Down on the Farm: The Whole Story

This is the complete version of Down on the Farm. There were several errors made in the three previous chapters, and I have attempted to correct them all and simply publish this as a complete short story. I hope that you'll enjoy it.

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Oh, good Lord, what had I bought?

The price was right: 7½ acres, right on the river, with a livable house, all for $75,000 cash. The taxes were super low, a hair under $800 a year, and the acreage was almost all river bottom land, very fertile. There was a working well on the property, and I should be able to grow my own veggies easily.

There was only one thing that really concerned me about the house, which I knew was a fixer-upper: had it ever been flooded? The previous owners said that it never had been, but they bought the place in 1995, and couldn't swear to what had happened before that. I opened up the crawl space before I bought the place, and found just what I needed to find: a raw wooden frame around an inner door opening. If the house had ever been flooded, I would see a stain on that frame. It was clear, so I knew that even in the worst flood along the river, the water hadn't reached the house. Mean river level was at 604 feet, according to the Corps of Engineers, and the topographic map had the house sitting at 625 feet, so I thought the house would have been safe, but I still had to check.

So, I took the $75,000 I had, and bought myself a small farm. This meant no house payments. Insurance was cheap, and I already told you about the taxes.

In the four months before I was able to move to the farm, I went ahead and had a contractor erect a three-bay pole building, with two overhead garage doors, and the third bay just had windows and a man door. The contractor ran electricity to the building for me, and installed a breaker panel, but that was as far as it went.

Moving was a pain, coming down from the Poconos, a ten-hour drive. My furniture had been old, and kind of on the shabby side, so, other than my bed, it went to the dump; it wasn't even good enough for Goodwill!

My tools, on the other hand, were valuable, and bulky. I filled my truck, plus a trailer, stuffed to overflowing, but managed to get everything I wanted to keep in one load. Unloading my tools into the new pole barn was the most important thing, because to fix up my fixer-upper, I was going to be using every tool I had.

Fortunately, I had picked up a lot of different skills over my 44 years of life. I didn't have a license, but I could do the electrical just as professionally as any electrician. I wasn't a licensed plumber, but I could do the plumbing, and it not only wouldn't leak, but it would look as neat as any plumber could do. My carpentry skills were good, I could hang drywall, I could really do just about anything that I'd need to do. It was just too bad that I'd have to do all of it alone.

Well, after getting settled in -- sort of -- I had to get to work on the place. The bathroom worked, and the bedroom was good enough for now, but the kitchen, living room and den were disasters, the kitchen being the worst. The floor joists in the kitchen had sagged a bit, and while I knew how to fix them, it was going to be a pain in the ass. I had to take up the whole floor, dig out two square footings, and pour concrete in them. After the concrete cured, I'd have to set two short posts to support a beam, to jack up the floor joists. Thing is, I had to use hydraulic jacks, and lift the beam before I could cut the posts to length and set them in place.

Fortunately, the beam needed to be only sixteen feet long, and I could manufacture it myself, using four sixteen foot 2 x 8s. Three would probably have done the trick, but I'm not a structural engineer, and it was cheaper to just add a fourth board than hire an engineer to tell me that three would be enough!

Digging the footings was no fun, no fun at all. They needed to be three feet by three feet, and eighteen inches deep, and I was standing in between the floor joists, which were only three feet off the ground. Not fun, not fun at all. I managed to get both of them dug in one hot, sweaty, miserable day. Since it was just a crawl space, I could just scatter the dirt I removed, without having to get it out of the house.

It was around three in the afternoon when I got done with that job, and I needed a break. Normally, I'd grab a shower, but then I thought, you know, I bought this property on the river, I ought to enjoy the river! When I got out of the hole that used to be the kitchen floor, I grabbed my water shoes -- no telling what was on the river bottom around here -- and a towel, and headed down for the riverbank.

I was lucky: while it wasn't sandy, I did have one small section of my shoreline that could be called a beach, even though it was mostly mud and rocks. There was already an old picnic table down there, so I'd have a bench on which to sit to take off my work boots and socks, to put on the water shoes. I was wearing shorts rather than jeans, and hadn't had a shirt on all day, so I was good to go.

It was a good 300 yards down to the river, out in the hot sun, but the bank itself was lined with trees, and the shade felt good. I got down to the picnic table, pulled off my boots and socks, and put on the water shoes to wade into the river. I got right to the water's edge and looked around; there wasn't a soul in sight and, being a weekday, if there weren't any boats on the river that I could see, there's almost certainly be no one coming around the bend.

Well, I'd been to the nude beach in Sandy Hook before, and when I was married, my wife and I had been to Sunny Rest Nudist Resort a few times. I liked going nude, and, like I said, there was no one around. No sense getting these shorts wet, and, it was a good thing I decided to pull 'em off, because I remembered my cell phone in the pocket when I did; it sure wouldn't have been a good idea to go swimming with that in my shorts pocket. I headed back down to the water, and there was still no one in sight as I waded in.

The river was wide, but reasonably shallow. It might have been twenty feet deep by the time you got to the middle, which was the old shipping channel -- the commercial traffic had ended back in 1998 -- but I was probably fifty feet from the bank and it was still not quite six feet deep. The water was nice and cool, and I just lazed around, sometimes bouncing on the balls of my feet, and sometimes floating on my back.

This was just what I needed! The water was refreshing, and even if it wasn't shower water clean made me feel as good as if I had just gotten up in the morning.

"Hi, there!"

What? Who was that? Oh, crap, a kayak had come around the bend, and there was a woman paddling toward me. Well, I was in deep enough water that she couldn't see I wasn't wearing anything. I didn't really care if she saw me nude -- thousands of people had, at the beach -- but I didn't want to offend her, and I didn't really know that, if she was a real prude, she might not call the sheriff.

"Oh, hi, how are you? I'm Richard." She was paddling closer.

"Hi, Richard, I'm Gina, well, Virginia, but everybody calls me Gina. Looks like you've found a better way to cool off than I have."

"Yeah, it's great. I was working on my house, and needed to cool off."

"This your land?" she asked me. She'd paddled to within ten feet or so, and was using her paddles to keep her kayak steady to talk to me; the current in the river is very slow here.

"Yup, bought it a few months ago, and now I'm remodeling the house."

Gina was engaging in small talk, and I'll admit it: I was checking her out while she talked. She looked to be close to my age, and she had short brunette hair. I couldn't tell too much about it, because she had on a wide-brimmed white straw hat, to shade her from the sun. She was wearing a light, open blouse over a black bikini top, just enough to keep the sun off her; she seemed a bit on the fair-skinned side, I think with freckles, but with the sun glaring off the water, I wasn't certain.

"I'm getting kind of hot," she said. "Mind if I join you?" Gina really didn't wait for my answer, but started heading her kayak into the gravel beach.

"Uh, Gina," I started, when she burst into giggles.

"You're skinny-dipping, aren't you?"

Well, she'd guessed, and if I didn't admit it, she'd certainly find out for sure if she started swimming around with me. "Yeah, I am."

"Cool," she said, heading her kayak into the shore. She beached it, got out, and secured the boat so it wouldn't get away with the current. She walked over to the picnic table and set down her hat and shirt, and reached around to pull off her bikini top, when she hesitated and asked, "Uhhh, you don't have a wife up there who's going to come down here and get all pissed off, do you?"

"Nope, no wife, no girlfriend."

"Cool! Well, you've got a girlfriend for an hour now. At least if you want one."

"Sure, love it."

With that, Gina pulled off her bikini top, and dropped the bottom right in front of the picnic table, and began walking toward the water. She had on water shoes herself, so that worked out well. I waded toward her as she started into the water.

Naturally, I had to check her out. Away from the glare off the water, I could see that yeah, she was fair-skinned, with freckles, and her hair looked a little more auburn without the shade of the hat. I know I smiled when I noticed that the carpet matched the drapes.

"Now, being your girlfriend for an hour does not mean that I've consented to sex, I just want you to know."

"OK, I understand that; I'm really not a rapist."

"Good, I didn't think that you were." Gina waded right up to me, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me, kissed me hard.

And that was all she did. Breaking away, she laughed and said, "That was fun. Tell me about my boyfriend for an hour."

"What do you want to know?"

"Who you are, where you're from, what you do for a living, and why you don't have a wife up there who's about to kill me." The smile never left her face.

"Pretty basic stuff. I'm from Pennsylvania, and I'm a writer. After I got divorced, I just wanted to move away from where I lived before, just get away from everything, so I bought this old farm, I'm fixing up the house, and just getting away from it all."

"Why'd you get divorced?" Boy, Gina was getting right down to business, digging deep for dirt.

"My own stupidity. My ex was stubborn and I was stubborn, and we fought over stupid stuff, fought over stuff that should never have led to fights. I can't even remember half the stuff we fought about, but I do remember the screaming matches and the silences. What about you? You're too pretty to be single." Time to find out about my girlfriend for the hour.

"Typical stuff for around here. Bad choices for boyfriends, guys who seemed interesting for a bit, but it seemed like every one of them tried drugs, and fucked up their whole lives. At least I was always really good about birth control!"

"I guess that you live around here?"

"Yeah, I'm staying with my mom at the moment, up on Route 52. I moved back in with her after I dumped my last loser boyfriend."

I was kind of worried about this; Gina was cute, and I was definitely thinking about sex with her -- it had been a long time! -- but she was looking like damaged goods.

"So, what do you do for a living, Gina?" My question was more than casual; I really was trying to figure out how responsible this woman was.

"I manage the cafeteria for the high school. That's a pretty good job for around here, at least if you're not a teacher or a nurse. Of course, school's out for the summer!" She sang that last sentence like Alice Cooper; I suppose that a lot of school employees did that. But, for me, I liked that answer: a school system employee probably had to take drug tests every so often. She was definitely piquing my interest, but I wasn't going to do anything stupid just to lay this woman I'd never even seen before. Trouble is, the caution I had with the big head wasn't being matched by the little head, and when she closed back in on me for another hug and kiss, I poked her in her waist.

"Hmmm, that seems promising," she teased me, "but I'm not sure about going that far today." This woman was killing me! Still, thinking with the big head again, I figured that would be the smarter way to go.

There was more small talk, and a lot of flirting, but it still stayed just flirting. Finally, we got out of the water, walking up to the picnic table to sit down and dry off. Neither one of us made a move to get dressed, so we were sitting there naked. The more I saw of her, the more I liked what I was seeing. I was pretty sure that she liked looking at me as well, and that my cock was staying at full attention. "This really does look promising," she said, giving my cock a squeeze.

Then she got up, and headed up the short path that led out of the trees, toward my house, and I quickly followed. We were both still naked, when we emerged from the tree line, where she stopped. "I just wanted to see what house was yours, Richard. That way, I'll know how to find you."

Then she turned around, and headed back down to the picnic table. "OK, my boyfriend for the hour, it's time to break up!" With that, she got dressed again, got in her kayak, and headed back down the river. She kissed her own fingers, getting them wet, and briefly touched those to the head of my cock before leaving.

I just stood there, still naked, watching her paddle off, wondering what the Hell had just happened. I didn't know her last name, I didn't know where she lived, other than the highway number, had no idea of how to get in touch with her, nothing, nothing other than she really knew how to tease a man, and had left me with a raging boner that I'd have to take care of by myself.

The next day was no fun at all. My two footings were going to take right at a cubic yard of concrete, and the only way to pour it was to carry it into the house in five gallon buckets. A yard of concrete weighs about two tons, and that won't be any fun at all to bucket.

I had two buckets, and had the driver fill them a bit less than half way, about 50 pounds in each bucket: it's easier carrying two buckets at once, because your load is balanced, and I figured fourteen buckets per footing. I'd put down polyethylene film over the living room floor, and up the walls, plus plywood decking down to get me to the holes to dump the concrete. After I'd made ten trips, I was really tired, and the driver volunteered to help, making several trips himself. It took us about an hour to dump all of the concrete, and I tipped the driver $100 in cash for helping me; he'd earned it!

I felt like I was ready to die after that, but I still had to finish the top surface of the footings. That entailed getting down between the floor joists, and running a concrete hand float over the top, to get it flat and level; I already had a piece of rebar driven into the dirt of each hole to make the grade that I wanted. At least I didn't have to put a real finish on the concrete; it just had to be level and smooth enough to the posts. I took a nail and wrote my name and the date in the tops of the footings, wondering who would ever see it. Maybe in a couple hundred years, when the house gets torn down or falls down.

The concrete needed to cure for seven days before I set the posts on top and added the load from the house onto the footings. This was going to be one pain in the ass to do by myself, if I could do it by myself at all. I brought in the four 2 x 8s, and worked them down into the crawlspace before building the beam. I glued and nailed them together to create the beam, staggering the joints, which was a project all of its own. Since I didn't have nails long enough, I had to use 16D sinkers to nail two together, then nail another board on each side, to get it all in one. Then, once the boards were sandwiched together, I bored holes all the way through, at staggered heights on 8 inch intervals, and fitted carriage bolts all the way through, to make sure the beam would never come apart.

Now, how do I lift this damned thing, to get it in place?

Well it was simple enough, if by no means easy. I took cinderblocks, and kept muscling up the beam, one block at a time. Trouble was, each cinderblock was 7½ inches tall, and that meant I had to raise the beam by that much, and more, with each added block. I kept thinking, maybe I should have put the beam together after I had it raise up some, but realized that would have been the wrong thing to do: it would probably have left a bow in the beam.

Then, after I got the beam as high as I could, an end at a time, I took some heavy-duty canvas straps, and tied the beam under the floor joists. I was going to have to take the cinderblock lifts back down, and use the bases for the hydraulic jacks to raise the beam into its final position. Then, when it was jacked up ¼ inch too high, I had to cut the posts, getting them exactly right, slip them into position, and then lower the jacks that ¼ inch to put the load on the posts and the footings. I added some strong, hard, waterproof plastic bases directly on top of the footings, so that moisture couldn't wick up through the concrete and get the wooden posts wet, rotting them out too soon.

All of this took me several days, and right around three or so, I'd break off of working and head down to the river, to cool off and hopefully see Gina kayaking by again. I went skinny-dipping every day but one -- it rained one afternoon -- but no Gina. Truth is that I did see Gina, almost every morning, in my mind, as I took care of my sexual frustrations by myself.

When I had told Gina that I was a writer, I hadn't been lying. I had, of all things, two romance novels to my credit. Oh, I was no Victoria Holt, but that genre sells well, and if I wasn't rich, I wasn't poor, either, with just enough coming in in royalties to keep the electricity on and the refrigerator stocked.

The refrigerator! Hah! It was in the garage right now, as were all of the appliances, while I was doing the kitchen floor. Since I couldn't cook -- there was no 220-volt circuit for the range in the garage -- it was either sandwiches for me, or, on rare occasions, grilling out; I did have a decent barbeque grill, but it seemed like a waste to grill for one.

At any rate, along with my two novels, I wrote short stories, mostly romances but a few more directly erotic stories. Sometimes I could hammer out a decent, 5,000-word story in a single sitting, but other times the words just didn't flow. But I needed to get something written, and published, to keep the money coming in. Trouble is, I was just plain stuck!

I mean, the genre is actually simple: boy meets girl, boy dances around girl, boy and girl think that they like each other, some problem gets in the way, boy and girl conquer problem, boy and girl live happily ever after. With short stories, you can skip the problem, if your writing and character development is good enough.

Character development, that's the key. Trouble is, I was running out of characters. Normally, the characters just come to me, sometimes in my mind as I'm waking up in the morning, but I've been drawing a blank. Every female character that comes to mind is Gina; I'm seeing her face, I'm hearing her voice, I'm visualizing her nude body, dripping wet coming out of the river, every single time, but really, I don't know the slightest thing about her. I'm just plain stuck. I've tried writing in the morning, I've tried writing in the evening, I've even taken my laptop down to the picnic table by the river, to try and write there, and nothing works.

Well, there's nothing for it; if I can't write, I need to get work done on this house. Once I got the floor joists leveled out in the kitchen, it was time to install the new floor. What I had taken out was a laminate, over a plywood subfloor. The plywood was still in good shape, so I was able to reuse that. After putting that down, I put in hardie board, a cement board used in wet areas like kitchens and bathrooms. I was going to install ceramic tile in the kitchen, using 18 x 18 inch square tile to make the job go faster. I measured out my floor -- you always start tiling from the center, and work your way out to the edges -- and got ready to start tiling. I used the premixed thinset, to make the job go faster, but fast it was not. First you've got to put the thinset on the hardie board, use a notched trowel to get set lines, and then back-butter the tiles. It's not too bad with two people, but it's a pain in the ass trying to do it by yourself.