My brother, the rest and a question future tense
Author's note:
This is Part 4 of a 4 part story arc. As with all my stories, this one starts slowly with background and character development. Please vote – it is the only way I can see if I am pleasing you, the reader.
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"Man, I feel great!" Eddie crowed as he came into the kitchen looking for coffee.
I was already sitting at the table, getting ready to down four naproxin. Every muscle in my body hurt. I had passed out, blissfully sated, and woken to Linda being cuddled up with me, smiling in her sleep. It was when I tried to move that I found out how trashed I was.
I remember asking her, "why does my groin hurt?" She had just looked at me and laughed.
"Well, that's one of us," I told Eddie, chugging the pills with hot coffee.
"Didn't you get laid?" he asked, coming to sit at the table.
In answer, I held up two fingers.
"Two?" he asked. "Well, Sherry was with me, so Linda and Beth? Wow..."
"It wasn't Linda," I quietly admitted.
He stared for a moment. "Squirt and
Maggie???
" he exclaimed. "Jesus, Jim... can I have an option on your Eternal Soul? 'Cause God sure ain't gonna want it!"
"I am a victim of circumstance," I told him.
"I thought they called it your pecker," he smiled.
"You've been watching too much
Tremors
," I shook my head. "I hurt all over."
"Then you'll be pleased to know that you don't have to do any work today," he informed me. "Adam and his crew are bringing in the temporary bridge and they'll install it. Once it's in, we can bring the Jeep and the Suburban across and get Sherry settled."
"By the way," he rattled on, obviously on a roll, "any idea where you want Sherry to set up her traveling studio?"
"Well, we only seem to be using three bedrooms," I told him somewhat sarcastically. "You and Sherry, Sherry and Linda, and me and Linda and Squirt and Mags, and Sherry. Maybe four. Not sure where Beth and Maggie went after I passed out."
"With Sherry. So only three. Sherry gets around, doesn't she?"
"It's been four years since Tom got killed, Eddie," I reminded him. "She's kind of been doing without for a long time."
"Well, between you and me, she's pretty damned good and I'm glad she decided to seduce me," he offered. "I don't mind helping her out. At all."
"It isn't just between you and me," I pointed out. "There are four women and two guys who know exactly what's going on. We need to keep it like that."
He drew his thumb and finger across his lips, like zipping and locking them, then threw away the imaginary key.
"Good," I told him. "Once the Jeep's across, I think I'll take the girls out cutting and splitting wood. Until then, I'm going to try to recover."
"Suit yourself," Eddie told me. "I'm going to be down by the river with Adam and his crew."
He tossed back his coffee, grinned and gave me a "thumbs up", and walked out the door.
"Ow..." I muttered to myself as I nursed my coffee.
* * * * *
It took Adam and his crew about 3 hours to put up the bridge. They brought in this mahunga truck with bridge sections on it, then used a crane to assemble it and stretch it out over the river. It was basically a steel trestle bridge and once they had it solid on both sides, the crew went down the bridge putting in bolts and screwing them down with nuts that could've held the Titanic together. They, of course, had a portable electric generator to go with the electric wrenches. By the time they were done, I could have driven a tank over it and it wouldn't have flinched.
Eddie paid the man while the girls were ogling the guys with their shirts off, glistening with sweat. It might have been frosty out, but they were working hard. When they finished up, they put their shirts back on to the combined groans of four rather libidinous females. Personally, I think the workmen were getting a kick out of being leered at by a bunch of attractive women.
I brought the Jeep across and Sherry followed with the Suburban.
"Wonder how much one of these would cost permanently?" I asked Eddie.
"Don't know," he admitted. "I can look it up. I mean, they make their money by taking an expensive commodity and putting it in temporarily for a fraction of the cost. So based on what he's charging, I'd say it's pretty damned expensive."
"Does that guy upriver still have that old sawmill?" I asked.
"If you mean Old Man Coulter, yeah, he does," Eddie told me. "But that sucker was built in the 1800's. Your chances of it working are two: slim and none."
"I don't know," I told him. "Back when Dad was alive, Coulter ran it sometimes in the summer, as a demonstration of how things got done in the old days. He and Dad knew each other. Maybe if we supplied the logs, he'd saw them down into rough beams for us. It'd make rebuilding the bridge a hell of a lot easier than piecing it together from 2"x12"s."
"Maybe," Eddie answered. "That's between a 30 to 40 foot span. That's some big timber to be hauling around without a logging truck."
"We could use a chainsaw and lap-joint it in a couple of places. Gorilla Glue and big fucking bolts. It's an idea."
"Okay, we can check it out. You know, we have enough money in the trust to leave this steel bridge in for a month, no sweat."
"Okay, we can talk about it later," I decided. "Let's get the vehicles unloaded."
We grabbed one of the bedrooms and rearranged it so Sherry could set up her jewelry studio.
"This is your portable one?" I asked, amazed at how much shit we schlepped in for her.
"Jim, the one at home takes up almost the whole basement. I only brought a small kiln and centrifuge. Most of it is pieces to be assembled," she told me. I just walked away, shaking my head.
I hooked the hydraulic splitter and dump wagon to the Jeep's ball hitch and called the girls. They came bouncing out of the cabin naked. They were probably just jerking my chain, but seeing their nipples standing out a mile in the brisk wind was worth it. It definitely went to my groin.
"I don't think you want to cut and split wood in your birthday suits," I called over to them.
The light dawned and they went back inside, coming out in a few minutes in jeans, boots and flannel shirts.
"Better," I told them. "Let's go."
Linda came running out of the house right behind them, dressed similarly.
"Hey, Jim! I want to go!" she hollered. When she got to the jeep, she added, "I haven't been out splitting wood in forever. It'll be like old times."
"In that case, with three of you along, I need to hook up the big wagon instead and take it along." It took me about five minutes to haul it out and hook it up, but soon we were on our way up into the timber.
Dad's rule had been simple: don't take anything standing up, even if it looked dead. So we were in search of trees that had been knocked down by the storms passing through. We picked a likely clearing and set up the splitter and wagon there, then drove off looking for candidates. We only needed three or four if they were decent-sized. When we'd find one, we'd throw half-inch lines on it and pull it the rest of the way down, then use logging chains to drag it back to the clearing. Two of us would use the chainsaws to cut the trunk and branches down to roughly 18" sections and the other two would muscle them up onto the splitter and run seven splits, creating 8 wedges that went into the wagon. We'd knock off when the wagon was full.
We were out there a couple of hours and it was starting to get dark when we headed back. Thank God we didn't have any problems and we just parked the Jeep, splitter and wagon next to the barn and went in for dinner. We could unload the wood in the morning.
We walked in to find Eddie in the kitchen with a huge apron on, chopping up iceberg lettuce while something was running in the microwave.
"I thought the women were doing dinner," I told him.
"You've got them all," he pointed out to me. "And Sherry's still setting up her stuff. So whatever I make, you're going to eat it and like it."
"Aye-aye, Sir!" I told him and went to wash up. Linda and I ended up sharing the shower and not long into it, there was a knock on the glass. I could see Beth and Maggie standing outside it, naked.
"You've got to make a bigger shower, Uncle Jim!" Squirt informed me. "It isn't big enough for four of us."
"You could always use the tap outside the back door," I told them.
"Very funny, Daddy," Maggie piped up. "You know we'd freeze your favorite body parts off."
"Give us a minute!" I told them and Linda and I hurried to finish washing each other up.
As we were getting out, Squirt commented, "where's the fun in an old married couple showering together?"
"If you'd like a demonstration," I told her, "come back sometime when my wife and I aren't hurried and watch."
She kind of giggled at that and she and Mags took our place in the shower. Linda and I went out to find out that Eddie only needed a little help finishing dinner and Sherry only needed a little help unpacking her studio. A few minutes later we were waiting on the girls to come out of the shower for dinner.
"Want to have some fun with the girls?" Sherry asked.
"What kind of fun?" I was learning to be suspicious.
"Strip down and eat dinner in the buff," she told me. "Let's see their reaction to their parents' lewd and lascivious ways."
I looked at Linda and Eddie and we all shrugged – and stripped. We brought the food out and sat down at the table, and that's about when the girls showed up. The looks on their faces was worth it.