GET OVER HERE! I have to trim your toenails!” Jethro Benton yelled. “It’s for your own good!” And of course that was a very good reason for toenail trimming. Too bad he was trying to reason with . . . a goat.
I must have been crazy choosing goats! he thought. Well, they were a good idea at the time . . . but that was sixteen years ago!
Yes. They had been more manageable than, say, cows would have been—at least for his kids. But then, why was he the one strapping this ornery creature into the milking stand, cajoling it with its favorite feed, lifting and scraping each foot with the hoof pick, and wielding that pair of strange—and sharp—pruning shears, all the time hoping he wouldn’t wrench his back, cut himself with the clippers, or get kicked in the face—all of which had happened in the time he’d been running this homestead.
* * *
“Ma! Rebecca won’t give me back my doll!”
“I don’t have your dumb doll! I don’t even play with dolls anymore!”
Mary Benton stared into the sink, listening to her daughters skirmishing behind her.
“Okay, Rebecca,” Ma finally responded, “instead of bragging about how mature you are, how ‘bout proving it by helping Hannah find her ‘dumb doll’?” Hannah flipped her blond braids in Rebecca’s direction, figuring she won the battle this time.
Hostilities ceased for a moment. Ma knew it wasn’t because they were pondering her Solomon-like wisdom. More likely, the older one was cooking up a good excuse instead.
“I have to finish my chapter first,” burying her freckled face in her book and hiding her mouth behind her sweater-covered hand—a cute but sometimes annoying habit of hers.
“Uh-huh.” Ma continued the dishes.
They did get along remarkably well for two adolescent girls inhabiting rather cramped quarters, with few—or rather, no—modern-day distractions.
“Listen, girls, we need to get supper ready before Pa and your brother get back from hunting. Rebecca, would you get to peeling some potatoes? And Hannah, please get some flour and lard out for biscuits?”
The girls both started picking up their things and putting on aprons. Ma looked through the small window over the washboard at the fading blue sky between the trees and was thankful it was starting to stay lighter longer now that spring was fully upon them. It also gave her men a longer time to hunt, which, after the long winter they had, was a necessity if they weren’t going to go hungry. Well, they weren’t quite that bad off, but she did like to have some increased variety in their diets on top of what they could grow on their small patch in the woods, especially in late winter and early spring.
* * *
“I hope you can help me with the new clothesline when you get back,” Mary Benton had requested of Jethro before he left.
She and her husband, Jethro, had worked into a very natural routine over the years. He did most of the construction and heavy maintenance—and hunting and trapping—and she, the gardening, clothes, and housekeeping duties. They split the cooking when they could, with the kids apprenticing at their sides. And, of course, there was always the feeding and caring for the animals, enough to keep them all busy. It was admittedly stereotypical in a way. But it seemed to work, like some ancient family of hunter-gatherers.
It seemed to Jethro that he spent most of his time chopping wood. The space between the woodlot and the cabin attested to that, lined with multiple courses of wood, piled in rows like so many grocery-store shelves, each topped with tar paper or strip aluminum to shed rainwater. In early years, he had made the mistake one too many times of not chopping enough and running out before the end of the winter. Being more than 500 miles south of Chicago, major blizzards or long below-zero spells weren’t as common. But they were still in the mountains, and long winter nights still got mighty cold … especially when there were babies in the house, though their three were growing quickly.
Their boy—the oldest of the three—and the two girls always helped out around the place, how and when they could. Jethro was most glad of that, at least when he—a typical father—could tolerate their slow learning curve.
Jethro Benton, not the name he was born with, was in early middle age. For a college professor—a former one, that is—he was young. To the rest of the world, maybe not. He was of medium height, average weight. Under his wide-brimmed canvas hat was short, curly hair, light brown and graying. He was bearded, mostly gray on the chin and jowls but still dark brown up into his sideburns. His eyes, always scoping his environment, were green-blue and bright yet showed the inevitable signs of his daily hard labor.
But he and his wife Mary, also not her real name, had been in these woods homesteading for nearly sixteen years now, and age didn’t seem to matter much to them up here anymore. Mary hadn’t aged as much as Jethro appeared to. Her hair was still dark and long, with brown highlights in the sun. She had sparkling brown eyes and a smile that was subtle but strong. Her skin had not weathered like her husband’s, though she spent comparable time out in the sun and the wind.
Their decision to leave their successful jobs in Chicago—he from a tenured position in the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine program at the University of Chicago, and she as a junior partner with a large accounting firm in the Loop—had not been an easy one. There were still days that one or both of them resented the threat that had exiled them to this place. It had certainly not been part of their long-term plan for their lives, but here they were, making the best of it.
* * *
Today, though, those thoughts were far from Jethro’s mind at least. For him the day was perfect for checking his traps. The purpose of his trapping was half for the money the pelts brought in at the yearly fur sale held at the Cumberland County Fair in Crossville and half for the simple challenge of it.
He usually got out earlier in the morning to be more humane to any surviving animals caught in his traps. His delay today involved trying to get Timothy, their sixteen-year-old son, introduced to the trapping trade as well. Pa—as Timothy and his sisters called him—was looking forward to seeing how the boy would handle the new undertaking. Timothy had watched Pa prepare the traps and had observed the tedious and gory process of “putting up” the pelts. But today was to be the boy’s first day “on the line.”
Read next chapter
Read previous chapter