Chapter 3

I finally got back to the farm about four in the morning and was dead on my feet. I set the thermos down on the counter as I went to my room. I didn't even bother to undress, just fell on the bed, asleep before I quit bouncing.

"Jon! Jonnnn! If you don't get up, we are going to be late for my fitting."

"What time is it anyway, Sally?"

"It's eight in the morning and your feet stink. Didn't you bathe while you were gone?"

"What time is your appointment?"

"It's at eleven and I want to have breakfast at Denny's before we get there."

"Ok, get me a cup of coffee and I'll shower and get dressed, Ok?"

"Well hurry up or we'll be late."

I made my way into the shower half asleep, but woke up quick when I turned the wrong knob on the shower, and got ice cold water instead of warm as I had expected. I yelled and heard Sally laugh from downstairs. I had to smile at her impatience when her fitting was several hours away and the shop we were going to was about six miles away from the farm. I could only hope as she got older she would settle down a little, or I would have grey hair before I was forty. I heard the house phone ringing as I was drying, and wondered who would be calling at this time of the morning.

I finished getting dressed, and quickly shaved, then dabbed a little Old Spice on my face when I was done. "Now I'm ready", I thought as I headed down the steps to get the coffee that was supposed to be ready for me. Sally must have given Myrna the day off again or I would have heard the familiar sound of pots and pans rattling. She had to quit trying to take over when I was gone, I was thinking as I walked into the kitchen. Myrna was sitting at the counter with Sally whispering back and forth.

"Ok you two, what are you cooking up now? Myrna you're supposed to be the adult here, so act like it."

"Oh shush, Mistah Jon! This is girl talk and you don't know how much we despise being interrupted when we is just hatching our little ideas. You take yore coffee into the study and let us finish our hatchin'."

I grabbed the cup and left, knowing better than to try to argue with Myrna when she gave an order. Hell, she had to be sixty and thought she was the boss. My grandfather always said when it came to the house, it was better not to upset the status quo. He always said Myrna treated him like she was the boss, not him.

Before he died, he had told me her story. But, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why she preferred to stay here, with all the money she had. He had said she had been in the family since she was eighteen and had never been married except to her job. Her family tree was almost as long as ours, I had been told, and she was one of the smartest women he had ever met. He said her stock portfolio was worth millions and that she had made it all herself over the years. Now she had pitched right in the moment Sally had come and had adopted her as her own. The only problem I had with that was the fact that Sally thought she could get away with bossing me around like Myrna did. In a way it was funny, but sometimes very irritating. I did notice that she only did it in the house, and was always polite and respectful when we were away from the farm. Sometimes I wondered if Myrna was teaching her this so that Sally could replace her if she ever decided to leave. God, now there was a scary thought. Sally as a mini Myrna. The only difference was that Myrna was a woman of color, as she had told me on several occasions. She said she hated the term Negro or African American. She said this was just a polite way of saying they needed to be called something society wanted, instead of facing the fact that we were all a nation of people of color, just different in colors and shades.

I had already learned that lesson in the Legion. We had a very large African instructor. Mean bastard he was. I remember the first time one of the recruits had called him a derogatory name. He found out real fast that regardless of what color we all were, we all bled red and the worse the wound the redder the color. From then on, if anyone had something smart to say, they kept it to themselves.

"Come on Jon, Sarah is meeting us at Denny's for breakfast. She says she has something important to ask you."

My suspicion meter went through the roof as I went out to the truck. Now I knew something was up, and all the whispering I had heard had been against me.

"Who called while I was in the shower, Sally?"

"That was Sarah wanting to know if you had made it back yet. I told her we were having breakfast at Denny's and that she could join us if she wanted to."

"Did she say what she wanted to talk about?"

"No, just that she needed to talk to you as soon as possible."

I looked over at her and she had that teenage "I know everything" smirk on her face. God, I hated that look, but Sally and every teenage girl or boy that I had met since being here all seemed to have it. Sometimes I wanted to just smack them on the back of the head to see if it would go away. I knew the conversation with her was over when she turned on the local country station and started singing along with the song that was playing. I knew she was baiting me, but I didn't say a word, just drove. She had done this before when she wanted to keep me from prying something out of her. I personally thought it was inborn with women, but it seemed to be stronger when she and Myrna had a chat whenever I was home. I didn't know what these two had up their sleeves, but this time I wasn't buying into it like I always had. Over the last few years they had gotten me a few times by ganging up on the only man in the house. Every time they got their way, I swore they wouldn't do it again. But they seemed to be able to keep doing it, somehow. One of these days I was going to sit Myrna down and have a serious talk about who was boss in my home.

When I recovered from all the knots and bumps from her favorite iron skillet, she would still be boss in the house. But I would have at least let her know how I felt about the whole thing. She had already chased me out of the house when I first came over here because I told her she didn't know how to cook chicken like we Frenchmen did. As she was chasing me with the skillet, she hit me and reminded me after each bang that I wasn't in France now, and that this was the South. If I didn't like it, I could starve or eat in town. It took two whole days before my grandfather could get her to let me back into the house and near her kitchen. I walked on eggshells for another month until she forgave me. Needless to say, I learned real quick that she was worse than any instructor I had in the Legion, and that iron was a lot worse on the skull than a wooden truncheon. The knots took a lot longer to heal and the headaches were a killer.

Of course my grandfather thought it was all a big laugh. He warned me that Myrna could run faster at her age than any man on this end of the state. He also said that I better get used to her cooking, or I might have to go back to France to eat anything even remotely tasting like a woman had made it. He said all the other women in the county followed Myrna's lead when it came to their cookin'. I never claimed to be the smartest one in the crowd, but I knew if it was like my grandfather had told me, I needed to stay friends with her or starve. We did almost come to blows again a few years later when she insisted that I eat grits for breakfast before she would cook my eggs and ham. This time I told her I detested them and if she expected me to eat them, she could forget it. We stared at each other for what seemed like hours before my grandfather had put a stop to it. I'll never forget what he told her and from that point on it changed her whole attitude toward me. I quote; "This boy has eaten things that you stepped on and thought they were delicious. The French Foreign Legion trains their men to eat anything that moves or crawls as long as it's not poisonous. If you are in a battle and cut off from your supply lines, anything you can put in your stomach is protein and if it's alive or wiggles, it's considered food. I know because I have seen the French eat food that I would bury during World War Two while I was over there. Myrna, if they hadn't eaten it, most would have starved to death because the Germans stole for themselves anything that wasn't tied down. If he doesn't want to eat something you fix, then don't fix it or try to make him eat it."

From that day on Myrna seemed to change her attitude, and we had a nice long talk with me telling her about some of the countries I had fought in, and how we had to eat what the natives did or die. I told her about eating spiders, snakes, weevils and lizards. Sometimes it was raw because we couldn't build a fire, but we needed the protein to survive. She gave me a funny look and from that point on, never said anything about my eating habits. It had taken a few years but we became good friends, and when my grandfather had died, she had come to me crying and wanting to know if I was going to kick her out of the only home she had ever known.