Chapter 4

Over the course of the last couple of years, a close friendship had evolved among Randy and Nicole, Trey and Myleigh, and Danny and Debbie Evachevski. Randy and Nicole had known Myleigh for years, of course, but hadn't known Trey anywhere as well. However, after Myleigh and Trey married and moved to Spearfish Lake, the seeds were already there for a close friendship.

Randy had known Danny much of his life; they'd grown up in the same neighborhood. To be honest, Randy hadn't much cared for Danny back in neighborhood days when Randy had been a scrawny kid several years younger, and Danny had been an accomplished and rather arrogant high school athlete. But in the dozen years that Danny had been gone from Spearfish Lake during college and his disastrous marriage, Randy had become close with Danny's father, Gil, who had been a friend of the Clark family anyway. When a rather dispirited and defeated Danny came back to Spearfish Lake a few years before, Randy and Nicole got to know him a little. After Danny and Debbie Elkstalker had started living together and Danny took over his father's business, the three couples became much closer, at least partly because Myleigh and Debbie were very unique people in their own individual ways.

Myleigh was small, very neat, very precise, and very brilliant, but very, very quirky – the kind of quirks that can grow on people if they can stand them at all, and a lot of people couldn't. Myleigh's unique way of talking just underlined her individualism. Debbie, a full-blooded Shakahatche from the Three Pines band was a very warm and outgoing person, the kind who becomes an instant friend. She sold advertising for the local paper as a day job, but in her spare time she was also a tribal katara, a word that didn't translate easily. Danny and Debbie could easily come up with a dozen words that touched on what a katara was, shaman leading the list, but none of them was an exact match. She was very spiritual in her own way, with a talent for making you stop and take a fresh look at things.

Debbie and Preach had only met a couple times, never for long, but getting the two of them together held the promise of an interesting evening.

Though Danny and Debbie were a few years older than the rest of the group gathered in the Clark living room that evening, the age difference didn't matter much anymore, at least partly because they had been fully married the shortest of any of the four couples. However, they were the only ones with a child, their boy Sky, who was a couple of months short of a year old. Debbie was pregnant again, and was due in June, a couple of months after Nicole.

The air in Randy and Nicole's great room was filled with the smell of pot roast as Danny and Debbie came in, with Sky in a baby carrier. Sky had just recently started walking without holding onto things, but still fell down a lot, so to keep him out of things Nicole had set up a play pen that had spent several years in her father and mother's attic. Sky was the center of attention for a while, especially among the women, but soon fell asleep in the play pen.

"That," Trey observed, "appears to be a look into the future around this place."

"I'd say you have it about right," Randy agreed. "In fact, I'd say about a year into the future."

"I take it you guys are still waiting to be surprised in the boy or girl department," Crystal observed.

"We could find out," Nicole agreed. "And it would make life a little bit simpler. But at the same time we decided it would be more fun to be surprised."

"Have you made any decisions about a name?"

"Not really," Nicole said. "If it's a girl, we've pretty well decided that it's going to be Sabena Marie, at least unless we get a better idea between now and then. A boy's name, well, that's a little more up in the air. We've thrown around a couple dozen names, but nothing seems to stick."

Randy shook his head. "I've drawn a couple lines. For instance, I want to lose the 'R' tradition. Ryan, Rachel, Ruth and Randy are enough in my mind."

"You know," Danny opined. "Dad and I were kicking around possible names for our next addition the other day and the discussion drifted to you guys. He said you guys might want to consider 'Wayne, ' after your great-grandfather."

"That's on the short list," Randy sighed. "The hell of it is that Wayne Clark is a hell of a name to have to live up to, both good and bad."

"How's that?" Preach asked.

"Long story. Bear in mind that I never knew him, he died years before I was born, and Dad never really knew him that well." He leaned back and stretched while he was figuring out how to say what he wanted to stay, then continued. "Wayne Clark was a very mixed bag," he began. "On the one hand, he was brilliant in his own way, and he had a tremendously long view. He wasn't the one to invent plywood or wafer board, but was one of the pioneers who got the bandwagon rolling. He was a great businessman who knew when to jump and where to jump to when it was time. Even when everybody else was jumping the other way, his instincts were usually pretty good. For instance, he pulled out of the stock market in early 1929, six months before it bit the big one. People called him crazy for doing it at the time, but he proved that he was crazy like a fox."

"Not too many people did that," Danny observed. "My grandfather Dan said that he never would have made it through the Depression without what Wayne did."

"True," Randy nodded. "Even though a lot of people didn't understand his vision at the time. His ideas about conservative woodland management and sustained yield were decades ahead of his time, principles that Clark Plywood still pretty much follows today and with any kind of luck will be following a hundred years from now."

"How did he help people through the Depression?" Preach asked.

"Again, long story," Randy said. "To be as brief as possible, back in the early thirties much of the woodland around here was still barren and empty following the great white pine clear-cut of the late 1800s. Lots of stump land reverted to the county for unpaid taxes. When everybody was really hurting, Wayne bought up all he could get his hands on at pennies an acre, and hired people to go out and plant tree seedlings. It was sort of the same thing as Roosevelt did with the Civilian Conservation Corps, except that Wayne thought of it first and did it out of his own pocket. My grandfather told me once that Wayne told him that he never expected to cut those trees, but that his grandkids would. And he was right – most of what my dad and Clark Plywood harvests today are those trees."

"That doesn't sound like a bad legacy," Preach observed.

"If that was where it ended, it wouldn't be," Randy said, "But all that was on the one hand, and what was on the other hand wasn't as pretty. Let's just say that he wanted what he wanted and didn't mind too much how he got it. He could be vindictive and obnoxious. He would run right over people if they got in his way. He knew what to do when he got a bottle in his hand, and he liked chasing skirts. That didn't fly very well in a small town like Spearfish Lake, which was a lot smaller then than it is now. The story of how he wound up with his last wife, Donna, isn't very pretty, and caused a split in the family and in this town that lasted long after his death. In fact, he and his son, my grandfather Brent, were barely on speaking terms for the last twenty years of Wayne's life, mostly because that deal pissed my grandfather off enough he didn't want anything to do with his father. And, it's part of why my grandfather started Clark Construction, rather than going to work for Clark Plywood. Wayne Clark may have been a great man in some ways, but he was no saint by a long way, either."

"Yeah," Danny commented. "I guess I can see why you would have second thoughts about wanting to saddle a kid with that name."

"Names are very important," Debbie said. "One of the most important questions I have ever had to ask myself is, 'What is my name?' I mean, what does it mean? Why does it affect me? How does it affect what others think about me? What does it mean for my future? Too many people are much too casual about names, Randy, so it's good to see that you are putting some careful thinking into this question. But I should point out that in this case the name carries special power, and it'd be up to you to give the child bearing it the wisdom to use that power wisely."

"Which is part of the reason I'm reluctant to use it," Randy said. "I'm not sure I have wisdom enough to pass that kind of wisdom along to a son. I've come to the conclusion that making a baby is easy and fun, it's what comes after that's hard."

"If you've thought it through that far you're ahead of ninety percent of the rest of the world," Preach snorted. "The odds are that it's going to work out for you and Nicole, Randy. You are both showing a refreshing sense of responsibility about it."

"Glad you think so," Randy shook his head. "I mean, I look at Nicole and sometimes wonder just what in hell we were thinking about, beyond the fact that we're both getting to an age where it needed to be done before too long. No turning back now, though. I guess we'll just have to do the best we can and hope it works out."

"That's about all anyone can ever do," Debbie smiled. "I happen to think the two of you are off to a good start."

"You guys are pretty serious about this, aren't you?" Crystal asked.

"Very serious," Debbie said. "It's a big responsibility. Most people don't understand how big a responsibility it is, and that's where they screw up. We're hoping to avoid that, and I think we may have a chance of managing that. On the other hand, you never know. When you look at the kind of drunken, lousy parents my folks were, I have to think that somehow I got lucky and turned out pretty good. So, you never know."

"It's a crapshoot," Nicole shrugged. "In fact, it's about the biggest one you can make. I can think of plenty of examples of good people who did everything the best they could and came up with some absolutely loser kids. On the other hand, I can think of people who did everything wrong and came up with a winner, like Debbie or Myleigh."

"The odds are that good is going to produce good, and bad will produce bad," Debbie smiled. "But it doesn't always work that way, in fact, it often doesn't work that way. To be honest, I'm a little surprised that Danny and I decided to take the risk to not only do it once, but do it again."

"The biological imperative is toward reproduction, and it's also toward hedging our reproductive bets," Danny said. "I know I wanted to be a good father for many years before I met Debbie. My ex-wife was totally against having kids, and in looking back at it I'm just as glad that we never did. It would have been a disaster. I think Debbie and I can make it work, though."

"You know," Crystal mused, "I've been thinking that Sky is sort of an unusual name for a kid. Is that really Skyler?"

"No, it's Sky, as in Sky Blue," Debbie smiled. "We wanted to come up with a name that reflected both his Indian and White heritage. We went a long time before we settled on that, and it was actually suggested by one of my katara friends over at Three Pines, and we had quite a conclave with them before we settled on it."

"So how about this one?" Preach asked.

"We haven't settled it yet, but we've still got some time," Danny said. "Right now, the short list would have to be Hunter, Sage, Talon, or Raven if it's a boy, or Raven again, April, Autumn, or Aurora for a girl. But that could change."