Bonanza Fan Fiction by “Southplains”

The morning drive to the cattle pasture in Daddy’s pickup truck was one I always looked forward to whenever school wasn’t in session.  I especially liked it when my numerous siblings weren’t along for the ride, since it meant special time with just me and Daddy.  We’d drink coffee on the way, and the bumpy road made me burn my tongue and my fingers when the hot liquid sloshed over the sides of the cup, but I didn’t care.  I was with my dad and drinking coffee and checking on the cattle just like a grownup.

We farmed and ranched several sections of land, and we categorized them somewhat as the Cartwrights did with their “north section”, “lower section”, etc.) Some of the names we used were the Huggins Place, the Home Place, the Old Home Place, the Lamb County farm.  Then we would identify further, such as, “Go to the north section of the Lamb County Farm.”  Each named section included several hundred acres.  Depending on the season, we moved our cattle around among these different sections, but mostly they stayed in a pasture located in what was unflatteringly called Snake Farm, so named for the multitude of rattlesnakes we invariably ran into there.  (Hey, sometimes a place names itself.)

I was six years old, and on this particular morning Daddy and I were headed to Snake Farm, coffee in hand, to check on a cow that was due to calve.  I was excited; I thought this might finally be The Time.

While I had seen countless calves soon after birth, their coats still damp and matted as their mothers cleaned them up, I had never seen the actual process of the calving.  I had always expressed disappointment at having “just missed it.”  It never dawned on me that my absence during these blessed events was due to Daddy’s timing, and when he knew a calf was about to be born, he made sure we were somewhere else.  He was a product of the 1940’s and 1950’s, a time when such things as birthing weren’t considered appropriate for children’s eyes.  While my parents didn’t go so far as my mother’s parents did, telling her and her siblings that the family dog had “found” puppies out in the garden, apparently they still weren’t comfortable with us seeing birth actually happen—pretty much a laughable concept to look back on, considering we were growing up on a farm. 

But I didn’t know any of that then.  All I knew on this crisp early spring morning was that Daddy and I were going to check on a cow that he said was bound to have her baby at any time, and I was lucky enough that it was Saturday, and I was finally—finally—going to be present when it actually came about. 

In the middle of the pasture we had a small barn with a pen out front which we used to contain animals when they needed special attention, and it was when we drove up to the barn that I discovered Daddy’s traitorous determination to sabotage my education.  He took one look at the miserable cow in the pen, and promptly drove the truck around to the back of the barn and parked it.

Right where I couldn’t see a darn thing.

Still hopeful, I started to scramble out behind Daddy, but he stopped and shook his head.

“Stay right here,” he ordered.  “Don’t get out of the truck until I tell you.”

What?  What??  “But, Daddy, I—”

“Stay here,” he said again, and then he was gone.

So, furious and stricken with deep disappointment, I sat and pouted.

And sat.  And pouted.  And sat some more. 

After the longest time, I entertained the idea of getting out anyway and creeping around the side of the barn, but I knew I didn’t dare.  My dad was not the sort of parent you thought of disobeying.  If he told you to do something, you did it.

After what seemed like hours (to my young mind, anyway) Daddy came around and opened the truck door.  His arms were streaked with blood and a myriad of the icky stuff that came along with a new calf.

He was breathing hard.  “I need your help,” he said.

I knew he was talking about help with the calving, and I wanted to shout and jump up and down with delighted triumph.  But the expression on Daddy’s face confused me.  It was a mixture of regret and doubt and worry.  His request for my help had sounded oddly apologetic even to my young ears.

Now that I’m grown with children of my own, I know that he was experiencing doubt in his own parental decision.  While most parents today are pretty open about their kids seeing things like birthing, times were different then.  It was 1967, and though the sexual revolution was sweeping the nation, it would be many, many years before its impact trickled into my little part of the world.  In hindsight, I realize that Daddy wondered if my witnessing a calving might somehow harm me in some way.  After all, rancher’s daughter or not, I was a young child.

Being a rancher, though, the possible loss of livestock overruled his concerns.

We rounded the corner of the barn, and my heart went out to the poor cow.  Standing with her head down, oblivious to our presence, she was obviously in pain.  Bloody, stringy discharge hung down from her backside, something I had seen lots of times but had never paid much attention to because cute new calves were lots more interesting, even if they were covered in the same slimy stuff.

Only this time there was no calf.

I looked at the cow’s bulging belly and then glanced up at Daddy.  “Why isn’t it coming out?” I asked Daddy, whispering despite the fact that the cow was in too much distress to move even if I had shouted.

Grim-faced, Daddy shook his head.  “Something’s wrong inside.  The calf is positioned wrong, and the mama is young and too small.  My arm is too big to slide in alongside the baby’s body to straighten it out.  I’ve been trying, but…”  He sighed and looked at me hard, as if trying to judge whether or not I was up to the task he was about to ask me to tackle.

I looked again at the mess covering Daddy’s muscular arms.  I’d never seen it happen, but I knew enough to realize what he was talking about.  I’d heard him talk about having to go into a cow and pull a calf—and it had always sounded like a pretty gross thing for someone to do.

I looked again at the cow’s back end.  He wanted me to do that?  Put my hand inside a cow, in all that gross, icky, red and yellow and white slime that sometimes made me want to throw up just from looking at it?  Oh, no, I couldn’t…

“Your hand is smaller,” Daddy said.  “You can do it.”

You can do it.  It was a phrase I heard from him thousands of times over the course of my life, and darned if he didn’t always make me believe it.  This time was no different, despite my reluctance.

I nodded.  “What do I do?” I asked, and I tried to ignore the frightened beating of my heart.

He put the looped end of a lasso in my hand, the rope drawn tight until the circle wasn’t much bigger than the palm of my hand.  “One of his legs is bent back.  You’ll have to slide your hand in and go back along the calf until you find his foot.  I don’t think you’re strong enough to pull his leg into position, so you’ll have to slip the rope over it so I can do it.”

Okay.  I took a deep breath and put a small, shaking hand up to the cow’s swollen, blood smeared vagina.  I hesitated.

“You’ll have to push,” Daddy instructed.  “Go ahead.  It’ll give.”

So clenching the rope in my fist, I did as he said.  Sure enough, the cow’s flesh eased and parted.  It reminded me of punching my fist into the ball of dough Grandma made for cinnamon rolls—only not nearly as pleasant.  No, this wasn’t pleasant at all.  I gagged.

“Ewww,” I whimpered, and I hesitated again, looking at Daddy.

“Don’t think about it,” he said.  “Just do it.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t want to!”  And I pulled my hand back out, gagging again at the stuff streaming off my arm. 

Daddy shook his head and regarded me steadily.  “You don’t have to do this.  But if you don’t, that calf is going to die.”

Oh, dear.  I really loved those baby calves.  I loved the way their hair sparkled in the sunlight after their mamas had cleaned them up, with thick, white curls adorning their little baby faces.  The Herefords even had blue eyes for a few days after birth, giving them a stuff-animal appearance.  I loved the way their neat little hooves bounced across the grass, and the way they bucked and twisted through the air as they played.

I didn’t want this one to die.

So I took another breath and pushed back inside, gritting my teeth and trying not to think about how disgusting it all felt.  And how on earth was I supposed to tell what I had my hand on?  It was like hunting for Easter eggs while wearing a blindfold.

“I can’t see,” I said, relating my frustration to Daddy.

“I know.  Just try to imagine what you’re touching.  Do you feel the calf’s fur?”

I shook my head.  But then— “Yes!  I feel fur!”

“Good.  Find his leg.”

For several moments I went on blindly searching before my fingers brushed against something that might’ve been a leg.  “I have it.  I think.”  Truthfully, I couldn’t have said for sure if it was his leg, his nose, or his tail.  It all felt like a furry wet mess.

“Now keep your hand on him and keep moving down as far as you can reach until you find his hoof.”

It was a struggle to do so.  The cow’s body was closed so tight around my arm that my hand tingled from numbness.  The part of my arm that was still outside the cow was starting to itch from the afterbirth drying on it.  But Daddy murmured encouragement to both me and the poor mama cow, and finally my grasping fingers were rewarded with the soft, rubbery texture of newborn hoof.  I fumbled the loop of rope around it, and gratefully withdrew my arm.

“Good girl.”  Daddy began to gently tug at the rope.  Soon the calf’s folded leg was aligned with the other one.  The cow shuddered and strained, and two tiny hooves oozed out into the bright sun, along with a miniature cow’s nose.  I was fascinated.

But things progressed no further. 

“Mama’s worn out,” Daddy said.  “We’ll have to do it for her.”  So he wrapped the rope around the two tiny legs, and we pulled.  And pulled and pulled, with all our might.  Daddy grunted and groaned with the effort, and I threw all the weight of my small body into it.

At last the calf slithered out, landing with a plop on the dusty ground.  It just lay there.

Daddy knelt in the blood-laced dust beside the calf, clearing the afterbirth from the calf’s nostrils in quick motions.  He poked his fingers down its throat, drawing out yet more slime.  And yet, the calf still did not move.

Tears shimmered across my vision.  I was only six, but I had seen plenty of animals die.  This one was definitely not breathing.

“Run to the tank and get me a piece of water hose,” he barked, not looking at me in his hurry to clear more gunk out of the calf’s windpipe.  I did as he said and ran to the water tank sitting below its tall windmill, wondering how a piece of garden hose was going to save a poor baby calf’s life. 

There were several short lengths of hoses lying there; we used them to drain the tank periodically.  I grabbed one and ran as fast as I could go back to Daddy and the lifeless little calf.  Daddy whipped out his pocket knife and cut off a section several inches long.  He shoved one end down the calf’s throat; then he bent over the calf and blew into the other end.

For long moments, the only sound was the moaning of the West Texas wind starting to pick up and the raspy, hollow noise of Daddy’s breath moving through the length of hose into the calf.  I knelt down in the dirt beside him.

And then the calf jerked its legs.  And did it again.  Daddy pulled the hose out of its mouth and whacked the baby across its rib cage with the flat of his hand, once, twice, three times.  And then an odd, gurgled, strangled cry came from the little critter’s throat, and the next moment it was kicking its legs and rolling up onto its chest.  It cried again, and for the first time its mama lifted her head.  Daddy and I got it onto its feet, steadying it until it no longer topped over, and the mama cow began to shove us aside so that she could do what mamas do, her faith in life and her stamina restored by the sound of her baby’s voice.

And as the calf nursed Daddy and I did a little jig around the pen. 

When the cow started cleaning the baby up, Daddy jerked his head toward the water tank.  “Time for us to wash up, too,” he said, and we dunked our arms into the cold water that the windmill pumped from deep beneath the ground.  I scrubbed hard, grateful to get the oh-so-unpleasant and unnamable substances off my skin.

“Can I help every time from now on?” I asked.  I was half afraid that I would get stuck behind the barn again.  What if Daddy didn’t need my help next time?  Heck, I’d miss the whole darn shooting match.

But Daddy nodded.  And even if the satisfaction of saving the calf wouldn’t have been enough to make all the grossness worth it, the pride in the grin Daddy shot my way would have.  “Every time,” he said.  “You did good.”  He tousled the top of my head with a still-damp hand and went to retrieve his cowboy hat from the dirt, where it had fallen while he was trying to get the calf to breathe.

“You’ll bring me next time?”  I wanted an out-and-out promise.

“I’ll bring you.”  He turned toward the pickup truck, and as he clamped the hat down on his head, I heard him mutter, “I’m liable to get some argument out of your mama over it, though.”

I wasn’t worried.  Mama couldn’t win over both me and Daddy together, could she?

As I followed Daddy to the truck, I looked back at the calf, who was still getting a bath from his mama’s rough tongue and who was beginning to look more like a pretty calf than the horror-movie monster he had more closely resembled when he first emerged into the world.

And darned if that wasn’t the prettiest calf I have yet to see in my entire life.

Author’s note:  Although this is a true story from my own childhood, it serves a fanfic purpose as well; I love to incorporate my own life experiences into Bonanza fan fiction.  Because the Cartwright sons were children of a rancher, many of their experiences would mirror mine, which makes things a bit easier since it cuts down on the research needed. J 

Blizzards, sleet, ice, snow.  The United States has been inundated with it this year.  Even England got a doozy of a snowstorm this weekend, I hear.  People are either huddled inside trying to stay warm, or breaking their backs trying to shovel their driveways clear for the umpteenth time.  Cold, nasty weather is everywhere.

Well, not exactly everywhere. 

In central Texas, this is the time of year to rejoice in heavenly blue skies and warm, soft breezes.  Nighttime temperatures often fall below freezing, but hey, that’s only during the hours while we’re snug in our beds.  As soon as the sun rises, so does the temperature, and we are usually back into the upper 60s or even 70s and 80s by noon. 

I hear people from other parts of the country lamenting about spring and summer being so far away.  Well, to heck with summer, I say.  I dread its coming.  Summer in my area brings misery, not comfort.  Normal temperatures of around 100 with heat indices of 115—who in their right mind would wish for that?  Sometimes it is worse.  We had three days straight of 114 degree temperatures a few years back.  And 105 degrees is nothing out of the ordinary.  Here, swimming pools are not a recreational luxury; they are a necessity.  My family has spent more time together in the pool than any other place during the summer.  Sometimes on a Friday or Saturday night, you can find us there until midnight, since the temperatures by that time of night are usually still in the 90s.

As if it wasn’t enough to walk around in a sauna all day, the heat brings with it other discomforts.  Mosquitoes, chiggers, horseflies, snakes.  And fire ants.  If you’ve never been bitten by a fire ant, believe me, you haven’t been bitten by an ant at all.  I’d hold onto a handful of red ants before I’d purposely let one fire ant crawl on my hand.  They kill anything they can get to: rabbits, snakes, birds, newborn deer and calves.  Down here, even older people who have the misfortune of falling in their back yard have died, not due to injuries, but because they couldn’t get up before the fire ants killed them.

Yeah.  Grisly.  Welcome to summer in Texas.  (And Louisiana, and a few other southern places.)

But for now the crisp nights hold the fire ants at bay deep underground.  We can sit in the evening and watch the sunset without being carried off by mosquitoes, and the snakes are hibernating or at least sluggish enough that our risk of being bitten is low.  My children play outside for hours in shorts and tshirts, and their faces aren’t fire-engine red from the heat the way they are in the summer.  We spend as much time outdoors as possible, because we know once April gets here, we will want to cower inside under the air conditioning.  Summer for us is a time not to enjoy but to endure, and to dream and wait for October to arrive.  January and February is a time to play and enjoy the outdoors.  It’s a time of comfortable temperatures and golden sunshine.

Yesterday while Kentucky was trapped under a heavy sheet of ice, my oldest son and I were riding miles from our house on horseback.  The temperature was just under 80 degrees, and the breeze was light and warm.  I looked over at my son as we loped down a country road, and the sun shone on his horse so brightly that it was almost blinding.  The horses had worked themselves up into a good sweat, and the dark shade of 500-year-old oaks was invitingly cool as we passed beneath them.  Thoughts of all those coat-and-scarf-clad people in the north and the northeast buried up to their noses in snowdrifts passed through my mind, and then I thought of all the pristinely beautiful days we’re enjoying here, and I almost felt guilty.

Almost.

But not really, for this is our time to sigh in contentment and lounge under gentle sun.  Our time of suffering comes later.  But for now…heaven is central Texas.

I heard the sound of Christmas today.

I work in the business office of a Texas state school for mentally retarded individuals.  At the beginning of December a coworker of mine had to have an emergency hysterectomy due to a diagnosis of uterine cancer.  The good news is that the surgery went very well, the doctors think they got every bit of the cancer, and she won’t even have to have chemo or radiation treatments.  The bad news is that she will be out for six to 8 weeks, which pans out to somewhere around the first of February.

This means that for the next two months I will be handling not only my own job duties, but hers as well.  I don’t mind doing this; truly, I don’t.  This is what coworkers and friends are for—pitching in and helping out.  It’s how we all get by in this world, and I’m happy to be able to assist.

But sometimes the reality of handling twice as many job duties becomes overwhelming, even with the best of intentions.  I’ve been so busy for these last two weeks that I’ve barely been able to look up from my desk, and many days I look up in surprise and realize that it’s time to go home even though I’ve still got work to finish.  The knowledge that I’ll have to continue in this manner for at least another month and a half looms over me like a mountain.  And of course trouble comes in bunches.  Another coworker badly sprained her ankle and was home on the couch this week; yet another one had to go in for jury duty, leaving us even more short-staffed.  Payroll for 800 employees arrived late, causing yet another rush when it finally did get here.  Time off lately is non-existent, which has further raised my frustration level.

“Here it’s Christmas time, and I’m not even able to spend any time with my family,” I’ve thought darkly more than once these past few weeks, and then I inevitably feel guilty about complaining.

I was hard at work today, feeling a bit sorry for myself as tension caused my neck and back to kink and cramp, when a sudden sound came from the hallway outside my office door.  The sound swelled and grew louder; a group of the school’s residents were serenading us with Christmas music!  Their voices were joyfully loud and uninhibited; their faces shone with the excitement of making others smile.  They sang ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and other favorites.  Some of them knew all the words; some aren’t able to enunciate well enough to sing the lyrics, but they hummed along in one way or another.

As they sat or stood there in the hall with their voices raised in jubilant expression of the song ‘Silent Night’ and big grins on their faces, my priorities suddenly fell into place.   I was reminded of what makes Christmas special; indeed, what makes any day of the year special.  It’s doing what you can to make the day brighter for those weaker or less fortunate, and doing it with a smile and a glad heart.  And often it’s your own day that is brightened.

So today I had to be reminded how to keep my heart light and happy.  It’s a darn good thing I’ve got these people around to teach me.

My latest story, Lucky, is now posted in the fanfic library at Bonanzabrand.net.  To access it, scroll down and look on the right side of this page for the “Lucky” link.  Click on it and you will be taken to the story.  Enjoy!

Marie’s background.  The part of the Cartwright saga that has always been hidden in swirling mists of obscurity, of dropped hints and half-told secrets.  Bonanza writers told us just enough to give us a sense of lost innocence and veiled shame, and perhaps not even that—or perhaps more than that, depending on which clues you choose to follow.

Like most Bonanza fans, I’ve always been curious about Joe’s mother’s history, and on this day, the day Michael Landon (and therefore Little Joe) was born, it seems appropriate to think about the woman who gave Little Joe life.  The one episode that dwelled solely on telling her story, or part of it, was sadly lacking—a convoluted mess of an episode, really.  After the tantalizing hints that were dropped in episodes like ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Julia Bulette Story’ and ‘First Born’, the ‘Marie, My Love’ story was not only confusing, but very disappointing.  We had so many questions that were not answered, and the episode hinged on such a short period in her life that we weren’t even given a chance to see what sort of woman she really was.

In the year that I’ve been writing Bonanza stories, I’ve thought long and hard about doing one about the mysteries surrounding Marie.  I’ve even started two or three over the past several months, but each time I attempted it, I quickly grew frustrated.  Marie’s story, you see, is so complicated that it’s hard to jam it all into one story.  It would take something novel-length to do it justice.

Well, a novel-length Bonanza story just isn’t something I want to do at the moment.  Or rather, it’s not something I feel I can do at the moment, not if I want to keep Real Life functioning smoothly.  So I decided to put out just a small story that touches upon some of Marie’s secrets, with the intent that I may add more in a series if the mood strikes me.

The result is a story called ‘Lucky’, and it flowed very quickly, as most of my favorite stories do.  (It is already posted elsewhere on the internet, and will soon be posted at Bonanzabrand as well.)  In ‘Lucky’, I fed Little Joe tiny pieces of his mother’s mysteries, and in the end—well, I pretty much left him—and us—with more questions than answers.

And it occurred to me—do I really want Joe to learn all there is to know about his mother?  I don’t think so.  I don’t think I want to know all her secrets, for that matter.  Peel away the mystery, and you lose something else as well.  As long as Marie remains a relative unknown to us, she can be anything we want her to be.  An innocent wronged, a woman with an “undesirable” heritage, or a worldly beauty who has used her charms in ways a “decent” woman shouldn’t.  This is one reason we see so many more stories about her than about Inger and Elizabeth.  Neither of Ben’s other wives have been tainted by that breath of scandal—therefore they are not minutely as interesting.  Loveable, kind, gentle, yes—but not interesting. 

The wonderful thing about Marie is that, with the lack of concrete evidence available among all the insinuations, we’ve all been given a remarkable freedom for creating our own versions of her.  Everyone’s opinion is equally viable.

And this is why writer after writer will continue to tantalize us with visions of Marie’s murky past.

My most recent story is a What-Happened-Next for the episode “My Brother’s Keeper”.  Yeah, I can hear you groaning, “OMG, another one?”  Believe me, I tried to talk myself out of doing it, because that episode has to be one of the top contenders for having the most WHNs done for it.  The Bonanza fan fiction world is full of them.

“My Brother’s Keeper” is, I think, the episode that had the greatest capacity for exploring the relationships between the brothers, but because the writers found it necessary to include some rather annoying guest stars and side stories, that capacity was never allowed to develop.

The entire episode was wrapped up too abruptly.  I mean, good grief, Adam Cartwright had shot his little brother—that had to be one of the worst things that had ever happened to Adam (not to mention Joe), rating right up there with losing his mother and two stepmothers.  Adam was a man who took his responsibilities seriously.  To be the cause of his brother’s close call with death had to be absolutely excruciating for him.  I just don’t believe things would’ve been all hunky-dory on the Ponderosa as soon as those guest stars rolled away in their buggy.

So, in Glory, I’ve explored some of what I felt would have happened, and what I wish had been filmed.

 An excerpt:

It’s funny. I’m the one that got shot, but it’s Adam who was really wounded.

I watch him as he rides along beside Pa, fifty yards or so ahead of Hoss and me. On the outside he looks the same as he ever did, leaning slightly to the right, one hand easy and relaxed on the reins. Pa says something to him, and he nods and answers. But his answer is short, like most of the answers he gives these days. 

Another excerpt:

But I’m not listening any more. I pick up Pa’s rifle and walk toward the fire with a gun in each hand, and I don’t stop until I’m standing right beside Adam. I thrust our father’s gun out toward him.“Here,” I say. Still on his haunches over the fire, he looks up at me. One brow rises in a mocking sort of question mark, but he says nothing.

If you want to read this story in its entirety, just press the link on the right side of this blog.  Happy reading!

Little Joe Cartwright was a Texan.

Huh? 

Yes, you heard me correctly.  Little Joe Cartwright was born in Texas.  

Bet you didn’t know that, did you?  Oh, my, I hear the shouts of dissent resounding around the globe from Bonanza fandoms everywhere.  What the heck are you talking about?  Everyone knows that Little Joe was born in that little room at the top of the stairs in that big ranchhouse.  He was born on the Ponderosa, in the Territory of Nevada.  

That is true, at least according to one Bonanza episode.  But did you realize that at the time of Joe’s birth the Territory of Nevada was part of the country of Texas?  (And yes, I did say “country”.  Texas was her own Republic for ten years before she agreed to become part of the United States.)  So if you accept the premise that Joe was born on the Ponderosa…well, at that time, the Ponderosa was located in Texas.

When Texas became a state in December of 1845, she brought along with her land which now makes up the states of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, California, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma.  Almost ONE-THIRD of the present area of the American nation, nearly a million square miles of territory, changed sovereignty when Texas won her independence from Mexico—more land than was in the original thirteen colonies.  

Ownership of all this land was still in dispute for the next two years, however.  Nevada Territory was among the Texas lands included in the annexation that took place in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, part of the agreement ending the war between Mexico and the U.S.  The Treaty was signed in February of 1848, when Joe was between five and six years old, and very possibly right around the time that Marie died.  You bet your boots that Ben was keeping tabs on all this, right up until the time when grief over the death of his wife distracted him.  (Hmm, I believe I hear the pitter-patter of plot bunnies running around.)

Anyway, there you have it—proof that Little Joe was a Texan by birth!  ;)  

I wrote ‘A World of Hurt’ for one very shallow reason—to satisfy my own craving for a hurt/suffering Joe story.  (There’s a bit of suffering Adam included as well, but this story does center around Little Joe.)  I think that’s why most fanfic writers write what they write—self-satisfaction.  Otherwise there would be no point, since there’s certainly no monetary incentive involved.  We like to make up scenarios involving Joe Cartwright, Adam Cartwright, or whatever Cartwright, purely for the enjoyment it brings to us.  If we’re really lucky, we are able to please others at the same time.

This particular story of mine, however, isn’t all make-believe.  It contains some truth.  The “surgery” that takes place in it is based on a real-life experience involving my dad and my husband, Jay (who wasn’t my husband at the time, but only a new boyfriend.)  We were camping high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico, a beautiful, enchanting, isolated place.  Daddy was using a big fallen pine to cross a shallow river when he slipped; one of the protruding branches of the tree’s trunk tore an eight-inch gash down his shin, all the way to the bone.

He managed to get himself back to camp, but medical assistance was at least a couple of hours away, so Daddy proceeded to order my horrified boyfriend to sew the leg up. 

“You’ve got to get to a doctor,” Jay said, and both his face and his tone made it clear that he thought Daddy had lost his mind.

But my dad was one of the most stubborn men on earth.  Think John Wayne’s character on the movie ‘The Cowboys’, or ‘Rooster Cogburn’ and you’ve got my dad, both in looks and mannerisms.

“Boy,” he growled at Jay, “you’re gonna do like I say.  Now go get that bottle of whiskey out of that pack.”

Jay looked at me.  “Can’t you talk some sense into your dad?” he begged.

I shrugged and shook my head.  Had my mom been with us, she might have been able to convince Daddy to head for the hospital, but she hadn’t arrived in camp yet.  Jay looked at me and rolled his eyes and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “a bunch of lunatics”.

He tried arguing some more with Daddy.  No use.  Jay gritted his teeth, threw up his hands, and did as he was told, but he wasn’t happy about it. 

We had no needle and thread, so Daddy had him take pliers and snap the barb off a fishhook.  Fishing line would be used for the thread.  Then they poured a heavy douse of whiskey into the wound, after which Daddy decided he needed some whiskey down his throat as well.  As for myself, I sat behind my dad propping him up and trying not to cry.  I’m not someone who would make a good nurse anyway, and the wound was bad—I could see torn muscle, ligaments and bone.  Two of my sisters hovered near, pouring more whiskey into the wound every now and then.

Mind you, this trip into the mountains was the first time Jay had spent any real amount of time around my family.  A city boy from Pennsylvania, he had already experienced quite a bit of major culture shock upon moving to Texas.  My horse hated him to the point of trying to kick and bite him whenever he came near; my brother had let him drive the tractor and then yelled at him for making crooked rows; my sisters had teased him unmercifully about his “Yankee” mode of dress; and now my dad was insisting that he perform surgery on the side of a mountain. 

He was definitely feeling out of his element.

But he took the whiskey from my dad, chugged a good bit of himself, and then started to work.  It took quite a bit of time and several stitches; I did notice that his hands shook a little, especially every time he forced the hook through Daddy’s skin (which Jay later described as being shockingly tough) but he got it done.  As soon as he finished, he stomped over to his own pack, threw it on his back, and headed off down the trail.

“Where’s he going?” Daddy asked me.

I didn’t know.  “Where are you going?” I called to Jay.

He never looked back, but raised one hand in the air as he yelled, “I’m getting the hell back down to civilization.  You people are nuts.”  It was obvious to me that, now that it was over, Jay was pretty shaken up—and absolutely furious.

Daddy looked at me and grinned.  “Guess this week’s been kinda hard on the boy,” he said.

“Yep.”  I watched Jay’s back growing smaller as he headed down the trail.  “He means it.  He’s leaving.” 

Daddy shrugged.  “Let him go.  The walk’ll give him time to cool off.  We’ll walk down to the truck and pick him up on the way down.”

And that’s what we did.  By the time we got to a road and our truck and caught up with him, he was already several miles down the mountain.  As we pulled up beside him, he wouldn’t even speak to us.  Just stared straight ahead and kept walking.  We sweet-talked, we cajoled—it did no good.  He was still really, really angry–at my dad for not rushing directly to the doctor and for making him do such a thing, and at the rest of us for not talking him out of it.  Of course, it didn’t help that the madder he got, the funnier we found it.  My sisters and I kept bursting into giggling fits, and my dad couldn’t hide his grin as he kept trying to convince Jay to get into the truck.  Our inability to see the seriousness of the situation only served to infuriate Jay even further.  And if you’re wondering about my dad being able to grin at all after being through an ordeal like this, did I mention that he was the toughest man I’ve ever known?  Plus, he was still operating on a surplus of whiskey.  (Once that wore off, he did whine a bit more.)

“Come on, boy,” Daddy told him as the truck rolled slowly along.  “You can’t walk all the way down this mountain.”

For the first time, Jay turned his head to look at him.  “You want to bet?” he said, and then kept going.  I was really starting to wonder if he planned to walk all the way to the airport to catch the first plane back to Pittsburgh.

But he didn’t.

We’ve been married for over twenty years now.

And here’s some excerpts from the story that contains that little episode.  (If you want to read the rest, just click on the link on the right-hand side of this blog.)

An excerpt:

Joe tried again to let Hoss know what had just happened. “Hoss, Adam’s shot.” He knew his lips were moving but he didn’t think any sound was coming out. It didn’t matter though, because Hoss pulled him in under that ledge and laid him down onto the cold sand and immediately ran out again. Joe struggled to lift his head, desperate to know if his brothers were all right, but the movement caused a wave of dizziness crushing in its intensity. He fell back and heavy darkness weighed him down. He drifted off to the noise of more gunshots, and he knew the sound meant nothing good. He wondered if his brothers had gone ahead and died without him.

Another excerpt:

Another excerpt:

Some people may find this picture upsetting; after all, it is a poor, dead little creature who was minding his own business when a car mowed him down.  (So I warn you, don’t look at the photo below.) But those of you who are familiar with armadillos know that 99% of the ones you see on the road are dead.  The reason for this is that they have an unfortunate tendency to jump straight up in the air when frightened.  So they’re minding their own business moseying down the highway, a pickup truck comes barreling over the hill, and the armadillo jumps straight up to an instant death.  If it weren’t for this peculiar instinct, most of them would easily survive.  The cars would pass right over them, for even the biggest ones don’t rise much more than 8 inches or so above the road’s surface.

Anyway, my daughter and I came upon this one, and someone with a quirky sense of humor had stopped and…well, you just have to look at the picture.  We cracked up over what was insinuated as causing this poor armadillo’s demise.

I was surfing on an online book site this morning, (the authors there were expounding upon the use of Little Joe Cartwright as a pattern for the romance heroes in their books) and while looking at various book covers it occurred to me that seeing your story in book form must be an incredible thrill.  Alas, it is a thrill that fan fiction writers will never realize, save for a few very rare exceptions.

Being the stubborn type of soul I am, though, I’ve never let reality get in my way.  I decided to design my own book covers for my Bonanza stories.  I whipped out the first one today, and silly as it is, it pleases me to look at it.  I intend to eventually create covers for all my stories, and I hope you enjoy them, too.

The first one is for my story Invincible, and I’ve included some excerpts here.  If you want to read more, simply click the link in the list on the bottom of the right-hand panel of this blog.  (Also, there will be an audio version of this story available soon.)  This particular tale involves the entire Cartwright clan at times, but it centers on Joe and Adam Cartwright.

An excerpt:

Something tore loose inside Joe’s chest. The burden and blessing of his entire existence was based on the fact that everything he’d ever done, everything he’d ever tried, had been done under the watchful eyes of his pa and brothers. It seemed that he had spent his whole life working to either struggle up to their level of manhood, or climb out from under their shadow, Adam’s in particular. In this moment, a moment when death moved toward them with terrifying swiftness, Joe watched as Adam played the role of protector one last time. The Indians would see Adam running; they’d be too busy running him down to notice Joe in the water. Joe’s path was being ripped away from his brother’s against his will, and he knew without a doubt that he’d never see him again.

More excerpt:

Cracks in the ground a foot deep and as wide as a man’s arm.  Edges of asphalted roads actually cracking and falling off into the ditch in chunks the width of a sheet of paper.  Grass in mid-summer as brown and crispy as if it was January.  Temperatures well over 100 degrees starting in early May and continuing into September, only giving up because a killer hurricane came instead.  We had a brief respite of high 80s weather last week, and it was heaven. Today we had a high of 96 degrees, and we’re thankful for that because it’s a cool-down from what we had all summer.

And now squirrels are committing suicide in our swimming pool.  We’ve fished three of them out in the past two days.  All we can figure is that the poor things are trying to get to water and are falling in.

I knew this has been a bad summer.  Ask my Bonanza friends.  I’ve been whining about it for months.  But ten minutes ago the weather forecaster on television gave me a better idea of just how dry it is.

“Can you guess how many days it’s been since we had a two-inch rain?” he asked.  “Go on, guess.  Two hundred days?  Three hundred?”  And then he blasted us with the deadly truth.  “People, it has been 437 days since we had a two-inch rain.”

My mouth dropped open.  He made it sound so much worse, even though I already knew it was bad.

“That’s right,” he continued, and repeated the number just in case anyone thought they had heard wrong.  “I had to go into the archives to figure this out.  The last time we had two inches of rain was on July 21, 2007, when we got 2.12 inches.”

July 21, 2007.  NOT 2008.  2007.  We have not had a two-inch rain here in poor, shriveled up south-central Texas in over a year.  Fourteen months, to be exact.  Fourteen months.  They call our state the Land of Contrast, and it has never been more true.  The fact that our neighbors two hours to the south have homes underwater seems cruelly ludicrous—part of Texas has no grass because it’s all been washed away, and the rest has no grass because it all burned up months ago.

No wonder the squirrels are leaping to their deaths.

In Part 1 of the Cowboy Camelot article I mentioned how closely the Ponderosa’s trials and tribulations emulated that of the historic King Ranch.  One of those similarities is depicted in the Bonanza episode “Bitter Water.”  (The original title was “Cattle Plague.”) 

In “Bitter Water,” cattle infested with the dreaded Texas tick are planted in the Ponderosa herd by an embittered neighbor.  The news, helped along by the neighbor, spreads wild and fast, and neighboring ranchers are demanding that the Cartwrights take action to prevent the tick fever from spreading.  At that time the only action to take was to kill infected and exposed cattle and burn the carcasses.  The Cartwrights would lose their entire herd.

Why was “tick fever” so feared?  It was first noticed in 1814 in South Carolina, but little attention was paid to it until Texas ranchers began driving longhorns to Kansas railheads.  Southern livestock are immune to the fever, but as they passed through northern states, northern herds immediately fell prey to it.  The fever killed approximately thirty percent of the northern herds.  The problem was so serious that five states passed quarantine laws against southern herds, which was devastating to Texas ranches.  All Texas cattle were considered suspect, even though livestock in the Texas Panhandle were tick-free due to the harsh weather there.

In the episode, the Cartwrights decide to try the radical idea of dipping their cattle in a sulphuric solution to kill the ticks and thereby stop the spread of the fever.  In real life, it was Robert Kleberg, legal advisor to Richard King (and eventually his son-in-law) who came up with the idea.  Kleberg, along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, figured out that ticks carried the disease and decided to build dipping vats so that every head of livestock could be immersed in a sulphur solution to rid them of the ticks.  Sound familiar? 

What Bonanza didn’t tell us was that it took thirty years of constant effort to rid the south of the pest.  Local law was sometimes needed to force owners to comply with the eradication effort.  There were even skirmishes called “The Dipping Vat Wars” where protestors dynamited dipping vats.  There was a scene somewhat reminiscent of this in “Bitter Water”, where Ben, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe Cartwright are energetically dipping their cattle in the tick solution and the irate neighboring ranchers come and try to interfere.

Texas pastures were eventually proclaimed clean, and in 1906 a narrow strip of grasslands along the Texas/Mexico border was designated as a protective zone.  To this very day, approximately sixty tick inspectors ride these lands, living in remote camps and watching for stray stock in their specific zone.  If Mexican-owned cattle are found, they are turned back across the Rio Grand.  If American-owned cattle are found, they are immediately inspected for ticks and turned back north if found clean.  If ticks are found, the owner is notified and his ranch quarantined for six to nine months.  Nothing may leave that ranch without being inspected—no livestock or hides, or even dirt, gravel, posts or firewood.

So now you know why all those ranchers were so up in arms when tick-infested cattle were discovered on the Ponderosa!  It was certainly something to be—forgive me—ticked off about.

I will be naming other Ponderosa/King Ranch parallels in future additions to this article.

The Ponderosa.  A thousand square miles of land that Ben Cartwright swore heaven would have to go some to beat.

Amazingly, I’ve heard some people express disbelief in the likelihood that one ranch could be so large.  Well, folks, if you’re one of the skeptical ones, I hate to disappoint you, but the fact is ranches like the Ponderosa did not exist only in a fairy tale state.  They were (and are) very real.  Two of the most famous of such ranches were the King Ranch and the XIT Ranch in Texas.

There probably isn’t a rancher alive who hasn’t heard of these Cowboy Camelots.  For Texas schoolchildren, they are one of those places mentioned in social studies textbooks often along the same levels as, say, the Alamo.  (Or on a lesser level, the Whitehouse.)

The XIT’s holdings dwarfed that of our beloved Ben Cartwright.  With three million acres, the XIT was over four and a half times larger than the Ponderosa.  At its peak (toward the end of the 1800s) the ranch handled 150,000 head of cattle, contained within 1,500 miles of barbwire.  Its land had 100 dams (talk about having to keep tabs on water rights, especially in the arid Texas Panhandle) and 325 windmills, one of which boasted of being the tallest in the world. 

The King Ranch was smaller than the XIT, but still, at its peak, fifty percent larger than the Ponderosa.  It still carries on today as the largest ranch in the United States with 1,289 square miles of land.  To give an idea of just how large that is, the King Ranch today is larger than Rhode Island plus the Borough of Brooklyn.  Or, as another example, it is larger than 982 Central Parks.  In 1961 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.  As a Bonanza fan, the similarities between the King Ranch and the Ponderosa fascinate me, and I am of the belief that much of the background for many Bonanza episodes, and indeed for the Ponderosa itself, was derived directly from King Ranch history.

Those similarities begin with the parallels between Ben Cartwright’s life and that of Richard King, the man who established the King Ranch.  Richard King was born in New York City to Irish immigrants, and was indentured at a very young age to a jeweler.  Very soon he ran away to sea and served as a cabin boy on the Desdemona.  By thirteen, he signed on with a steamboat captain.  By eighteen he was a steamboat pilot.  He was purchasing land in Texas by the time he was in his late twenties, and by the time he was in his thirties his acreage had increased to 1.2 million acres. 

Ben Cartwright was an extremely generous man, benefactor to many.  We’ve all seen how he opened his wallet and his home to those in need.  Ben’s real-life double, Richard King, was just as magnanimous.  At one point he purchased several head of cattle from Las Cruillas, Mexico.  The little village was being forced to sell all its stock because of severe drought.  As King drove the cattle away from the village, he started to think, and realized that he what he was taking was the village’s sole livelihood.  He rode back and invited the villagers to work for him on the ranch.  They accepted, and history was made.  Such loyalty was forged between King and his vaqueros that they were called “Kinenos—King’s men”.  Today, over 150 years later, the ranch is still worked by many Kinenos.   The title “Kineno” is considered a badge of honor, and the only way it is ever bestowed on anyone today is if they are of at least the third generation raised on the King Ranch.

In this excerpt taken directly from the King Ranch website, the description of Richard King could just as easily been that of Ben Cartwright:  The boy who started as an impoverished, indentured jeweler’s apprentice became an adventuresome, hardworking and visionary businessman who, by the time of his death in 1885, had made his indelible mark on the landscape and taken his place as a titan among the ranks of the tamers of the Texas range.

In the next parts of the Cowboy Camelot article, I’ll name specific Bonanza episodes and how they pertain to King Ranch history.

Almost as if she feels remorseful over the dirty blow she dealt us with Hurricane Ike, Mother Nature has bestowed some glorious weather upon Texas this week.  It is the least she can do.  With 1.5 million (I’m not sure what the total count was at the peak of destruction, but the highest number I saw was 4 million) Texan customers still without power, the consequences would be even more staggering than they already are if people were without air conditioning in triple-digit heat.  Had the storm come in August, deaths from heat stroke would have abounded, compounding the disaster.

The cool front that came on the heels of Ike has given those of us in south-central Texas long-awaited relief from a relentless summer that one newscaster described last week as “brutal.” It is a very appropriate word to use for the hottest summer on record (and also one of the driest) since 1854. 

How lovely to start the day at 6:00 a.m. with a crisp 63 degrees rather than a muggy 82 degrees, which degenerates into triple digits by lunch time.  How pleasant to hear the quiet when the poor overworked air conditioner isn’t having to run all through the night.  And how nice to head off to work without feeling as if you need a shower an hour after you’ve stepped out of the tub.

We’re back up to the low 90s today, but the humidity is still low, and that makes all the difference.  A 90-degree day with low humidity is not hot; it’s pleasantly warm. 

You people in more northern climes will shake your heads at this.  As soon as the temperatures fell below 80 degrees, my children insisted upon wearing jackets and fleece to school because they were cold.   Thin-blooded little south Texans apparently turn into wimps when they’re not under blistering sun.

I’m looking forward to enjoying the kind weather while it lasts, for this is south Texas, after all.  The heat will be back, for summer doesn’t generally release its grip on us until early November.

So thanks, Mother Nature.  It’s the least you can do.

I just finished what has to be the 600^th WHN for a Bonanza episode that’s been done and done and done—‘My Brother’s Keeper’.  It’s an episode that’s a big favorite for many, and yet most fans have mixed feelings about it for several reasons.

I didn’t want to do it.  I tried to talk myself out of it.  After all, I’ve read and enjoyed a multitude of fanfics based on this ep, many of them very good and a few that were superb.  And heaven knows we’ve talked this one to death on all the forums.  How many possible angles could there be on this story that haven’t been covered already?  The wonderful brotherly moments, the irritating guest stars, the flaws in the storyline.

But you fanfic writers know how it is.  The voices kept whispering in my ear, interrupting my thoughts when I was supposed to be doing something else.  Little Joe and Adam Cartwright kept jumping in front of my face shouting, “Watch this!” and then they would enact some scene for me, something to grab my interest and my attention.  They made me start to wonder, “What if?”

And the truth is, with all the discussion I’d seen regarding MBK and all the stories that I’d read, I’d never seen anything that talked about how debilitating it would be for the person who had managed to shoot a member of his own family, how it would shake his confidence in being able to handle a gun again.  (I’m not saying a story like that isn’t out there, I’m just saying I haven’t seen it.)

So I finally said, “To heck with it,” and gave in to the nagging voices in my head, and put them on paper.

Here’s my question to readers and writers alike:  how many what-happened-nexts is too many?  Do you personally become nauseated when presented with yet another story attached to episodes like My Brother’s Keeper, The Crucible, The Gift, Vengeance, and other favorites?  Or will you always seek out another story dealing with an episode you especially love? 

Well, heck.  Hubby just called and said the neighbor lost two calves last night to blackleg.  For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s a highly contagious and usually fatal disease of livestock.  There were some references made to it in Bonanza, but I don’t remember the episodes off the top of my head.

So now I get to look forward to vaccinating our entire herd this evening.  And if we’re running them through the chutes, we might as well worm them at the same time.  That will pretty much shoot the entire evening.  Looks like fishsticks for supper and no writing time–again.

Riding alone is a different way to experience the world.  You see so many things you would never be aware of otherwise.  It’s akin to the difference in traveling down the interstate or taking country back roads—the interstate will get you to your destination faster, but you miss a lot along the way.

When I was around eleven I had a horse named Charlie.  He was a buckskin gelding just like Ben Cartwright’s horse, only he wasn’t as well-mannered.  There were times when he would take the bit between his teeth and run away with me, and I’d end up furious and terrified all at the same time.

But I dearly loved him.

My saddle was an old roping saddle from the 1940s, already old when I was born.  It weighed a ton; sometimes it took me several tries before I could heave it up onto Charlie’s back.  It was a man’s saddle, way too big for me.  The seat was made of glossy, slippery leather, and I slid around all over the place once I was mounted.  The only thing that made it safer than riding bareback was the fact that it at least had stirrups to help me keep my balance.

We owned 2,000 acres, so I had plenty of room to roam, and I did.  I remember one wintry day when Charlie and I went a lot farther from home than I had realized.  This wasn’t a problem in itself, but the temperature had dropped into the teens, and I was cold.  The wind blows a lot out on the southplains, and on a cold day it cuts like a knife.  I had gloves, but still my hands ached as I held onto the reins, and home and warmth were still quite a ways away.  So when I came upon a field of maize stubble that we had enclosed with an electric fence to hold the cattle in, I had an idea.

I got down off of Charlie.  I didn’t turn loose of his reins, because although he sometimes would stay ground-tied well enough, there were plenty of times when he didn’t.  I made a neat little pile of maize stubble and found a stick, which I used to press the electric fence down into the pile of stubble.  (Kids, don’t try this at home.)  The stubble started to smoke, and after a minute or two, voila!  I had a nice little campfire.  I sat there for awhile warming my hands while Charlie snorted and stamped his feet in the dusting of snow on the ground. 

The thing I remember most about that afternoon was how alone I felt.  The open prairie of the southplains area is the most silent place I’ve ever been in.  Usually the only sound is the incessant wind in your ears.  On a day when there is snow on the ground and the sky is winter-white rather than blue or gray, the flat, far-off horizon tends to disappear, and it is very disorienting.  I can certainly see how people would get lost in a blizzard out here. 

That afternoon, as I sat crouched over my little fire listening to the silence, it seemed that Charlie and I were the only two creatures in the world.  It was a delicious sort of feeling—for a few minutes. 

Then it started to make me nervous.  I rode by myself a lot, but on that day the isolation was so intense as to be oppressive.  Perhaps it was the way the snow muffled what little sound there was.  Perhaps it was the way the sky and the ground merged into one white wall.  Whatever it was, the back of my neck began to prickle and I suddenly was very ready to get home.  I kicked snow over the fire, got up on Charlie, and let him go as fast as he wanted, and I couldn’t resist looking over my shoulder a couple of times to make sure nothing was behind me.

When I think about travel by horseback in the Cartwrights’ era, my mind always goes back to that afternoon.  Those people rode alone all the time, sometimes for weeks on end.  Were they more comfortable in their isolation?  Most likely.  After all, they had to cope with it all the time. 

But still I wonder if there were times when Joe, riding alone toward home from Virginia City, ever got uneasy and dug his heels into Cochise’s flanks in order to get home faster.

Ah, the ‘Super Cartwright’ syndrome.  You know what I mean: those jaw-dropping moments when Joe gets shot in the chest only to rise immediately afterwards and punch out ten stout miners.  Or Adam somehow knows who the real bad guy is even though all the evidence points to someone else.  Or Hoss wrestles a bear down to save his brothers from certain death.

When writing Bonanza stories, the Super Cartwright syndrome is such an easy trap to slide into.  I’ve been guilty of it myself.  And you know what?  If I was writing regular fiction I would try harder to discipline myself against writing the “super” character.  But I’m not writing regular fiction.  I’m writing fan fiction about some heroic characters that were created by Hollywood.  By their very nature, television characters, especially those from fifty years ago, are larger than life.  They are stronger, faster and smarter than the people you and I know.  Characters from westerns are perhaps even more prone to having superpowers than those from other shows (except for maybe Star Trek characters.;))  They manage to punch their way through fights that would leave most of us in the hospital, or at the very least kneeling on the floor puking our guts out.  They get hit on the head numerous times with pistol butts but never seem to retain any negative effects from it.  They get shot so many times it’s not funny. 

So should we tone the injuries down from what we saw on the Bonanza episodes?  I don’t believe so, not if we are truly interested in portraying the Cartwrights as they really were on the show.  Not every story, of course, needs to include such physical trauma.  And yes, when we do write about an injury, we should endeavor to keep it realistic—but only as realistic as the series itself would’ve presented that injury.  Because we are writing fan fiction and not regular fiction, letting the show set the standards for us is not only an option, it is our duty as true fans of the show.

In Vengeance, did it irritate us when Adam staggered to his feet after receiving a head wound so that he could run out and stop Joe from shooting the bad guy?  No, it didn’t, even though we know that it would’ve taken most people more than a couple of seconds to shake off the dizziness enough to even get to their feet.  Adam is allowed to do such a thing because he is Adam.  He is a Cartwright.  And the Cartwrights, as we all know, are way better at doing everything than most people are.

My thought is, if we’re willing to suspend belief to watch the Cartwrights leap tall buildings in a single bound on the show, we shouldn’t whine too much when we read about it in a story. 

An excerpt:

He could feel the thump of Adam’s heart beating against his chest, and his own heartbeat joined into perfect unison with it. He felt himself begin to lose his grip on consciousness and as he began to slide back into darkness the irony of it struck him; after a lifetime of fighting his oldest brother’s lead, even his body knew enough to fall into step with him as they both got ready to die.

It’s funny what inspires a person while they’re writing.  For me, inspiration comes from a variety of sources.  When I was writing Heroes, my inspiration came from a song done by Jeff Buckley called Hallelujah.  On the surface, this song has little to do with the plot of the story.  But Jeff’s singing has such intense emotion that it is almost painful; it was this emotion that was the overriding influence for this story.

 Listen to Jeff Buckley sing Hallelujah here.   Jeff Buckley\’s \’Hallelujah\’

I look back at the door as they move away from it, and my stomach rolls again, and this time it’s not just because I’m hurting. I grit my teeth to beat back the nausea. Joe’s blood is already drying on the white-painted wood, an uneven, dark streak snaking down the length of the door, an obscene testament to the way the peace of a warm summer’s day can be shattered by a group of men we don’t even know….

….There is something about the sight of my brother’s blood on the bottom of their boots that enrages me so fiercely that I find I can hardly breathe because of it.