BEDROW
Jeff Bedrow was your average man, but more than average things happened to him.
He had three extermities broken and yet he didn't do what is considered today
to be "extreme" sports, or outright risky behavior. Bedrow was a working young
man and a hard one at that.
There's a jagged scar on his left cheek on a diagnal just below the temple
that is somewhat faded. It was put there many years ago though no fault of
his own. It was a fight. A fight with the town bully.
Now who would want to fight the town bully? Well Bedrow (this is what the folk
around town called him) hadn't. He was just about afraid of him as everyone
else in town. Why every time he saw him his heart quickened. His pressure
went up a point or two the same as everyone elses did. But like several other
boys in town, he would stand his ground against old Billy Watson. The way Bedrow
looked at it he was going to get licked on way or the other. If he ran, Billy
would just catch him and whop him good. If he stood and fought he could get a
few good licks in. Besides he'd heard a saying that he who is whipped best is
whipped more often. And he knew many guys old Billy beat up more often than he.
Bedrow, unlike most of the other young people, had no siblings. He was born the
only child to Crystal and Mark Bedrow. They, like most of the town folk, were
farmers, and to farm you had to be tough. He'd started at an early age helping
his father around the farm. He'd been taught the value of the land and hard work
from the crib on. And he'd learned his lessons well. He'd started slopping the
hogs, feeding and watering the other livestock when he was a bit more than seven.
He would never forget the feeling when he's father sat him in the tractor seat
for the first time at age ten by himself and let him cultivate the west thirty.
And because he'd raced with himself to do a good job he'd gotten finished earlier
than even his father had expected him to. So to reward and honor him his father took
him and his mother into town to the best restaurant and... let him order his
own meal as if he were a grownup.
Yes, there were some tough times being the only kid but there were also some good
times. He didn't have to compete for attention. Fact was sometimes he'd wished
he had a little less of it coming from his mother. Why no macho little boy wanted
to be called "sissy" or "mama's boy". He adored his father and his father showed
his adoration for him by letting him do more grownup things. There were the Sunday
evenings after church that he and his his father spent fishing and exploring Old
Man Wilson's Creek. Oh, he had fished with his father since he was knee high to
a duck but now their little junkets up the creek were filled with more manly
conversations.
His father let him use
the rifle to go after jack rabbits and gohphers. And he had a promise from his
father, and his father's word was better than gold, that he would get his own
rifle for his fourteenth birthday.
Well Bedrow never got his new rifle for his fourteenth birthday. Two weeks shy
of his fourteenth birthday he inherited the title Man of the House and all of its
concomatence. Mark got killed in a farming accident. Bedrow instantly went from being
a helper to one needing help. His mom helped as much and she could, but she suffered
from the misery. With bones aching, she'd complain incessantly and as good hearted
as Bedrow was even he could only take so much. Thus she was shooed back into the house
to nurse her aches and pains and tend to the house work out of earshot and out of
eyesight too.
She wasn't considered to be an old woman even by the standards of her time. She
was a mere thirty years old, but already aging fast. Having married young, she had her
only child at the age of sixteen. And being frail as the day she was born she ran in
to grave consequences near and during childbirth. The doctor had wanted to "take"
Bedrow to save her life but she listened to the older women in her church,
and made her husband promise not to let the doctors do it.
