Thanks to the many readers who have sent me notes commenting on this series. I had a wonderful adventure during the writing phase and am pleased to be able to share this with you. Be sure to add a donation to Nifty.org to your list- Nifty provides space for hundreds of authors and thousands of original articles for your free reading pleasure. The following is an original story and is copyright by the author and no distribution or replication may be made except with the written authorization of the copyright owner. If you are not of legal age to enter this website you must leave immediately. Please send any comments or questions concerning this story series to: pjwltx9@gmail.com. Please note this is the final chapter in the series on the lives of Paul Campbell and his husband David Branson; thanks to the many readers who have sent me notes commenting on your experience. Please look at my other series "The Old Fag" filed on Nifty under "Relationships". Paul and David pop up several times in the lives of characters in that series as well.
Chapter Nine: Trees
It took a great deal of arm-twisting, but after the family farm corporation had been formed and registered with the State of California, and shares distributed equally to Mom, Scott, Emily, and myself, we convinced Grandpa Campbell to take a little vacation, a kind of semi-retirement. He was pretty upset at me for suggesting it, but I had been noticing a far-away look in his eyes for a month or more.
"Grandpa, didn't you go to Scotland on your mission?"
"Yes sir, and in those days we were practically the poorest creatures on the face of the earth, and depended on the local members to sustain us. And we worked for three years, not two."
"Have you been back to visit?"
"Scotland? Never. Been working every day since I came home."
"Why don't you take Grandma and go spend a day or two and have a look at the old country?"
"Well Paul you are a smart man but that is a dreadful idea."
"Why Grandpa?"
"Scotland is cold and dreary. They eat porridge and mutton. Why do you think so many Scotsmen left and came to America?" He could not stop laughing at himself.
"Well, anyway, if you wanted to go, we would all be happy to pitch in."
"Dreadful idea."
It was about six weeks later that the patriarch of the Campbell clan in the Sacramento Valley excused himself from his duties, and went home to Heavenly Father and his loved ones. He was committed to the rich earth he had tilled with his own hands for many years, to lay beside his parents and his son Robert. The little live-oak tree-shaded cemetery up in the hills above the creek that led up to the shepherd's shack, a relic of the original pioneers of the valley, held the remains of those who made this land world famous. It was a beautiful clear day, and I wondered how many more of these days we would have before the next one of our ilk would be brought here.
When we returned home after all of the duties of the day, Mom was sitting on the front porch rocking again. I had seen this look on her face a few times and always knew it held portent. I decided to not even play the cat-and-mouse-game with her but plunged right in.
"You are thinking pretty loud there Madam."
"Paul, you and David have been together quite a long time, but there seem to me to be two big errors in your relationship."
"Do you mind if I go get my husband and let him be a part of this conversation?"
"That's one of my points, son, you do not have a husband."
"What? Of course I do."
"No you certainly do not. You two look, act, and produce a great wonderful positive atmosphere as if you are husbands, but you are not. You have never married. I think it's about time."
"Whoosh, thanks for being so gentle."
"You expected me to be something else?"
"No ma'am. So, your second point?"
"Charlotte. And Robby. And?"
"And what? Or, who?"
"That's my second point. When are you going to have children?"
My knees buckled. I had to sit down. Children? Me?
"Uh, Mom, in case you have forgotten the biology,"
"Don't get smart with me Paul Wilford Campbell; you know as well as I do there are ways. I want another grandchild, and you and that man deserve to have a child to carry on after you."
I decided to bring it up to David that night in bed; he started laughing immediately. "Paul, how dare you even consider challenging her? I thought you were a lot smarter than that?"
"David, darling, really, children?"
"It's not such an outlandish idea. Let's just think about it. My Mom actually brought it up to me last Christmas when we were in Salt Lake. I just never told you."
I was silent. I had no idea what to think. I fell asleep and had very confusing dreams. I saw my father and grandfather, walking with a little boy, who looked almost like me. They were walking along a cold sea shore. I was completely lost, until right at the end of the dream, the little boy turned and looked at me and ran toward me.
We were in a heavy season in the farming operations; David was gone a lot due to bank responsibilities, giving conference addresses across the country. I spent a lot of time just pondering the dream as well as Mom's conversation. The next time David returned home from a conference, this one in Mexico City, I said to him, "Surrogate."
"What?"
"A surrogate mother. She takes our sperm and gets pregnant and carries our baby and we live happily ever after."
"Really, Paul, I suddenly get this flash of a very bad porn movie, and I am not willing to share any of the details of that with you."
"No sweetheart, we use a lab sample of sperm, and then the woman is artificially inseminated, we do not have to participate, we do not actually `know' her in the Biblical sense." I started laughing.
He just stared at me. After I calmed down, he said "Two."
"What?"
"Two children. Two surrogates. Your sperm and mine. Twins. Sort of. Two kids."
"Oh David now you have lost your mind."
Sometime between the end of February and the beginning of April, exactly twenty-one days apart, Bethany Yukiko Branson-Campbell and her brother, Stephen Douglas Branson-Campbell, were born. Their fathers, David and I, had been surrounded by family and friends on the beach at Sonoma, a year before, and been blessed to call each other `husband', by Bishop Turley.
Wow.
The babies were blessed at home, in the Mormon tradition. Scott took our daughter into his arms, and we men stood in the prayer circle, and each helping to hold the baby, he said "Little Bethany, this is a very special moment in your life and in the lives of every person in this room. You are special because you get to carry for the rest of your days on this beautiful earth, the name of your grandmother, and the names of your two Dads. And you get to show the world what true love is all about."
And then he blessed her with health and strength and courage and integrity, and invoked the name of the Lord to seal the blessing. There was not a dry eye in the house, including my darling David, who had almost never cried in my presence.
We took our son in our arms, and Scott said nearly the same things to Stephen, ending with "The courage to be a man in this cruel world is an enormous responsibility, and you have only to look at your two Dads to see the perfect example of what that means." The stake president was there with us in the circle, and he was feeling the emotion as well, and had to wipe away a tear at the end.
"Now, President, you see, I cannot possibly go on a mission, I have these two babies to raise" Sister Bethany Campbell, Senior, said to the stake president.
"We'll see about that" he retorted.
Both of the grandmas, Campbell and Woodruff, who were by now almost fixtures in their rocking chairs just chuckled and nudged each other.
Mom went to England a year later, and served eighteen months. We buried both of the grandmas while she was gone. When she returned, the twins were running amok; she was delighted.
We had acquired about double the acreage of the fruit and nut trees, buying distressed properties around the valley, mostly to the northwest near Woodland. By the time the twins were in kindergarten, we had more trees under production than rice, and had completely gotten out of the cattle business.
We continued to farm alfalfa, and sold it to the beef production company from Brigham City, Utah who had leased our cattle facilities. We never varied from Grandpa Campbell's' admonition to not go into debt. The farm had been productive enough that we always acquired new properties with current cash flow.
One night about half way between the twelfth birthdays of our son and daughter, Mom left us. She went to bed early that night, and the next morning when she did not wake for breakfast, I went to tap at her bedroom door softly, and hearing no response gently opened the door. She was lying on her side, clutching a framed photo of my father.
I suddenly realized the answer to that question I had asked David many years before about the success of couples. It was laying there before me.
Two weeks after the funeral, Bethany asked me if she could continue going to church, and of course I answered "yes', but she wanted to know who would take her, in place of Grandma Bethany.
I volunteered to do so, even though it was not my favorite idea. David and I agreed that we could start to go back to church, if that is what our kids wanted. Stephen agreed, and so the big gay farm family started to attend the Mormons again. Surprisingly we did not make much of a ripple. We held family prayer with our twins, we blessed the food at each meal, we tried to watch our language around them, and we tried to be honest about every aspect of our lives that Bethany and Stephen questioned.
Some of the questions were hard. "Why are you gay?" Wow. How to answer that? Well, the best answer I have for you is, it is something inside of me that has its own agenda, no, that's not it, well, let's see, it is just a feeling I have always had. Yeah, that's it. Man, I fumbled that one. They were very forgiving children.
"Why did you have children?" OK, that one was easy, we could blame Grandma Bethany, no not really, well, see kids, the reason is, every gay man wants kids, no, let's start over, let's see, God wanted you to be with our special family. Sheesh. I had no idea.
Perhaps the greatest blessing of having kids is also having a family that surrounds you and helps you answer all of those hard questions just by being normal. Every summer season, Scott and Cindy sent their kids, Charley and Cynthia, to work on the farm, along with Bethany and Stephen and Charlotte and Tommy. It was a great arrangement, and I only ever heard one argument between my kids and their cousins about the `Two-Daddies' issue. Tommy had said most of the kids he knew did not have any Daddies, and he thought it was not fair that Bethany and Stephen got to have two of them!
Emily was a tremendous support with Bethany, as well as Stephen, when they got into middle school, and puberty issues hit us like a train wreck. Emily offered to have our kids stay with them one or two weekends a month, as a support mechanism, and things were pretty normal after that, for the most part.
By this time in our lives, David had become the senior economist at the San Francisco branch, and his travel duties were lighter: he could assign junior economists to do the traveling. It was becoming obvious that the really urgent time in the lives of our kids was ahead of us, not behind us. Diapers were nothing compared to puberty. I sorely missed my mother at this time.
One Sunday in the late summer, a storm hit us. After sacrament services, the Bishop asked if he could see us in his office. He was obviously uncomfortable, and asked us to sit down. Bishop Turley, the man who had sent me to Japan as a missionary, had long since been released as Bishop and was serving a mission himself with his wife, in Mexico.
The new Bishop kept switching objects around on his desk top, and finally blurted out, "I have been asked to invite you brethren into a high council court for discipline." I was stunned.
"You are aware, Bishop, we have been faithful to each other for our entire adult lives, we have a respectable family, we have raised our children carefully, and we have done everything necessary to insure the integrity of this family, including bringing them to church as often as possible?" The lawyer in me was on fire.
David said, "Bishop, what is the purpose of this now, at this time? We have been together for years, why now?"
"David, I am so sorry, I do not know but here is the copy of the letter for you brethren to attend the court. It will be a week from tonight at 7 PM here in the stake offices, in the high council conference room."
I could not breathe, I did not care at all for myself or my church membership, but I was devastated for our kids. We drove home in silence, and of course Bethany picked up on it instantly. "What did the Bishop want?"
"You guys are going to be Sunday School teachers, huh?" Stephen chuckled.
"Or scoutmasters?" Bethany joined him.
When neither David nor I replied, they were intimidated into silence. Late that day after supper, David and I had decided not to share this with the kids as yet, but to see what this storm would bring before we reacted.
A week later, with Scott and Ted accompanying us, we entered the stake high council offices at promptly 7 PM. The stake president introduced us, acknowledged our two brothers, and asked the second counselor to give the invocation. When we sat at the end of the table, I grabbed David's hand. The stake president said "To open, we are here to ask you brethren to explain your lives to us. Brother Card will begin."
When Brother Card looked in our direction, he did not make eye contact with us; he looked over our heads toward the wall behind us.
"I suppose you brethren think it's really funny, running your game the way you do, parading a gay family to church all the time?"
"I am sorry, Brother Card, is that a question?" David looked directly at the speaker.
"Well sure it is. Do you think it is right to be a gay family?"
I heard Scott sigh deeply to my left. I knew he was going to get violent.
"Brethren, may I answer that? David and I have been together a long time, perhaps as long as some of you, and have celebrated our life together as a couple, have been welcomed and loved as a couple by our families, and have brought into this world our own children, and have, as my own father said a long time ago at the very beginning of this journey, re-invented the definition of family. I do not apologize for any of that."
"We want to save you a great deal of time here tonight. We are not here to beg you for our church membership. That is not the question. What we do wish to share with you is a simple fact. This man, David Stephen Douglas Branson, has been a true and faithful companion, a true man, a true father, and a worthy soul mate in every definition. I could never have chosen better. In the eternal scheme of things, that is enough for me. If you find us wrong, disgusting, unacceptable, or unworthy of your society or fellowship as a church, so be it."
There was silence around the room. The stake president looked directly at me, and then at David. "I cannot find any fault in these men, except they are men" he said.
"David, do you love this man?"
"Yes sir, with my whole soul."
"Paul, is this the man you wish to spend eternity with?"
"Absolutely."
"Will you brethren allow us some time to deliberate?"
We left the conference room, and wandered the hallway looking for the water fountain, and finally, in about a half hour, were asked to return. The stake president lowered his head, and then looking first at me and then at David, said "Our dear brethren, in light of the standards of the church concerning the holy state of marriage, we must inform you that your union, such as it is, does not receive the blessings of the church. We cannot find a way to sanction this union, as righteously as you have lived inside of it for your adult lives" and he paused for a dramatic moment and looked directly at Brother Card, "and yet, as much as we admire you for your faithfulness to each other, to your families and to your children, we may not extend to you the blessings of the church. Thank you for meeting with us tonight."
We were ushered out of the room, and as we were driving home, Scott said, "So, what?"
"Well," David began, "he did not say we are excommunicated."
"Yeah, I noticed that, what a weird twist."
"I only want to make sure the kids are not harmed by any of this" I said.
"You know, someday the church is going to have to recognize gay marriage," Scott predicted. "I hope it is in my lifetime." He grabbed us from across the seats and hugged our necks, and when we entered the farm house, the kids were sitting in the living room with very expectant and confused faces.
"Hey. Who loves you?" David asked.
"Dad."
"What happened?" Bethany asked. Scott explained the barest outlines of the evening to her, leaving out names, and said we are going to keep going to church as usual every Sunday.
When Stephen at age 19 stood to speak at his missionary farewell in church, the week before he entered the missionary training center in Provo for his two-year call to serve in Paraguay, he said "I have never had a mother, but in my house and in my family, I have two Dads, and that has made all the difference. Here in front of me sit the two finest men I have ever known. God bless you, Dads, for all you have sacrificed for me and for Bethany."
Naturally I was crying. It's what I do.
On our vacation that year to celebrate our anniversary, David took me to the mountains of central Japan. We stayed in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese style hotel, with futon instead of western-style beds and an o-furo. We only spent a few days in Japan, because we had to get on to Bangkok to visit Bethany, who was teaching in a convent school.
While in the ryokan, in the middle of the night, he woke me up and said "Elder Campbell, would you please hold me? I am cold."