Kelsey's Quest

By Fred Ephraim

Kelsey Stewart had grown weary waiting for her new young husband Michael to grow up through a troublesome early marriage, and through his armed service in an unpopular war in Iraq, but still, she had waited. But now, upon his return home, her once wounded, and now confused husband decides to take off to California to clear his head, leaving his small town farm wife, his farm and their lovely twin daughters behind. After a while of not hearing from him, Kelsey, resolutely sets out after him to bring him back home, when simultaneously life-altering adventures develop for them both.

You may visit the authors website at fredephraim.com and contact him via email at [e-mail].

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 7, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469113449

Fred Ephraim

In Percy’s Plunder, actor, schoolteacher, world traveler, history lover and author Fred Ephraim – now a California resident – has brought to fruition from his fertile mind and talented pen a work that is marvelously crafted to appeal to a wide readership. In this, his second book, due for release this fall (November), Ephraim offers a unique tome, complete with compelling characters, surprises and adventures that will jar the most complacent reader and stimulate the most imaginative minds alike. Although many of the characters will at first appear familiar, their behavior and what happens to them by the end of the tale will no doubt be a challenge to old thinking. This is an area in which Ephraim shines. Through his writings he challenges us to think a little differently about issues large and small, making us a bit more culturally aware along the way.

Book preview

Kelsey’s Quest

Fred Ephraim

Copyright © 2008 by Fred Ephraim.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are

the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely

coincidental.

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Contents

Acknowledgment

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

Acknowledgment

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Photo by

Kelsey Edwards

I dedicate this book and praise God from whom all blessings flow. And praise to my wife Liliana for her endless encouragement and support, and for her lovely presence to share all of God’s good blessings with. I thank her from the bottom of my heart and to whom I am constantly and forever devoted.

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

The soft, moist rose pink fingers of the insouciant five-year-old twins dangle like warmed dewdrops from their mother’s strong hands. Awed by the calm beauty of this strange and distant-from-home place, the three visitors glide almost timidly along the high beach road as the grains of crushed stone sing like little chirping crickets under their delicate feet. They were seduced by the colorful assortment of exotic flowers and plants whose aromatic gifts waft gently through the air, mixing with the sea air below and the heat of the morning sun above to shape a gentle mood for the young family. Everything is quite calm and near quiet when Sandy, the precocious one of the twin sisters, begins tugging excitedly at her mother’s hand; she points with her free hand as she squeaks the universal appellation for her female parent.

Mother, Mother, she cranes her neck as she calls high up toward her protector’s head.

Mother, that man there. Isn’t that Tara’s daddy?

Kelsey Stewart, the twins’ mother, has been walking quietly as her mind wandered off to distant concerns and thoughts. Her young family had recently come west to California and had taken refuge in her sister Karen’s Santa Monica home. She had gone walking with her once-quiet daughters, seeking some fresh air and a moment’s peace from the tumult that had recently turned her life upside down. But the tugging at her hand and the squeaking of her daughter’s voice snaps her quickly and not so gently back to this moment’s reality.

Mother, look, Mother. See him, that man over there, Mother? Look, look, Mother, look.

As her daughter excitedly tugs at her hand, Kelsey finally turns to look at the man in question, and she quickly understands her sweet daughter’s incessant querying. Just steps away from where they are walking, a man sits crumpled in a corner mere feet away from a green metal bench; he is actually leaning against a thirty-foot-tall palm tree and the bench. He is nesting, it seems, as a debrislike mess of things is all clustered around him: a green army duffel bag filled with his stuff, a dirty beige Whole Foods cloth shopping bag filled with more of his stuff, a take-out sandwich bag from McDonald’s, and a container of Tropicana orange juice that rests full of juice precariously teetering and leaning like the Tower of Pisa on the grass next to him.

The young mother and daughters stop walking as the man at the tree steals their attention for the moment. The picture of the three of them walking is a nineteenth-century impressionist portrait, a bit out of touch with this twenty-first-century moment. The sweet little innocents are dressed, seemingly too, too formally for the more casual California beach. The girls stroll along happily and lightly, all ironed and starched in lovely pink sundresses neatly ensconced behind starched and ruffled white pinafores, all dolled up and seemingly readying for a glass of fresh, cold lemonade. And as the dust kicks up on their patent leather Mary Jane’s, they appeared a little more Shirley Temple-ish than these trashy, chic times demand. Overdressed may have been the theme of the day, as the object of the twin child’s overbearing curiosity was wearing combat boots, army fatigues, and a heavy jacket in the middle of a California heat wave.

No, sweetheart, that’s not Tara’s dad, sweetheart.

The precocious child is not easily convinced as she continues insisting, But, Mother, he has the same clothes like Tara’s dad and the ones like Daddy wears when he comes home.

Lately, Kelsey is sometimes so terribly sad and heavyhearted that her strong young body feels like there’s another whole body resting on top of it, resting right on the top of her original set of bones. It weakens her. And it’s often a strain lately just trying to muster the energy sometimes to find the words to explain things to her child’s insistent and frequent inquires concerning one thing or another. But she’s a good mother, so she manages to muster up the effort once again.

No, sweetheart. Listen, do you remember Mommy telling you that there are many, many men and women who wear these very same uniforms just like Tara’s father and like your father?

The child seems disappointed at the same time that she seems to grasp the concept.

But, Mommy, why is that man wearing his clothes like Daddy’s in the summertime? Isn’t he too hot, Mommy?

It’s just too much to hold back. Kelsey is overcome as the constant allusions to her husband pricks her tired, fragile heart, a heart so full of pain and conflicting emotions that she begins to shake. She lets her daughter’s hands go as she walks a few steps to the nearby bench, where she sits down heavily and drops her head into her hands crying.

The child reacts to protect and please her mother as strong children will often do. Eying the strange man’s clothing as the problem, she rushes to her mother’s aid.

Mommy, don’t cry, Mommy, I’ll tell that man to take off his jacket, it’s too hot.

Quickly, in a flash, the sweet, innocent, misguided child is at the man’s side before her mother can engage a reaction from her grief-weakened body.

Mister, mister, it’s too hot. Take off your jacket so my mommy will stop crying.

The disheveled man turns his weary head as his soft, sad eyes meet the sparkle in the little girl’s eyes for the first time. But before he is aroused enough to speak his piece, Kelsey speedily arrives there next to her daughter’s side. And like a swift yet gentle breeze, she caresses her with one arm under the child’s arms and pinches around her pinafore, while her other hand tethers the other quiet twin by the outstretched arm that follows behind her like the tail of a rhesus monkey.

Mommy, Mommy, the man’s eyes are like Daddy’s eyes, Mommy, look. Kelsey’s head loses control of her eyes to her heart’s driven curiosity as they peek to where they were directed by her child’s instructions. And indeed the percipient child is right, for when she turns and looks into the stranger’s eyes, she sees the same distant sadness seen in the eyes of the man for whom her heart has been constantly filled days and nights full of tears. After she turns away embarrassed by her first glance, Kelsey’s heart draws her right back to his eyes again. Compelled by her first glance, Kelsey turns, and now this time she stares into this strange man’s face. But now, she’s not the only one staring, for as Kelsey stares one way, Mr. Michelson—if the name on the fatigue jacket is indeed his—also stares back from the other direction into her eyes. Both sets of eyes lock in curiosity over a long moment, but then Michelson quickly averts his eyes away from hers and looks self-consciously toward the ground. That this man’s eyes show a sudden softness must have released Kelsey’s inner tension as it gives way to a surge of unanticipated courage far beyond her old and usual habit; she has changed much in her short time while in California searching for her husband.

Don’t turn away, Mr. Michelson, there is no ridicule to be found here, she calls him by the name on his jacket, intuiting that the man inside the jacket is indeed called by the name on the outside of the jacket.

As she unconsciously squeezes her curious daughter’s waist, the child squeaks, You’re squeezing me too tightly, Mommy. Are you afraid?

It was then that the man whom Kelsey had just called Michelson turns his eyes again to the little family of females and says in a voice as soft and cool as shade, Don’t be afraid of me, I wouldn’t hurt a fly anymore.

Sandy smiles first, and then her mother, Kelsey, smiles, one from relief and the other out of the sheer joy of innocent and playful life.

Mister, take off that jacket. It’s too hot, please, so my mommy won’t cry anymore.

Kelsey quickly shows her humanity as her face flushes with the hint of embarrassment of the kind that only the words of an innocent, uncensored child can induce without a hint of effort. The weathered ex-military man, his chocolate face drawn and gaunt from mental anguish and physical needs, as if just ordered by a superior officer and without a hitch owed to hesitation, immediately begins to wiggle out of his jacket. First, he wiggles from the shoulders, in an action like the shedding of a heavy second skin. His movements make the twins giggle, which in turn makes him giggle as Kelsey’s late rendition chimes in and finally makes a quartet of gigglers. Sandy’s amusement adds again an unexpected wave of emotion to the festivities when she adds, That’s very funny, Mommy. He’s like Daddy used to be, before he got hurt in the fighting.

As the laughter trails off from the adult duet, the two playful twins, now thoroughly aroused, find further amusement in the mimicry of shedding skin, while their mother and the military-garbed stranger seem to silently commiserate an unspoken yet intuited certainty that they are sharing a moment where words have no place. For a brief interlude, until the children’s laughter dissipates, the two veterans of sadness speak not another word.

Finally, when the twins are quiet again, the incipient bond between the two adults finds an appropriate voice.

I have called you by the name on your jacket, and I see now that it is also on your shirt. It is your name, isn’t it?

The eyes that had turned slightly suspicious softened again to the inquiry, as it seemed like forever to him since anyone, any one stranger that is, had bothered to seek the person inside the clothes of this long-lost soldier. The sad man smiles a real smile from the heart for the first time; the other time was for the camera. He had thought, as habit has rendered his behavior to servitude and shame, that there might be a handout coming if he succeeded in not scaring the children. In his more lucid moments, it was a posture that he well understood was partial to his survival. But now, this development, the pursuit of his person by this strange woman, seemed to flavor the moment a much different taste.

Yes, ma’am, Michelson’s my name, like the golfer. Although you can plainly see that I hail from the darker side of the family.

Kelsey does not fall for the self-deprecating bit as her life has also been richly seasoned with pain. She is careful not to chide him for that, though, and risk sparking a match to a poorly hidden fuse that most assuredly would obliterate the happy little scene. Kelsey pauses for a minute, and then she asks a question that for certain this man Michelson would never have expected to come from such a person, a child-toting civilian like Kelsey.

How long have you been back in the world, soldier?

Michelson pauses as his eyes begin to dart way back and forth in their sockets.

Harsh times, too fast, ma’am, harsh times and many days back in the world, ma’am, too many to count. Not enough time to make a life good again, not enough help.

Kelsey remains solid as she settles the girls down on the grass; she pulls juice boxes from her large carryall bag to give to the girls. Then she puts her index finger to her pursed lips to signal them to be quiet.

Where did you serve, soldier?

Michelson answers unhesitatingly in an instant as if on cue, Fallujah, Tikrit, and Baghdad mostly, ma’am.

Kelsey knows these three names all too well, both from letters written home from Michael, when he was over there, and some from the TV news reports; some of the fiercest fighting of the war takes place in those cities. But she also knows that the names don’t really matter much, that this man’s sense of safety has been totally compromised; she can see it in his face just the way she has seen it all too often in the faces of other returning veterans and, most recently, in the eyes of her now-absent husband, Michael.

The hot spots. You really got around, soldier.

Michelson gives Kelsey Stewart a curious look.

What do you know about all this? You’ve got kin over there?

Kelsey’s eyes now fall low and sad.

Had kin over there, had kin, soldier.

Michelson looks at the girls.

The twins’ daddy, he’s the one that was over there?

Kelsey turns to look lovingly at her girls, now sitting quietly on the grass beside her; she first smiles, and then she nods her head slowly.

Yes, that’s right, the girls’ father, my husband.

But just as she did answer him, Mr. Michelson seems to drift off to another place as if his reality tank were low on the gas of lucidity. His eyes begin to dart again REM-like, as if dreaming, but to Kelsey this interlude is all too familiar. She waits for the clock to reset itself; she has seen this all-too-familiar look before when Michael and some of the other men had first come home. She had seen a lot of this kind of behavior. When Michelson’s attention returns, it is as if he never left; like a commercial on network TV, he begins again where he left off.

Is your man hurt like me?

This question makes Kelsey physically shudder a bit, and Michelson sees its effect on her, and he begins to back away.

I’ve said too much, ma’am, I apologize. I haven’t talked to many people except to take a handout of money or food for so long, ma’am. I was starting to feel like a vending machine. I didn’t mean any harm, ma’am, really I didn’t.

Michelson turns away from Kelsey and reaches for his jacket as if preparing to collect himself to leave the area or to at least leave the conversation. Kelsey rapidly composes herself, and as Michelson reaches for his jacket, she sympathetically reaches for his arm. Quicker than a flash, it happens, almost in the same moment that she touches him; he doesn’t see her hand coming, and his reaction is programmed by his military training and his present circumstance in the world to react without question.

As his hands move with blindingly fast speed, he locks her hand at the crease of his elbow, then he coils like a snake and spins away from her so fast that it pulls her seemingly lighter-than-air body quickly forward. As her body extends straight out, she ends her flight facedown in the grass upon which she quickly rolls away two paces from danger and rights herself. As she hops to a squatting position, she sees Michelson standing defensively by the palm tree. The sudden laughter of the twins seems to instantly soften the moment, for even the passersby smile at what seems to be an apparent acrobatic play by the two adults. The girls laugh because they had watched their mother do these kinds of tricks many times before.

Kelsey is fine and unharmed; she seems more concerned about the soldier than she is concerned about herself. She begins to talk to Michelson as he stands off by the palm tree. He knows he’s only done something that is now instinctive and intuitive, but what everyone else will see as something very wrong, all except Kelsey it seems.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I should’ve known better, Mr. Michelson. I never should have touched you without some kind of warning. I was wrong, I’m so sorry.

There seems to be no words that Kelsey can say to mollify the tension ignited by her ill-timed encroachment into this still-strange man’s space as Michelson continues to stand off in silence. Yet now, after Kelsey speaks, he is a little more relaxed than just a moment before. Somewhere tangled, all jumbled up in the distorted perceptions of his damaged mind’s new way of seeing the world, there is a window of clarity, and Michelson is able to see that Kelsey is at least a sincere, if not careful, person.

You’d better go now, lady, and take your babies home to their father.

Kelsey resists the man sending her off; she is stubbornly intrepid as she plows forward through his fears, maybe through both of their fears, and continues to speak her piece, My name is Kelsey Stewart, and my man is not at home now. I am looking for him. And yes, as you asked before, he is suffering very much like you. Yes, he is, he’s suffering just like you.

Michelson seems, at first, confused by Kelsey referencing her husband’s condition as if she were responding to a query never posed, but that wasn’t it at all, far from it. Standing now, it is clear that the once-strong and regal man, his body now bent from the weight of heavy emotions, bad dreams, and paranoia, is pondering Kelsey’s response. He then asks softly, You are not afraid of me, are you?

Before Kelsey can answer, Michelson puts his jacket back on and places his belongings neatly into the Whole Foods shopping bag. He tosses his duffel bag strap, as he has done thousands of times, over his shoulder and seems to salute Kelsey, and then he turns and walks away. As Kelsey watches the strong-bodied but mentally broken man walk off, she has to stop herself from calling after him. Her daughters, who have sat quietly ’til now, stand close by her sides holding her hands like before as they all, having done this scene before at home some two thousand miles away, watch while the uniformed man walks away.

CHAPTER II

Sitting poolside at her sister’s fine Santa Monica house, Kelsey watches her daughters as they squeak innocently and safely, splashing and swimming under her watchful custody. It is now several days later, and she is still thinking about her encounter with Michelson in the park. She has not yet told her sister, Karen, with whom she once shared everything, about her encounter in the park. Never the intrusive one, according to herself, Karen sits staring at Kelsey, when finally she can take not another second of Kelsey’s distant behavior. She knows that her sister, always serious by nature, has always been more resolute in thought and manner than she; but in the last few days, she has been quite different, meandering in actions and tone more desultory than she has in any time since she first arrived in Santa Monica to visit with her.

Okay, that’s it. I can’t take it any longer, Kelsey. What is going on with you? Kelsey looks up from her distant daze at her sister, but she doesn’t immediately answer her. There was a time in the most recent past when that very same tone of inquiry would have brought a different, stronger response than the weak, insipid response that is offered up at this juncture as Kelsey weakly and distractedly sighs.

Oh, nothing.

Kelsey’s answer was a dodge to be sure; they were the two words put together in that order that would have enraged their father, whom Karen is the spitting image of and takes after in manner and appearance as much as Kelsey favors their mother. He would have blown his stack at such a meager response, probably saying that those words together weren’t worth the breath of air that it took to say it. At this point, Karen takes an intolerant deep breath, readying to scold her uncooperative sister for offering such an anemic response. But in the space of time that that thought goes from her brain to form words from her lips, she turns to look at Cindy, one of the twins, who seems to be struggling in the pool. Without another word, Karen jumps up simultaneously with Kelsey as they both run to the child’s relief, not quite a rescue yet. Kelsey gets there first; she grabs the child from the wading pool. It turns out that her daughter Cindy is just fine; she was playing scuba fish, she says, or something like that as she was seeing how long she could hold her head underwater. She giggles at both her aunt and mother, who are both nervously hovering over her, while her mother takes a towel to her wet hair.

Hi, Mommy, Auntie Karen, I love it here. Now, may I go back into the water, please?

The aunt and the mother both smile broadly as they release the precocious five-year-old to the pleasures of the pool again, but before Cindy is totally free of her mother’s grasp, Kelsey gently warns her daughter not to keep her head so long under the water as it makes her mother nervous. After she frees her daughter to play again, Karen turns to Kelsey.

Sweetheart, I’m so happy to have you here with us. When he’s at home, Hamilton loves playing with the girls, and Mark is delighted to help out in this way . . .

Making an expansive gesture with her arms, Karen continues her very formal, if somewhat overdue, salutation. And you can plainly see that we do have plenty of room for your wonderful little family.

Kelsey smiles broadly at her sister’s largesse, thinly veiled in pride and gloating as if she had done something more than marriage to personally secure it all.

Thank you, sweetheart. We are eternally grateful to you and Mark for so kindly opening your home to us.

Kelsey touches her sister’s hand as she speaks, as there is still a genuinely honest and great love between the two sisters, especially once they’ve cut through the old stale crap, the resentment, and disappointment that have festered between them during their many years apart.

Karen and Kelsey Davis were like two peas in a pod, which is an apt metaphor, as they both grew up on a family farm in the Midwest. To be specific, it was in Northern Illinois in the small farming town of Capron, a town so small most people from Chicago, which is fifty miles away to the Southeast as the crow flies, have little knowledge of their existence. Kelsey and Karen are the only children of Harold and Martha Davis, from a long line of Davises that have farmed their now-two-thousand-plus acres for over three generations. It is a family farm as all the neighboring farms have always been there in Capron.

The Davises are a typical farming family. They are dry farmers, and although they had experimented with other crops like winter wheat and cabbage over the years, they mainly farmed soybeans and corn in rotation, with smaller parcels of alfalfa for feed and extra cash. Their father Harold married Martha when he was older, as many men in the region do for some unknown reason; he was almost forty-three years old, while Martha was twenty-seven. Martha had been—well, that’s what she thought anyway—well on her way to becoming a spinster teacher at the local elementary school the first time she met Harold one Friday evening at one of the local high school’s football games, a must-attend for this entire starved-for-social-variety community. It was there that the first sparks flew between the two soon-to-be-married lovebirds. But their incipient love affair was nearly overwhelmed by the stench of cow manure, fertilizer, and hog slop aroma that too often occasioned a strong autumn breeze; but it turned out to be a less-than-minor hurdle. At Harold’s age, he was determined to have children rather quickly, for he surmised that at forty-three years old, he had used up all his dawdling time. That Martha was amenable made the sudden marriage a sudden triumph, a long-awaited fait accompli.

One after the other in quick succession came Kelsey and then Karen only eleven months later. After Karen was born, Harold suddenly put on the brakes to having any additional children. He was a proud man, Harold was, and he had never been heard to say a word out of anger or disguised an action meant to hurt anyone. But when the second child came, and she too was a girl, the man’s once-friendly and gregarious behavior abruptly changed to that of a grumpy, sullen, brooding, and intolerant man, a diametrically different man than the man Martha had married. All things changed, some suddenly, others more slowly. For one, he stopped attending the football games that he had played in as a high school boy and had continued to love and support all those years since. And his once-deep well of tender and loving ways with and toward his wife and daughters all but dried up, a resource that his girls and his wife, Martha, would spend the rest of their days with him waiting and hoping would return. But on what might be called the positive side, he would never say that he was disappointed that his children were girls; it only felt that way to all the close-by victims of his great disappointments. Three females and no males save him is not what he had envisioned as his future, or intended when he got married.

Maybe it was shame, his own personal shame for not having produced at least one son, or maybe it had always been his fear, which had now become a self-fulfilling prophecy that he had not produced a son; maybe that was the reason for such a late marriage, but he would never say. Harold loved his children, maybe because they were his, maybe because they were good people; they’d never really know because he never told them. He was a farmer, and maybe through his work with plant hybrids he understood simple genetics, and he knew where the fault for having two daughters lay, but we’ll never know because Harold never said. He never said much after a while; he grunted more than he ever spoke. Oh, they three knew how he felt about manners or how the chores around the farm should be carried out; he could gripe about that openly and profusely enough especially when things were not done to his strict specifications. But simple small kind of talk fell a long way away from his demeanor. And in time, this circumstance led the three, the two now-teenaged girls and their sad and lonely mother, to seek affection elsewhere.

When Harold suspected that his wife of sixteen years had found a lover, he sunk even further into the emotional abyss that had started years before upon the birth of his second daughter and, of late, had become his permanent home. Maybe even his first child had begun the slide; it wasn’t ever that clear. But after years of only light social drinking, Harold began to drink heavily, first secretly in the barn late at night, sitting in with his prized roosters and chickens. That phase lasted only a short time when he changed to drinking in the bed next to his wife late at night while watching pornography videos and masturbating himself to sleep in front of her, often manhandling her into making her watch and forcing her to participate in his drunk antics. At first Martha complained, but after several slaps and rapes and alcohol-induced attempted rapes, she learned better how to navigate the minefield of her husband’s neurosis and alcoholic, psychotic behavior.

It was a time in which to make the girls safely miss the treat of her nightly scorn; there were many sleepovers at friends’ or relatives’ homes, and these were clearly scheduled by their mother’s design. Harold Davis’s final descent into a morass of constant drinking, total depression, and self-pity ended one day when he became irretrievably distraught, shooting himself in the head with a shotgun while sitting at the kitchen table. He had left a note as big and bright as day, written in lipstick on the stark white kitchen refrigerator door, for all to see, condemning his wife and the man with whom he suspected she had found some tenderness. The younger daughter, Karen, was the first to find him, the mess and the note. It hit her very hard, and she blamed and could never forgive her mother. From that day onward, she barely spoke to her ever again. A year and a half later, when Karen graduated from high school, she left her home, her state, and her sister for college and California. She also left many things unresolved with her sister; she could never understand or accept the way that Kelsey always found a way to remain supportive of their mother.

For several years, all through college, Karen had very little contact with her sister and, still none, with her mother. However, once she had found a husband and had a child, she softened, sending Christmas cards and baby pictures back home. The elder sister, Kelsey, had started at a local teachers college one year before Karen had left for California. When she graduated, she became a teacher, like her mother, and like her mother, she found a husband at the Friday-night football game up at the high school. He too was a local boy, and his name was Michael Stewart.

There is a curious phenomenon that permeates the region for some inexplicable reason. Many of the households are made up of families of well-educated women, meaning that the women have attended and most often have completed college while the men have not. The men are usually farmers or tradesmen, carpenter builders, plumbers, electricians, or something allied to the trades, while others work in local industries. Now, this is not to imply in any way that these men are dumb; far from it, many of them are bright and do quite well, but few of them are formally educated. These men enjoy their lives; they still barter livestock for veterinarian services, a hog, six months’ supply of eggs, etc., in lieu of monetary compensation. They hunt, they fish, they drink a lot, they have families, and they enjoy the land; they are really tied to the land.

Most of them have been farmers, or come from families of farmers. Many of them still have land that they farm or lease out from or to other farmers while holding down other jobs to pay the bills; virtually none of the smaller family farms can, any longer, make a living or by themselves sustain a family as they once did. It is a way of life gone wanting. Their entire way of life is going through changes. The scourges of the big cities have ravaged many of the current younger generation; the local kids now flirt with drugs (methamphetamine), gangs, last year’s hip-hop fashion turned rural and god-awful music of every conceivable ilk.

Michael Stewart, however, is a throwback; he is the American farmer’s boy next door from fifty years ago, although next door is two miles away. His family, like the Davises, has been in the area for generations, but different from the Davises, they were still making their way solely as farmers. With ten-thousand-plus acres, they have a little more breathing room between plantings.

The families had always been as close as any two farming families could be. They helped each other during the hard times as most neighboring farmers do; it’s a way of life there. They saw each other weekly at Sunday services at the Lutheran church in town. Or at the Lions Lodge pancake breakfasts and social gatherings at the veterans’ hall also in town across from the bank. All the children know one another, but there is little social contact except in class at school. It really wasn’t until after college that there were any sparks between Kelsey Davis and Michael Stewart, and even then he was reticent, given her reputation for being very, very choosy. It took a long time, maybe halfway through that football season, before Michael could do more than just stand and stare at Kelsey.

She already knew the book on him though; she knew that he was still a hardworking full-time farmer, he along with his two brothers and his father, Jared. And she knew that he didn’t date much at all. She also knew, of course, that he knew about her father and her mother. Remember, this town, Capron, is the archetype for small-town America. It’s a place where everyone knows everything about everyone else, or at least will claim that they do, so much so that people would often be halfway through repeating a rumor before they realized that the story they were repeating was about them. So suffice it to say, Kelsey knew that he knew all about her and her family, the rumors if not the truth. This fact always made Kelsey hesitate when surveying a dating opportunity there at the football games. But after they went out several times, she felt much more secure about her risk.

Michael continued to work his father’s one-day-to-be-his farm from the time that he and Kelsey started seriously dating to before they were married. It started from the beginning of their dating; there was always this subtle flow of tension between Michael and his father, Jared, just below the surface, and it continued to grow as it bubbled and festered up into being a real negative life force between the two men, becoming increasingly contentious the longer Michael and Kelsey dated. It became increasingly clear that Jared Stewart was not happy with his son’s choice. Michael was finally disinherited amid much distress that included his father boycotting his wedding, a mindless archaic custom that still predominates rural patriarchal families. Then Michael moves in with his mother-in-law and his wife, and soon Kelsey gives birth to beautiful twin daughters.

Michael had always been a farmer; it was in his blood. He had always seen himself as the elder son, taking over the family farm and raising a family of Stewarts. Now that dream had been dashed for what now, in his weaker moments, seemed a bullheaded move on his part. He tried to make a go of his mother-in-law’s two thousand acres, but as much as it sounded like a handsome idea, it always looked better in the fields than it profited on paper, and this reality led Michael to greater and greater frustration and financial disappointments.

This area of Northern Illinois is a typical yet beautiful Midwestern setting of small towns, distantly separated farmhouses and when in season acre upon acre of crops, some short, some tall, all green. The plantings are all portioned off by straight and curved one-lane roads, which separate one man’s farm from the next. Dominant tractors and even larger combines periodically roam, literally eclipsing both lanes of the mostly two-lane roads during fall harvesting and spring planting. One must be very careful not to crest a hill or a gentle rise in the road while distracted with distant concerns, or the culverts that define the deep runoff boundaries on either side of the road or head-on with one of the behemoth machines will quickly become your final resting place. Even to this late date in the twenty-first century, some of the roads lie as when first scarred on this earth unknown years ago as unpaved, rutted, axle-busting, potholed dust blankets. Many of the farmhouses hide behind clumps of trees as small groves of wooded forests intersect most areas as uncultivated distractions, a homage of sorts to the way all land here once stood. It is still a place where wild animals—red fox, deer, rabbits, coyote, and even an occasional bobcat—and an assortment of little hairy mammals still make their homes. In season they all scamper wildly, hiding from the local farmers-turned-hunters or, more recently, the construction crews turning the animals’ old homes into the new homes for humans.

At first, in this new adventure of family—including a live-in mother-in-law, wife, and children—Michael seemed really well-adjusted and loving, especially to his two little girls, Cindy and Sandy. The presence of the girls worked even to soften his father enough to invite them, on occasion, to Sunday dinners after church. Sadly, however, it was too late to turn back the clock on that disinheritance episode as his father had now promised the farm to his younger brother Peter, and there was just no changing that.

This familial impasse became increasingly difficult for Michael to swallow. For the first couple of years, with the new babies and the new marriage, things were going relatively well, so well that Michael thought it was time to assert his manly dominance over his family, so he demanded that his wife, Kelsey, should stop teaching at the local Capron Elementary School. Kelsey soon realized that Michael was like her father in that way, a very proud man. This is about the time that their troubles really first began to surface.

As if on cue, a one-year solid drought followed her teaching sabbatical; it was a drought that hurt all the dirt farmers, breaking some, including Michael. But as he kept most things financial far away from his wife, and as Michael solely ruled the roost now, she didn’t dare to ask, and so no one except Michael really knew how badly they were hurting. When Kelsey found out and offered to return to work, Michael blew his stack. It seemed to both Kelsey and her mother, Martha, that it was the same situation that had happened with Martha’s husband that is now happening all over again as Michael’s entire demeanor changed. His behavior became increasingly morose; he began drinking and brooding.

But one day Michael arrived home. He had been drinking, which he had been doing more of late since the hard times had begun. But today he was much more jovial than usual, more than anyone would have expected or would have anticipated during this time.

Listen, I want everyone to sit down and listen, I’ve got a plan, Michael requested on this early-fall evening after he had arrived home from a Lions Club meeting at the veterans’ hall in town. Michael starts slowly.

Look, you guys, I wanted very much to talk to you both. I know that I have been very, very difficult lately, and I’m sorry. All I ever wanted was to be the man of the house and to take care of my family. I know that I haven’t done such a good job of things lately, but that’s all going to change now.

Martha and Kelsey sit wordless and quiet while Michael speaks. Michael could not have known that the two of them had decided that they were going to ask him to leave until he could deal better with his drinking and harsh behavior toward all of them. His bad behavior had been something that the two women were willing to ride out, but when over the last two weeks Michael had begun to upset the twins, that’s something they couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate. So with that in mind, for now, they sat and listened.

I have been talking with some of the guys down at the Lions Club, and three or four of them, in the same position that we’re all in, have decided, now get this. They’ve all decided to join up.

If it wasn’t known that Michael lived in Capron, Illinois, in the heart of Midwest farm country, and that his family had been there for generations, you would have no way of ever telling that Michael is an American. Well, maybe you would be able to tell that he is an American, for there are many like him all over America, but the point is that he was not even political enough to be called apolitical; Michael had no political barometer at all. But now he is talking about joining up, which the women could only respond to with the most obvious question; his wife asked it.

Join up, Michael? You guys are going to join up what? What are you talking about, Michael? Are you guys going to pool your monies together for some kind of business venture? Well, we don’t have any money for that, Michael.

Well, Michael must be thinking now, What is she talking about? Nevertheless, Michael remains resolute, intrepid, undaunted, and unperturbed by Kelsey’s attitude.

Michael plows through what seems to be some sort of obvious prophylactic resistance to any new idea of his that would further harm their already-financially-reeling family. Kelsey has already made it ever so clear that she doesn’t have the foggiest notion of what he is talking about. And his mother-in-law is no better as she stares blankly as if waiting for the punch line to a joke that she hadn’t found funny from its inception. After Kelsey’s comments, the two women now sit waiting for the next installment of her husband’s folly down the road of bad ideas.

Look, you guys just don’t get it. Some of the guys from the Lions Lodge and I are going to join the marines. We’re going to go to war against those Arab terrorist bastards. We’re going to kill them, and I’m going to get paid to do it. I already talked with my brother Peter— Kelsey can’t wait for him to finish.

"Is Peter joining up too?

Michael laughs.

Peter? Hell no.

He quickly apologizes for his profanity.

Oh, excuse my bad words, Mrs. Davis, but Peter, Peter’s not going two feet from that farm. He’s afraid the old man might change his mind and give it to our younger brother, Alex, next. No, Peter will farm your two thousand acres for us while I’m gone. That’s if that’s okay with you, Mrs. Davis. And between the money from the farm and the money that I send home and the medical benefits and all, we’ll be in the black again in no time.

The two women are stunned, not only did he have a plan but it also seemed well thought out, very un-Michael-like. Martha immediately realizes that this may be a workable plan, especially because it gets him out of the house; but however good it is, or however they decide to go, they, Michael and Kelsey as husband and wife, should work it out together first.

Wow, that’s a lot, a lot to take in all at once. I’m going to get ready for bed while I’ll leave you two alone to talk more about all this. Good night, you two, and good luck.

Martha catches her daughter’s eye and winks as she walks away.

Kelsey then remains seated with her elbows on the table, resting her chin in her hands, pondering all that she has just heard from Michael and the wink by her mother she interprets as a positive go-ahead sign. When she and her mom had first sat down with Michael, her mind, if not her heart, had settled on a totally different kind of conversation, and now, now she had to consider all that had just been said by Michael. She did quickly grasp most of it, without any problem, but she was a little concerned about the money part, and she was feeling a little guilty, if she was going to be totally honest, that she was feeling more than a little relieved that Michael had decided, on his own, to leave the house.

Maybe he already knew what she and her mother had planned. In that case, she could feel badly for forcing him out, but that wasn’t likely; how could he have known? However, if somehow Michael had come to the same conclusion that he needed to find a way to get himself together and at the same time take care of his family, she could and would applaud that choice on merit alone. All these thoughts and more, like how the girls were going to take their father up and leaving, and whether Michael’s father, if he found that Michael had made a negative choice, would somehow now blame her for his son’s decision as he had already blamed her for his current list of failings, including, at the top of the list, their marriage. And also her own work. She had always enjoyed her students. He had insisted on her quitting, which, in fact, she saw as the beginning of their financial problems, if not the cause; they could have weathered the hard times if she had continued to bring in an income. Should she now tell him that she had accepted her old job back, or rather had reapplied and been accepted back, if the complete truth were to be told? Her head was now full with all this and more. Thinking hard now, was she now to start talking, competing with her husband for who has the most goings-on in their heads? No, not now. Kelsey decides to hear Michael out.

Well, Michael, we’re alone now, is there more to this?

Michael is still excited, maybe even more so now that his mother-in-law has gone to bed.

Listen, Kelsey, I needed to do something. Everything, every long-term thing that I have tried since we’ve been married, has been an abysmal failure.

Kelsey’s eyes stretch as the light in her head goes on. Michael has found someone to talk to, to counsel him. Abysmal failure, she thinks. She knows that Michael couldn’t have put those two words together if he slept with a dictionary for a month; besides, even in that amount of time he could’ve only learned one of the words, and it wouldn’t have been the word abysmal. But she saw progress, and no matter how he had come by it, if it was good and positive, then it was good for them. So with the stoic demeanor learned from her dad, Kelsey continued to sit and listen while her newly tutored and enlightened husband continued to spring forth new and good news.

I have to be honest, Kelsey. I was going nowhere, and I was going there fast and dragging you and the twins with me. I didn’t want that. I know you didn’t want that either. I love you, Kelsey, and I love my family, but . . .

Michael breaks into this big shit-eating grin and says, A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

Kelsey stares at him as she raises her eyebrows. It’s a bit of twisted humor, or at least that’s what it becomes in this very moment. You see, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Well, in Michael’s house as he was growing up, the saying was used so often by Michael’s father, Jared, that it became more or less, depending on how you personally experienced it, the punctuation at the end of every conversation, if not sentence spoken by Jared Stewart. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do were words that were Jared’s credo. In fact, they were the words that Jared used before doing or after doing anything, comfortable, desirable, pleasurable, or unfavorable. In fact, they are the very words used when he had disinherited Michael: Michael, I here now disinherit you because a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. They were the words he used when he gave the right of inheritance of their farm to Michael’s brother Peter. They were the words he used when he first hugged the twins and welcomed them all to his home on that now-infamous Sunday. Look at these beautiful little girls, my granddaughters. Well, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, he says as he takes the twins in his rough hands and muscular arms and hugs them. It was that very Sunday when Michael first found out that his brother Peter was now going to get their family farm. Up until then, he thought that his father’s disinheritance would someday, even that very day, be lifted once and for all time. Instead, Jared Stewart crushed Michael with the news over Sunday dinner. And that’s why the big smile on his face—because he knew that Kelsey hated those words, and she had always forbidden Michael from speaking them in her presence.

I have been talking to some of the older men down at the lodge, Kelsey. There is really a good group of guys down there, and one of them in particular has really been like a father to me lately. It’s a lucky thing too because I was really starting not to like myself very much, and I have been taking it out on you, your mom, and even the girls lately. I’m so very sorry, Kelsey.

Kelsey is so very glad now that she hadn’t spoken to say more about her thoughts because what Michael had just done, and without her help, was to restore, in one fell swoop, so much of the good feelings that she once held for him. Kelsey smiles at Michael for the first time in weeks; it was real, a really warm broad smile without conditions. She was happy about the things he had just said, and the way he had just said them had resurrected such warm and tender feelings in her; she so much needed that, even more than she herself could have known given her reaction. And her hunch was right about him having been talking to someone. Well, she was happy about that as well. Kelsey knew that Michael was sorely missing that kind of guidance in his life now, and that he needed that from someone because he certainly no longer was getting it from his father, who now seemed to only have negative things to say to his once-golden boy. Sadly now, whenever Jared and Michael were together, Michael would return home more beaten down than when he had first left to visit him.

Kelsey’s personality is not one given to great emotion, but Michael knows her well enough to read her approval.

Well, Michael, it sounds good, a little scary but good. So what’s the next step?

The next step came quickly, and before she could first get used to the idea that he was going to go, he was already gone.

With his athletic background and his gung ho attitude, it was a cinch that Michael would be a good soldier; at least his