Chapter 5: Horses and Hearts

Towards the end of July, long past the Fourth of July excitement, and with the heat of the summer in full force, I got invited out to Joe Porter's ranch to ride some horses.

I'd seen some of his Dad's horses in our Fourth of July parade, and made a comment to Joe at our next baseball Sunday how neat I thought they were. Their family had taken part in our festivities rather than the larger events in Hermiston, only because Joe said that this was where his friends were. He picked me up after church on Sunday, one of the rare ones where we didn't have baseball.

Actually, his sister Janet picked me up, with Joe along for the ride, since Joe was the same age I was. Damned if Joe didn't have a gorgeous sister too. I smiled as I said hi when we were introduced, but I was shaking my head as I slid into the truck alongside Joe.

"What?" Janet said, seeing the shake, and the blush I was sporting through my summer tan.

"I'm sorry, but I'm an only child, so I'm not used to the older sister idea." I offered, but Janet wasn't buying it.

"Yea, so..."

"So ... that my friends have older sisters I guess I can understand. What I can't understand is why they all have to be gorgeous."

"Oh geez!" she said with a snort. "How old are you again?"

"I'll be fourteen in August," I answered.

"Good Lord. Joe, you make sure you keep an eye on him around Greta."

"Who's Greta?" I asked.

"My little sister," Joe answered.

"You have a little sister and a big sister? Oh man!" I moaned in sympathy.

"Worse. I have four sisters. The youngest two are twins, and they're both eight."

"How old is Greta then?" I asked.

"You're about dead-on halfway between our birthdays. I'm about six months older than you, and she's about six months younger," Joe said.

Janet would look over at me every few minutes and shake her head and laugh. I didn't know whether to be embarrassed or worried.

Joe asked his sister to take us straight to the barn, rather than drop us off at the house. The horse barn was a couple hundred yards from the main house, and I think Joe's intention was to avoid the rest of his sisters for now.

It had been a long time, I told Joe, since I'd ridden a horse, and he double checked the saddle and gear for me as I got my horse ready. I was riding a horse called Hack today, a solid, dark sorrel. Joe rode his own horse, Champ, who was a striking dun, with beautiful markings, particularly the stockings, which were a dark, muddy brown near the ground fading smoothly to a dark, dusky gold at the body. The mane did a similar fade from front to back, and the muzzle was a darker blend, somewhere between the two.

We filled two canteens with water, and made sure the horses had a good drink before we rode out on a northeasterly course, headed, my internal compass told me, for the river. We'd hit the Columbia River Highway long before we got to the river, but I knew it would be nowhere near the busy highway I remembered from my first life.

Some folks see Eastern Oregon as a desolate place, and rely on the description, 'high desert' to describe it, but it is nowhere near a desolate place, and especially not so as you get close to the Columbia. This time of year it tries hard to match that lazy man's image, with high temperatures, dry winds that never seemed to stop, and a seemingly endless supply of dust. But hidden in the dust and rock are treasures if you're looking, birds linger among the sage and scrub, and you can see snakes and coyotes, foxes and cougars. Even in the driest, hottest days there are living and growing things.

We rode for several hours, making a big loop around a rough rocky outcrop that stood a few dozen feet above the surrounding terrain. We talked about baseball and family, and living in small towns. Joe missed a lot of the things that even a town as small as Cold Lake offered.

"Janet's back for the summer, so its not too bad," Joe admitted as we rode back into the ranch. "She can drive, and she takes my sisters places all the time, which is a nice break for me. I'm sure they see it as a nice break from me as well," he followed up a moment later.

It took us a while to get the saddles cleaned up and put away, and Hack and Champ rubbed down and fed.

"Time to face the music," Joe said. Even if I was going right home we'd have had to go to the house to get a ride, but I was staying for supper.

Sunday supper was a big deal at the Porter ranch, and especially so when there was company, Joe told me as we walked up the porch, apologizing in advance for any potential embarrassment.

The twins were the first to greet us, Rose and Lily, two cute-as-a-button eight year olds with big eyes and full of giggles. Mrs. Porter was next, coming out of the kitchen, apron on and her hair done up high in a way that said it was just to keep it out of her way while she cooked. She was a slightly plumper version of Janet, and I saw where all the Porters I had met so far got their look, she had the dark hair and blue eyes that Joe, Janet and the twins all shared.

We had already knocked the dust of the trail off at the horse barn, But Joe's Mom told us to go get washed up for supper. Joe led me to a utility room at the back of the house with a big double sink, the utility kind, and we washed up, even wetting our hair and drying it off. There was a communal comb on a shelf with a few other odds and ends, so I didn't have to go back in with my hair just slicked back with a towel.

Coming out of the bathroom with Joe, I saw Greta for the first time.

If I hadn't been the old man I was inside the young Sammy Kendall, I probably would have made a tongue-tied ass of myself, because even as I was, I was nearly stunned to a stupor. Here was the true beauty of the Porter family. A vision with long, dark, shiny hair, sparkling blue eyes, long arms and legs, and all arranged in a very pleasing package.

As I finally focused, and saw Janet beside her, I grinned, a little lopsided I think, but recovering quickly.

"I was wrong," I said to Janet.

"Wrong?"

"My theory," I added. "Its not just older sisters apparently."

I saw Greta blush then, and knew that Janet had already told her what I'd said when I met her.

I managed to keep the universe upright and on an even keel all through dinner. Mr. Porter showed up just before it was served, and shook my hand before we all sat down. He was tall, thin and sandy haired, and all the Porter kids looked like Mrs. Porter and nothing like him, though I guess I could kinda see his jaw and eyebrows a little in Joe. Dinner was fried chicken and mashed potatoes, with peach cobbler for dessert. There was only one thing I remembered from the dinner conversation, when Mrs. Porter asked me if I was going to be a freshman at Hermiston high school in the fall.

"Yes Ma'am," I answered.

"Joe too of course," She offered, adding "Greta too."

"Greta too?" I said weakly.

"She's a smart girl, and has been skipped a grade," Mrs. Porter boasted.

Joe groaned, Greta blushed and I gulped.

Work soon became just that, work. Brian Nileson moved on to work with the yard crew most days, and I worked the seed and feed bins by myself. I saw some ways that the sacking and seaming could be made easier, but they all required a table that could be raised and dropped quickly, and other than hydraulics or some complicated mechanical scissoring pedestal arrangement, I couldn't see a way to do it and still be practical and economical. I also didn't want to engineer myself out of a job. I saw Mr. Greer on the loading dock quite often, but he was working and so was I. We didn't play catch in the mornings before work, unless we were having a rare non-Sunday get together after work at the field.

Dad got back from his trip on August 3rd, it was almost a month later than he had expected, and he looked tired but happy.

"It was all skull sweat for a change, son," he told me, "no hiking through the boonies."

I could understand how skull sweat might wear you out. I'd spent a few nights since my return thinking myself to exhaustion. During the time that Dad was gone, I'd returned again and again to the idea that I had to tell someone about what had happened to me. I could think of no one I trusted more than my father, and that was from the perspective of the Sam Kendall who had lived sixty years. I had spent hours searching my memories for some upcoming event that I could use to prove the truth of what I would tell him, and I found it.

"Dad, can we sit down and talk tonight after Dinner?" I asked while we ate.

"A family discussion?"

"No, just you and me for now, but probably Mom later."

"Sure Son, We'll get together in the den after the dishes are done."

The dinner conversation was mostly about what he had done and where he had been. The group he worked with had stayed in St. Louis after all.

"I spent most of my time doing research and talking on the phone long distance," Dad told us. "Once a week we got together and had a meeting to argue about everything we were doing. Those were fun. The people I work with normally aren't the types to appreciate a good argument."

We talked baseball, and Dad was very curious to see how I was doing with my new position, and the new power at the plate. Mom made me take my shirt off and show him my muscles, and that of course led to the embarrassing discussion of the 'changes' I'd been going through.

"Well I could see that you were noticeably taller the minute I saw you," Dad told me, "so I wondered."

"The boys that have been playing baseball together are going to have a big game and picnic next Sunday," Mom added brightly. "We will have to go and watch Sammy play!"

It was true. With school starting at the beginning of September, and other commitments drawing a lot of the players away, we were having our last game on Sunday the 13th. Mr. Greer wanted to get the families of all the kids together for a big picnic to celebrate, and even though it was still almost two weeks away, the moms were planning like mad.

It was my day to do dishes, but Mom helped with the drying, and we were done pretty quickly. While I was doing that, Dad had been getting caught up on all the old newspapers we had saved for him, but there was little in the way of local news that was worth recapturing, except perhaps for some of the Fourth of July event descriptions. When I came out of the kitchen he folded up the paper he was in the middle of and we headed for the den.

The den was really Dad's home office, they just didn't call them that these days. Most of the reference books he had collected over the years were on shelves here, along with some others, including, I think, his old college text books. He had a desk and chair, but there were two comfortable stuffed chairs in the room as well. Dad closed the door behind us and took one, motioning me to the other.

"Okay, Sammy, I'm all ears."

"Thanks Dad," I began nervously, "First, you need to know that what I'm about to tell you is going to sound impossible, but its true, and I can prove it I think, but its going to require some time."

"Okay," Dad said, sounding unsure himself now.

"I have lived this life before, completely. The Sam Kendal I am died of what I think was a heart attack while trying to fix a flat tire on August 28th, 2008. I had just turned 60 a few days before."

"Son..." Dad started to say.

"Dad, I have a complete set of memories. Memories of things that haven't happened yet. But I already know that what I do can change the future for the Sammy Kendall that I am this time."

"How do you know that, and what kind of memories?" Dad asked.

"The day I died, I felt myself falling ... pulled really, and when the journey was over, I woke up in this Sam Kendall's body. It was the last day of school and I was waiting outside the school for Mom to pick me up. In my first life, that surprise job at Nileson's did not go over well. I felt betrayed and I not only refused the job, I got mad and stayed mad through the rest of my school years. This time, that didn't happen. I took the job and my future changed."

"So you're really a sixty year old man in this body?"

"Yeah ... Yeah, but it mostly feels like I'm a teenager again," I admitted. "I have the old memories, but the Sammy that was here when I got back is still here too, I can feel it, and he and I are sort of in this together."

There was more of course, and I tried to explain the bumps, but I wasn't even sure myself yet what they meant, so it left both of us confused.

"Dad, the proof I can offer will be the Sunday of the baseball game, the 13th. When the people of Berlin wake up that morning, they will discover that East German troops have sealed off the city and divided it with barbed wire fences, splitting Berlin into a West Berlin and an East Berlin."

That had Dad pretty quiet for a long time. I could tell there were several times when he wanted to ask me questions, but stopped.

"Obviously, there are a lot of questions I'd like to ask," he said finally, "but there's no sense doing that until we've the proof come next Sunday."

"I agree," I answered. "But I should tell you now that there are some questions I won't answer. I won't tell you when anyone we know dies, unless I think its something we can and should change."

"And that's the real reason for telling me, isn't it?"

"Yeah. I worry about how I might be changing things, and there are things that happen in the future that I would like to change, but don't think I'll be able to, tragic things."

"Foreknowledge is not the great thing we might imagine it to be then?"

"No," I answered, the tears starting to flow. The telling of my secret had brought a sense of relief, but at the same time it brought a renewed sense of helplessness and fear. Dad stood, and I stood with him and let him hug me as I cried. We stood like that for a long time before Dad finally spoke.

"You have no idea how suddenly weird hugging my own son feels."

I had to laugh at that, a snorting, blubbery kind of laugh that helped choke off the tears and get my mind back to a calmer place.

"Thanks Dad," I said, starting to dry my tears with my sleeve.

We talked for a little while longer, mostly abut the differences since my return. He was sad to hear how we had grown apart after the big blow up, and his having to find a new home for Ned.

"I told your Mom something like that might have happened," Dad said in the end.

"But it didn't happen this time, Dad. Please, let it go. You can't worry about the way that life turned out. This one is already proving far, far better."

Dad gave me a guilty smile, realizing that he had been about to get angry with his wife for something that hadn't happened as far as their reality was concerned. Then I saw Dad raise an eyebrow and give me an odd look.

"What?"

"So, are you going to be able to make us rich?"

"You mean like with the stock market and that sort of thing?" He nodded. I'd guessed that this would come up eventually.

"To be honest, I don't know. I was not an investor in my first life. I remember some things, like companies starting up, and new products being announced, that sort of thing. I could think of a couple to keep an eye out for, but beyond that, I'm not to sure what I'll remember. I know who wins the World Series this year, and you know the home run race Mantle and Maris are having?"

"Yeah?"

"61. Maris is going to hit 61 home runs and break the Babe's record on the last day of the season. The Yankees go on to beat the Reds in the series in five games. I remember it because I had followed the M&M boys all season, and by the time the series rolled around I was in basic training, and the series was a big bit of home for all of us."

"Basic training?"

"I didn't even try for college the first time, and got drafted."

"Vietnam?"

"Yeah. Changed my life."

I refused to discuss that topic any further, and anything else would have just been fishing, so we ended our meeting and I went out to take Ned for a late walk while Dad got Mom to agree to wait a while before she heard anything about our discussion. I kind of would have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that talk, but two lifetimes or not, I was happy to let them be the parents. Nobody likes to have their childhood illusions shattered, and that included me, so I might have been curious, but it was a curiosity that I didn't really want eased.

The next morning over breakfast, Dad told me that he was going to have to do a lot of catching up with his regular job now that he was back, so he planned on being gone for the rest of the week and most of the next. I asked about the weekends, and he said he'd have to see how it went. If working this weekend meant he could be home for the big game, that was what he would do.

I got into quite a big discussion at lunch on Wednesday. Brian had mentioned high school football, and Mr. Nileson wanted to know if I was going to try out. I understood that football would have a big impact on my free time, and would probably mean I would have to quit work, or else work drastically different hours. School in general had held out some chance of that, but football would pretty much guarantee it.

I had been thinking about it, but not with much seriousness, up until this point. My new and improved body made the prospect of playing football a lot more attractive to me, but I didn't really have much sense of the game. There were no organized youth leagues for it like there were for baseball, and all my football experience was from playing pickup games, touch tackling, mostly. The aching joints had gone away by this time, but I'd grown three inches over the summer, and I'd beefed up considerably. To be honest, I looked at myself and I didn't even see the adult Sam Kendal I remembered from my first life.

I'd gotten pretty lean and mean during my army days, but I'd never been this tall, ever, and even in my fittest I'd have been better described as wiry. At 13 going on 14, I was definitely something beyond wiry. In truth, this was the part of this second lifetime that I was having the most trouble explaining to myself.

In the end I had to tell Mr. Nileson that I didn't know yet what I would do, but that if he couldn't afford to wait for me to decide, I'd understand. He agreed that he could give me at least until the beginning of school, and we shook on it. I knew he valued me as an employee, just as I knew, with sons of his own, he appreciated my dilemma.

I told mom about the discussion when I got home, and she looked serious for a moment, nodding her head. "You've proved yourself to me Sammy, if you choose football over working for Mr. Nileson, I'll know that its not for the wrong reasons."

With high school looming in my future, and the possibility of college perhaps keeping me out of Vietnam this time around, I was at a continual loss for something to devote myself to. Me, Sam Kendall, the boy who knew the future, couldn't pick a path to follow into it. The only thing I'd found any enthusiasm for so far had been baseball, and with the advantage of my unique perspective, didn't have to wait for my parents to tell me that sports was not the way to plan for one's future, whether you had talent or not.