Jake Todd and Buck Read had been adjoining farmers all their adult lives. Each was now approaching eighty. Blood enemies as well, most of those years.
Why, you ask, and the question tells me you have no experience with their situation. To adjoin is to irritate, irk, agitate, infuriate. No myth is so untrue as that of rural tranquility. It exists only in the imagination of delusional city dwellers. Rural inhabitants know better.
Fences or the weaknesses thereof were early sources of the discord. Jake was a dairyman, Buck a beef cattle raiser. Years ago Buck’s rogue Hereford bull smelled heifer and went through the line fence and bred a dozen pedigreed Holstein virgin heifers Jake had sold but not yet delivered to a doctor gentleman farmer for an astronomical price. Deal busted, feud begun.
Later Jake embraced unpinned pig raising. His breeding swine went through the line fence and marauded Buck’s crops. The battle had been joined.
On through the years and then the decades the adjoining farmers irritated one another as rural adjoining neighbor will. Then Jake’s only son and child Mark fell in love with Buck’s only child Alice and they wed despite parental disapproval all around and the union produced Tom. Jake’s wife and Buck’s died from natural causes in their seventies, young by modern standards but after blessedly brief illnesses.
But more tragic still Mark and Alice died in a plane crash leaving Tom at sixteen an orphan. The feuding grandfathers were awarded joint custody in a deal brokered by the Albany lawyer Ben Reach with expert testimony from Sam Nixon, MD.
Jake and Buck had been obsessive workers all their lives, as successful farmers are wont to be. Their one diversion was still-hunting for trophy deer, for which their adjoining farms were utopian grounds. Neither had a lust to kill any but trophy bucks, high on the Boone & Crocket scale.
The grandfathers had each instructed grandson Tom in marksmanship and gun safety. Tom proved an avid target marksman but somewhat due to grandfatherly advice he avoided less than major trophy game.
Then upon the adjoining farms a trophy whitetail buck appeared. Jake and Buck each observed it longingly from afar. Each naturally hoped It might excite the imagination of grandson Tom. It did.
The grandfathers watched the buck mature year after year hoping Tom might harvest it at its zenith as a record. Tom all along had stalked the buck with a slightly different aim.
Tom finished high school and completed two years at the community college, taking courses suitable for one who wished to farm. Then he fell in love with a local girl, Minerva, and they wed, with begrudged approval from the grandfathers (she too was from a local farming family).
The grandfathers were ready and pleased to turn over their acreage for Tom to farm, without rent, except enough to cover taxes and insurance. Ben Reach advised they charge him market, to discipline Tom and secure their own old age. They acquiesced and to Ben’s delight Tom agreed with his advice.
Meanwhile, the trophy buck had matured to vintage age, and the grandfathers insisted Tom harvest it, by gun or bow they did not care. But Tom could not bring himself to do so. Instead he undertook to photograph it in still and video, with game cameras set about both farms, and with video cameras, held by him on horseback and in blinds around the farms.
For Christmas he and Minerva presented Jake and Buck with a two-hour video DVD of the trophy buck’s meanderings on the adjoining farms. They were disappointed, for they had wanted Tom to harvest the now beyond mature buck. Tom explained he could not bring himself to kill the buck, which had come to symbolize for him his grandfathers.
Then Ben Reach and Sam Nixon, advisors to Tom and on occasion Jake and Buck separately but never together, advised Tom to push upon the grandfathers this plan. They should move in together to the home of one of them, leaving the other farmhouse available for Tom and Minerva.
Minerva’s mother was a practical nurse and experienced companion and caregiver for elderly folks. Ben and Sam suggested Jake and Buck jointly hire her to come live with them. They fought the idea, but when Minerva announced she was pregnant they acquiesced. They flipped, with Ben and Sam supervising, to determine which farmhouse would be ceded to Tom and Minerva’s occupation. They consolidated on Jake’s farm.
Meanwhile the great grandchild was due and the buck was a year older and well past prime.
Somehow Minerva’s mother had manage to bring reasonable harmony to the consolidated household of Jake and Buck. She had done it by encouraging them to record their memories of lives farming, which she transcribed and edited on computer. With Print-on-Demand self publishing via Internet they had their life stories in print for Christmas.
Also for Christmas, Tom presented to his grandfathers a mounted trophy. He had found near the line fence the carcass of the trophy buck, horns locked with those of an equally developed dead rival. They had locked and died together in mortal combat.
Tom had the taxidermist mount the heads so locked, and labeled “Jake and Buck,” and the trophy mounted above the fireplace in the house now occupied by the grandfathers, soon to be great-grandfathers.