Chapter 36: Lefleur Homes

Well, I slept happy that night, let me tell the world! It was the sleep of a well fucked man! All good things must end, however, so I woke at six the next morning when my alarm clock went off. I stumbled off to the bathroom, where I found that, yes, Marilyn had given me a hickey. It was low down, where it would be covered by a shirt, but only if it had a collar. No t-shirt today.

This reminded me of a time when my parents were staying with us. My Dad hadn’t gotten sick yet, so we must have been in our mid-forties, and Marilyn got extra amorous one night. My mother made a number of amused comments about my ‘bruise’ the next morning, much to my embarrassment!

I relieved myself, and then went back to the library. I cleaned up my bedroll and made sure the evidence had been cleaned up or destroyed, and then I changed. I put on some running shorts and yesterday’s t-shirt and dug some socks and my running shoes out. It was time for my morning routine. I stretched the kinks out and then let myself out of the house.

It was cool in the morning, with dew on the grass, and I looked around at the neighborhood, such as it was. We were a couple of miles west of Commercial Drive, and the area was rural. There were a number of dairy and vegetable farms in the immediate vicinity. While I wasn’t sure, I figured I was about three or four miles from the Oriskany Battlefield, max. I took off at any easy lope down the side of the road. There wasn’t much traffic at this hour.

I kept the pace down for the first mile or so, before picking it up a notch, and made it to the battlefield in about half an hour. It was warm enough by then, or I was warm enough, that I took off my shirt and carried it. Once there, I wandered around in the parking lot, not that there was much to see. The Battle of Oriskany was one of the opening salvos in the Saratoga Campaign in the Revolution, but it was a small battle and not very well known. There isn’t even a visitor’s center, just a monument and memorial plaques. After about ten minutes I ran back to the Lefleur house, and tried to up my pace, so that I had a good sweat going by the time I got there. I made it back about 7:15 or so, just in time to find some of the older Lefleur boys wandering around the parking lot.

I wiped my face with my shirt and walked up to them, blowing out and cooling down. It was Mark, Luke, and Gabriel, and they were looking at the old rust bucket Galaxie. “Hey guys, what’s up?” I asked.

“Where’ve you been?” asked Gabriel.

“Out running. I try to run or work out every morning.” I wiped my face off again.

“Where’d you run?” asked Luke, looking around the yard.

I pointed down the road. “I ran down to the battlefield and looked around, and then ran back.”

Luke stared at me. “The battlefield? The Oriskany Battlefield? That’s, like, miles away!”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s three, three-and-a-half miles or so. I wasn’t measuring it, but I left here at six, and I didn’t push it. I guess that’s right.”

Luke kept staring at me, and Mark, true to form, said, “Bullshit!”

I just smiled at my once and (hopefully) future brother-in-law, and I shrugged. “No, no bullshit. Come down and join me tomorrow morning. It’s a nice morning run. Or we can do calisthenics for an hour. You choose.”

Mark didn’t respond, but Gabriel asked, “Why?”

I leaned back against my car. “Oh, a bunch of reasons, but really, only two. First, I’m going to be a soldier. I need to be in shape. Second?” I hooked my thumb towards the house. “Girls like a guy who’s in shape.”

All three of them groaned and rolled their eyes at that, especially when the door opened up and Marilyn stuck her head out. “What are you doing out here? It’s freezing!”

I waved at her and I smiled at her brothers. “Like I said, there’s benefits to being in shape.”

“What’s that on your neck?” asked Gabriel, the youngest of them.

I grinned at that. I winked at the boys and answered, “Ask your sister.” Luke and Mark just groaned in disgust, but Gabriel was mystified. He wasn’t quite at the age where girls mattered.

I headed towards the door with the boys following.

The hall bathroom upstairs was occupied when I got there. I just sat down on the floor and waited. Eventually it was free, and I got inside before anybody else got any smart ideas. I made it a quick shower and shave, and then changed into clean khakis and a sports shirt. I grabbed my stuff and went back downstairs; the bathroom was filled as soon as I left it!

I found Marilyn and the three boys in the kitchen with their mother, along with a couple of the smaller kids. Marilyn looked at me curiously, and said, “Gabe says there’s something on your neck?” Behind her, Luke and Mark were damn near breaking up with laughter, and Harriet was eyeing us curiously as well.

I just gave her an innocent look and shrugged my shoulders. “No idea what he’s talking about, hun.” I leaned in and kissed her quickly. There was a basket of apples on the corner table, and I grabbed one. “Want one?”

“No thanks. So, you went running this morning? Down to the battlefield?”

I nodded as I chewed a bite of apple. “I wanted to make sure which side won. I’d hate to find out I was rooting for the wrong side all these years.”

Rafe popped up. “General Herkimer stayed in the house!”

“Really? General Who?”

“General Herkimer! After the Battle of Oriskany!”

I nodded in understanding. The farmhouse was at least a couple hundred years old, and in dilapidated condition almost the entire time. I remembered vaguely that Herkimer died of wounds after the battle. “Did he die here, too?”

“That would be cool!” came from Rafe.

Marilyn said, “Yuck!”

I smiled at her and nodded towards her brother. “Boys!”

“Very funny.”

“Come on, are you going to show me around? I want to know all about trailers.”

“HOMES! They’re homes, not trailers,” said Harriet.

Yeah, Harriet, I know. We used to call it the T-word, sort of like the F-word and the N-word. I spent enough time in the business to call them any damn thing I wanted to. “Yes, ma’am.” I leaned over to whisper directly into Marilyn’s ear. “Trailer, trailer, trailer.”

She gave me an elbow to the ribs, and whispered back, “Behave!” I just grinned at her. When she finished her cereal, she put her bowl in the sink, and grabbed my hand. “Come on, let’s go.”

I grabbed another couple of apples and stuck them in my pockets and followed her out the side door. She was already describing anything and everything in sight. It was a pleasure to hear her talk. She loved her family, even though she wasn’t totally in love with the trailer business. I was the one who ended up working there full time; she never became more than a gofer.

In most ways, this was because of Big Bob. Women were second class to men. He was a very traditional sort of father and businessman. It was very curious, in a way. He often hired women for sales positions, which were the highest paid positions in the company, but it was because women were better at the touchy-feely sorts of things in house hunting. He never once promoted a woman to a management position, and his own daughters never rose higher than part-time secretary. Marilyn’s jobs were cleaning lady, trailer escort, secretary, and general gofer. Sarah and Miriam understood this immediately, and it was why they went to school and never got into the business. Ruth never had any choice; nobody else would ever employ her.

I will point out that his sons, the second generation to own the company, never had this problem. We frequently had women in various management positions. Big Bob didn’t like that, but after he sold it to us, he didn’t get a vote.

Marilyn led me on a tour of the facility. The office was a metal sided double-wide that had seen better days. There was a gigantic warehouse full of parts. There were about a dozen or so trailer homes of various sizes, and another couple of dozen used trailers further back, and to one side were three double-wide trailers. It took me back in time. These homes were state of the art in the trailer business at the time. Lefleur’s had a reputation for only carrying high end trailers, and the brand names were like a time machine for me.

Most of the acreage was flat and empty. Eventually the operation would grow immensely. Two more warehouses would be built, along with a massive pole barn capable of storing homes inside it. The existing office building and farmhouse would be torn down and new office buildings would go up. It would continue growing until the Great Recession, at which point it would begin a long, slow, and painful decline. The company finally failed about a year after Marilyn died and I had gotten out of it completely, in 2021, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were shuttered and mortgage financing collapsed. I was lucky. Gabriel lost his house, and John committed suicide.

Maybe I could change that. I wasn’t going to work for the company, but maybe I could change things. That would be a worthy goal for the future. I would have to give that some thought.

I pointed at a yellow metal double-wide out back, in a field. “What’s that building for?”

Marilyn laughed. “That’s where the boys live! Come on!”

Marilyn tugged my hand forward, but I stayed where I was and kept her from romping ahead. “Hold on, hun,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s just ... listen, do me a favor and don’t tell anybody about my family. Have you said anything to anybody about what happened when we were down there?”

“No! That was just too weird. Nobody would have understood.”

How true, how true. “Okay, so don’t let it out. I’m already enough of a shock to your parents. Let’s not make it worse.”

“I think you’re being too critical of them,” she replied defensively.

I gave her a sad smile. “Your parents are good people, but I am not what they bargained for in a boyfriend for their daughter. They already don’t like that I’m a soldier. Later today they’re going to learn I’m not Catholic. Let them get used to me before we spring on them that I ran away from home as a teenager.”

She looked up at me sadly and wrapped her arms around me. “I love you. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks.”

I hugged her fiercely. “If that was all I had left in the world, it would be enough. Just humor me on this. It will all come out eventually. Just let me tell about it first, please?”

She looked like she was going to cry on my behalf. I just grinned down at her. “If I ran away from home and joined the circus, that must be the ring with the elephants out there,” I said, pointing at her brother’s double-wide. “Let’s go feed them some peanuts!”

“You’re awful!” She tugged my hand and pulled me along.

I remembered the building, but not very well at its original purpose. The Lefleurs had a brilliant solution to the problem of how to house their gigantic brood in a farmhouse not equipped to hold them all. They had lots of empty land and the ability to get a big trailer at cost, so they built a four-bedroom double-wide trailer out back of the sales lot and put the four oldest boys out there. Then, as each boy graduated from school and went out on his own, the next oldest boy would move out to the second house. Since this occurred at the same rate as new kids came along, the house population remained high but stable. Ultimately, it became the service building.

Marilyn walked up to the front door and barged right in. I hoped none of her brothers were in a state of undress, but we walked into a small living room. I had been in the building innumerous times, but only once when it was still a house. I had completely forgotten the layout of the place. Four bedrooms, two baths, small kitchen, central living and dining rooms, no foyer, small laundry off the kitchen. Only Matthew and Mark were out there, and neither was naked in the living room. The place reminded me of a residence inhabited by teenage boys - it was messy and smelled of gym socks.

“What’s up?” asked Matthew as he came out of his room.

I was just standing there in the doorway looking around, and Marilyn answered, “I was telling Carl how Dad put a place for you guys up out here and decided to show him.”

“Yeah, we were really getting packed in down there, and then you came back,” he said.

“So where do you keep the beer and women?” I asked.

Marilyn gasped and smacked me in the arm. “There’s no beer or women here!”

Both Matthew and Mark, who had now come out of his room, were grinning as she said this. I just shrugged good-naturedly and said, “How do you know? You don’t live out back here.”

“Because they don’t!” Strong on emotion, weak on logic, that was my Marilyn!

I just held my hands up in an undecided sort of gesture. “You never know, babe, you never know!” Actually, I did know. Matthew, for instance was incredibly strait-laced, and John was pretty serious, too. (Luke, on the other hand was a party hound, and would do it if he could!) If anything like that were to occur, the chances their parents wouldn’t hear about it were infinitesimal!

Luke and John came in and I asked them where they kept the beer, which got a nice discussion going, and then Marilyn and I left. She shook her finger at me. “Don’t go giving them any ideas about beer and women!”

“Honey, they’re teenaged guys. All they think about is beer and women!”

“No, they don’t! They’re good boys!”

“Then they must belong to a different species of humans than the one I know about!” I grabbed her from behind and wrapped my arms around her. “I think about beer and women, or at least just one woman!”

“They’re better behaved than you are!”

“Most humans are!” I decided to punish her for arguing with me, so I started tickling her.

Marilyn is extremely ticklish, and within seconds she was shrieking and trying to escape. She managed to squirm out of my reach and ran off towards one of the warehouses. I ran after her, which made her bolt in a different direction. I caught up to her and tickled her some more, and she kept running away. Eventually I managed to trap her in one of the corners of the warehouse. “Stay away from me!” she said with a warning tone.

“Oh, I can’t do that. All I can think about is beer and women, remember, and there’s no beer out here.” I moved closer, and she tried to squeeze to my left, but I blocked that and moved in.

She was smiling, and said, “I’m not that kind of girl!”

“But I’m that kind of boy!” She moved the opposite direction, and I blocked that path as well. By now I had her completely in the corner, with my arms planted on the walls, trapping her.

“Your father would have never done this with your mother!” she argued.

I laughed loudly at that. “Where do you think us three kids came from? The stork!” I moved even closer, so that I was pushing up against her. “I think we should go find an empty trailer.”

Suddenly she got a very scared look to her eye and tried to push me back. “That would be crazy! We’ll get caught for sure!”

Yeah, we probably would be. You’d think that my experience when Jeana’s parents caught us would have taught me a thing or two, but hormones are powerful things! “We can be quick!”

“My parents will kill us!”

“What a way to go!” I started kissing her.

Marilyn eagerly responded, but then she pushed me back. “No way are we doing anything in the homes or out here in the warehouse. You are going to just have to wait until tonight!”

“Okay, but tonight you’d better have taken your vitamins! It’s going to be a long night!”

“I hope so!” We settled back down to making out. “I missed you so much!”

“Me too, and not just because of that. I like being around you. I love you,” I told her. I never told Marilyn that enough the first time.

“I love you, too.”

“It’s just too bad we can’t be back at the Hilton for a few hours.”

She giggled at that. “I can’t believe we did that.”

“It’d be even better now, without the, well, you know.”

She just rolled her eyes. “Those things are so gross!”

“But necessary.”

She nodded, but said, “Yuck!”

“Come to Kegs in a week or two and spend the weekend with me. We’ll kick Bradley out and get crazy.” I pushed my body against hers. “I really liked sleeping with you, even when we were just sleeping.”

“Okay. Maybe every other weekend we can see each other?”

It was my turn to nod in agreement. “You know how we spent our vacation? How would you like to do that over winter break?”

Marilyn eyed me curiously. There was some sound from the other end of the warehouse, so we pulled apart and slipped out a side door and walked hand in hand slowly around the lot. “What did you have in mind?” she asked.

“Well, I was thinking, I have off most of January. I don’t know what your schedule is going to be, but you’ll probably have at least a few weeks off. You could come and visit me, and we could go away for a week.”

She had an eager look to her face. “Where?”

I shrugged. “Who cares? Anyplace would have to be warmer and sunnier than New York in the winter!”

She gave me a disdainful look. “New York is a great place in the winter!”

“Not if you’re wearing a bikini it isn’t!” That got a giggle from her. “Do you know how to find a tanning booth or salon?” I asked.

She looked very confused at that. “A tanning salon? Why do I need a tanning salon?”

I wrapped her back in my arms and whispered in her ear, “Because I am going to find you the world’s smallest bikini, and you’re going to need an all over tan before you can ever wear it.”

She blushed fiercely. “Oh my God!”

“It will be so small I will need to shave you, everywhere, before you can wear it!”

“You are evil!” She tugged my hand, and we went back to the farmhouse. It was time for lunch.

We goofed off after lunch, and I took a quick nap around two. At three I woke up and Marilyn asked me if I was going to church with her. I shrugged. “Sure, but don’t sit next to me. When the lightning comes down through the roof, you don’t want to be caught by friendly fire.”

“Very funny!”

At three-thirty the entire family showed up. I changed shirts and put on a dress shirt I had brought for the occasion, along with a tie I had tossed into my bag. Back home, when I was growing up, ‘Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes’ consisted of suits and ties for the guys and dresses for the women. I was surprised to find that to the average Catholic simple clean clothes were considered sufficient. In the rural area we ended up living in, that could mean fresh overalls and clean barn boots. My mother would have been scandalized! As it was, simply wearing a tie meant I was fancier than any of the boys.

They went to St. Peter’s in two cars, and Marilyn and I drove separately in my car. She simply had on clean jeans and a decent shirt. We sat together in two pews, with Harriet and Big Bob in the back pew, the better to swat unruly heads. I had been to countless masses before and skipped countless more. It took all my willpower not to whisper to Marilyn my thoughts on the priest’s sermon. Over the years it got to the point where Marilyn stopped asking me to attend, because I wouldn’t behave. I think that was after one of the priests at her church compared the Holy Week to a baseball game. Of course, it could have been after the sermon where an older priest repudiated the Second Vatican Council and called Jews the Christ killers. My mother was a quarter Jewish (maiden name Rosenkrantz - long story, but she was still hard-core Lutheran), enough to have gotten her into trouble with the Nazis, and it was all I could do not to stand up in the middle of church and denounce the priest and leave. Marilyn was very worried about me that day.

And don’t even get me started on the priestly sex scandals that ultimately broke the church. By the time I stopped going to church with her, I had taken to calling the collection plate the Altar Boy Defense Fund. Marilyn lived long enough to see how all that ended, and it just about killed her.

Marilyn had steadfastly refused to believe there was a problem in the Catholic Church. Whenever there was a sex scandal in a Protestant church, maybe once a year at most, she would trot that out to ‘prove’ we had problems like they did. Never mind that for the better part of two decades the Catholic Church had a problem every week! That was just anti-religious people like me publicizing things unfairly.