Pamela Morsi (11 page)

“I want to be inside you,” he told her, hoping that she understood. “I want to put myself inside you.”

Deliberately he pressed against her, wanting her to feel the length of his erection against her belly. He was pretty sure she was a maiden, and though he didn’t know it for certain, he’d heard it said that the first rime for a woman was difficult and painful. Moss didn’t want it to be either. But how that was to be avoided he had no notion. He was desperate to shag down, tight in her. He couldn’t allow her to make him stop.

She was anxious, he could tell. Anxious and more than a little bit scared.

He caressed her to comfort her, assure her. He
slipped one hand in between them and stroked her intimately. She startled, but then steeled herself to his touch.

“You’re my wife,” he stated to her firmly, hoping that she understood that this was her duty. “You are my wife and we will make a life together.”

“Yes, that’s what I want,” she whispered.

“I’ll keep you by my side always,” he assured her. “Once Uncle Jeptha is passed and your youngers are gone, we’ll head west together.”

“What?” Her question was unusually loud in the darkness.

He was in no mood to repeat himself. His hand was wet from her. He shifted, positioning himself to enter.

“What do you mean?”

“Easy, Eulie,” he told her, as if attempting to gentle her like a skittish mare.

“Wait! Stop!”

She was balking, trying to push away. He didn’t think he’d hurt her yet, but his was poised to enter her and he was sure that he would.

“Wait! Stop!”

She slapped at his caress.

“Don’t fight me, Eulie,” he told her. “The worst will be all over in just a minute.”

She continued to struggle. “How many hands have you got?” she complained.

“Just two, Eulie,” he answered. “But I got three legs, and the one in the middle is aching like the gout.”

“Please! Stop! I need to ask …”

He was on the threshold of her body and couldn’t wait another moment. He was in no condition for conversation. He covered her mouth with his own. The
kiss was his alone; she was writhing and resistant.

Moss wanted to get it over quickly. That would be best, he was certain. Ignore her fear and get the hurtful part behind them. He began thrusting himself inside. Her body was wet and ready, but she was narrow and untried. And she was fighting in earnest.

Her fingernails dug into the side of his neck. Momentarily he relaxed his grip and she got free of him.

“Eulie, sweetheart,” he coaxed as he reached for her again.

She jerked away and tried to crawl off the pallet. He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her back into the corner. To his amazement, she began to kick and scratch.

“Easy, darlin',” he soothed her. “Easy, easy.”

When he tried to kiss her again, she angled her head to the side and sunk her teeth into his cheek.

Moss screamed loud enough to wake the heavens.

He got to his feet clumsily. He was cold sober now.

From across the silence of the darkness, the two stared at each other.

“Cheese and Christmas, woman, you bit me.”

“You shouldn’t curse,” she told him.

“Curse!” he hollered. “I ain’t even cursed, but if ever I was of a mind to do so, now would be the time. Lord a’mighty, I’m bleeding.”

He heard her scrambling to her feet. She was undoubtedly running away. She’d probably go up to the cabin and sleep with her sisters until his temper wore off.

To his amazement, she poked a twig into the coals of the fire and lit some tallow scraps in the reflector
bowl. As light filled the room, they faced each other.

Her long hair was wildly tousled and her eyes were wide and scared. Moss didn’t know if she was scared of him or of what she’d done.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

He removed his hand down from his face. She gasped. He looked down at his palm and saw it was full of blood.

“The face always bleeds worse than it is,” he told her.

“Let me get some witch hazel to put on it,” she said, hurrying to the cupboard.

“That’d be good,” he agreed. “You’re probably rabid.”

She quickly gathered up a pile of rags and a pan of water along with the witch hazel. Moss seated himself and checked the placket of his flannels, modestly rebuttoning himself. His erection had disappeared more quickly than dust in a rainstorm. Fortunately, her attention was completely upon his injury.

When she’d cleaned it thoroughly she brought the reflector bowl to the table to get a better look. She didn’t seem pleased with what she saw.

The witch hazel stung like blue blazes. Moss put all his concentration into not wincing.

“It might leave a scar,” she said her voice trembling nervously.

Moss snorted with unconcern. “I don’t reckon I was so pretty before that a scar now would hurt my chances.”

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I just … what were you talking about? What about my youngers leaving and Uncle Jeptha passing away?”

She put a fresh sousing of witch hazel on the bite. He grimaced.

“Blow on it,” he said.

“What?”

“Blow on it. It burns awful.”

Moss Collier sat in his ill-lit kitchen in the middle of the night with his stringy-haired bride puffing cooling breaths against his cheek.

“Is that better?” she asked finally.

“That’s fine,” he said.

She pressed a clean rag to the bite.

“Hold this tight against it,” she told him. “It’s the only way to get that bleeding stopped.”

Moss did as he was bid.

“I knew you wasn’t the type to hit a woman,” she said.

“What?”

“If you was ever prone to strike me,” she said, “I suspect this might well have been the occasion.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Preacher Thompson,” she answered. “He worried when I came out here that you might take to beating me.”

Moss raised an eyebrow. It hurt. He determinedly kept his face still.

“I ain’t never beat nobody, and I ain’t about to start now,” he said. “Although I would like to turn you over my knee, but I’m afraid you’d chew my foot off.”

She glanced up sharply as if she thought him serious, then as she looked into his eyes, a smile curved upon her face and she laughed delightedly. He hadn’t heard her laugh before. It was a very nice laugh. It was the kind of laugh a man could live with for a very long time.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I am willing to … to do my wifely duty.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Moss told her. “I truly ain’t in the mood no longer.”

“What were you saying about my youngers?” she asked.

He ignored her question, patting gently at the injury on his face.

“I think my face is beginning to swell,” he told her.

“I’ll see if I can find some chervil and make a poultice,” she said, turning toward the storage shelf.

“There ain’t much in that old herb box,” he admitted.

“I know, I looked through it this afternoon.”

As she riffled through the contents of the herb box, he watched her. She was still in that short josey, and with her squatted down that way, he could see her knees and a good deal of her exposed thigh. She was pretty in her own way. He’d known that the day at the falls. He’d just not been able to really think about her that way since the wedding. Now tonight, with a little liquor in him, it had been
all
he could think about.

“Here’s some,” she said delighted. “There ain’t a lot of it, but enough to do.”

“It’s probably older than Methuselah,” Moss told her.

“Might as well try it,” she said as she hurried back over to him with it in hand.

He watched her dampen the chervil. It wasn’t thick enough to make a paste, but she spread it on a piece of cloth thinly enough for it to stick. She laid it directly upon the bite and then wrapped a long strip to wrap around his head and hold it in place. The bandage covered
up one eye and forced Moss to use his other one to watch her. Her touch was very gentle and her movements confident and certain. She was accustomed to taking care of people, he thought. She’d probably been taking care of people all her life.

“What did you mean about us going west and about the children?” she asked him.

“Maybe we should talk about it tomorrow,” he said.

“No, I think we should talk about it tonight,” she assured him. “What is it all about?”

Moss shrugged as he gingerly fingered his injury.

“Marrying you was not something that I ever intended to do,” he stated simply.

She looked genuinely troubled, her cheeks stained with blush.

“You surely know that a man, any man, will have made some plans for his life,” he said. “My plans didn’t include a wife and half dozen kinfolk.”

“Only five,” she piped in quietly.

“What?”

“Only five,” Eulie repeated. “I haven’t got a half dozen youngers, only five.”

“Oh, only five!” he exclaimed, his tone rife with sarcasm. “Well, I’m working as hard as I can to get that number down to none.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I thought that there was not any way to go west now with all of you depending upon me,” he said. “But tonight I got it into my head that I could make things work out. That if I could get this family down to a reasonable size, I could still go west.”

“Go west?” Her tone suggested that she had never heard of such a thing.

“I’d always thought to go alone,” he explained. “I never imagined myself with a wife. But others have done it, I suspect we can, too.”

“Go west?” she repeated again stupidly. “Where west? You mean like Cobbly Creek or Three Rivers?”

He turned to look at her as if she were out of her mind.

“Why would I want to go to Cobbly Creek or Three Rivers?” he asked her. “The life there is no different than here. I want to go to Texas.”

“Texas?” Eulie looked thoughtful. “I’ve heard the name of that place. Is that on the other side of Knoxville?”

Moss laughed, regretting it immediately when the movement pulled painfully against his injury.

“Oh yes, Eulie,” he told her. “It’s a ways farther than the other side of Knoxville.”

“Do you have land there?”

“I don’t now, but I’m going to get some,” he said.

The excitement he’d always felt, the rush to get out there to see a new place and meet new people, swept through him and he wanted to share it. He wanted her to understand it.

“There is land out there, Eulie,” he told her. “Land almost for the asking. Grazing land, low rolling hills as far as the eye can see. It’s a land for cattle.”

“Cattle?”

He nodded.

“If I go out to Texas,” he said, “I can graze cattle.”

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked him.

“I’m no farmer,” he told her. “I never have been, never will be. I hate scratching in the ground. I’m a herdsman, Eulie.”

“But everybody around here is farmers,” she said.

He nodded in agreement.

“That’s what we do in these hills,” she continued “We farm.”

He didn’t argue that either.

“That’s why I want to get away,” he told her. “I want to go where there are people like me.”

“But
we
are people like you, the folks in the Sweetwood are all like you. And we’re farmers, we’ve always been farmers.”

“That’s not true,” he told her. “Our granddaddies way back as far as Scotland and Wales, they was all herdsmen, cattlemen. They came here to find land to run cattle.”

Eulie looked at him skeptically. “I never heard of such a thing,” she said.

“But it’s true,” he assured her. “Nobody would have picked this land for farming.”

“They wouldn’t?”

He shook his head.

“The ground is too sloped, there are too many rocks. The dirt is too thin for corn and too loamy for cotton. The trees all around sap up the water and give too much shade.” He shook his head and tutted with disapproval. “If a man was looking to farm, he could hardly pick a worse spot than these mountains.”

“So our folks, our forefathers, they didn’t come here to farm,” she said.

“No they didn’t,” he told her. “When the old Scotsman settled here and built this cabin, he never meant to farm. The ground is so poor you couldn’t raise a row with a pitchfork. He meant to run cattle.”

“How can you know that?” she asked.

“The licks. You’ve seen the licks,” he told her. “You’ve seen those old hollowed-out salt logs in the woods.”

She nodded. “But those were just for their farm animals,” she said. “They had to bring salt for a couple of milk cows, maybe, and a litter of hogs.”

“If they had kept just milk cows and hogs, they would have left salt for them near the cabin, like we do. They would not have carried it up into the woods where every deer and bear and raccoon on the mountain would take his share.”

She still seemed uncertain.

“If they, us, if the people of the Sweetwood were herders before, why aren’t they now?”

“Because the hills were too high and the hollows too deep,” he told her. “The land is no good for farming. It’s equally no good for herding.”

“Are you saying the Sweetwood is no good?”

“It’s plenty good for hunting and fishing,” he admitted. “But if a man wants farming or herding, he’d do better to look elsewhere.”

“But we get by,” she said. “Year after year we put in a crop. Some make it, some don’t, but folks get by.”

“I want more than getting by,” he said “I want … I want more to show for my labor than what I track in on my shoes. I want more than I even know, Eulie. And I’m just figuring how to get it.”

“How’s that?”

“By leaving all this behind and starting again in Texas,” he said. “I’ve been saving every nickel I can put by, selling everything I can.”

“You’re really leaving here?”

He nodded with certainty. “It’s been my dream,” he
told her. “It’s been my lifelong dream. I’ve been thinking about it since I was a boy. All I’ve ever wanted was to put this place behind me and never look back.”

Eulie’s expression was complete astonishment.

“I’ve only been waiting for Uncle Jeptha’s passing,” he admitted. “I can’t walk out on my responsibility to him. He’s held me here a lot of years now. And yesterday I was thinking that you and your youngers were going to hold me here even more. But tonight I realized that a wife wouldn’t be such a bad thing to take along. A man should bring things with him that are in short supply—a good horse, a reliable handgun—well, women are in pretty short supply out there as well. I’ll just take you with me and we’ll settle there together.”