Orchard Flower (Version Bravo)
by Lubrican
Chapter : Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15
Chapter One
I got married at thirty-one, relatively late in life, after years of
thinking I'd never meet that special woman. When she suddenly
popped into my life I was astonished, and then delighted.
Losing her was just as sudden, and the emotions involved in it were
even stronger. I didn't even have the closure of being able
to bury her because ... well ... there wasn't anything to put in the
coffin. The counselor the airline supplied suggested I think
of her as having been buried at sea. That didn't help.
I want you to know up front here that I'm not trying to get you to feel
sorry for me. I took care of that, believe me. I
just want you to understand the frame of mind I was in when things
happened after that, or I made decisions; that's all.
I couldn't live in the house any more. I had a company
auction off all the furniture and everything else we'd bought
together. I sold the house too, because even seeing it from
the outside made me want to fall down and cry. I didn't need
a whole house any more anyway. I couldn't get up the interest
to look for an apartment, and got a long-term room in a fleabag hotel
because it was quick and easy. The room had a television,
though I didn't watch it much. I read a lot of books, though
it took a really good one to keep my mind off my loss.
I kept my job as an accountant, because it was somewhere to go during
the day, and I could dull the pain by letting the numbers distract
me. Tax season was the best, because I was busy extra hours
of the day. I turned management of my own financial affairs
over to Phil, a friend of mine who didn't know what to say about Vicky
being dead, but wanted to do something to help.
I found that going for a run helped. I wasn't a physical kind
of person before all this happened. I had never been a runner
before this, but I'd heard that runners kind of zone out while they run
and I desperately wanted to zone out, so I tried it. I didn't
zone out, but there were lots of things to distract me, particularly if
I ran during rush hour. That's when I started running to and
from work, instead of driving my car. Rain or shine, cold or
hot, it didn't matter to me. It was something to do that kept
me from constantly thinking about my loss.
Three years later I was finally able to think about her without
crying. I probably should have stayed in therapy a lot longer
than I did. Maybe that would have limited my mourning time to
a year.
Basically though, one day it finally occurred to me that I didn't have
a life. I looked around and took stock. In the
hotel room I had some clothes and three neatly organized accordion
folders of my personal records. I had a few books.
I swapped books at the local used book place, or got them from the
library, so I didn't own that many. I still had a bunch of
stuff in the self-storage place, but hadn't even been down there in
over a year. I paid all my bills online from my computer at
work, and didn't get paper bank statements. Whenever I paid a
bill I saw a summary of account activity, and all I ever checked
routinely was the balance in my checking account.
They say mechanics drive broken down cars, and accountants never
balance their checkbooks. It's true, I guess.
When I took the time to actually go talk to Phil and look at my own
financial situation I was mildly astonished to find that the proceeds
of the house, and my wife's life insurance, having been invested and
rolled over a number of times, had made me a modestly wealthy
man. Of course the Spartan lifestyle I lived had a lot to do
with that too. I'd completely forgotten about the fact that
I'd signed papers for Phil to have almost fifty percent of my salary
diverted to an investment fund, and that I'd also elected to pay taxes
on it up front. In short, if I wanted it, within six months I could have over two
million dollars in liquid assets available to me.
When you have that much money it's easy to overcompensate for awakening
from three years or so of lethargic non-involvement in the
world. While before this I elected to do relatively nothing
except feel sorry for myself, now I went a little crazy trying to
change the feel of my life.
Things were slow one day, and I saw an ad in the paper about how the
government auctions off land to settle tax debts. I'd heard
of it before, but had never paid any attention to it. This
time I went to the web site that was listed.
For some reason I got interested in a four hundred acre farm in South
Dakota that had been seized by the government for back taxes.
I had this stylized vision of being a gentleman farmer, which turned
out to be a real hoot.
You can be an accountant anywhere. South Dakota needs them,
just like everybody else. It turned out that four hundred
acres in South Dakota is considered to be a garden plot by most
ranchers. If it's not land that's contiguous with what you
already own, it would be more of a pain in the ass to mess with than be
of any benefit to a big rancher.
In short, I got the farm for a song. I felt bad about that
later, when I realized how the former owners must have felt about
losing it, but at the time I thought it was great that I still had
plenty of money in my investment accounts when I got the deed to the
place.
It was after that that I found out farming is hard work, whether you
think you can hire somebody else to do it or not. It's risky
too. Two days of bad weather at the wrong time can ruin an
entire year's crop. After the first two years I ended up
renting most of the tillable land out for shares of the crop, and
turned the rest into pasture for horses. I usually board five
or six these days, which kind of breaks even on the expenses.
When I'm not taking care of horses I spend my time working on the
house, which is sixty or seventy years old, and on a garden that turned
out to be probably ten times larger than I really needed.
During harvest season I spend a lot of time at the farmers’
market and still end up donating truckloads of food to the food bank.
I brought my Spartan lifestyle with me. I wash dishes by
hand. I heat as much as possible with a wood stove.
I don't have cable or a cell phone. When I'm not working
(which is unusual) I still read lots of books. Somehow being
closer to nature made me feel closer to Vicky too, and I was able to
talk to her out there in the sun, wind and rain, and nobody would hear
me.
Well almost nobody. I do have neighbors, though it took me
years to get to know them. I first met Lynne the second day
I'd lived there, when she brought over a casserole as a housewarming
gift.
"Welcome to the neighborhood," she said brightly when I opened the door.
She said more than that, of course. She introduced herself,
and I somewhat belatedly invited her in. There were still
boxes lying around, unopened, and I had no furniture. She
told me about the local auction barn, which had a public sale every
Friday night. I judged her to be twenty-two or so and thought
maybe she was the neighbor's daughter or something. I figured
out that was an error when she said she and Paul, her husband, had a
ten-year-old daughter. During the conversation she mentioned
that the land I'd bought had originally been in their family.
Their house was only a quarter mile away and had been built by her
father. I was living in her grandfather's house.
That was about all I found out that day. I met the little
girl, whose name was Jill, when I took the baking dish back.
Jill was a bright, friendly talkative girl. Her mother was on
the phone when I arrived, so Jill entertained me by asking at least
three dozen questions about who I was and where I came from and why I
had bought Great Grandpa Lucian's house and what was I going to grow
and all manner of other things.
Once Lynne was off the phone she scolded Jill for being
snoopy. The girl flashed me a smile and disappeared off
somewhere. I ended up staying for dinner and met Paul when he
came in from tending their cattle. I found out during supper
that they'd wanted to get my land back, but because they were related
to the owner who had let the taxes build up, they weren't
elligible. There was no rancor about it. Paul just
suggested that if farming didn't work out for me, he'd appreciate if I
let him know if I was going to sell or not.
Being from the city I was a bit standoffish. I was also
somewhat shy, because my people skills weren't the best. I
guess I took a page from Jill's book and asked a lot of questions so
that they'd do all the talking instead of me. In the process
I found out they'd met in the local chapter of Future Farmers of
America, and that Lynne had inherited her farm, about three thousand
acres, from her parents. Her grandfather's farm had already
been sold to a man who turned out to be a speculator. When
they got married Paul was able to start building a herd of
cattle. Lynne spent most of her time working in the orchard
her parents had planted a couple of years before she was
born. About all I told them was that I was a
widower who got tired of the city and wanted to give clean living a try.
That was pretty much it, at least for a few months. I went
back home, with mixed feelings because while it had been good to be
able to do something as simple as chat with some nice people, I didn't
have the kind of social skills to feel comfortable talking to
them. Paul was a strong young man who looked like the cowboy
incarnate. Lynne was a pretty young woman who made
me feel uncomfortable BECAUSE I thought of her as being so
pretty. The major difference between us wasn't age, but the
subcultures from which we came. And their ten-year-old daughter was
even more removed from my normal social group.
Had I been so jaded as to think that Paul hoped I'd fail (so he could
try to buy the land) I would have been disabused of that notion almost
immediately. Within days he came over and said he'd like to
help me get off to a good start.
The good equipment, or at least the newer equipment, had been sold
before the farm was sold. What was left was what might have
been called good equipment fifty years ago. Of course I
didn't know the difference, and the fact that I had a tractor that ran,
and plows and disks and harrows and all that kind of thing made me
think it would be easy. After all, all you did was ride the
tractor, right? Whatever the tractor was pulling did all the
work, right?
Actually, as things turned out, the tools I had were about right for
the three hundred acres of tillable land I now owned. It
hadn't BEEN tilled for over seven years, but Paul helped me hook up the
old three bottom plow to the three-point hitch on the Massey Ferguson
tractor and showed me how to turn the earth over so it could be chopped
up into smaller and smaller pieces by succeeding implements.
It took me three weeks to prepare those three hundred acres for
planting and it was only then that I found out my options for a crop
that would have time to mature before winter came were reduced to only
one thing.
That's how I became a sunflower farmer.
After about two weeks, when he'd spared much more time than he could
afford to get me started, Paul went back to taking care of his cows and
I didn't see much of him after that.
After that I got what I thought of at first as the "B Team," which was
Jill. It's a little odd when a knobby kneed girl wanders into
your life and starts telling you how stupid you are and what to
do. She didn't say it in so many words, but she rolled her
eyes a lot.
It wasn't like Jill was babysitting me or anything. She'd
come over a couple of times a week and have a look around, but more
often as I labored to become a farmer I'd see Jill sitting on a horse,
watching me. She'd smile and wave and, more often than I like
remembering, ride over to tell me what I was doing wrong. She
was a skinny thing, with those coltish legs that make a girl look so
awkward, though she wasn't really awkward at all. She knew
ten times as much about farming as I did.
It was Jill who told me I was letting the weeds get too big amongst the
sunflowers.
It was Jill who told me that the sweet corn in my garden was planted
too close together, and that unless I put a fence up, I wouldn't have
any lettuce because rabbits would eat it all.
That's not to say she was mean about it, like some kids can
be. Not at all. She was friendly in a way I
remembered kids being when I was a kid, many years ago, and which the
youth of today are restricted from being, normally. But where
she lived things weren't "normal" in the sense of where I came
from. She paid attention when her mother taught her how to
bake, and was good like only a 4-H ten-year-old girl can be at baking
cakes and pies. They ate the baked goods that Lynne made, and
I was the lucky recipient, about every two weeks or so, of what Jill
made. I didn't complain.
What kind of pie she brought depended on what was in season.
If there was no fruit ripe, she'd make lemon meringue, or chocolate, or
banana cream or some such thing. Her rhubarb pie was one of
my favorites. I kept telling her she didn't have to do that, and that I
had nothing I could repay her with. She'd smile brightly and
say "I know," and then pick up the empty dish from the last one and
take it with her. I saw the whole family at a community
event, where Jill ignored me completely while I stood and chatted with
Paul and Lynne. I mentioned the pies and cakes to Lynne and
that I felt guilty because a lot of time and resources went into
them. She waved a hand and said Jill was just being
neighborly and not to worry about it. They were just like
that. They were good people.
Of course my male ego rebelled a bit at this skinny girl telling me
what a pitiful excuse for a farmer I was. So about a year
later I hired a man to do all the things I didn't know how to do and
was too stubbornly proud to ask Jill about.
It was Jill who told me he was shamming, sleeping instead of
working, or even going off to town when I thought he was out in the
fields. She said he was just collecting his pay instead of
actually doing anything.
It was Jill who said that the late hail we got in my third year had
disrupted the soil too much, and that my five-inch sunflowers - which
weren't beaten down at all, though a few were broken - would
die. They all did too. That was when I found out a
sunflower can't be transplanted. If the roots are disturbed
... it just dies.
By the fourth year, when I finally realized I wasn't farmer material, I
rented out the tillable land to another sunflower farmer and started
using my other hundred acres for boarding horses. I also hung
out my sign as a certified public accountant, so I could still be my
own boss. Turns out farm taxes are complicated and time
consuming, so folks were happy to have me around.
By that time Jill was fourteen and she was a regular fixture around my
place. Paul said she was still too young to work cows, but
she'd been riding horses since she could find a way to climb up on
one. During the school year she'd come to my house for help
with her math homework, and in the summer time she spent a lot of hours
"helping" me, though I think she was really goofing off. Her
job at home was to climb high in the apple trees to do the pruning up
there, because she was small and light. Because the orchard
was between their house and mine, it was easy for her to slip over to
my place. I think in the beginning her parents might have
told her to keep an eye on me. When that was no longer
actually necessary, it was already a habit and she just never stopped
doing it. I should have been flattered that she liked my
company, but I didn't think about it that way. Not then,
anyway.
Then one dark, stormy morning Jill came tearing into the yard on her
horse, screaming. They weren't whoops of joy or adolescent
exuberance either. There was terror in her voice.
"D-d-daddy's d-d-dead!" she screamed.
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