It was fortunate that our new arrivals didn’t bring many farm animals because a large redwood grove isn’t the ideal place for a farm. There was one big storage shed a few hundred yards from the lodge and we emptied it of old furniture and turned it into a barn for our two cows and six horses. There was a clearing next to it with a bit of pasture and a stream. It took us weeks to fence it in but after that they had a home. We also built a chicken roost at the far end of our lodge, away from the bedrooms. The infants were quite enough for waking us up in the morning. We didn’t need to add a rooster. But the fresh eggs we enjoyed each morning were reward enough for any trouble.
The three young women were just as I requested and with five of us to teach them now, and three of us practiced at it, they rapidly rediscovered their human side, with results twice as quick as our first tentative efforts with Jane and Tom. Dora was impressed.
Amira took to one of the girls and followed her everywhere on farm chores, talking constantly. They would milk and feed the cows together, spend hours grooming the horses, walking each one in the meadow on sunny days and seeming to come back to the house only for meals. By Spring I think they were having an affair, whispering in each others ear, running hand in hand to the barn, laughing and giggling in sink for no reason.
I knew it when I chanced upon them one hot day sitting on a rock by the stream, kissing and dipping their feet in the cool water. It gave me inner joy to know that Amira was so happy. And this wasn’t the only affair in bloom.
Our women and the horses had arrived in late Fall. We spent the winter just taking care of them and watching instructional videos on how to ride. By Spring we were saddling them and circling the meadow. There was a small theater room in our lodge, a screening room where Dora would stream for us from her huge collection. All eight of us would watch and learn after dinner, the two infants sleeping beside their mothers. The next day we would practice what we had seen and our horsemanship flourished.
I asked Dora the extent of her library and was told it included every movie ever made. So to increase our relish in riding I asked her to present us with the best of western films, cowboy flicks, one a night. Beth and Jane most often excused themselves but the rest of us became avid fans of such classics, the highlight of each day, the desert topping. This inspired us to take longer and more rugged rides each day, which we did, and in all of this I had an ulterior motive, not yet revealed.
The other prong of my plan was weapons practice, which went hand in hand with the movies we were watching. We built a weapon’s range a mile away from the lodge and rode out each afternoon with our pistols and rifles to practice, leaving the infants to their afternoon naps and Beth and Jane to blissful quiet.
On the first day of their arrival the knotty question of names came up. After a growing debate and with opinions clashing, getting nowhere, I pointed to the youngest of the new women, Amira’s favorite, and said ‘April’. The slightly older women, still in their mid-twenties, I named ‘May’ and ‘June’, keeping it sweet and simple.
May was a red head and a stunning beauty. With Beth’s consent I handled most of her sex education personally. We did this again because it worked so well the first time. Tom slept with all three and Jane too without any compunctions or favoritism, a true professional.
It was all part of their education in human feelings, in love and all the myriad emotions attendant upon that one all-encompassing word. But from their communal, emotionless past they saw nothing extraordinary about this sharing, nothing wrong, just a gentle gesture of affection.
But I did ask Dora one thing, to dictate the times appropriate for our lessons so that none of these young women might get pregnant. It gave me a shiver to imagine the possibility of four more babies, and the home-based life that would entail, when I had plans for expeditions far away.
