Chapter 44: Beware - Congested Traffic Zone

We did manage to get out of bed to do the evening chores, slopping around in the slushy snow that was being melted by the chinook. Then we had a quiet evening, but just before we went to bed, Lucille made a big deal out of presenting me with that rawhide thong that had held Gramma Tilly’s ring and hung around Grampa Bender’s neck for years.

The chinook played out during the night and a sudden cold snap moved into our area. The slush and water, left behind from the chinook’s melt, froze where it lay and we were surrounded by a skating rink. Even the snowmobile was useless in the mess that was left behind and four-wheel drive vehicles were even worse. Lucille and I were stuck in a valley, with our only road up to the plateau covered in ice.

The two of us were isolated from anyone else for a full week. At least there was no service break in either the phone or the electricity, and I’d stocked up on enough food for two months for three guys. Then too, I’d just had a fuel delivery of heating oil for the cabin, and the new furnace kept the whole place pleasantly warm, so we were in good shape. Most of our days were spent either looking after the animals or working on the house, but we filled in several spare hours acting deliciously naughty. Somehow the word ‘Cuz’ took on a definitely sex-filled overtone.

Actually, conditions for us were a lot better than they were for many others in the municipality. The hardships that the frigid weather created were quite general. In fact it affected everything from road conditions to school openings and I heard later that the unseasonable weather pretty well wiped out Halloween celebrations in our local town. Our local weekly newspaper actually came out with a prediction of a coming ice age, but in actual fact anyone who was prepared for a normal fall and winter lived through it with little problem.

Personally, it let me get to know Lucille much better and surprisingly, one phone call changed Mom’s attitude toward me as well. We weren’t able to go to see anyone, but the telephone conversations we had certainly accomplished a lot. Actually, I found that Lucille used the telephone much more than I did. She talked to Mom every day and with both Beth and Jasmine at least every two days. But the surprising thing was the amount of time she spent on the phone to Sandy, Carissa and Jackie. She must have talked to each of them for at least an hour a day. The result of all her phone calls was that she heard a lot about my school days and knew much more about me than I did her. I didn’t realize it then, but during those phone calls, she also changed the attitudes of Sandy and Carissa, both toward me and toward herself and all of the changes were positive.

On the Friday following Halloween, a chinook came blowing in and by late Saturday evening, the roads out of the valley were passable. Early Sunday morning, Lucille left for town and not long afterward, Dad arrived with Matt and John, but John was just there to pack up his clothing. He wanted to move to Innisfail to be with his other brothers for the winter, and told me he was going to go back to school after Christmas. However, he wanted to come back the next summer and I did promise him a job. That’s when I found out that Dad had offered him one as well, so when they left John was in a great mood. He knew he was welcome to come back and he even had his choice of jobs in the spring.

Matt and I were working out at the barn later that afternoon when we saw a strange car come driving into the yard. Sandy and Carissa had brought Jackie out for a visit because she hadn’t spent much time with her brother for months and was going to the hospital in Edmonton in two weeks. She was scheduled for tests and surgery in mid November, so I offered to pay for a pair of motel rooms for Matt and his brothers during the time she’d be there. From the way the two of them reacted, you would have thought I’d offered them the moon.

Carissa and Sandy left for town that afternoon, but Jackie stayed behind, supposedly to spend time with Matt, but that night she made it clear that she was sleeping with me. Even though the doctor had warned her not to be involved in any kind of penetration during sex, she’d have been willing to risk it. I wasn’t though. Instead for the next few days she cuddled with me at night and spent her days getting to know her oldest brother.

I found the fact that they barely knew each other very weird, but considering the way they had been raised, it shouldn’t really have been a surprise. Even though they’d often lived in the same house, the only times they’d seen each other were during church or at meals. Even during the meals Jackie hadn’t eaten with the boys. Instead she had served their meals, but had been taught to be silent while the family was eating, then she and her mother had eaten later. In other words, women in that household were treated as servants and little more. On top of that, Matt had been away from home for years. At the age of sixteen, all the boys had been forced to find jobs and support themselves, so he’d been away from home for most of the last six years. In that time both of them had changed. So in some ways it was as if they were getting to know strangers.

I’d thought Matt and his brothers were raised in isolation, but as I talked to Jackie, I realized that she had literally been kept away from any way to learn about the real world. Her main view of what Calgary was like was seen from the perspective of her home and that of the homes of four other families who were involved in similar situations. A trip to a bargain clothing outlet or a fabric store had been a big deal for her, because that meant she would wear new clothing. However, she’d often worn hand-me-downs.

Since both Matt and Jackie had been home schooled, there were woefully huge gaps in their education. Current affairs and recent history were blank pages for both of them because they’d only seen TV or heard the radio on odd occasions. Matt was in better shape than Jackie was, but not by that much. Actually Matt was taking grade nine and ten courses by correspondence now and when Jackie saw the books for the course, she almost devoured them. By the time she left four days later, she had made up her mind to do the same thing as Matt was doing.

However when Carissa came to pick up Jackie, the two of them went into a huddle about schooling. By the time they came up for air, they’d decided that Jackie would apply to school in town and see if she could repeat her grade nine courses or even try to get into grade ten. Unfortunately she’d been home schooled and what education she’d been given was somewhat spotty, so some essential courses had been skimmed over very lightly. I suggested that she bone up on the grade nine courses that she’d already taken, then arrange to take any other essential courses by correspondence during the time before school started in the fall. That way she’d be able to start in regular high school classes and although she’d be two years older than most of her classmates, she wouldn’t be that far out of sync with them.

Since it was less than a week before Jackie had to be in Edmonton for tests and possible surgery, she and Carissa were in a rush to leave that day. Not only did they have to get ready for that trip, but now they had Jackie’s education to consider. Jackie was extremely emotional when they left, but she promised me that she’d be back once she’d recovered from her surgery and Carissa let me know that she’d be back to see me as soon as she could.

Sandy showed up two days later and she brought enough clothing and paraphernalia with her that I knew she planned on moving in for a while.

“What’s up with all this?” I grinned as I looked at all the bags and packages in her car.

“Well, Carissa and Jackie are coming to get Matt tomorrow to go to Edmonton, so I’m here to see that you aren’t spending any time alone. If I’m here with you, you won’t get lonely,” she grinned at me. “Besides, both Lucille and Jackie got to spend several days with you on their own. It’s my turn.”

“I see,” I laughed, wrapping her in a hug and getting a short kiss as well.

“Besides, we didn’t tell you, but my family is hoping to spend Christmas with you. In fact, if Jackie is out of the hospital, Jackie, Matt and the other boys are planning on spending a few days here then. Oh, Lucille and Carissa will probably spend some time here too, but with them there are other family members that they’ll spend time with as well.”

“It sounds like you have the next month and a half of my life all planned out,” I grinned at her. “Are you women getting uppity again?”

“Not really,” she broke into laughter. “Actually, I was supposed to ask you if it’s alright, but I got carried away. So now I’m asking, can we impose on your hospitality and join you for Christmas?”

“Well, since we have six weeks to plan for it, I guess that’s okay,” I tried to keep the grin from my face.

“Well, it’s not as if things are set in stone. I know your family has plans as well and we aren’t going to interfere too much with those,” she giggled then. “I think your mom would have our hides if we did.”

“Yep, she probably would at that,” I chuckled. “Now do you want all this stuff inside? If so, I’d better call Matt since there’s so much of it.”

“Well, it’s not all mine,” she giggled. “We talked it over and since people seem to end up being stuck here for days on end, we decided to buy a few emergency supplies to keep here, just in case. Not many of us gals like the idea of wearing guys’ gaunches and things of that sort.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I wasn’t planning on having a bunch of women underfoot when the blizzard happened.”

“Yes, but it happened twice. Lucille wasn’t any happier than I was about having to borrow your underwear,” she giggled as she grabbed a big bundle of clothes. “We’ve decided that you have the weatherman in your pocket and you’re bribing him to keep us here for extended periods. However, now that we’ve got some essentials here, it probably won’t happen again.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. The weather does what it wants and we have to live with it,” I laughed and followed her inside with a couple of boxes.

Unfortunately, Sandy coming with a lot of clothing served to illustrate the fact that there wasn’t enough furniture for the rooms in the new addition. The whole cabin was woefully short of drawer space for all that additional clothing and Sandy got on the phone as soon as we realized how short of storage space the cabin was. She must have been quite effective with her plea for used furniture. It was snowing lightly the next morning, but Frank Dolens followed Carissa out with a big truck and it was loaded to the hilt. He had a whole master bedroom set and two extra dressers from the Coulters, but he’d also decided to donate his family’s old living room furniture. When we unloaded it all, I saw that he had a used snowmobile hidden under everything else.

“Whose snowmobile is that, Frank?”

“That’s mine or rather it belongs to my family,” Sandy grinned at me. “I asked Frank to keep an eye out for a good used one. Jessie, Jean and I want to have some fun, but I thought a second snowmobile was essential up here anyway. You don’t mind it we keep it here, do you?”

“I guess not,” I shrugged, but winked at Frank. “But, I don’t know where we’ll store it.”

“Well, while we’re on the subject of space, John and I have been talking about your ranch. You need more buildings,” Frank said quietly. “I don’t know if John has said anything to you about it, but we were thinking that you have an ideal spot here for scenery and protection. Have you ever considered starting a dude ranch?”

“A what?” I looked at him in astonishment. “This is a working ranch. I’m really not into babysitting a bunch of people.”

“Well, we looked at what you’ve done in the past six months or so. In that time you’ve taken several young people under your wing and helped straighten them out.”

“I didn’t do that alone. My family did more than I did.”

“No, you didn’t do it on your own and you are quite young, but it’s something for you to consider in the future. You’re very good at teaching greenhorns about rural life. You might want to think about it as a way to add income with a relatively small investment,” he said seriously as he untied the snowmobile from the tethers in the truck. “Now where should we put this thing?”

“Well, for now let’s put it with mine, in the lean-to beside the barn. I guess since Matt is leaving with Carissa, Sandy and I are going to have to shift things around to make space for it.”

Frank just laughed at that, and shortly after we’d unloaded the snowmobile, then covered it with a tarp, he left. After he was gone, I had a chance to go inside again. Sandy and Carissa were driving poor Matt crazy as they shifted and shuffled the various pieces of furniture around the new living room, trying to find a layout they both could agree on. I watched the circus for a moment, then I stepped into the fray.

“Enough!” I barked quite loudly. “As long as I’m the person who owns the house, don’t you think I should be consulted?”

Carissa looked ready to argue, but Sandy looked chagrined, meanwhile I wasn’t waiting for them to say anything.

“Matt, give me a hand, the couch sits facing the fireplace,” I grabbed one end of it and watched him grin slightly as he grabbed the other.

“But how will you watch a TV from there? Where will you put that, beside the fireplace?” Carissa pleaded.

“Carissa, this place is in a deep valley. TV signals go in a straight line, and pass about a quarter of a mile over our heads. You can’t get TV reception down here in the valley.”

“Oh,” she muttered quietly. “Well, there goes that Christmas gift idea.”

“Is that what this was all about?”

“Unh huh,” she looked upset. “I miss having a television. Are you sure you can’t build a bigger antenna or something?”

“There is no way we could build a tower that would be anywhere near tall enough,” I chuckled. “Even if we did build something that tall, the signal wouldn’t get from the antenna to the TV because of the resistance of the lead-in wire that would run between them. You’d have to put in a signal booster of some kind and that would be too darn expensive to even contemplate.”

“Oh. Okay, but why does the couch have to go there of all places. It’s right in the middle of the room and...”

“And from there, if I’m lying down on the couch, I can look out the window and see both the driveway and the barn,” I interrupted as I pointed a few feet from one end of the couch. “However, since I like to sit down and read at times, I eventually want to put a nice chair right about there. I’ll find myself a comfortable chair and set it right where I want it, then I can do the same thing from that seat. I designed this place to be practical and comfortable, not to be a showcase of style or anything else. Don’t forget, this is a log cabin in the boondocks, not a mansion on an estate just outside of town.”

Once I got it through everyone’s heads that I wanted things to be practical and comfortable throughout the house, we got the furniture shifted around quickly and easily. It wasn’t long after we finished moving the furniture into place that Matt and Carissa left.

Sandy and I were alone once more and as we watched Carissa’s car disappear around the last bend and into the cut that lead up the hill, she broke into giggles.

“What’s so funny?” I frowned at her.

“Well, when you did your imitation of a grizzly bear and barked at us, I thought Carissa was going to pee herself,” she snickered. “She gets so wound up with the idea that she’s right that she forgets things like the fact that you own the place.”

“Yeah, she has a tendency to want her own way and I hadn’t realized it until just a while ago, but she had me wrapped around her little finger for most of the summer.”

“I can’t complain about that,” Sandy leaned over and snuggled up to me. “I don’t think I’d be here if she wasn’t a bit pushy with both of us.”

“Well, it seems to me that all of our families got into the act as well.”

“Let’s not go there, huh?” she sighed and leaned against me. “That’s really not something I want to be reminded of right now. There are still some uncomfortable memories tied into that sort of thing.”

“Sorry, I didn’t think about that.”

“Umm, I know. That sort of thing happens,” Then with another sigh, she grabbed my hand and turned us toward the door of the cabin. “Right now I’m getting chilled from just standing here. Let’s go do something. Either inside or out, but if we’re going to be outside, let’s dress for it.”

Instead of going outside, for the rest of the day I did my best to make her forget those uncomfortable memories. I know I succeeded some of the time.

Over the next six weeks, between gifts from friends and purchases that we made, we furnished the new addition quite well. While we were at it, we bought curtain and drape material, then between Mom and Sandy, we soon had new curtains and drapes. While they were busy with that, I built some bookshelves and I finished painting the last of the new walls and all of the trim in the house. We even spruced up the old part of the cabin with new curtains and new paint and extended the kitchen cabinets before turning the rest of the old living room area into an eating area. I added a large propane kitchen stove and set it up right beside the old electric one, then made Sandy’s day by buying and installing a dishwasher next to the new double kitchen sink. With a bit of paint, some new counter tops and new doors on the cupboards, even the old section of the cabin felt like new. Then to add to our feeling of security I picked up a big deep freeze to put in the basement so we could store much more frozen food.

While we were doing that, we found time to go to town to see Grampa Bender at least twice each week and we tried to time our visits so we could see others as well. Lucille managed to come out and visit us as often as she could, but she had to work her visits around both her duty schedule and the weatherman. She didn’t want to risk being caught in another blizzard or ice storm. Of course on the weekends, if the weather looked good and there was no risk of a storm, we brought Jess and Jean out to the cabin. Tom, Jasmine, Beth and George often dropped around on a Saturday or Sunday. However, we also had visits from Mom and Dad as well as Uncle Tom and Aunt Alice. In fact we had visits from a lot of other people who came to see us for various reasons.

We did arrange to have Tom and George handle the chores on the first weekend in December. We left the cabin after doing the chores on Friday morning and drove to Edmonton in my pickup in order to visit Jackie. We arrived in the afternoon and went to see her, but at that time she was still recovering from the operation. We hadn’t realized that it had been postponed until that morning while the hospital did several tests in order to know what to do once she was in surgery.

We met Carissa and Matt at the hospital, then stayed in the same motel as the Coulters and Jackie’s brothers. In a way it was sort of like being home away from home, but we weren’t in the mood to party. Instead, we were all worried about Jackie’s future health, Carissa more than anyone else. In fact, after all the tests and all the waiting around, Carissa looked worn out.

It seemed that Jackie had developed a cyst and the doctors had removed it, however they were afraid the cyst was cancerous, so it was being tested. When we arrived they were still waiting for the results of the tests to find out if a further operation was needed. If the cyst was cancerous, she was going to have to go through the possibility of another operation and even chemotherapy. Unfortunately the doctors wouldn’t know that until Monday morning, but Sandy and I had to be home by Sunday night.