soon to be daughters-in-laws, as a convenient canard.

Since Ellie wants it, and a dubious starving survival is my only alternative, I’m forced to concede. Ruth has no qualms accepting me as husband. She is determined and delighted. I think.