Chapter Thirteen
- Beware - Livestock on Roadway . . .
I suppose the fright everyone had received about Grampa Bender's heart attack had put everything into a different perspective and also calmed everyone down a lot, at least in respect to Corinna and Wil's actions. All of us were feeling our mortality and I think Mr. and Mrs. Coulter had been impressed by the prompt action that Carissa and I had taken when we'd found Grampa Bender in such bad shape. In some way Corinna and Wil may well have gained some 'reflected' respect from our actions as well, at least no one was bearing down on them as hard as I had expected.
Actually I think it helped that Mom and Dad took the time to discuss all the happenings of the last few days, then to answer any questions that Mr. and Mrs. Coulter had about anything that had happened. In fact I felt they laid it on just a bit thick, but at one point all of Mom and Dad's work almost went down the drain.
"I was very impressed with how Carissa and Corinna pitched in to help around the farm, particularly after Chris was injured." Mom smiled at Mrs. Coulter. "Actually we owe your two girls a huge thank you for all the work they've helped us do."
"Well, we sort of felt responsible for Chris getting hurt, so we were trying to make up for it." Corinna said quietly.
"Yeah, if we hadn't been so eager to ride the horses, he wouldn't have been hurt at all." Carissa added.
"You certainly don't owe us anything, in fact we owe you." Corinna smiled at Mom, then turned her head toward Wil.
I felt Carissa's leg move at my side and suspected that she'd kicked Corinna's leg under the table. At least Corinna jumped slightly, but also shifted her gaze to Carissa almost instantly.
"We certainly do." Carissa said. "I've learned a tremendous amount about farming and raising animals. For instance, I never, ever want to be involved with raising chickens!"
"Oh my, that reminds me, you should see those pictures your uncle took of the two of you." Mr. Coulter chuckled. "I think they're priceless."
"Oh, Daddy! You would!" Corinna grumbled. "Why would anyone want a picture of us with no makeup, grungy clothes, messed up hair and both of us dripping wet with sweating from working so hard."
"That's the whole point." Carissa said and I could feel her relax, as if the dangerous subject had been bypassed for a moment. "Daddy likes them because they're proof that we're not the totally spoiled little bitches that some people seem to think we are."
"Oh, I see." Corinna actually smiled at her twin. "Then I think we owe the whole Crawford family a gigantic thank you for taking a chance on us, don't we?"
"I think everyone should call it even." I chuckled. "It was another of those deals that Dad calls a fair trade. Everyone got some benefit out of the process."
"Well seeing that you're the only one who seems to have been injured in any way, I suppose your opinion should be our guide." Mr. Coulter said quietly. "I must admit that when I heard you were in the hospital I was worried. Since the rumour I heard made it sound as if the twins had been involved in some way with your being injured, I felt somewhat responsible myself."
"Well, I think it was really Beth's idea for them to be stuck here." I said quietly.
"Oh no, her idea was to have them come to spend a full day with you, or at least to stay overnight. I was the one who extended the time limit." He jumped in to correct me. "Then when you got hurt, it became a different ball game. I'm afraid I didn't exactly foresee the results that have happened because of my interference."
"Well, John, since you admit it was your idea and since everyone else but you seems satisfied with what's going on, with some reservations, what are you complaining about?" Mrs. Coulter put in her two cents. "I'll be honest, when we returned from the hospital and I saw the girls join in with everyone else to do all the chores so quickly, I was rather impressed at the change in our daughters."
Mr. Coulter simply stared at her for a moment as if she had suddenly become a stranger. "But, you were the one who was so upset this morning?" He protested.
"Not so much upset as unprepared." Mrs. Coulter corrected him. "I was used to thinking of our daughters as girls, not as young women. Between their words and actions, on top of the discussions I've had with Liz, I've had a slight change of heart. I've realised that they are old enough that they have minds of their own and I'm rather proud of them too."
"But . . ." Mr. Coulter started to protest again, only to have Mrs. Coulter reach out and touch his lower lip with a finger.
"I'm not done speaking, John." She said firmly, then she turned to look at Corinna and Wil. "The pair of you needs to think long and hard about where you are headed and about what you want to do in the long run. I'm simply not old enough to accept the idea of being a grandmother yet."
"Yes Mom." Corinna whispered. "Actually, I don't want to be a mommy yet either and Wil has two more years of Ag. school to finish, but we do want to be together as much as we can."
"Hmmph, well, since I and John weren't that much older than you are when we started dating each other, I suppose I can understand." Mrs. Coulter sighed. "However, since I hope you two have a fairly long engagement, I think you and I will be going to see Dr. McGraths as soon as I can get an appointment. I understand that they have a pill on the market now which can prevent pregnancy."
"Count me in on that appointment." Carissa surprised everyone but me. "Chris and I aren't getting engaged, but accidents can happen."
Mr. and Mrs. Coulter simply stared at her.
"Well, Daddy did set me up." Carissa grinned. "I mean he threw both Corinna and me at Chris. I was the lucky one. Corinna tripped and fell for his older brother."
"Hey!" Corinna yelped, then grinned after a second and grabbed Wil's arm. "Well, I guess when you think about it, you're right. I did fall for Wil."
Carissa stuck her tongue out at Corinna, then turned back to her parents. "Chris and I are just dating, so don't get your shirts all in a knot, but like I said, accidents can happen. In any event I want to be prepared, just in case."
Both Mr. and Mrs. Coulter looked shocked. In fact, there was a moment of complete silence, then Dad broke it and changed the subject completely.
"Well, it's a good thing Will did come home early." Dad sighed deeply. "With Chris partially laid up, we can use his help. Now as well, we're going to have to think of a way to work in a trip up to Grampa Bender's place every day or two. We can't just abandon his animals to the elements."
Now was my chance to speak up and I hoped I had a decent argument ready.
"Well, Dad, I only have a few exams at school, and then as you know I was originally planning to go to the city to work for the summer. The problem is that with my casts, I don't think I can drive as well as I'd need to in the city, after all the traffic there is darn heavy." I said quickly. "I was thinking that perhaps I could go look after Grampa Bender's place for him. There isn't really that much work to do and I can easily handle it."
Carissa surprised me, by jumping in then.
"I can understand what Chris is talking about." She smiled at me and grabbed my hand in hers. "Grampa Bender has a beautiful place up there on the edge of the foothills and someone should be there to look after everything, just in case. The road isn't that bad and if some of the more 'rangutang kids from town hear that there isn't anyone living there, they could go up there and make an awful mess."
"Wait a minute." Mom jumped in. "Are you suggesting that you stay up there, Chris?"
"Well, yeah, I guess so." I was caught off balance because although I was going to suggest that eventually, I wasn't planning to mention it until I'd made the trip a few times, just to illustrate how much time was wasted in driving back and forth. Since Carissa had blown my plan away, I had to adapt quickly. "I was originally going to suggest that I only make the trip each day, but Carissa is right. It makes sense for someone to live there, especially at night, just in case there are any prowlers who come around after dark."
I think the next few moments were a surprise for Mr. and Mrs. Coulter. At first none of the rest of my family seemed to be in favour of the idea, then slowly, one at a time, they all seemed to come around to my way of thinking.
The capitulation had started when I'd looked at Dad and made a gesture of tipping a glass to my mouth. Almost instantly I could see his mind racing as he thought about the idea of anyone finding Grampa Bender's 'home brew' stash, but from that point on I felt I had his support. Wil caught on next. In the long run even Mom gave the idea her grudging support, but she had a few reservations. In fact, she insisted on a couple of security measures to be more assured of my safety. As well as that, she was insistent about my finishing the school year and writing my final exams.
I think Mom had high hopes that Grampa Bender would be out of the hospital by the time that my exams at school were done, but I'd overheard the doctor who had first seen Grampa Bender when he had been admitted. The doctor was discussing the case with the head nurse and the two of them had mentioned making sure that they had a long term bed available. Because of overhearing that conversation I wasn't as hopeful as Mom was.
In reality, what I was doing was establishing the fact that I cared about Grampa Bender and about what he had done.
I suppose I should explain; when his family had moved into this area to homestead, his father and brothers had all set up homesteads on the lowlands. Instead of taking the easy route and homesteading next door, Grampa Bender had followed the local creek upstream and had found that the creek which provided water to a large part of the local area flowed from a spring fed lake on the edge of the foothills. He reasoned that if he controlled the water, he could have a say in the way the land was used, so he homesteaded the area around the lake. Once he had established his homestead there, he'd approached the government and had leased the valley from the edge of his homestead to the point where the stream flowing out of the lake had joined with another creek. Since that lower point just happened to be at the edge of the property that his father had homesteaded, and since his brothers had homesteads that spread across the whole lower end of the valley, it meant Grampa Bender's family had control of the whole valley.
The whole family had benefited from Grampa Bender's foresight though. While the lease from the government was in his name, he'd allowed some control to slip into the hands of the family as a whole in the form of a sublease. That meant our family controlled a roughly triangular area that was one mile wide at the top end and three miles wide at the lower end. However, it was eighteen miles between the upper and lower edges of that area, so in essence my family had almost a full township of land under our control. In other words, we farmed, ranched, and subleased an area of about 20,000 acres and it was all because of Grampa Bender.
We'd almost lost partial control of that lease once though. When my Great-Granddad had died, the farm that we lived on had almost been sold out of the family because Great-Granddad had been very ill and very cantankerous for years before his death. He'd been unable to keep up the farm himself, but at the same time, he'd been unwilling to have any help from the family. After his death the farm was badly run down and no one in the family had wanted to tackle bringing it back to shape. As well as that, the family had changed. Most of our extended family members had moved to town or to the city so they weren't interested in farming, they only seemed interested in the money that the sublease brought to them.
The whole thing was a complicated mess because the sublease had been written out badly in the first place. In fact after Great-Granddad's death, a magistrate had told the family that whoever controlled his land would also have some rights to the subleased area. That threw a huge monkey wrench into the idea of selling Great-Granddad's section of land to an outsider.
It was about that point of time when Dad and Mama Kate entered the picture. In fact they fell in love with each other, but to complicate matters while Mama Kate was a Bender, Dad was her fourth cousin. While legally they could marry, there were several people in the family who opposed the idea. However since they both wanted badly to live on a farm, Grampa Bender backed them and even lent them money to get started on the old farm, so in a nutshell, that's how my family ended up living where we did.
As you can see, everything about our family and about the farm was quite involved or rather quite complicated. The fact that my Mom came along to help Dad after Mama Kate got ill, then had married Dad after Mama Kate died added another bump in the road. However, Grampa Bender supported Mom and Dad once again. I'm sure you can understand why I and my family had a special bond to Grampa Bender, but in the long run the lease and the sublease were still in the hands of family, even if the people who were directly involved in living on the land had changed.
I had a bit of further insight into the whole legal situation about the lease and the sublease that most people didn't, that was because of the time that I'd spent going to see Grampa Bender and talking to him over the last few years.
I knew he was upset with the sublease in several ways. In fact I remember his words about the situation exactly.
"Them there city slickers never add a dang thing to the place; they just suck money out of it. Us folks that actually live here, gotta change that!" He had said profoundly one day as he looked out over his farm from the front porch of his house. Then he had looked at Tom and me and he had winked. "You boys has done more dang work in the last couple of years than that useless bunch of clock punchers have done in their whole lives. I figure on rattlin' things around a bit real soon, danged if I don't."
On top of remembering that speech, I knew that while the title of the property he lived on was in his name and that he had a ninety-nine-year lease on the valley, the sublease had only been made out for sixty years. Since both the lease and the sublease had been made out fifty-eight years ago, there were only two years left on the sublease. I didn't know what Grampa Bender planned to do and I'd never seen his will, but I felt sure things were going to change in the near future. If I could make my family's position a little more secure by spending some time looking after his place while he was in the hospital, I intended to do it. Besides, I still had that dream of raising horses in the upper end of the lease in the back of my mind.
Of course while I'd been daydreaming about Grampa Bender, leases and other family matters, the conversation around the dinner table had carried on. I was brought back to reality by a poke in the ribs from Carissa.
"Hey, are you still with us?" She asked.
"I'm sorry, I was thinking. What did I miss?"
"Well, Mom and Dad want to go home, but with all the fuss and bother that has happened here today, Corinna and I aren't packed and ready to leave yet. We were wondering if you could either run us into town once we're packed up or if we could just catch a ride to town tomorrow morning with you? After all, we all have to go in for the first of our finals then anyway and neither Corinna nor I really want to rush away."
"Oh, sure, whatever you want." I shrugged my shoulders.
"Well!" Mom said sharply, as if I'd insulted someone. "You could be a bit more decisive."
"Oops, sorry." I apologised, then looked at Mr. and Mrs. Coulter and couldn't help grinning. "What would you like me to do with your headstrong daughter and her twin sister?"
The look of surprise on their faces was priceless, but it was the gasp from Carissa that really made my day.
"Headstrong? Me?" She squawked as if I'd really insulted her. "Just what do you mean by that?"
"Well, it seems to me that you insist on getting your way, no matter what." I grinned at her, then turned my head and winked at her parents. "For instance, just over a week ago, weren't you one of the girls who phoned here, almost demanding that I spend some time with you?"
"Well, yeah, but you never called back and then you gave me some wild story about having to study hard to pass your finals and I backed off."
"Oh sure you backed off, but all the time since then you've been plugging away on the periphery of things, making sure you were impressing me or at least making sure you were on my mind in some way or another." I reached over and took her hand in mine and gave it a light squeeze. "It seems to me that all of that illustrates how you're headstrong or stubborn or at least single minded, wouldn't you agree?"
"I, unh . . ." She started to say something, then fell silent and actually blushed.
I don't know why, but right then I glanced around the table at everyone else and I realized that all of them had a smile of some sort on their face, even Mr. and Mrs. Coulter. In fact, Mr. Coulter winked at me.
"Like mother, like daughter. When I met Wilma, she did almost the same thing to me, so I know what you mean." He laughed. "I couldn't seem to turn around, but I was tripping over her."
"Me?" Mrs Coulter squeaked. "You were the one who was always showing up wherever I went."
While they were telling us about the way they had met and had grown to like each other, the center of attention had changed and I squeezed Carissa's hand lightly once more, then winked at her.
"What do you really want to do?" I managed to whisper.
"Spend the night here." She whispered back. "So does Corinna. I'm sure your folks don't mind."
I just nodded at that. Since I happened to be watching Mom out of the corner of my eye, I saw her smile and knew it really was okay with her.
We were still outside, after saying goodnight to Mr. and Mrs. Coulter, when Uncle Tom and Aunt Alice brought Beth back from town. They only stayed long enough to tell us that Grampa Bender seemed to be resting comfortably, then my family and the twins turned to go back inside. I wasn't surprised when Mom came over to Carissa and me, then nodded her head at the seats on the front porch.
"I'd like to talk to you two alone for a moment." She suggested quietly.
"Sure." I answered, then found that Carissa was suddenly holding my hand.
When we were sitting down, Mom seemed to stare off into the sunset for a moment, then sighed deeply. She turned her head and looked into my eyes, then reached out to touch Carissa's and my joined hands.
"I really don't understand the dynamics of the two of you toward each other, but what I can say for sure is that Wil and Beth seem to look to you in the way of a guide, Chris." She spoke very quietly. "Whatever you two do, I want you to realise that both of them will be influenced by it, especially Corinna."
"I don't think I understand, Mom." I frowned slightly at her.
"Oh, Chris." Mom sounded a bit peeved. "Do I have to blankly ask you two not to have sex tonight?"
"What?" I stared at her in surprise.
Carissa had gasped in surprise as well, then she giggled slightly.
"Oh Mrs Crawford, you even surprised me that time." She said softly. "I'll be the first one to admit that I'd be willing to sleep with Chris, but tonight isn't right in any way for that sort of thing. We have talked about sex and I've teased Chris about it, but I think we need to learn a little more about each other first before we do anything. On top of that, today has been about as romantic as a trip to the grocery store; I'm just not in the mood for sex. I think instead I need a nice long cuddle and then a warm bed. I'm not about to sneak around the house and climb into Chris's bed with him or anything like that, if that's what you're worried about."
"Thank you." Mom actually sounded relieved. "There have been so many changes in the last few weeks . . ."
Her voice drifted off and she was quiet for a moment, then she seemed to realize she had been talking to us.
"I'm sorry. I'm a bit wrought up today after everything that's happened." She apologised. "I'll leave you two alone to have that cuddle, but before I go, I just wanted to ask if you're both ready for your first exam tomorrow."
"I think I am, Mom, and if I'm not, studying at this late hour will simply confuse me."
"I'm confident that I'll do okay, thanks." Carissa added as she leaned toward me. "I promise that we won't be too long."
Carissa was wrong though. We were still there, cuddling and talking until midnight. It wasn't until I heard the old clock in the hall strike twelve that I realized how late it was. That's when I insisted that we both needed some sleep if we were going to be able to stay awake and write a history test in the morning.
After one final kiss we slipped inside and quietly sought out our individual beds. I think I was asleep ten seconds after crawling into mine.