Читать книгу A Bandicoot Holiday - Sherman E Hister - Страница 5

Samantha Rivers loves to cook for her boys more than anything else in the world. So there is always plenty to eat at the Rivers farm. Mrs. Rivers has always been this way through thick and thin. She is a woman that would give you the shirt off her back. Before Mr. and Mrs. Rivers met, Samantha was a nurse at Walter D. Huffhines Hospital. This was after growing up on her father’s struggling farm. Eugene Jones was a crop farmer who could never catch a break. If his equipment wasn’t breaking down, then his fields were not producing. Mr. Jones did always seem to keep a handful of world-class dairy cows. There were times these cows kept the Jones farm out of foreclosure. When Samantha Jones was old enough for nurse’s training, Mr. Jones sold one of his dairy cows to Devro Rivers. This allowed Samantha to pay for her nurse’s training. Eugene and Devro had known each other through the town’s farm bureau. After Samantha Jones completed her nurse’s training, she went to work at Pickerville’s only hospital, Walter D. Huffhines. Early in her career, she tended to an older cattleman who had been brought in by his son. The older cattleman happened to be Devro Rivers, and the son who brought him in was Dalton Rivers.

Devro’s horse had been startled in a group of cattle he was trying to drive in to a large pen. When the horse spooked, Devro fell off and caught the tip of a horn in his right eye. The eye was permanently damaged but really didn’t cast a shadow over the old cattle baron. While being tended to by Samantha, Devro talked to his son about what it would be like to start a baseball team. Dalton did his best to accommodate what his father was saying, but could not hide the fact that he was more interested in the nurse bandaging his father’s eye. Not only was Dalton captivated by this woman’s beautifully natural curled hair complementing her smooth tawny skin, but also the way she moved as she spoke with such a warm embrace in her voice.

Devro noticed this and asked the young nurse her name.

“Who, me? I’m Samantha Jones, but you can call me Sam.”

“Well, Sam,” Devro Rivers said, “You wouldn’t happen to be Eugene Jones’s daughter, would you?”

“Why, yes, yes, I am.” Sam smiled.

“Last time I saw your father, I bought a dairy cow from him that he had for sale. That cow produces the best milk I ever tasted.”

“Well, you know,” Sam began, “he used that money to put me through nurse’s training. That’s part of how I got here today.”

“You don’t say.”

“Small world, isn’t it, son?”

Devro wanted Dalton to stop gawking at the beautiful young nurse and engage in the conversation.

“Yeah, Dad, I guess it is. I’m Dalton Rivers, this eyeless gentleman’s son. So nice to meet you, Sam.”

Sam picked up on Dalton’s sarcasm for his father’s pushiness and said “So nice to meet you” before extending a hand. Dalton shakes her hand and is immediately surprised by Samantha Jones’s grip.

“Wow, you must have milked some of those cows yourself. You got a grip like a regular rodeo cowboy.”

“Don’t you mean cowgirl?” Sam corrects him. “And yes, I’ve been milking dairy cows since I was little bitty and still do. Sundays, when I’m off, I usually go milk after church. It’s a way for my family and me to spend time together.”

Dalton looks at his dad then back at Sam with a smile and says, “Well, I’m impressed. Can’t say I’ve ever met a woman that compares to you.”

This comment caught everyone’s attention and surprised even Devro, who had just lost the use of an eye.

“Say would it be to soon to ask someone on a date I just met under these circumstances?” Dalton asked with raised eyebrows.

“Not at all. I was hoping you’d say something,” Sam remarked.

Devro knew his son might have just met his wife.

“Can I pick you up later?” Dalton asked anxiously.

With the same amount of enthusiasm, Sam tells Dalton to pick her up after her shift ends near the front entrance of the hospital. Sam happily explains that a doctor will be in to check Mr. Rivers’s eye with further instructions on what is possible for treatment.

“I sure wish this didn’t happen to you,” Sam sincerely expresses her concern for Devro Rivers.

“Don’t worry young lady, God and I covered it years ago.”

“How is that?” Sam asked.

“I got married young, and God gave me two eyes just in case something like this happened.”

Sam soulfully laughs then looks at a smiling Dalton and says, “It was nice meeting you.”

Dalton concurred, saying, “It was a pleasure meeting you.”

With that, Sam leaves the father and son to check on the rest of her patients.

Not too long after Devro’s accident, he sold the Rivers cattle company and started a baseball organization. A year later, Sam and Dalton married.

Quail goes through the back door leading into his parents’ kitchen. He takes off his boots and coat while addressing his mother.

“Whatever you’re cooking smells good enough to eat.”

Mrs. Rivers, laughs as she says, “Come on, you goofball, get in here and eat while it’s hot.”

Quail enters the kitchen in his socks and heads toward a large pot of chili.

“Wash your hands before you eat in my kitchen,” Sam Rivers says with a joking sternness.

“Jeez, Louise, I’m so hungry I forgot.”

“Well, you’ve been working with cows and fiberglass all day, and I can tell for a fact you haven’t washed your hands once.”

Quail washes his hands and dries them on a towel. “Are you always going to talk to me like a child?” Quail asks his mother.

“Just as long as you act like one,” she rebuts without hesitation.

Quail gladly shovels chili into a bowl for the ease of his hunger.

After three large helpings, Quail gets up from the dining table in the farm-style house and walks over to the sink to clean his bowl and spoon.

“Was mighty tasty, Mom,” Quail says with a funny accent.

“Are you going down… Did you hear that?” Mrs. Rivers was interrupted by someone opening the front door.

The door slams loudly like the wind caught it. The sound of wet shoes clomps into the hallway leading toward the kitchen. Mrs. Rivers mouths “Who is that” to her son without making a sound.

Quail takes his eyes off of what his mother was trying to say and aims them at the doorway near the end of the hall.

“Hello?” Quail calls for an answer.

“Yeah, it’s me, Wayne.” Clomping into the kitchen, Wayne enters covered with mud from his waist to his shoes. “You all will not believe where I’ve been.”

“What happened?” Quail asks his older brother.

“Honey, how did you get covered in mud,” Mrs. Rivers anxiously asks her son.

“Well, I wasn’t paying attention,” Wayne begins. “I was driving back to the main road into town when all of a sudden I hit a patch of melted snow left over from the last storm. The snow must have just been slush because as soon as I drove over it, the car immediately slid into the embankment on the side of the road.”

Quail gets a little humor out of this when he mentions, “I told you to get a truck when you bought that car.”

Wayne ignores his brother, and finishes explaining his accident to Sam Rivers.

“So when I managed to get out of the car, I realized the wheels were submerged in mud.” Wayne pauses as he looks down at his mud-soaked pants and shoes. “I looked around for something to dig the tires out and noticed a stray pile of wood that had been dumped, so I grabbed a piece to try and dig with it. All I managed to do was cover my lower half with mud. After that, I decide to walk the couple of miles back here for some help.”

Quail and Mrs. Rivers both console Wayne for his bad experience. Mrs. Rivers goes to get Wayne some dry clothes while Wayne and Quail discuss getting his car unstuck. They decide the farm’s tractor should do the trick, but now that it was dark, they decided to rescue the vehicle in the morning. Mrs. Rivers returns to the kitchen with dry clothes for Wayne. Quail goes to the back door, where he puts his coat and boots on. Wayne was changing out of his mud-soaked attire while his mother dished up a bowl of chili.

“Mom, thanks for the chili. I’ll be back in a little bit.” When Wayne returns to the kitchen, he asks, “Did Quail go to milk?”

Mrs. Rivers explains that he had as she puts the bowl of chili on the table.

When Wayne finishes eating, he puts on one of his father’s coats to go down to the old barn and help with the evening chore. Quail had already milked five cows when Wayne got down there.

“Need any help?” Wayne asks.

Quail looks up from the cow he was milking at the moment and says, “Are there cow patties in the pasture?”

Wayne grabs a stool and positions the dairy cow that he picked to milk. They both work without speaking, mimicking each other with the sound of milk being squeezed from the cow’s udder ricocheting off the sides of the buckets they use to collect the milk in.

The Rivers are a traditional family and prefer doing this chore the old fashion way. This was Mrs. Rivers’s idea. After she and Dalton were married, she talked her husband into buying the dairy cow her father sold Devro Rivers. Samantha Rivers grew up milking her father’s cows and enjoying the fruits of her labor. The milk she grew up on was not processed or store-bought. It was homegrown and collected by Sam and the rest of her family. They all took turns with the chore. This was a part of her early life that she was very grateful for. It instilled a work ethic in her that Mrs. Rivers wanted her children to have. Also, the fruit of her labor was always a rich delight to drink fresh milk. Samantha Rivers swears that children raised on fresh dairy milk were less prone to disease, had stronger bones, and seemed more mild tempered.

Mrs. Rivers’s kids took to milking right away. Once they learned how to pull the milk out of the udder, they milked on a daily basis. Mr. Rivers also enjoyed milking the cows. After long days at the office, Mr. Rivers’s favorite thing to do was to come home and milk a cow. As the boys grew, Mrs. Rivers asked her husband to breed their dairy cow. Each year the Rivers did this, they started increasing the size of their herd. When the amount of milk they were collecting each day got too large for the family’s own consumption, Mrs. Rivers began distributing the milk in town. She would take milk to both sides of her family. The Rivers dairy milk was prized for its quality and became very popular throughout Pickerville. The milk got so popular that it is sold in the grocery market, and it is served to the town’s schoolchildren for lunch every day.

After the two brothers are finished milking, they place what they collected into a large refrigerated tank that stores the milk at the preferred temperature. The two brothers go back up to the large cabin-like farmhouse to get some rest. They know they have to get up early the next morning to pull Wayne’s car out.