by April Hill
It was three days before Labor Day, 2013. And it was also the very last time Jennifer Karen Walters would ever use the “F” word—within hearing distance of certain up-tight people, anyway.
What happened next, happened fast, and it was Jenny’s bad luck to have made her stand in a house littered with scrap wood and broken cedar shingles—an abandoned house, with no close neighbors. For Cal Banning, on the other hand, the location proved to be ideal. In les time than it had taken him to make the threat, the woman he had loved since the sixth grade was bent over the kitchen counter with her jeans and panties around her ankles. And since this spanking was something he had waited for and planned for fifteen years, he wasn’t about to make a half-hearted job of it, no matter how much she kicked, and squirmed, and swore. Cal was a good craftsman, who believed that something worth doing was worth doing right—and doing thoroughly.
He began with a wooden shingle, and didn’t toss it aside until Jenny’s rear end was the color of a ripening tomato, and until her first yelp of shock had progressed to a howl, and finally, to a forlorn wail of apology. But, even then, Cal wasn’t entirely persuaded that Jenny’s somewhat theatrical wail was sincere. Which is why he paused just long enough to pick up a foot-long section of molding, and began anew—on the tender backs of her thighs.
Less than fifteen seconds later, Cal was finally satisfied that her apology was sincere, and that her promise to never again utter her favorite expletive was to be trusted—probably.
Later, when she’d stopped blubbering, they sat on the front porch— with Jenny perched uncomfortably on a moldy cushion Cal had found somewhere in the house—and had the conversation they should have had fifteen years earlier.
“I just couldn’t believe you’d gone out and bought a whole house,” she grumbled. “And expected me to live in it.”
Cal chuckled. “Well, It wasn’t much to look at, that’s for sure. Six hundred bucks down doesn’t didn’t buy you much, even then, but that’s all I could scrape up. I worked two summers to save up that six hundred bucks—rounding up and gelding stock for Harley Snelling. It cost Harley four bucks an hour, and me a hernia.”
Jenny groaned. “I’m sorry, Cal. I hope you at least got your money back on the house.”
“I spent the next two summers after you left fixing it up. Came out pretty good, too, for a first try. That’s when I began to figure out that I was really cut out to be a contractor, and not a full-time cattleman, like Dad. He died a few years after you left town, but I still run a couple hundred head out there, to keep my hand in. If the housing market keeps going downhill, I figure I can always go back to being a working rancher.”
“You mean you still have that house you bought, all those years ago?”
“You bet I do. The place was a real labor of love, and all that hard labor helped to take my mind off you. I’d bought the house for you, but by the time I finished working on it, I’d started thinking of it as home. Bring Katie and come on over for supper, some night, and I’ll give you both the grand tour. It’s grown some, since then, of course. Four bedrooms, now, and three full baths. If it’s okay with you, Katie can have her own suite, so we don’t have to listen to hip-hop or rap.”
Jenny didn’t answer.
He drove her back to the motel an hour later. Jenny had already borrowed his phone to call Katie, to tell her to stop raiding the honor bar. They were all going to have supper, together—at Cal’s place. Oddly, Katie didn’t seem surprised.
“So, are we going ahead with the house project, or not?” he asked, as they pulled up in front of the motel.
“There’s no more in my bank account than there was, yesterday,” she told him wearily.
“It’s a partnership, remember? If it’ll make you feel better, though, I’ll keep a running tally, starting now. Let’s say six bucks apiece for tonight’s dinner, and if you’d like to sleep in a real bed while the work’s going on, I can offer you the two front bedrooms at twenty bucks each—bathroom and kitchen privileges included. For as long as you like.”
“Very generous. And what if I just share a room with you? Do I get a fifty percent discount?”
“Nope. Not just yet. Katie’s going to need some time to get to know me—and to get used to the idea of us.” He smiled. “Think you can hold out for a while?”
Jenny flushed. “I guess, since you put it that way, but I’m not going to like it. You’re making this all very businesslike, Mr. Banning. Is there going to be an additional charge for my recent lesson in patience and ladylike comportment?”
He grinned. “Nope. That spanking you got was on the house. Just part of the service. Does it still–”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “You know damn… darned well it does. Like the condition of my ass is any of your business, as nothing more than a business partner. And while we’re on the subject, what is your business, really. Ranching, or rebuilding houses that should have fallen down a hundred years ago?”
“Both, really. The ranch will always be what gets me up in the morning, but I’ve got eight people working for me in the construction end of things, along with an on-site foreman, and a great lady named Nola Dempsey, who runs the office, keeps me solvent, and makes sure I don’t tangle with the IRS or the union.”
“Your workers are unionized? In a town this size?”
He nodded. “Six guys, two women, and in case you didn’t know it, Mrs. Walters, unions made this country great. And made me rich, which I sure never got pushing cows. Which reminds me. How’d you like to help decorate a float?”
“A float? Like at the Rose Bowl Parade? That kind of float?”
“More on the order of a lot of cardboard boxes, and a lot of red, white and blue crepe paper, wired to a pickup. The only rule is the boxes need to look something like houses, and we need a Banning Construction Labor Day Princess.” He grinned. “Play your cards right, and the princess job’s yours. The way I remember it, you were pretty good at being a princess, fifteen years ago. Or was it queen?”
Jenny shook her head. “Second runner-up, actually. Jolene Hickerson won the queen spot. Of course, all we princesses thought she bribed a couple of the judges. All of them were football jocks, and everyone in town knew that Jolene Hickerson would suck the chrome off a trailer hitch to be voted prom queen. And no, thank you. I’m not interested in being a princess, again. My stint as consort to a king didn’t turn out that great—even if he was just king of the fu…the freaking prom.”
He grinned. “Good girl. Looks like the message finally got through. What about Katie? Think she’d be interested in being a princess?”
“My feminist daughter would rather be covered in honey and tied down to an ant hill than ride in a Labor Day parade—even as a princess of commerce.”
“Well, you might want to mention it to her. The job comes with a free dress—anything off the sale rack at LouAnn’s Second Time Around consignment shop.”
“LouAnn is still in business?”
He grinned. “Yep. She’s been dressing Elkfoot’s fashion-conscious elite for thirty-two years.”
For a few minutes, Jenny didn’t say anything else. She was trying to frame her next words.
“I want you to be sure about all this, Cal,” she said finally. “Everything we’ve talked about. If you need more time to think about it, just say so.”
“I’ve had fifteen years to think about it, and so have you. It’s a good life, here, Jenny. It’ll take some getting used to. I know that. And especially for Katie.” The high schools consolidated into one district a few years back, and the one Katie’ll be going to has a first class reputation.”
“I don’t know, Cal. I may have brain-washed her too well.”
“Meaning?”
Jenny sighed. “Thanks to me, my daughter thinks people in small towns live on pork rinds and marry their own siblings.”
He chuckled. “There’re a couple of nice-looking kids who work for me every summer she might like to meet. Bright kids, planning on coll
ege in a few years. Working cattle can put a fella in damned good shape, and he doesn’t have to pay a gym for the privilege.”
“Let’s not encourage that, just now. I should probably warn you, right now. Teenage girls aren’t always the most pleasant company.”
Cal raised an eyebrow. “I sort of figured that out for myself, after the last one I tangled with. How much worse can this one be?”
Jenny smiled. “You have no idea, cowboy. But you’re about to find out—if you still want the job, that is.”
“I want the job,” he said, pulling her into his arms. “I’ve already waited fifteen years for it. And in a couple of months, I’ll start collecting the fringe benefits.”
THE END
“Legends Of The Fall”
As I sit here at the window, watching the last of the fading autumn leaves drift down into the yard, I am thinking about many things. Thanksgiving has just passed, so I am thinking about how grateful I am not to have left the wax paper packet of gizzards and guts inside the turkey this year, thus avoiding the look of horror on my mother-in-law’s face. I am also remembering the post-Thanksgiving dinner spanking that took place in our upstairs bathroom last year, after I told my mother-in-law in the nicest possible way to get stuffed. I am pondering how I will manage to purchase lovely and useful Yuletide gifts for everyone on my Christmas list even though I detest most of them and currently have a mere fourteen dollars credit on my Visa card and have slightly overdrawn my checking account. I am debating the wisdom of using our newly refinished colonial era fireplace to incinerate every wooden, leather, or rigid plastic item in our colonial era home that might be used to administer the history-making spanking I will be receiving when it is discovered that I have borrowed a smallish amount of money from an individual by the name of Sammy the Shark, with which to cover my unforeseen overdrafts and replenish my deflated credit card. And finally, I am thinking about my throbbing rear end, which is still on fire after the most recent disagreement with my husband. A disagreement, oddly enough—about falling autumn leaves.
My husband Jed and I live in New England, just outside the small college town where Jed teaches American History and I operate a small but highly unsuccessful art gallery. We’re a bit off the beaten track to draw the usual flood of tourists, which is both good, and bad. Good, because it’s quiet and peaceful most of the year, and bad because the same well-heeled tourists who come to admire the glorious autumn foliage often buy paintings of quaint, purely imaginary New England scenes—of which I have a great many sitting around and collecting dust. I wouldn’t live anywhere else if you paid me, though, especially at this time of year. Well, maybe if you paid me a lot, but I’m not even sure of that. I grew up in and around Los Angeles, which is an exciting area full of things to do and places to go—and (my apologies, L.A.) my idea of what hell must be on a bad day. It’s overcrowded and hot and dry most of the year, except for when it rains for a solid week and starts washing houses and swimming pools down the canyons. There’s no real fall season, and in the months that should be autumn, the dreaded Santa Ana winds blow for days at a time, scorching everything in their path, and fanning the recurring wildfires that used to send my dad up on the roof with a garden hose on a regular basis.
When I was eight years old, my family and I visited New England during a particularly dazzling fall, and I became convinced that the changing of the leaves was irrefutable evidence that there was a God. Having already made short work of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, my older brother (a sophisticated intellectual freethinker at twelve) had begun to question God’s existence. My Italian mother was horrified, but my father, a mild-mannered Presbyterian minister of Scottish origin, merely smiled every time she bemoaned the fact that their eldest was sliding down that slippery slope from adolescent cynicism to atheism, and inevitably, to Godless Communism.
Eager to save my brother’s endangered immortal soul, I explained to him about the fall leaves and God—illustrating my point with a picture of riotous fall foliage torn from my father’s copy of National Geographic. There must be a God, I told him, because there was no other reason for the leaves to turn such beautiful colors. They could have just as easily been brown, or gray. God loved looking at the turning leaves, and because He wanted us to be happy, and to have something beautiful to remember over the long hard winter, he created autumn—and the turning leaves.
When I had finished, I waited breathlessly for my brother’s response. I was hoping, I think, for him to fall to his knees, offering his eternal gratitude for my childlike wisdom, and plead with me to help him repair his relationship with God. (It was already too late to fix things with the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Even I was beginning to waiver in my faith in that regard, and the Tooth Fairy had been toast for two years.)
But that didn’t happen. What the rotten little ingrate actually said was, “I’ve got news for you, moron. You like the stupid, freaking leaves because you don’t have to rake the stupid, freaking things up, then stand around for half the freaking day while they get done burning.” (Note: My older brother did not use the euphemism, “freaking.”)
My heart sank. What he had said about the leaves was true, though. I had asthma, and wasn’t allowed to help when he and Dad burned the dry brown leaves that accumulated on our lawn. What I couldn’t understand, though, is why anyone wouldn’t want to help with burning the leaves, even though these leaves weren’t crimson and orange and gold, the way they were in New England. The smell was still wonderful, and the leaping flames were beautiful, with puffs of smoke and little whirlwinds of sparks flying around your head. The pile always smoldered for hours, and made our hair and clothes smell like autumn, even when everything around us still looked like West Covina, California.
Anyway, that’s why I chose to go to college in New England, and how I came to marry my History of the American Colonies professor. Jed is twelve years older than I am, devastatingly handsome, and brilliant. He’s published two books, one entitled, George Washington, American Napoleon? which I actually read, and one entitled (I think) The Implications of Federalism in Modern Political Systems, which I tried to read, but fell asleep. Jed is neat, organized, and logical. I’m creative, decidedly not brilliant, on the plump side, and about as disorganized and illogical as it’s possible to be and still dress myself each morning. Maybe it’s Jed’s deep New England need for order, or maybe it’s just that I’ve driven him to it, but as you may have guessed by now, Jed spanks me, on occasion. On a lot of occasions, actually.
The first time was right after we were married, and no, it wasn’t a couple of newlyweds being playful. But it also wasn’t just Jed losing his temper and taking me across his knee to show the little woman who was going to be the boss. This is Jed we’re talking about, here. Mr. Cool, Calm, and Logical. But he’s also funny, and sweet, and patient, and gentle, and definitely not the kind of guy to take a woman across his knee and spank her without her consent. Even if she has it coming, which I absolutely did.
There had been a couple of arguments while we were dating, and a few more after we got engaged—mostly about two issues. My smoking habit, and my parking tickets. At the time, I smoked like the proverbial furnace, and collected parking tickets like collecting and not paying parking tickets was a job. Jed hated both the smoking and the tickets, and since even I recognized how stupid and immature I was being, I promised him solemnly—on the day we got married—to clean up my act, get on the ball, get my ducks in a row, blah, blah, blah, I would never get another parking ticket, and I’d never light up another cigarette.
(I should probably explain here that Jed takes promises very seriously. And he takes lies even more seriously.)
Within a week, of course, I’d broken both promises, and lied about breaking them. I thought the whole thing was sort of funny. Jed didn’t. When week two ended with Jed catching me puffing away in the garage and trying to hide the evidence, he sat me down for a little talk. I don’t remember too much about the disc
ussion, but when it was over I had agreed to a trial run of Jed’s “anti-smoking cure.” The program was a fairly simple. No pills, no meetings, no motivational lectures. If I got caught smoking, I got my butt blistered by the program administrator—Jed. I had no idea at all what having my butt blistered would feel like, but what the hell, I reasoned. I did need to stop smoking. How bad could it be? I was about to learn a hard lesson—that it can be as bad as the program administrator wants it to be.
Maybe because he was afraid I’d back out of the deal, Jed was in a very determined frame of mind, and the “trial run” turned out to be astonishingly brief. Three sneaked cigarettes and three thoroughly disagreeable “blisterings” later, I walked away a more-or-less confirmed non-smoker. I say more-or-less because there would be a couple of additional relapses over the next few months, each requiring what Jed cheerfully referred to as a “booster shot.”
The spankings have continued, mainly because I sort of like the sense of order and justice it gives me—or maybe because it’s better than having to act like a grown up all the time. But after eight years of marriage, Jed and I are almost unreasonably happy, and he still seems to like me, despite my occasional forays into lunacy. Jed says I simply hear a different drummer, which is a literary way of saying it takes all kinds.
On a happier note, Jed and I share a great passion—besides the usual, better known passion, I mean. We love to scour the countryside for antiques, when we can afford it. College professors at small New England colleges are not especially well paid, and living here is very expensive, so items for our home are the usual focus of our weekend treasure hunts. The house we live in is old, very authentic, and hideously expensive to maintain. In the fall, when the leaves begin to turn, I wouldn’t take a million bucks for it, even though it probably needs close to that in repairs. Fortunately, Jed is good at carpentry and plumbing, and at fixing things in general. The centerpiece of what we call the “den” and what was once a parlor, is a ceiling-to-floor fireplace of antique white brick. (An antiqueness that took Jed and I two full weeks of painting, grouting, scraping, and sanding to achieve, I might add.)