Chapter 3

Right after Ellen and I got back from our Reno honeymoon, she and her mother found us a nice rental house over on Fort Hill Road in Poquonnock Bridge. The rent was more than I was comfortable paying, what with no income coming in yet, but Ellen loved the house, and I loved Ellen. I spent even more money paying for all the furnishings we needed.

We'd done pretty well with wedding gifts, so things like towels, toasters, bread boxes, blankets, linens, irons and ironing boards were taken care of already. I already had my own television set, record player and radio. I bought a used Chevy for Ellen to drive.

Now that I knew I wasn't headed off to college any time soon, I was willing to spend some of my savings. Ellen was so happy and excited to be playing house for real, and seeing her being so happy made me feel good. We'd been home for over two weeks and still I hadn't heard one word from Billy or Theresa. I was beginning to worry that maybe I'd miscalculated.

My brother, Ray, came over to see the new house. We were sitting in the living room talking after Ellen and I had given him the grand tour of the place. Ellen had gone off to the kitchen to start making our supper. This gave me a chance to start pumping him for information about what had been happening.

"What's going on Ray? Where's everyone else been hiding? I haven't heard from hardly anyone since Ellen and I got back from the honeymoon. Are they all mad at me for something?"

"We're all waiting to see what you're going to do, Jackie. The old man told all of us not to try to rush you or push you into doing anything. You know he's really pissed off about what Billy did to you, right? He says it would serve them right if you let them lose everything now. Billy has told everybody that he doesn't care what they think of him. The reason he's not calling you is because he doesn't want to listen to you telling him that you told him so. Theresa had to borrow some money from her parents, but they told her however much they lent her was all they had to lend. Are you going to keep selling wood?"

"Pop doesn't have any right to be pissed at Billy. He's one of the reasons all these flare ups keep getting built up like they do. He makes every little thing seem like its something really big. This is between Billy and me. It always was. He should just keep out of our business. Billy and I can both take care of ourselves."

Ray and I didn't speak any further about the situation with Billy. Ellen made us dinner, and after that, Ray borrowed twenty bucks from me, then got me to give him a ride over to where a friend of his lived in my truck.

"The old man is going to ask me what we talked about. What do you want me to tell him?"

"I don't know, Ray. Tell him what I said, I don't care. Tell him I said he's making things worse by getting involved where he doesn't belong. Tell him we'll be coming over to see him and Ma pretty soon, after we get settled in at our new place."

"Do you want me to go see Billy and tell him anything for you?"

"No. If I have anything to tell Billy, I'll tell him myself. It isn't like when we were kids, and we had to send other people around to try to get things fixed. I'm not mad at Billy. I just haven't figured out what I'm going to do yet."

"If you're going to do something, now is a pretty good time to be doing it. You need to go see Lenny too. He's been pretty worried that you haven't told him what he's going to be doing now that you aren't selling Billy's wood anymore. Labor Day is almost here, and you know what that means. No more Caddy Master job for Lenny. You need to go over there pretty soon and let him know where he stands, okay?"

"I don't know where he stands. I don't know yet where I stand. I'll go see him though. There are lots of things Lenny can do. Do you think pop can go see somebody and get him on over at Electric Boat?"

"Don't you remember he tried a few years ago? Lenny didn't want to work there because of all the noise. Lenny likes being outdoors and doing things. I think he's hoping to maybe get work over at the golf course, as an assistant grounds keeper or something. It doesn't pay that much, but Lenny likes working over there."

I knew those guys didn't make much, maybe twenty five to thirty bucks a week. Lenny and his family couldn't do much on that kind of dough, even living with his mother like they did.

When I got back to the house I started calling some of my best customers, lining up some deliveries for the next two weeks. One piece of good news was that none of the people I talked to had gotten their firewood anywhere else while I'd taken over a month off from work. They all acted happy to hear from me, and most of them were ready to place some big orders. Now, all I had to do was find some place to buy all the wood I'd committed to selling and delivering.

I had set up my first deliveries for the Tuesday after Labor Day. I called over to Lenny's house, but my Aunt Betty told me that Lenny was still over at the golf course. I asked her to have him call me when he got back so that he and I could go over his delivery schedule for the coming week.

"You're still going to have Lenny working with you, Jackie?" Aunt Betty sounded excited and relieved, but wanted to confirm that she'd understood me correctly.

"I'm still going to be selling firewood, and I still have two trucks, so why wouldn't Lenny be working for me? Don't tell me he went off and found another job without checking with me first?"

"No. No, Lenny wouldn't do that. We all thought, with the problems you and Billy have been having, maybe you weren't going to be using Lenny for any more driving. He's been a little worried. I'll have him call you when he gets in." I gave her my new phone number, and gave her my new address too. We talked about my being married, and about the honeymoon I'd just returned from. After I got off the phone with my aunt, I rang over to Billy's house.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Teri, this is Jackie, is Billy around?"

"Jackie. Hi. How was the honeymoon? I talked to your mother, and she told me you found a place over by the bridge in Poquonnock. Aren't you afraid of living right there on the river? What about when it floods?"

"We're just renting, Teri. If it floods, we'll move. It isn't right on the river anyway. We're about forty feet above the river, higher than the top of the bridge railing. It would have to be one hell of a flood. Is Billy available?"

"He's outside. Hold on and I'll go get him."

I waited almost five minutes before Billy came in to pick up the receiver on the phone.

"Is that you, Jackie? How's married life treating you?" I figured that Billy had taken most of the time from when Theresa told him I was calling to decide on how he wanted to handle that first greeting. Billy and I both knew this was an important phone call.

"So far, so good, We've been back for awhile now, but we're starting to get settled in at our new place. You and Teri should come out and look at it sometime. We're about a quarter mile away from Doris Cromwell's store."

"I guess you already heard about what happened to my big wood sale?"

"I heard the company fizzled out, but I heard you were one of the lucky ones and they didn't get your wood."

"Lucky my ass! I wasn't about to just assume their damn check was any good. Those guys that did, well they got about what they deserved, in my opinion."

"Are you interested in maybe selling some of that wood?"

"To who? You?"

"When I got back, I called a few people to try to find out if all that firewood got dumped on the market or not. Doesn't look like it did, not as far as any of the people I talked with. I picked up firm orders for two hundred cords to be delivered over the next two weeks, beginning next Tuesday. I thought I'd see if you were interested, before I called anyone else."

"I'd have to know how much you were offering before I could say if I was or not."

"I'd give you a fair price, Billy, just like I always have. Why wouldn't I want to be fair?"

"You and me, Jackie, we haven't always seen eye to eye on what's fair."

"That's true enough, we haven't. I was hoping that was all over with by now. We both have families to feed now. It can be hard enough to manage that, even without worrying about whether or not someone is setting out to cheat you, or looking for some way to beat you out of what you're entitled to. I've always thought I'd be willing to give up getting the best price when I bought from you, because I always knew I could count on the quality of the wood I'd be getting, and on the quality of the person I was buying my wood from. It also helped, knowing that my buying from you was assuring that you'd turn a profit too. I always felt good doing business with you, Billy. We're family, and I never forget what that means to both of us. Knowing who you are, and both of us knowing how the two of us usually do what we say we will, that's always added to my feeling that us working together was the best way for us to go."

"So what time are you going to be here next Tuesday, Jackie?"

I couldn't be positive, but I was pretty sure that Billy's voice had cracked from some of the emotion he was feeling when he asked me that question. You would have to know Billy to know how seldom he ever expressed any emotion other than anger. I knew then that he'd been feeling as much or more tension as I had over how this phone call was going to turn out.

"Lenny and me, we should be pulling in sometime around five. We'll both be coming back to reload around noon. You think you can handle four loads in one day all by yourself, Billy?"

"I think I can manage it. Am I supposed to get down on my knees and kiss your ass now, Jackie? I'm sure that's what my old man, Uncle Donald, and your old man are going to be thinking I should be doing."

I knew the question Billy was really asking. He wanted to know how much shit everyone was going to be expecting him to take over what had happened earlier. He was asking if I was going to be adding my own measure to that pile.

"I don't know about you, Billy, but I'm getting a little sick of all those other people interfering in our private business. I haven't spoken to any of them about what my plans are for us getting back to working together, and I don't have any intention of doing so. I'd just as soon leave them out of any future plans or changes the two of us might decide we want to make. As far as whether you should be kissing my ass or not, I appreciate you thinking of me that way, but if it's all the same to you, I'm not ready to get involved like that with you. At the very most, maybe you could bow down whenever you see my truck coming into your yard?"

"You know how likely something like that happening is, Jackie?"

"Are we going to be all right now, Billy? It would be a damn shame if we went through this like we did, and the problems hadn't gotten resolved."

"Theresa and I have done a lot more talking since this first happened. We learned a lot about who we could count on and who we really couldn't count on. I think we found out a lot more about the dangers of not appreciating what we already had, and of risking all that to try to get what we thought we'd like to have. Now, we're both back to just appreciating again."

When I showed up with Lenny early Tuesday morning, things were mostly back to how they had been before Billy and Theresa started making it known that they weren't happy with how the profits were being divided.

As my business grew, I steadfastly refused to buy my wood from anyone other than Billy. Other loggers would approach me, but I always sent them to Billy's yard so he could buy their wood. Billy would turn right around and sell it to me, pocketing the difference in what he paid them, and what I paid him. This was usually five or six dollars a cord. Billy wouldn't buy inferior wood though. Whatever he bought, the quality was always first rate. He'd see to that.

During the period of the middle sixties up until the early seventies, Billy and I made a lot of money in the wood business. We went in together, as equal partners, in several other ventures over the years. By 1981, the firewood business had shrunken down to where it wasn't really worthwhile bothering too much with it. By then though, Billy and I had moved on to mostly investing in different types of real estate.

Billy still sells firewood, even though he's taken all his signs down. He still charges the same price he charged in 1960 for his wood. Last year he sold ninety four cords, a banner year for sales from the farm. He mostly sells to friends and neighbors. If someone comes by, having heard that Billy sells cheap firewood, he might sell to them, or he might tell them that he's already sold all the wood he has available. Usually, if he does decide to sell his wood to someone, it turns out that the lucky buyer is a working stiff who really needed to catch a break on the cost of heating up his living room.

Billy started growing Christmas trees a few years ago. He gives them away to friends and family, but he makes everyone come over to the farm and cut down their own tree, just like he and I used to do most winters back when we were kids.

I was motivated to write this story by what happened to us last week. Billy called me, early in the morning, just a week ago, to let me know that Theresa had passed away in her sleep. She was sixty seven years old when she passed.

We had just learned she had cancer in her bones a short time before. She and Billy had known about it for much longer, but they didn't tell anyone until Teri got to the point where she couldn't hide either her pain or the great weight loss she'd had any longer. By this time, the cancer had spread into several of her internal organs.

When you've known someone for more than sixty years, and been as close to them as Teri and I were, their death tears away at some of what remains of your life. There were so many times and places where our lives had intersected. These weren't all happy times either, but that isn't how real life is.

Theresa was an excellent loving wife, a great mother, and a terrific sister. She was a very warm and loving grandmother, and a wonderful friend to many of us. She was all of this, and so many other positive things.

I worry now, having read again the different ways I've portrayed her in some of my stories, that I wasn't fair to who she really was when describing her to my readers. I am uncomfortable, having only told a very few parts of her whole life story. I'm worried now that my readers might have formed a negative opinion of Theresa.

Those of us who knew her, who loved her, all held her in the highest regard. In spite of all she went through, Teri did a lot of laughing in her lifetime, and she always did her best to comfort anyone who needed comforting. She loved only one man emotionally, and that was my cousin, Billy.

I'm afraid to drive out to Billy's farm today, afraid of what I'll find when I get there. I called out to the farm yesterday, the day after Teri's funeral, and Billy didn't answer the phone.

I know that if anything happened to Ellen, it would be impossible for me to summon up the will necessary for me to try to carry on. Billy was much more dependent on Teri that I am on Ellen.

What if I drive out there and find out that Billy has chosen to join her in death? I have to go out there anyway. If he did do anything, he did it expecting that I'd be the first one out there to find him. This would be just like him, to do something that stupid, too.

Well, I've put it off as long as I could. Damn Billy! I've never had to do anything I've dreaded more.

I should try to call out there one more time before I go traipsing off, as cold as it is outside right now.