“It’s not your fault Benny, you didn’t know he wasn’t to be trusted,” Jacob says to his son as he places a hand on his shoulder.

“I should have known, I should not have trusted that scum bag, I knew there was something wrong with him and now, now he’s run off with everything, to who knows where!” he says as he begins to cry in his hands.

“It’s okay, we’ll be fine, it was just money he took anyway, nothing we can’t get again,” he says as he looks at his other son and nods his head. “Now Patrick, you go out to the barn and you do your chores as well as Benny’s, I’ll be out to help you in good time,” he says, Patrick nods his head and quickly heads out the doorway, he looks up at his wife and smiles a uneasy smile before he turns back to his son.

“Now boy, when you told us of your life choices we found it hard to accept at first, for you to be abandoning your god given mission of procreation, to instead have sexual relations with another person of the same gender, it broke me, but you know that, because I’ve never lied about the way I’ve felt. But we accepted you for who you are and that the changes you made in your life are not due to anything we did wrong when we raised you, these changes are your changes, your desires, and are a part of who you are. Now you’re going to hurt for a little while, we all do when love is taken away, its worse when we realise that the person we thought we loved turned out to be nothing but a piece of shit. But you get it from all sexes, so you just take it easy for a few days and then, you’ll see, once you have got all the crying out of your system, that life ain’t too bad anymore.”

“T-T-T-Thanks Dad,” He says as he leaps up and grabs his father in a bear hug, crying profusely, he hugs his son back tightly as his wife watches on, smiling at the sight of the boy and his father, and a tear runs down her cheek. After a few moments he makes his way out of the house and onto the porch and lights up his pipe, taking several tokes on it before he grabs an umbrella from the side of an old couch and makes his way across the field, towards the barn where Patrick waits, chewing on a piece of hay.

“So, what are you going to do?” Patrick asks as they walk into the barn.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that son of a bitch hurt Benny and stole from us, so what are you going to do to him?”

“Patrick, my boy,” he says as he takes another toke on his pipe and places a hand on Patrick’s shoulder. “Why don’t we just see where the night takes us,” he says as they both look over to the gagged young man whose hands are bound and tied to the rafter that runs through the centre of the barn.

END