The Forgiven

by Mike Shepherd

  “We’ll stay in our camper on the land while working there on Saturdays and Sundays.”

  For shelter I would sleep in the back of my truck where I was protected from the elements by a camper top.

  The cost of the brothers’ labor was contingent on how many weekends it would take to finish the house. At today’s hourly wages we estimated it could amount to about $2,500 for three months of weekends, or a total of 24 days of labor. Anything over that would be tabulated on a per diem basis.

  Pepe agreed to pay me the asking price for the business (minus the $2,500 for labor), when he and his brother came north in the spring, so I called Ferd Weberling, the man selling the 10 acres, asking him to hold it until then. He agreed, if I would send him a $200 down payment, which I did.

  In March, I drove to Makanda to pay the balance and sign the deed. While waiting for the Pepe and Jose to arrive I decided on a flat patch of sandy ground for the house. Stones were abundant nearby, and could be conveniently hauled to the site. Many were flat so I plopped them down on the sand to make a floor, which I completed in just one day. The brothers brought sacks of concrete that we mixed in a tub with buckets of water from the pond, to mortar the stone walls. We assembled three levels using stones near the site before Pepe and Jose had to go back to Springfield. By the middle of the week, I was able to complete three more levels with stones that I hauled in a wheelbarrow from farther away.

  It was a warm mid-March day. The sun shone brightly, and I worked up a sweat and a thirst. Pepe left some beers in a net staked to the bank of the pond to keep them cool in the water. I popped one open and took a healthy swig, satisfied that I had made so much progress on the house in such a short period of time.

  I sat on a big rock and looked out at the pond whose water rippled from a slight breeze underlain with the fragrance of some kind of blossom somewhere. Frogs, awakening from their hibernation, trilled incessantly. Spring had sprung, and so did I, up off the rock when Cathy came up behind me.

  “Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “That’s okay, I was lost in a daydream. So what brings you to Shangrila?”

  “Just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “Want a beer? There are some in the pond.”

  “Beers in the pond?”

  “They’re in a net staked to the bank. The water keeps them cool. Nothing like a cold beer on a warm day when you’ve been working hard.”

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll have one. I see that you have been working hard,” Cathy said, glancing at the early stages of the house.

  I handed her a beer and she took a sip. “Ahh, I agree, there’s nothing like a cold beer on a warm day when you’ve been working hard, which I’ve been doing plenty of all day.

  “Hey, I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll help me with some of the chores, like feeding and milking the goats, I’ll let you stay at my house while you’re working on yours.”

  I immediately accepted her invitation. I’d have running water, maybe a hot meal or two, and a soft bed to sleep in, in the spare bedroom of course. That was unspoken but understood, unless things changed. There was always that possibility, I hoped.

  “I’ll meet you at the house when you’re finished here,” she said.

  “Okay. It won’t be dark for a few more hours. I can still get some work in.”

  “When’s the last time you ate?” she asked.

  “This morning, had a peanut butter sandwich.”

  “I’ll rustle you up something more substantial for supper.”

  “Sounds good to me, I’ll see you at the ranch.”

  Cathy drove off, leaving me enough time to set a few more stones in mortar before the sun went down.

  When I got to her place, supper was waiting – baked lasagna and toasted garlic bread with a salad of bean sprouts (grown in a Mason jar on the window sill in the kitchen), topped with a creamy goat’s milk dressing.

  Because I was famished, I ate my fill without saying much until I finished, at which time I complimented her profusely on her culinary skills.

  “If you don’t mind, Cathy, I’d like to take a shower and go to bed.”

  “Okay. As part of the deal we made, could you feed and milk the goats in the morning?”

  “Be glad to, if it means getting meals like this.” I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my belly, stretched and yawned, and went upstairs.

  I arose early in the morning, got dressed and went downstairs. There was a note from Cathy on the coffee maker.

  “I had to go into town to talk business at Mr. Natural’s. Help yourself to the coffee cake, non herbal. The goats are anxiously waiting to have their tits squeezed!”

  I remembered how to milk them and how much they seemed to enjoy it, and I remembered how much Cathy enjoyed having hers squeezed, but that was a long time ago, things had changed, our relationship became platonic. Was that irreversible?

  CHAPTER 19

  After nearly a week of working alone I welcomed the return of the Gonzalez brothers Friday night. They were amazed at how much I had done in their absence. It was time to put the window and door frames in place. Saturday morning we drove in my truck to Carbondale to pick them up after eating a hearty breakfast at Mary Lou’s diner.

  We spent the rest of the day and most of Sunday installing the frames and laying stone to the roof level, and because they didn’t have any landscaping jobs lined up for Monday in Springfield, Pepe and Jose spent another night on my property. We built a fire, roasted hot dogs, drank beer and smoked a little weed in celebration of how much we had done. Later that night I returned to Cathy’s half drunk and feeling frisky. I wanted to keep the party going if she was still up, and I was happy to see that she was, sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine and a half-eaten brownie. Apparently she was celebrating something, too. She seemed happy to see me.

  “Sit down, Mick, and join me in celebration of my birthday. Thirty-four years of staying single. That’s not so easy to do in a society that expects its young women to be married with children by the time they’re 25,” she said, apparently mocking those who had.

  “Guess I’m destined to being a fucking old maid.” She drank more wine straight from the bottle, then she went down to the cellar and brought up another one. She popped the cork, took a swig and handed it to me, skipping the formality of pouring the wine into glasses. She took a big bite of the brownie and offered what was left of it to me. I gobbled it down.

  “You haven’t been married either, Mick. Don’t you feel like a misfit too? Men aren’t stigmatized with disparaging characterizations like “old maid,” though. You’re bachelors, which connotes independence, freedom to play the field, like a playboy.”

  “You sound a little uptight about it, Cathy.”

  “Yeah, well, you could fix that with one of your massages.”

  She turned her neck around and around and hunched her shoulders up and down, indicating that she needed one.

  “Let’s go into the living room. I’ll lie down on the couch,” Cathy proposed.

  I began gently with slow, smooth strokes. Before long she closed her eyes, exhaled, went limp and fell asleep. Passed out was probably more accurate. She had drunk nearly two bottles of wine and ate most of a marijuana brownie.

  I tiptoed out of the room and went up to bed.

  When I woke up in the morning it was storming. Sheets of rain splashed against the window. Flashes from lightning strikes made me wonder what I was going to do about electricity and running water for my new house. I mulled it over while lying in bed before getting up to take care of the goats, and the answer came to me. I’d use my expertise in installing sprinkler systems to run a length of pipe in a trench from the spring down to a holding tank in the house under a sink. I’d install a pump (in the form of a faucet) powered by the electricity I’d tap into with wiring to the utility pole on th
e road. This would also serve as a pirate power source for lighting the house, until someone caught on to my shenanigans.

  First things first, though. It was time to put a roof on the house, the last chore involving Pepe and Jose. They arrived earlier on Friday than expected, and we had enough time to go to the lumber yard in Carbondale for trusses, plywood sheets and shingles. We could get an early start on the roof on Saturday morning.

  By sundown Saturday evening, we had the trusses and plywood in place and were ready for the shingles. We nailed them down early Sunday morning before it got too hot.

  This concluded the gentleman’s agreement I had with Pepe and Jose. I exchanged their labor for a reduction in the price of the landscaping business they bought from me. Pepe wrote a check for $12,500 and he and Jese went back to Springfield.

  “Adios amigo! Muchas gracias!” they yelled cheerfully while driving away.

  To make the house more livable, I put in a wood-burning stove for cooking and heating, and warming water for baths. I bought a stand alone tub, a bed, a table and chairs, lamps and kitchen cabinets from a resale store in Carbondale that salvaged furnishings from old houses slated for demolition. I bought bedding and kitchen utensils at the Salvation Army thrift store.

  The last phase of the project involved the building of a small tool shed with an adjoining outhouse. I used old barn wood that I purchased from a nearby farmer because I was nearly out of stones. I could do this without the Gonzalezes’ help. With their check in hand I was able to pay the $2,300 balance of what I owed Ferd for the land, leaving me a little more than $10,000 to live on until I turned a profit from farming by selling what I grew.

  I got a late start with farming because I was so busy building the house. Cathy was gracious enough to help me get caught up by sharing what she knew about natural farming. It required very little soil preparation, except for planting clover for weed control. We chose varieties of vegetables that didn’t require an early start, yielding a late fall harvest before the first frost. I grew green beans, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, carrots and potatoes, all of which were low maintenance crops, thanks to the clover.

  A long, hot, dry summer in southern Illinois forced me to haul countless bucket of water from the pond to the garden, at least every other day. Cathy had to do the same at her place. The hard work paid off considerably for both of us when we went to market in the fall.

  “In his One-Straw Revolution, Fukuoka discusses the marketing of naturally grown produce,” Cathy said. “He maintains that growing produce without applying chemicals, using fertilizer or cultivating the soil involves less expense and the farmer’s net profit is therefore higher.

  “He says that other farmers in his neighborhood realized that they were working very hard, only to end up with less profit.

  “As for the customer, the common belief has been that natural food should be expensive. If it is not, people suspect that it is not natural food so they won’t buy it.

  “Fukuoka feels that natural food should be sold more cheaply than any other. If a high price is charged for natural food the merchant is taking excessive profits. It is cheaper and less labor-intensive for the farmer to grow natural foods.

  “If natural food is to become widely popular, it must be available locally at a reasonable price,” he maintains.

  Consequently,” Cathy said, “Mr. Natural’s is the perfect place at which to sell natural food products, because of the large counter-culture population in the area.

  Cathy turned a healthy profit, and I did okay for my first year of production.

  To celebrated a successful fall harvest, which was enjoyed by many of the natural food farmers in the area, Mr. Natural’s hosted a feast and outdoor rock concert at Giant City State Park featuring the popular local band Coal Kitchen.

  Attendance was not limited to farmers and coop members. Once the word spread that there’d be a party, people came from all around.

  It was a breezy, but sunny day, and the fluttering leaves on the trees looked beautiful in their autumn hues. Their musty smell mixed with a hint of marijuana smoke.

  The band set up in a meadow under a picnic shelter with electricity. Their music echoed off the face of a cliff from where frisbees were being thrown to those down below, who tossed them back up. Acrobatic dogs leaped after the spinning discs, twisting and turning like outfielders making difficult catches. They seldom missed.

  Amidst the swirl of dogs and frisbees, people danced, and bottles of wine were passed around along with joints.

  Cathy was among those dancing. I watched her from a distance for a while. She stood out in the crowd, perhaps because of the colorful paisley dress she wore. It fit her well. Farming had kept her in good shape.

  We had been lovers for a few drunken moments some time ago, but now we were just friends, or at least that’s the way she seemed to see it. Seeing her dance in the meadow aroused something more in me. I desired to be her lover again.

  CHAPTER 20

  With the bulk of her produce having gone to market, Cathy began to can leftovers, including peaches with blemished skins that came from her orchard. They couldn’t be sold to the finicky customers at Mr. Natural’s. She invited me over to see how it was done. It was a detailed, but worthwhile process – preserving fruits and vegetables for consumption in the winter, and I enjoyed working closely with her on this domestic project. It made me feel more a part of a home than I’d felt before. I had longed for that in recent years, because I missed it in my childhood.

  The kitchen was filled with warmth; a cold wind blew outside. It was strange seeing Cathy in a frilly apron – she usually wore masculine clothes, except at the harvest festival when she donned a dress. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, then and now. She must have sensed that I was staring at her, because without looking up, she admonished me for not paying attention to the canning process.

  “Sorry, I was admiring your peaches. They look so nice and plump.”

  She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, twisted her mouth and frowned, but she managed a slight smile.

  “Enough with the double entendres, Mick. “Let’s get down to business, we can play later,” which I took to mean that after the canning there was some fun to be had.

  “Word games that is,” she added. “I play a mean game of Scrabble, remember?”

  Was she playing mind games by suggesting we engage in something as innocuous as Scrabble, knowing that I had been eyeballing her tush?

  To prepare the peaches for canning, Cathy blanched the fruit in boiling water for half a minute, then placed them in ice water to cool them off enough to remove the skin. She sliced them into quarters, removed the pits and added lemon juice to the fruit in a bowl to prevent browning. Then she added a sugar/water concoction (which formed a syrup) to the peaches in a pot, and boiled the combination for five minutes. She then packed the peaches into hot, sanitized, quart-size Ball jars, leaving half an inch of space at the top, and poured the boiling syrup into each jar, screwed the lid and rings on tightly and placed the jars in a larger pot of low-boiling water for thirty minutes before removing them to cool at room temperature. After they cooled she stored the jars of preserved fruit on a shelf in the cellar.

  Canning the tomatoes and green beans was a little more involved; a pressure cooker was needed for this process.

  When we finished canning, which took more than three hours, Cathy got out the Scrabble board, poured glasses of wine, and we played late into the night until she complained about her chronically aching back. She asked for one of my signature massages. She was risking the potential for something more, considering how she turned me on. And her reaction to my previous massages told me that they seemed to turn her on as well.

  Lying face down on the floor, she squirmed under the pressure of my hands that slowly moved from her back, over her buttocks and down her legs to her lovely little feet. Then I crossed her
ankles and gently turned her over, a trick I had learned from a masseuse in Saigon. When I crawled up on top of her, she wrapped her legs and arms around me and we kissed.

  “It’s too uncomfortable here on the floor, let’s move to the couch,” she said, suggesting that we continue with what we had started. We had kept our relationship platonic for a long time, but suddenly, that had changed and we found ourselves nearly intimate again. This time, however, I came prepared, with a rubber should we go far enough to need one. But we didn’t. Our move from the floor in the kitchen to the couch in the living room changed the mood and gave Cathy time to reconsider.

  “We don’t need to complicate our friendship with sex, Mick. It caused big problems before. Let’s just continue to be good friends.”

  “We can be both – lovers and friends,” I argued.

  “But then you rob the friendship of its purity by placing so much emphasis on sexuality. I wrote a little poem about such things. It likens the lasting light of the sun to the purity of a platonic relationship -- which gives unrequitedly. The moon, which represents short-lived lust, robs the sun of its pure light, particularly when it comes to making love under the influence of alcohol when there’s a tendency to be pre-occupied with self-satisfaction.”

  As wine flows tonight

  a lustful moon glows bright,

  robbing the sun of its pure light.

  And when the wine wears off,

  will lust endure until tomorrow

  in the sobering light of the sun

  a lustful moon has borrowed.

  I awoke in the morning, alone at home, with the sobering light of the sun shining brightly in my face. Through the west- facing window, a ghostly trace of the moon was still visible, its luster diminished by the brightness of the day. The lust I had felt for Cathy the night before had faded away, too and our relationship remained purely platonic.