Kissing Cousins by Barry Rachin (black male authors txt) 📕

After college Phillip Peters began hearing disturbing rumors about his father's identical twin brother. "Your Uncle Ned, the eccentric old coot, has gone back to nature," his mother giggled maliciously. "I heard the fool bought several acres of farmland off route eighteen in Rehoboth. Gonna build a log cabin and live the life of a recluse." Where Uncle Ned was concerned, Mrs. Peters favored one of several strategies: she either ignored her brother-in-law or ridiculed him mercilessly. "A fifty year-old Paul Bunyan," she tittered. "What a hoot!"

Mrs. Peters absolutely hated the man - hadn't spoken to her brother-in-law since her husband's death, although, properly understood, the feud, grudge, bad blood - whatever the hell it was – predated the marriage with Uncle Ned never even showing up for his brother's wedding. "The nerve of him!" Mrs. Peters hissed on more than one occasion. Why Uncle Ned loathed his mother was never explained by either parent. Phillip's father never spoke badly of his brother; it was Mrs. Peters who detested the man with a homicidal vendetta worse than anything a Sicilian Mafioso could dream up.

Phillip had met the man only once in thirty years when he showed up for his brother's funeral and it was a thoroughly eerie experience. An identical twin - he resembled the deceased in every way except that he wasn't laying stone cold in a mahogany box waiting to be lowered into a freshly opened grave. Dressed in a dark suit, Uncle Ned stood solemnly off by himself near a gnarled birch tree. He spoke to no one. Before the priest even finished his eulogy, the stocky man wiped his eyes and drifted from the ceremony. No mention was ever made of his presence at the gravesite. On the rare occasions when his name came up in mixed company, Phillip's mother still referred to her estranged brother-in-law as the ‘eccentric old coot’.


One morning in late spring, Phillip pulled into a gas station on the Rehoboth line. "Anybody building log cabins in the area?"

The cashier, a kid in his early twenties shook his head. "Naw, no log cabins… just some old crackpot with a camper puttering about in the woods."

"And where might that be?"

"Three miles up on the left. There's a dirt road and a 'No Trespass’ sign nailed to a scraggily maple tree.

Continuing up the windy country road, he located the property. A dilapidated, worm-eaten slab of wood that passed for a mailbox had been jury rigged at a cockeyed angle alongside the gravelly road. Scrawled in red latex paint, the name on the battered box, which had no lid, read Ned Peters. Pulling off the road, Phillip locked the car and continued a good two-hundred feet down a rutted trail to a clearing where an older man was puttering about a muddy foundation. The fellow, who stood about five-eight, was sturdily built with a bushy mop of brown hair shot through with gray, cascading down over his ears. The jaw was wide, forehead broad with a scattering of crow's feet dimpling the eyes. "Hello, Uncle Ned!"

Squinting at the intruder with a menacing scowl, the older man’s leathery features gradually softened. "Oh, hello there, Phillip." He came over and shook his nephew's hand as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

"What are you doing?"

The man wandered back to the rectangular plot. "Getting the foundation ready."

Phillip glanced about the property. There was nothing, just an endless profusion of knotty pines, maple and oak trees. A tangle of poison ivy nestled at the base of a chokeberry tree; the tiny, red-to-black, apple-like fruit had long since fallen away. "For what?"

"Log cabin. Twelve-hundred square feet." His uncle pulled a flat, carpenter's pencil from his pocket and marked one of the twelve-inch boards buttressed in a rectangular, knee-deep trench that ran forty feet and presumably defined the front of the dwelling. On the ground was a collection of threaded rods with nuts and silver washers. "Cement truck is delivering a load later this afternoon. Sure hope they can negotiate that twisty trail."

He moved a short distance away, ran a tape measure along the foundation and methodically scribed another pencil mark. "Sill plate's got to be anchored to the foundation. Before the wet cement cures, I'm gonna sink these quarter-inch, threaded rods into the mix so the outside walls can be bolted down. It's just an added precaution."

Adjusting to the late morning light filtering through the trees, Phillip surveyed the worksite. A rusty camper was parked a few hundred feet off to the left by a small pond, but there were no commercial-grade construction tools - no chain saws, nail guns, staging or even a suitable workbench. "How are you going to mill logs?"

"Structure's prefab. I ordered an A-frame, cabin from a commercial supplier in Bangor. Everything required is being shipped tomorrow afternoon. I just put it together." Phillip blinked and the man standing there in the dirty jeans and plaid, flannel shirt was his father resurrected from the dead. He blinked again and the older man morphed back into Uncle Ned, the eccentric old coot and his mother's sworn enemy. "Because the structure isn't overly large, I can get away with twelve-inch diameter logs, which will be more manageable for an old fart like me."

"Of course, there are a number of choices for securing the logs at the corners, including the lock-joint, dovetail, and butt and pass method…" Uncle Ned went off on a rather lengthy rant explaining all available options, but Phillip wasn't listening anymore. He was feeling light-headed, out of his element… no longer sure what to think. His mind had scurried off down a rabbit hole straight out of Alice and Wonderland, a cul-de-sac littered with all sorts of emotional excess baggage.

"I teach tenth and eleventh grade science over at the high school." The words emerged in a garbled, disjointed heap, and he was talking much too loud. "We get summers off. I want to do something. I want to help you build your log cabin."

The older man just stood there, perfectly calm and serene. A noisy blue jay flitted among the budding leaves of a slender poplar that leaned precariously close by the clunky trailer. Somewhere in the wooded distance, Phillip could hear a brook or small stream gurgling a bucolic, back-to-nature refrain. Uncle Ned rubbed his sunburned neck and smiled mischievously. "I'll have to pay you under the table," he quipped, "and, except for splinters, poison ivy and the ravenous, late-afternoon mosquitoes, there ain't no benefits."

Later that night at his apartment, the thought occurred to Phillip that his Uncle was nothing like the family pariah, the social grotesque his mother concocted over the years. But why the animosity? Why the disparaging and degrading caricature which didn't even begin to resemble the man laying sections of threaded bolt along the perimeter of his middle-age dream? As he was leaving the Rehoboth woods, Phillip asked, "Building a log cabin in the woods from scratch and at your age… why are you doing this?"

His uncle released the locking mechanism on his yellow Stanley, twenty-five foot tape measure and watched the blade snake back into the metal carcass. "When did the thirteen, original colonies come together as a nation?"

Phillip stared at him vaguely. "I don't know… after the British threw in the towel, and the redcoats sailed home to England."

"I'm a history buff," Uncle Ned explained. "The colonists were paranoid as hell at the prospect of being taxed to death by their own kind much as the British had done a decade earlier. It wasn't until the Second Continental Congress that the individual colonies agreed - with great misgivings - to give up their individual rights and form a nation." Uncle Ned spoke quietly directing his words at the clayey earth. "I want to live a more stripped-down existence… simplify things." There was no hint of bitterness or defiance in his voice. The man spoke calmly, almost philosophically and, in that moment Phillip felt an affinity for his estranged uncle that left him shaken if not thoroughly humbled.

Phillip told nobody about his clandestine meeting. A plumber by trade, Uncle Ned negotiated the worksite on sturdy legs with a comfortable, loping gait. Measuring, marking, double-checking the forms embedded in shallow trenches extending just below the frost line - there was no wasted effort, all his movements methodical and unhurried. Ned Peters said little else the remainder of the time they were together, but Phillip understood, at some visceral level, that the man was capable of completing anything he put his mind to.

The middle of the following week he went back to the woods. The cement had been poured and a smooth, gray slab defined the foundation of the new structure. Just as Uncle Ned intended, the metal rods, like dutiful sentinels, stood perfectly erect every few feet around the outer perimeter. Several piles of machine-hewn, twelve-inch logs were scattered around the clearing. "Looks like the cat's up the proverbial tree." Philipp came up beside the grizzled man, who was securing the two-by-six sill plates to the foundation with a metal ratchet.

"You come to make fun of an old geezer or do serious work?" his uncle shot back with a challenging grin.

Phillip pulled a leather tool belt and framing hammer off the backseat of his car. "Let's build a log cabin!"

From the morning straight through to the early afternoon, they laid floor joists, sixteen-on-center, securing everything in place with eight-penny nails. "Things would go faster if I had a nail gun," Uncle Ned noted, "but nobody's punching a time clock.”

Around ten o'clock they took a coffee break, boiling the water on a small hibachi with a propane fuel tank. "Uncle Ned, why the bad blood between you and my mother?"

The man cracked open a package of sugar cookies and hand a few to his nephew. "Your father - may the poor man rest in peace - died three years ago on the fifth of April. The coroner's report mentioned something about thrombosis, a blood clot in the brain, but it was living with your monstrosity-of-a-mother that sent him to an early grave. The medical examiner should have put that on the certificate of death." He bit into a cookie and washed it down with a swig of scalding black coffee. "Cause of Death: toxic wife syndrome."

Phillip would have offered up a rebuttal, something in his mother's defense, but knew deep down in his heart-of-hearts that every word was true. Uncle Ned stared at the dark liquid ruminatively but refrained from drinking. "I asked your father once… I said, 'Whatever possessed you to marry?' and do you know what he said?" As if on cue, a throng of crows secreted away in the branches of a hemlock tree began cawing a loud, throaty protest. "As personnel manager for a large insurance firm, your father used to screen new hires. He claimed that few applicants were ever really interested in the sales position as advertised. Rather, they puffed themselves up with delusions of grandeur and interviewed for the job-in-the-abstract."
"Every applicant was a super-salesman. Sitting there in the personnel office, their skills were boundless,… unimpeachable. Only problem was, they couldn't sell shit,... hardly a single life, car or medical insurance policy, once your father gave them the nod and sent them kicking and screaming out into the real world. It was all false bravado."

"But what's that got