The City of Lovely Brothers

The City of Lovely Brothers

A Family Saga

Anel Viz

Published by Silver Publishing

Publisher of Erotic Romance

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Cover Artist: Reese Dante

Editor: Devin Govaere

The City of Lovely Brothers © 2010 Anel Viz

ISBN # 978-1-920468-66-8

All rights reserved.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED:
This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission. All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. The Licensed Art Material is being used for illustrative purposes only; any person depicted in the Licensed Art Material, is a model.

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who stopped feuding when they grew up

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of thanks to my friend Pieter Bach, to whom I constantly turned for advice while preparing the manuscript and who reread it after I had completed it. I benefitted immensely from his input, especially on how to reproduce the speech patterns of eastern Montana at the turn of the last century. Without his encouragement, I might never have finished it at all.

This book is a work of fiction.

Trademarks Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

J.C. Penney
: J.C. Penney Company, Inc.

Montgomery Ward
: Colony Brands, Inc

No one who has looked at street map of Caladelphia or driven through it would think that the area enclosed within the city limits corresponds exactly to what was part of a vast, sprawling ranch owned by four brothers on the plains of the American West not much over a century ago.

Although they ran it jointly as a single ranch, each brother held the deed to his portion of it, for their father had willed them each a quarter of the land first settled by his father, Amos Caldwell. It was one of those quarters which became the city of Caladelphia.

Caladelphia is incorporated as a city, but one would more aptly call it a community. It lies in the middle of the cattle land of Montana far from any major city, surrounded by miles and miles of nearly unpopulated terrain; in Caladelphia itself, no trace remains of the open grazing lands, watering ponds, windbreaks, split-log fences and wagon-rutted dirt roads that were once here, and the farmhouse, stables, smithy and other outbuildings have also disappeared. Instead, we find what looks like a typical suburban residential community of neatly kept one-family homes and eight-to twenty-unit apartment complexes, shopping malls, churches, schools, fast-food restaurants, gas stations and other small businesses, with no downtown or city center to speak of.

Few Caladelphians know about the ranch. The Hokey Hill Mall gets its name from a minor skirmish forgotten by all but historians, in which the brothers' father and grandfather, their nearest neighbor, Travis Johnson, and a few hired hands chased off a band of Indians. A plaque in Victory Park marks the site of the original Caldwell homestead, but there is no homestead, nor a recreation of it with period furniture and artifacts for people to visit. Even most teachers at Calhoun High, named for one of the four brothers, think the school is named after the John C. Calhoun who was vice-president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson; and the pastor of Calvin Church believes the Calvin in question is the theologian instead of Calvin Caldwell.

The Caladelphia Chamber of Commerce tourist

brochure devotes an entire page to how the Caldwell Ranch became Caladelphia and how the city got its name, but it is unlikely any tourists have read it. No tourists go there. It lies some twenty-five or thirty miles north of the Interstate highway and offers no attractions or places of interest. The Caladelphians have their little festivals, like a Fourth of July parade and a winter carnival, but what community doesn't? They even have an annual Shakespeare Festival, originally organized in honor of yet another of the brothers —not that anyone knows it; it isn't even mentioned in the program— but the plays are amateur productions with a cast of local actors, and not very good.

In short, there is absolutely nothing interesting about Caladelphia except its origin, and one can learn about it without going there as easily as one could go there and not learn about it.

Caladelphia means, or is supposed to mean, "The City of the Cal Brothers." But
καλός
is the Greek word for pretty, so it could also mean "The City of Lovely Brothers"

and that fits too. Calvin, Caleb, Calhoun and Caliban Caldwell came into their inheritance very young. Their mother died before Calvin was eighteen —Caliban was only three— and their father died a year and half after. For years they ran the ranch together, but later they divided it up, though for some years afterward they continued to share the grazing lands and worked the farm together. The Caldwell Ranch already had the population of a small town while they still lived together, what with the brothers' wives and children and about three dozen ranch hands, some of whom were married and had families.

We know from photographs that the brothers were

all fine, good-looking men, and Caliban was the

handsomest. However extraordinary it may seem that their parents should have given so beautiful a baby a name like Caliban, they did name all their sons Cal and their only daughter Callie; and his name proved prophetic, for at the 1age of thirteen Caliban fractured his hip when he was thrown from his horse, and for the rest of his life, he suffered from chronic pain and walked with a limp. In spite of that, he was not sullen and vindictive like Shakespeare's Caliban, but an outgoing and generous man, and also the most agreeable of the brothers. Some said, albeit unfairly, he was the only agreeable one.

Calvin, the oldest, was a hard-working, stern man of high moral principles who seldom laughed and had an authoritarian side to him that increased as he grew older.

Some people called him cold and tight fisted. He was very tall, six foot five, with broad shoulders, brown eyes, and shoulder-length, dark reddish-brown hair he tied back in a ponytail when working outdoors. He liked horses, but had little taste for herding. He preferred to work the farm. He was also an accomplished blacksmith and carpenter, and he built furniture.

Caleb, three years younger, had hair much like

Calvin's, only cut short and with less red in it. He was the only brother to grow a beard, a thick, bushy one. It looked good on him, because it suited his solid, somewhat stocky build. He was the shortest of the brothers, ten inches shorter than Calvin. People kidded him about his beard and said he looked like an Old Testament prophet, because he was not at all religious. He was boisterous and a heavy drinker, and 1he had a hot temper and was often involved in brawls. For all that, he was a hard worker. He did not show much initiative, but if any member of the family asked him to do something, he did it. Whereas Calvin and the next brother, Calhoun, put the ranch first, Caleb was devoted to the family. He was an easy-going man and basically good natured. He was fond of children and laughed a lot.

His twin sister, Callie, could not have been more different. As a girl, she had been serious and soft spoken —

self-effacing, even— but inwardly rebellious. There are no known photographs of her. Few people remembered her, and most of the ranch hands did not know there was a sister, for they were all hired after she married and left the ranch at seventeen, before the ranch had begun to prosper when Calvin took charge of it. She returned only twice. The first time she arrived in the afternoon and left the next morning, and she only saw the family. The second time she stayed a little less than a week and lived in Caliban's house in a far corner of the ranch twelve miles from the main buildings.

Calhoun was two years younger than Caleb, and the only brother with auburn hair and hazel eyes, which he got from their mother. He was rugged and masculine, with the square chin and regular features of a Hollywood cowboy.

In fact, he was the family cowboy. He dressed like a 1cowboy, and he liked roping and branding and riding out on the range, and though in theory their herd of cattle belonged to all four brothers, it may as well have been his, for while Caleb ran the herd with him, he was more of an assistant than a partner to his younger brother. Calhoun was set in his ways and distrustful of innovation, but not unwilling to compromise — up to a point. Then he would dig in his heels and turn stubborn.

Caliban, an unexpected and none-too-welcome

arrival conceived nine years after his mother had stopped having children, was the baby of the family. His good looks were very different from his brothers'. He had delicate features and an almost feminine beauty. He had very dark, almost black, wavy hair that curled around his ears, and large, deep-brown liquid eyes with long lashes. His complexion was also darker than the others', and his skin smooth and unblemished. His beard was so light he could go a day without shaving, although it was as dark as his hair. Although his muscles were less developed than his brothers' because his infirmity prevented him from doing the more demanding physical labor one has to do on a ranch, he didn't appear frail, and people were surprised to see he limped. But the real secret of his beauty lay in his good nature, which lit up his face like the morning sun reflected in a clear pond. No one could resist his laughing 1eyes and kind smile.

He had shown great promise as a boy; he had been good at almost everything. His accident put an end to that.

It was months before he could walk again, and he never fully recovered. As he was unfit for heavy work, Calvin put him in charge of the stables, feeding and currying the horses. He was also good with his hands, especially leatherwork, and he knew how to sew. He could play the guitar, too, but that wasn't considered a proper trade in those days.

Finally, Caliban was the brain of the family, and completely self-taught. Before her illness, Mrs. Caldwell had overseen her children's education, teaching them to read, to add and subtract, along with a smattering of history and a hefty dose of Bible stories until the age of twelve.

After she died, Callie began teaching her little brother his letters, but she left to get married when he was five, and he grew up virtually illiterate. Then he had his accident, and it left him an invalid for close to two years. There wasn't much he could do except study, and unlike his brothers, he actually developed a taste for book learning.

Everyone agreed that the four brothers were the

handsomest men in the territory. Beauty, however, is a matter of personal taste, and the rough-and-ready folk who lived on what was then the frontier used to say that Caliban 1was too good looking for a man. If the men who rode the range or tilled the soil in those parts had been able to exchange their looks for someone else's —and more than a few wished they could— they would have chosen one of the other brothers.

Caliban was born six and a half weeks prematurely in the middle of the winter of 1875. The family was snowed in and could not send for a doctor. It was a long and very difficult labor. Nina Caldwell almost died, and never recovered from the birth. She remained bedridden for most of the three years of life left to her. The baby was extremely tiny, but surprisingly healthy and robust, almost from the first breath he drew, and he thrived.

The three older boys and their sister sat in the kitchen listening to their mother's ever weakening screams for three days before their father came out holding the baby and told them to say hello to their new brother. During that time, Callie had cooked for her father and brothers, heated broth for her mother, and boiled water and torn up rags for the delivery, but Clayton Caldwell would not let her stay more than a minute or so in the delivery room. Now the children wanted to see their mother; they weren't interested in the baby.