Chapter 4 – Juliette
FOUR
JULIETTE
Four months later
I sat in the pew and looked over at the coffin taking up space in the small church’s aisle, while the pastor droned on about the valley of death.
I tried to wrap my head around what I was feeling, but it was hard. So much anger and pain. Resentment towards my father and for my husband, sitting in the pew next to me.
Relief that it was finally over for Herb.
The wedding, for lack of a better term, happened three days after I met Creed. It was done in a courtroom by a judge. There were two witnesses. Herb and a local attorney who met with us after the ceremony to change Herb’s will.
Leaving everything he owned to Creed.
True to his word, Creed deposited the fifty thousand into an account both he and my father had access to.
Obviously not me, because I would have taken the money and run.
And Creed knew it.
The only awkward part had been when Mrs. Talley, from the Long Valley Ranch, the property adjacent to ours, stopped by a few days later. She’d come on the premise of being a good neighbor when word got around town that I’d been married.
What a show that had been.
She’d heard some crazy rumor from the auction (all true, and she knew it) and just wanted to be certain that my marriage hadn’t come about too suddenly (I hadn’t been sold by my unfeeling father to a stranger for cash).
Of course not, I’d told her. (Lies.)
Yes, Daddy had been anxious about his health so there had been a moment during the Rodeo Remnant Auction when he’d taken to the microphone. Maybe not quite right in his thinking, sick as he was. (Why else would a father auction off his daughter?)
But Creed wasn’t a stranger at all. No, he was someone I’d been writing letters to for years while he was deployed in the Navy serving our country honorably.
(Bullshit.) And, as soon as I’d told him about my daddy’s failing health, he immediately had come home to take care of me.
We’d only married as soon as we had because we wanted to be sure Daddy would be at our wedding.
I’d said all this with a straight face, while I poured iced tea and pushed a plate of cookies in Mrs. Talley’s direction.
Then she’d said something that struck me.
“Once upon a time, I had to get married under…unusual circumstances. But it all worked out in the end. I hope it does for you, too.”
Did Mrs. Talley see me in a one bedroom apartment in Seattle while I went to a university to get my nursing degree?
Because that’s how it all works out in the end for me.
Well, sometimes when I dreamed of my future, it was a teaching degree.
Nursing, teaching, whatever, what it was didn’t matter. It was just away from here.
Also true to his word, Creed hadn’t forced himself on me.
There had been too much sickness in the house.
Herb kept to his room. I moved my stuff from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs bedroom next to Herb’s so I could check on him throughout the night. Creed took my old room upstairs and didn’t have any complaints about the size of it.
Maybe he’d spent his time in the Navy on a submarine and was used to tight spaces.
Regardless, he kept to his room and I kept to mine.
Herb made a fuss in the beginning about it, but I was able to sell him on the notion that while we were married, Creed wanted to do the noble thing and court me first before we became intimate.
Shortly after the wedding, the only thing Herb cared about was how long it was going to take him to die.
Not very long, it turned out.
I glanced around the tiny church. A non-denominational congregation of devout followers of Jesus Christ, although they liked to spend more time sermonizing about the devil they hated than the God they loved.
There was only a handful of people scattered in the pews. Probably the ladies of the congregation who would attend any funeral. My father didn’t have friends. For that matter, he didn’t have enemies.
Other than me, I suppose.
“Jules,” Creed elbowed me. “It’s time.”
Yeah, he called me Jules.
I told him I despised the abbreviation and he told me to get over it. Juliette was apparently too much of a mouthful for him. So it was either Jules or Jay. I said Jay would be fine and he said, Jules it is.
I stood up from my seat and walked over to the lectern holding the bible open to a page I’d selected. I read the simple parable that had absolutely no meaning to me or Herb, but felt like it was required of me.
When it was done, I sat down.
“You okay?” Creed asked me, his head turned in my direction.
“You care?”
“Nope,” he said. Then faced forward again.
When it was over, I thanked the pastor for his time. And the ladies of the church. A crew would see to the burial in the graveyard behind the church. Neither Creed nor I had any interest in attending that.
Together we left the church, in Creed’s truck, because it was the nicer of the two vehicles.
At least I would have that. Now that we had two vehicles, I would at least have Herb’s truck as my own. Ancient as it was, it still ran.
Creed started the engine and we rode back to the farm in silence.
“Thinking about buying a dairy cow,” he said, a few miles out of town.
I laughed.
“What? We’ve got chickens, eggs, vegetables. We add dairy, we’re nearly self-sustainable.”
If there were any credits to give, (I was giving none to a man who basically stole my farm), the one thing I would commend Creed for was his willingness to learn.
He’d sat by Herb’s side for as long as Herb had energy to talk, peppering him with questions about the farm.
How and when to rotate the crops. The best time to plant and harvest.
Either he didn’t trust me to tell him the truth, (I probably wouldn’t have), or he didn’t think I knew anything about farming, I wasn’t sure.
He’d bought books. He was studying. But it had been clear that while he’d been born in Montana, he hadn’t known much about working the land. His ethnicity had been confirmed in an offhand comment he’d made when I’d asked about his name.
White father, Cree mother. By his grandfather’s assessment he was bastard half-breed. So, fun for him. He’d spent time both with his father going to “white” school, as he called it, and with his mother on the Res.
Appreciating neither life for himself, he’d enlisted in the military when he was eighteen.
When I asked him why the Navy, (I didn’t ask many questions if I could help it. I didn’t want to know too much about the man I was about to inflict psychological warfare on), his only answer was that no one on either side of his family knew how to swim.
Turning on the truck’s bench seat, I was about to school him in biology. “Do you know what’s involved in having a cow that produces milk?”
“Big tits,” he quipped. Then looked over at me and dropped his gaze to make a point. My tits were not big, they were appropriately B-cup sized and he knew it.
That’s how these past four months had gone.
Mostly we didn’t talk. Only basic communication to split the chores in order to run the house and farm.
However, sometimes he looked at me in a way that suggested he didn’t see me wholly as the sexless caretaker of my dying father, but rather, as his wife.
When he did, I would give him my not going to happen look and he would back down.
But there it was again. It was his subtle reminder of what he wanted this situation-ship to ultimately become.
Roommates with bennies.
“A cow has to give birth to produce milk. That means a calf. That means we have to decide if we’re going to have multiple dairy cows if it’s female.
If it’s a male, we have to sell it. And who doesn’t love selling babies for slaughter?
Then, once the milk dries up on our momma cow, we have to do it all over again.
Which means either leasing a bull to try and impregnate her or buying bull semen to inseminate her.
You ever inseminate a female cow, Creed? ”
His jaw ticked. “You’re fucking telling me female cows need to be pregnant all the time to produce milk?”
I pushed both hands under my breasts to lift them up under my black dress, my only other dress besides my white one, which I was never wearing again. “You think I walk around making milk all the time, Creed?”
He blinked, then laughed. “Fuck me. Shit, I don’t know.” He paused for a second then added. “Put those tits away, Jules, or you’ll get me thinking you want me to see more of them.”
“Stop calling me Jules.”
“No,” he said. “But I still think we should do it. Ran into a neighbor in town. He’s got a cattle ranch. They’ve probably got a plethora of bull semen at their disposal.”
“Bull semen in these parts is no joke. They pay top dollar to breed the best meat. That being said, we don’t have space in the barn for a cow and we don’t have enough pasture for it to graze. We’ll stick with the chickens for now.”
“The barn is more than big enough to be fitted for a horse stall. Looks like there was one at some point, but it was broken down. Why don’t we have any of those either?”
“Stop saying we like we’re an actual couple,” I snapped.
“We are.”
I brought my hand to my chest and tried to rub away the sudden pain there. “I had a horse. She was perfect. But then she got hurt and Herb wouldn’t take her to the vet in town…he put her down. After that, I didn’t want another one.”
“Well, I was at that auction because I thought maybe the place to start being a cowboy was to buy a horse. Got a wife, instead. I’m not complaining, but I’m thinking we either use the barn as intended, or we make that space more purposeful and add a cow.”
“You’re not touching the operation,” I spat. “Herb is dead. This little charade between us is over.”
“I got a marriage certificate and a deed to the property that says otherwise,” he said, unfazed.
“You’re going to divorce me,” I told him.
I hadn’t wasted a second of the last four months figuring out what came next. I went so far as using some of my precious savings to pay for an hour long consultation with a lawyer from Billings over a Zoom call.