We Missed a Great Party, I Guess
Life in the country is usually blessedly free of crime, but every once in a while something happens -- some real world ugliness invades our space, and we realize that mostly, we've been lucky.
When I was growing up our house was the command center of my parents' dairy. People came and went all the time. We locked our doors at night, but mostly because we'd feel terribly stupid if anyone found out that we didn't. The house was never locked during the day, and car keys -- well, Dad's car keys -- were routinely left in the ignition at all times. Nothing happened for years.
A dairy is a 24-hour operation, and vacations were not in the cards until I was 12 years old. At that time we began to take family trips, and employees would feed the cats, dogs, birds, rabbits, lambs, guinea pigs, ducks, chickens, and any other pets we may have collected, while we were gone. We'd usually arrive home in the middle of the night, fall into bed, and over breakfast the next day we'd hear from those employees about how things went in our absence.
One such bleary morning breakfast, the lady who fed calves at the dairy and who had cared for our pets and our house that vacation, appeared in the kitchen to give her report. Dolores looked shaken as she told us we'd had a break-in, of sorts. I'm wracking my feeble brains trying to remember whether or not we knew as soon as we walked in the house that night, but I can't be sure. In any case, I'm sure my parents knew that night, but there wasn't anything to be done about it.
Nothing was missing.
The offenders were not thieves, but partiers. They had learned that our house would be empty for a week, and they had used the house for a party. Not a big party, at least -- they had some decency, or maybe a lack of forethought. But they had a swimming party which spilled into our locked house. Dolores had cleaned up the worst of the mess -- many, many, many beer cans and bottles and cigarette butts and God only knows what else -- but some things took a while to show themselves. Some part of the swimming pool's cleaning system had been broken, surely an accident by drunken fools just trying to get the pool sweep out of their way. Something minor in the house had been broken, but again, it was not an intentional act of vandalism, but a clumsy mistake. Still, I can remember feeling creepy about being alone in my room at night, trying to fall asleep, for several weeks.
The story came out rather quickly. One of the milkers might have mentioned to one of the hay haulers that the boss would be gone next weekend. BINGO -- it was immediately obvious who had been in the house: a big friendly great dane-like guy named Carl, who had hauled hay to our ranch and to many others over the years. This guy had logged more time drunk and hung over than sober in his short life. This growing hypothesis was backed up by another milker, Rich, who reported being surprised to see a guy stagger into the milk parlor in the middle of the night, inviting Rich to "come on over to Dave's house" after his milking shift was done. He described Carl to a T.
Nothing was provable, but Dad did get the word out that he knew who had done it. Predictably, nothing like that ever happened again.
But the "win one for the Gipper" moment happened about ten years later, when Dad and my uncle and I were having breakfast in town one Sunday morning. Into the diner walked Carl, ten years older and ten years more hard mileage on his liver. He was still wasted from the night before, and in his big drunken friendly guy stupor he unwisely plunked down at our booth, uninvited, next to my fresh-scrubbed Mercedes-driving uncle, who was as uncomfortable as a man could be at that moment. Carl droned on to my dad for a minute about nothing, and then Dad let him have it.
"You haven't been back at our place in several years, Carl -- the last time you were there you used our house for a party." Dad fired the across the bow -- not in anger, but in even, morally-superior Father Tones. Carl blinked and swayed in his seat, not sure he heard that right. Dad fired another salvo: "You brought some women to our pool and had a party. The milker saw you, said you invited him over, too." This speech was delivered in the I'm So Disappointed In You, You Let Us Down tones that only a father can deliver, and from a laid-back, immensely likable man like my father, it had to have been devastating to hear (it always was for me).
After an uncomfortable, expectant silence, Carl stammered, "Yeah, I've been meanin' to come talk to you about that." That was a close to an admission as we were likely to hear, and besides, my uncle had COMPLETELY lost his appetite by this time. Case closed.
Carl died a few years later. I'm not sure he had turned 40 yet, but I'm sure his liver was at least 90.