Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I was a kid living on a 300 acre farm in a house that had five or six bedrooms. Guests would come and sometimes stay for weeks. 

Dorothy Brenan and her wealthy lawyer husband were great friends of my mother’s. Dorothy came to stay for awhile and her husband came up on the weekends. She bought my sister and me new mattresses for our beds. It seemed an extravagant gift. 

It was summer and Dorothy started to look very “country” in overalls and checked shirts. Soon she was hanging out in the barns where the young, good looking farmer, Jay, was tending to the dairy cows.

We kids played all over the farm, in the fields and the hay barns, and soon we noticed that something was happening. Way up in the hayloft, with bales of hay piled high one on top of the other, Jay and Dorothy were entangled with arms wrapped around one another and doing something we knew was forbidden. 

Kids are very aware of what is going on, even if they don’t know exactly what it is. And that was true for us. We started spying on their torrid love affair. One time we saw them making love way high up in the silo that was filled to the top with silage. Silage is corn that has been cut up in bits and pieces and fed to cows during the winter. 

The weeks of that summer went on and then disaster came to the farm and to Dorothy. 

The milking barn had stantions where the cows would stand and be milked. Right behind them was a trough with a conveyor belt where they could poop. With the flick of a switch the belt would move along the trough which ran out the barn like two arms stretching six feet past the door, and dump everything into a bin. 

One day, Jay turned the belt on, and was outside near the conveyor belts when he slipped and the back of his sweatshirt got caught in the rollers used to move the conveyor. The shirt coiled around and around, choking him. Dorothy was there with him but couldn’t figure out how to turn the conveyor off. Jay suffocated and died. 

We only found out when we came home from school and the house was filled with cries from Dorothy, sobbing in distress. It was heartbreaking and soon her husband came up from the city, took her home, and we never saw them again.