Chapter 9

I knew my way around downtown Hiaville pretty well as I’d made nearly a hundred trips there since my move. Away from the two main streets of town, though, I had no clue where I was. Thank goodness for GPS. I programmed Jacqueline’s address, and then the address of the restaurant. After updating the GPS program, I headed to Jacqueline’s house. I had no idea that Hiaville had a country club or a Country Club Estates, not that I really cared; you can’t grow much food on a golf course.

I was almost impressed that the Country Club was a gated community. I had to tell the security guard who I was, and he had to verify that I was on his list of expected visitors. I still found the house thanks to the nifty GPS unit in my car.

The house was a beautiful, two-story house with immaculate landscaping. That reminded me that I did know that Hiaville had a country club. We collect grass clippings from many landscaping services to make compost. When the country club offered theirs, we had to decline because they used chemical fertilizers, as well as insecticides and herbicides ... shudder.

The man who answered the door identified himself as David (pronounced Daveed) Rousseau, Jacqueline’s father. He let me in, but continued looking at me appraisingly. “I should warn you that I check out any guy who dates Jacqueline,” he said. “The Police Chief in Raleigh is a personal friend,” he added. I guess that was supposed to be a mild threat.

I don’t think he expected me to laugh, and he looked at me almost angrily. By way of explanation, I pulled out the case with my badge and ID and took out one of my business cards. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw my badge. “Tell the Chief I said hi, and ask him to email me his ammo order for this year,” I said as I handed David my business card.

“You’re a Deputy Marshal? I thought you were a farmer,” he said.

“I am a farmer. I only work as a part time volunteer for the Marshals when they call me to help with a special case. That’s why I work for them as a volunteer. They know I have limited time to help, and they limit their calls to times when I can help in ways nobody else can,” I explained.

“You work for them for free?” he asked incredulously.

“I wouldn’t have as much control over limiting how often I work with them if I got paid for it,” I explained.

“Couldn’t you make more as a Marshal? I understand that farmers are notoriously overworked and underpaid,” he asked.

“I think I can make more farming. I have several ideas to help increase our yields and the overall profit. Even if I didn’t, I have to be a farmer. It’s in my blood and my family has been farmers for as far back as we have records, more than a hundred years before the Revolution. I start getting antsy if I don’t get my hands dirty occasionally.”

“I recognize you,” he said suddenly. “You’re the Marshal who took down Senator Ludmill,” he said excitedly.

“I’m the one that upset him, but The Marshals Service, the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF all worked together to take him down. Aside from keeping him aggravated, I had little to do with his demise.”

“Well, good work anyway,” he congratulated me.

Jacqueline had been standing quietly behind her father listening. At first, she had seemed embarrassed. Now, she was actually interested in our conversation. Mr. Rousseau saw where I was looking and looked, too. “Jacqueline, my dear,” he said lovingly as he hugged her, “You have finally brought home a young man that I approve of.”

When they finished their hug, he put her hand in mine. “You two have a good evening,” he said as he escorted us to the door.

“I’m sorry about Father,” she said quietly after the door closed. “He’s overly protective of me. You’re the first date he’s ever approved of. Fortunately, he wasn’t around when I was away at college,” she chuckled.

“I have to admit, if any of my daughters are half as beautiful as you, I’ll probably be worse than that,” I admitted. She gave me a glowing smile for the compliment and snuggled closer to me until we got to my car.

We talked on the way to Hallston. Fortunately, most of the traffic was coming towards us. By the time dinner was over, we both knew a lot about each other. I knew that I really liked her, and not just her gorgeous body. I sensed that she liked me, too.

“Would you like to go to a movie, or dancing?” I asked on our way back out to my car after dinner.

“That sounds good,” she replied in a sultry voice. “Or perhaps we could go someplace private,” she suggested in a voice that left absolutely no doubt about her intention. She also pulled me to her and kissed me thoroughly, rubbing herself lightly against me to make sure I was fully erect.

Twenty minutes later, I parked beside my temporary home. “You live in a manufactured home?” she asked incredulously.

“My house is only half finished. We concentrated on what we needed to do to finish the farm, first. Once that was done, they started on the house,” I explained, pointing to a dark shape about a hundred yards away.

I barely got the door closed before she was all over me. We left a trail of clothing strewn on furniture and the floor from the front door to the bedroom. Sometime after ten o’clock, long past my usual bedtime, I crawled out of bed and picked up our clothing. Jacqueline had made it obvious that she intended to spend the night and I didn’t want a kitchen full of cooks in the morning to find our clothes strewn everywhere.

“Jim, I hear someone in the house,” Jacqueline whispered as she shook me to wake me up.

“I know; it’s the women making breakfast for everyone. They cook meals here and we all eat together. Each morning, we plan what we’re going to do that day and make work assignments. The women decide who drives the kids to school, who does the shopping, and stuff like that,” I replied while stifling a yawn.

“What?” she gasped. “What will they think of me coming out with you?” she asked.

“Considering that every one of them has tried to fix me up with a friend or relative, and even a couple of their older daughters, they’ll probably be bummed,” I chuckled.

“Oh, god, our clothes,” she panicked this time.

“I picked them up after you fell asleep last night. Shall we shower and then I can introduce you to everyone?”

The women must have used a lot of hot water making breakfast because the water started cooling off rapidly. “I hope your new place has a big water heater,” she grumbled.

“Two big water heaters,” I replied. I planned to have a big family someday and knew how often we had problems running out of hot water at home with only four kids. The new house would have solar heated water backed up by natural gas. It also had a bigger shower because I enjoy showering with my lover.

To her credit, Jacqueline took the teasing from the women in stride. Wekesa’s mother, Juwanna, introduced herself. She was a tall, fifty-something black woman who probably weighed nearly three hundred pounds. Before Wekesa had approached me about her, I’d seen her around and knew that she had a keen wit, as well as a twisted sense of humor like me.

“You don’t need to pay me,” she said waving a wooden spoon in my direction. “I just need something to do to feel useful, and I know my boy’s Millie thinks I’m being critical because I do so much for them.”

“Nonsense,” I replied. “If you work for me, you get paid, just like everyone else.”

“Okay,” she replied while looking at Jacqueline, “but the lady of the house should have something to say about it.”

Jacqueline’s eyes widened in surprise at her comment. “Don’t bother to deny it, honey, I’ve seen the look before,” Juwanna chided teasingly. “The way you’re holding onto that boy you don’t plan on turning him loose anytime soon. And the look in his eyes tells me he don’t plan to protest.”

Jacqueline looked at me, unsure just what to do. “If you plan to stick around, go ahead,” I said, motioning to Juwanna.

“I would love to have you help,” Jacqueline said to Juwanna. “I consider myself a decent cook, but I wouldn’t even know how many potatoes to peel for what you’re doing here.”

When Juwanna turned around to go back to work, Jacqueline grabbed me and hugged me, bouncing excitedly. The rest of the help started showing up at 5:00, just as the first rays of the sun peeked over the horizon to announce its pending arrival.

After breakfast, another workday started, and I took Jacqueline home. She returned that afternoon with two suitcases and took up permanent residence.

While I was in town after dropping her off, I had an inspiration and ran by the feed store to get seeds. They only had one of the three types I wanted, so I ordered the others online. I paid to have one delivered in two days, and the other with regular delivery. Carlos and Ramón were surprised when I told them what I planned to do, but both agreed that it would be a good way to use the new land this year.

When the seeds arrived two days later, I planted the seeds for the giant pumpkins in the new, much-expanded greenhouse, and set the flats on heating pads to encourage the seeds to sprout faster.

The land sale was finished in five days, and I now owned an additional 1572 acres. We closed the deal at 3:00 Tuesday afternoon. Fifteen hours later, our tractors started plowing. We had even leased three extra tractors so we could finish sooner.

While the tractors mowed, plowed, disced, and harrowed, readying the fields for planting, the tree cutting crews returned, bolstered with temporary help, as well as imported help offered by the sawmill we had contracted with. Our employees felled, cut up, and hauled away the hickory for our own use. Other temporary employees followed the cutting crews, gathered the small branches left when we de-limbed the trees, and then raked up leaves and other debris.

We ran the debris and smaller branches through a chipper, and then piled it in a corner of the new property. We didn’t add the chips to our compost piles since the small chunks of wood take much longer to decay than what we usually add.

I planted the first five hundred acres that we finished plowing with pumpkins. As I was growing up, our family always raised an acre of pumpkins, selling the nearly three thousand pumpkins from our fruit stand. If this worked, we’d have 1.5 million pumpkins to sell this Autumn. Carl, my Kroger liaison, put me in touch with one of their suppliers who produced organically grown, canned pumpkin. To me, canning something grown organically just seemed wrong, but hey, they were buying, and at a better price than everyone else. They even offered a few suggestions.

Carl was more interested in my second pumpkin project. Aside from the regular pumpkins my parents sold for Jack-o-lanterns, I had always grown ten Big Max pumpkin plants. These produced pumpkins up to 130 pounds. I even had one weigh 159 pounds one year. I had learned that the plants needed a constant source of water and lots of compost. I literally grew the plants on a compost pile with drip irrigation beneath the pile.

When I was younger, my first attempt at using drip irrigation taught me that the water had to be introduced below the compost pile. If I watered through the pile, it washed the nutrients into the soil, which had seemed like a good idea to me. However, one of those nutrients is nitrogen. Nitrogen makes the green part of the plants grow like crazy. The pumpkin vines were twice as long as usual, but the biggest pumpkin was only sixty-five pounds, only half as big as I had expected. The plants spent too much energy making vines and leaves, and not enough making pumpkins.

After running the drip irrigation lines, I made five hundred compost piles, putting the shredded wood chips at the very bottom of each pile. Each pile was roughly a cubic yard and got five transplanted Big Max pumpkin plants. A month later, I chose the three most vigorous plants and pulled out the other two. Each plant would be limited to two pumpkins by pinching off any flowers once the first two pumpkins were the size of a plum. Additionally, I would limit the ten best-looking plants to a single pumpkin. That should net us about three thousand giant pumpkins weighing between one hundred and one-hundred-twenty-five pounds each. Carl said that Kroger would love to sell those.

After we finished planting five hundred acres of regular pumpkins, we planted another five hundred acres of oats. Having never grown oats, I had to enlist the help of the county agricultural agent. Normally, I wouldn’t grow oats, but I had the land and the time this year. The oats would make a good addition to the feed for most of our livestock.

By the time we finished planting the oats, the tree crews were done with the last of the timber. Using a patchwork of smaller and oddly shaped fields, we planted the rest of the new land with alfalfa.

My parents finished planting their main crops about the same time that we finished planting the last of the alfalfa. They are traditional farmers, and plant when everyone else does. That means they harvest when everyone else does. The only problem is that they get the same price that everyone else does. My first tomatoes and first crop of corn should be ready two or more weeks before everyone else and should bring a premium price until the traditional farmers began harvesting.

My new home was completed at nearly the same time. Jacqueline loved it and immediately set about furnishing and decorating it. I must admit, she has an eye for decorating, even though her college degree was in finance. Even my family came down for the housewarming, and to meet the girl who always answered the phone when they called. Many of my friends from the federal agencies in Raleigh came, as did the Chief of Police of the Raleigh PD.

My parents and Jacqueline’s figured that we must be serious if we had both families meet each other. They were right; we’d already discussed marriage, although I hadn’t formally proposed yet. I felt that anything less than six months was too soon to propose officially.