Leander - Covenant Gap: The Taming of the Screw

Covenant

Gap

The Taming of the Screw

They say ten years is a long time to mourn a lost spouse, at least for a man. I dont agree. They also say the majority of women rarely remarry after widowhood. I can't imagine why they wouldnt, since we usually handle all the finances and heavy lifting, and ask only little ass in return. Not a bad gig, especially if the lady in question was usually as horny as her man.

My Amanda was the perfect wife, through and through. She was quite a bit older than me, and just as sexy as any cute little cougar in the area. What's more, she still wanted to have children and keep house. No more working outside the home. I was happy to accommodate her.

In the early days, I worked at the Sheriffs Office in the village, usually babysitting some idiot or other who managed to get himself arrested, waiting for a cruiser from Coventry to come and take him to their more secure lockup or detox.

That was where I first heard the term screw. Outside of sex, anyway. When the inmates were relatively quiet and content, they called me deputy, or even Sergeant. In the usual chaos and resultant incarceration of an unruly drunk or drug-nut, the word was scattered among the often quite colorful collection of filthy language that spewed from the unhappy soul. It wasnt long before I got hardened to the little word; the profuse, sexually busy epithets took a lot more self-discipline to ignore.

If I werent an officer of the law, I would have smacked the face of the dirty-mouthed offenders.

Like my father before me, I was moving up in the sheriffs department, while putting in some time weekly as a volunteer firefighter and EMT. Neither were especially busy jobs, but we liked to maintain ties to Coventry and some of the cities that werent too far away.

Civil service allowed me to stay in contact with the area beyond our community, while staying close to home and my family most of the time.

We had two fine sons, twins, and we were always in agreement in raising them with loving discipline. The boys worshipped her and easily fell in line at an early age. They respected me and my authority, and still do. We raised them right.

As I say, mine was the perfect wife. Unfortunately, a man pays for having a mommy-wife. Mommies tend to die early, in our case, way too early.

Amanda and I had barely finished raising the boys when we found her on the kitchen floor, dead of an aneurysm. No goodbye, no stop-off in the emergency room or even a nursing home. We were heartbroken and shocked to the core. I could not imagine how we could get along without her. The boys almost immediately met and married wives to help fill the hole in their hearts. There was a batch of local ladies ready to jump at the chance.

Common in our little village of Covenant.

Not so for me: for a while I thought I was losing my mind in the grief that lasted many years.

By then I was a lieutenant in the sheriff's department. They even called me Lieutenant in the volunteer fire department. Otherwise, I spent my free time living alone at the edge of the woods on a huge (for just one person) piece of land. For a while, I searched for Amanda in little trips up the hillside and usually found her on the cliff above the ocean waves.

And, no, I don't mean she returned to haunt me. The last time I saw her, she was peacefully dead at the funeral home. Just not my wife anymore, even though the director was anxious to make her appear as she was in life.

I had to order them to cut back on the cosmetics. Never did like too much makeup on a woman, and certainly not on Amanda. If she wanted to get fancy, I would let her order clothes or jewelry, whatever she wanted. To me, every wrinkle, line and especially stretch mark was a badge of honor. The world should witness what her husband and sons had cost her.

After the public viewing, we decided on cremation instead of burial. Amanda's beauty and life story should not be left to rot in the dirt. We scattered her ashes far out over the ocean: to where she and I used to stare for hours, together in dreamland. Heartsick, I tried to reconcile myself to the life of a widower. It seemed to me that the sadness was a fitting memorial to my beloved angel.

Oddly enough, it turned out that I was pretty good at living alone. It actually was peaceful being by myself, seeing the boys at work, often riding in the same prowler, as their senior partner. Just a little too lonely when I returned home from a shift.

On the other hand, I had plenty of time to bone up on procedures and state laws. In a few more years, I had attained the rank of Captain. At that point, everyone in Coventry County began to call me Captain.

Here in Covenant, we write our own script and make our own lifestyles. Many say we are a regional legend. You may have heard the rumors of a hidden village where men are still in charge, and women are happy living the old fashioned American dream. All tucked away in the northern woods, just above the rocky shore of our nearby ocean. Some of the rumors are true, but naturally the gossips get a little out of hand. We do not break the law, and Covenant is not a hellhole for frightened ladies (or relatively gentle men) living in terror of an overbearing spouse who rules with an iron fist.

No, we just go out of our way to ensure the peaceful lifestyle. It's not that new neighbors are unwelcome; we simply vet them thoroughly through our networks. Like any other town, we prefer like-minded people next door, in the merchant district and at civic meetings.

More vigilance and less trouble. It works well with a good core of civil servants and leaders, and a smattering of citizens working elsewhere, one eye on world news and the other out for possible candidates. We want to fill any vacant property before a true outsider steps in and disrupts our haven.

Perhaps the network functions well on the inside, too. I don't doubt that I benefited from friendly neighbors watching out for me the last several years. Otherwise, I managed on my own with few problems. Or maybe my boys simply tightened the circle to fill the gap.

It worked; my sons were very generous with me. I got the grandkids on many summer weekends, when I would let them wander through the woods and down the rocks to the seashore. In the winter, I would take them again, to allow the adults to enjoy vacations.

Incidentally, I never thought I would be thrilled to have a cellphone. Until then, it was enough to use the local police and firefighters coms. My family often told me their cells were a godsend to them as parents; their kids had begun with some very simplified phones, almost toys.

We used them to keep in touch while they ran wild in the woods.

It had been five years since my husband passed, when I decided to return to my roots. Time to head back to the rural north and grow old in sight of the ocean.

Widows in my family, coming down on my mothers side, were likely to remain single to their dying day. The hubbub of the husband and childrens needs were easily dropped for a more introspective daily routine.

My kids married early, and their spouses certainly got more than they expected. Marrying into a big family is a pain in the ass, and I used to apologize to my man for my own quirky clan and their vagaries. It was now the kids turn to do the same.

Every one of us is on the Attention Deficit spectrum, and my poor hubby never could "get a handle on" any of us, including me.

His own side of the family was small and getting smaller, except for our growing branch. I had no regrets watching whomever was left disappear in my rear-view mirror. I found a place with a view of the sea and settled in for my golden years.

That was lovely, until the girls began to plan divorces. Seems I had been a little too liberal in raising them. Not exactly a feminist, I nevertheless instilled in them the ideas that would make them very independent.