Pamela Morsi (6 page)

“Oh my!” She gasped sharply. “That feels very strange.”

He spread his palm upon her skin and held the full breast in his hand.

“I never imagined that it felt like … like this to be touched.”

He brought his other hand to grasp her other breast.

“It’s as if … as if my whole body is connected to this one place.”

Would the woman never shut up?

“I don’t think I—”

Moss angled his head and brought his lips down upon her own, effectively silencing her at last. The taste of her stirred his memory. She was sweet, almost treacly like she’d been sampling honeysuckle. Tonight he knew it to be her own special seductive savor. He reveled in it, sucking indulgently at her mouth as he stroked and fondled her naked bosom.

She made tiny, pleased and pleading noises at the back of her throat that coaxed him onward eagerly to the edge of his control.

He was hard now, hard and desperate to press her against him. He loosed her breasts to grasp her buttocks and urge her tightly to the ache in the front of his trousers.

He moaned at the contact. It was everything. It was not nearly enough.

He squeezed and handled her backside pleasurably for several moments before recalling with enthusiasm what little impediment her thin josey was to him. He jerked the hem of the singular undergarment out of his way, and immediately his hands encountered her bare flesh. The smooth, delicate skin covering a firm, rounded derriere was far too great a temptation to resist. He didn’t even try. Exploring with urgency, he clasped and caressed and cosseted. His huge hands could cover her completely. It made him feel powerful, masculine, conquering.

He needed more. His only thought, if thought it was and not instinct, was to be inside her.

Ending the kiss with a hasty reluctance, he circled her waist sat her once more on the edge of the kitchen table. He grasped her knees and parted them, stepping in close between her thighs. The scent of her arousal spurred him forward. He wanted her. He wanted all of her. And he wanted it all now.

He lowered his head to her bosom. The nipples were hardened and thrust out before him as if pleading for his attention. His tongue snaked out and swiped at the right one.

“Oh! Oh! That’s … oh, that’s …”

She was talking again. Somehow it no longer bothered him.

He nuzzled against her and sucked at her breasts, voracious in appetite. He soothed and massaged the smooth straightness of her back, following the trail of her spine from between her shoulder blades to the narrowness of her waist and beyond.

She buried her hands in his hair, stroking him and holding him against her. There was no need. He wasn’t moving away. And the touch of her fingers only excited him further.

Her heels dug into the back of his thighs urging him forward. And he was ready. The furies of nature set course for his destination. He wanted to be inside her.

“Um yes … oh yes, that … oh …”

Her words no longer had sense or pattern. They spoke to him with amazing clarity.

Moss released his hold upon her just long enough to jerk the galluses from his shoulders and allowed them to dangle near his knees. He clasped her waist again, not able to bear the loss of contact for more than an instant.

He stood at full height once more, reluctant to leave the warmth of her bosom but eager to taste her lips again. She met his mouth, her own open, willing. She wrapped her arms around his neck, giving as he got.

The hot, sweet flavor of her fired him beyond caution.

Moss reached for the buttons of his trousers. Beneath them, his erection strained and ached and pulsed with need.

“Eulie, you in there?”

The words crashed in upon the tiny, fog-lit world of two people with the effect of dousing cold water on a pair of hounds.

“Rans!” Her voice was almost a squeak.

Moss glanced toward the door. The boy stood there, slack-jawed and staring.

Contrary reactions swept through Moss. He wanted to chase the boy away. He wanted to protect the modesty of the woman in his arms.

Instinctively, he chose the latter, moving closer to shield her body from the sight of the intruder.

“Get out of here!” he yelled furiously.

“I was just …” her brother began, flustered. “I come back and saw the light and—”

“Get out of here!”

The boy fled. And with him went every drop of mutual passion.

Moss looked at the woman in his arms. Embarrassed, she had covered her bosom with an arm and was trying to pull down the hem of her josey to cover her nakedness.

He released her immediately and turned his back to her.

“Beg your pardon, ma’am,” he said.

T
HE
sounds of a raucous fiddle filled the mountain clearing lit by the glow of a dozen torches. He stood in the middle of the shouting cheering circle.

Shuffle, slap, heel, stomp. Shuffle, slap, heel, stomp. Stomp, kick. Stomp, kick.

He glanced over at his rival. Pomper Dickson was a sleek-limbed and graceful dancer, but now he was sweating profusely and tiring badly. Pomper would not beat him tonight. He was going to win this competition. He was going to win the right, once and for all, to claim himself finest jigger on the mountain.

“Look at him,” a young voice whispered. “He’s twitching.”

It was strange how he could hear the small voice over the whine of the fiddle and the noise of the crowd.

He ignored it. He kept dancing.

Pomper was slowing, slowing so that he could hardly keep the rhythm, and all his fancy steps were gone.

He jigged on. He held his upper body straight and rigid while his feet flew against the packed dirt beneath him.

Shuffle, slap, heel, stomp. Shuffle, slap, heel, stomp. Stomp, kick. Stomp, kick.

He glanced over as Pomper stopped abruptly, dropping to his knees in exhaustion, trying to catch his breath.

He had won it. He had truly won it. The knowledge swept through him like a new burst of energy and he twirled and stomped with renewed enthusiasm. He was the one. The finest jigger on the mountain.

“Don’t touch him,” a voice warned breathily.

There was no one close enough to touch him.

He jigged on, allowing his gaze to search through the faces in the crowd. They were there. They were all cheering for him.

There was Myrtle with her strawberry blonde curls, and luscious little Garda June. He spied Dora Dickson, Pompeas dark-eyed sister. And, of course, there was Sary. His sassy Sary. Her smile shining like a new copper penny.

He should get that girl alone some time and kiss her. Lord knows, he’d always wanted to kiss her. Maybe tonight. Tonight, with the taste of victory on his lips. Maybe tonight he would kiss her.

With high step and full jig he danced over in her direction. She was smiling at him. His sassy Sary was smiling at him, and it was a smile a man could never forget.

The ground exploded in front of him. Pain ripped through him like fire and he was falling, falling, falling.

“Sary!” he screamed as he hit the ground with a thud.

He was dead.

No, no—he wasn’t dead. He opened his eyes. He was alive. Thank God he was alive. He was alive, and he had to find Sary.

He raised himself slightly on one elbow. The pain shot through him, searing him like fire. He grimaced, but he was grateful. He was alive. Thank God, he was alive.

Just a few feet away from him a bloody, severed limb lay in the dew-soaked grass, steam still rising from its torn opening as the body warmth inside escaped into the cool air of a Virginia spring morning.

He felt the bile rise to his throat and thought he might vomit. He thought of the leg’s owner. Poor bastard, poor unlucky bastard. He hoped the man was dead. Better dead than to live life as a cripple.

It was then that he recognized the boot.

“No!”

As Jeptha screamed the word, he sat bolt upright. His cry was echoed by the swarm of children around him surrounding his bed who gazed at him wide-eyed and cowered away.

“What are you doing?” he asked through labored breathing. His heart was pounding, and he was covered with sweat.

“We weren’t doing nothing,” the boy, Rans, insisted defensively.

“Your bed was squeaking, and it woke us all up,” one of the twins explained.

“We didn’t mean to bother you,” the other one assured him. “We thought you might be sick or something.”

He had had another one of his nightmares. Another of the frightful visions that had plagued his sleep for twenty years. He had seen it all again, lived it all again. The ground exploding, the scream, the pain, the severed
leg wearing his boot. Was once not enough to live through such a moment? In his restless sleep, Jeptha had lived through it now perhaps a thousand times.

“We all have bad dreams from time to time,” the older girl, Clara, said.

“You was twitching,” the spoiled little brat girl told him accusingly. “Twitching like you was running or … or …”

Dancing. Jeptha thought the word but did not utter it. He’d imagined himself dancing at the spring social. He had seen himself once more as he had been, young and strong and whole.

“Get away from me, all of you,” he yelled angrily at them. “And leave me be.”

They scurried back from him as if he were a rabid dog. Jeptha supposed that he knew how one felt. He ruminated unkindly upon why his nephew had married a woman with a whole passel of children in tow. He didn’t want to see anyone. He didn’t want to know anyone. It had been better than twenty years since he’d had more than a word or two to say to anyone but Moss. How in the devil was he suppose to continue his life with a half dozen noisy, nosy children romping around the cabin?

He reached for his shirt and pants hanging upon the bedpost. The former he pulled over his head without ceremony. The latter he dragged beneath the covers, managing to struggle into them inexpertly from a lying-down position. The gentlemanly behavior was not as much modesty as it was defense. The uneven stumps of his legs were a sight he could barely look upon himself without recoil. He would not inflict upon himself the horror and pity of onlookers.

The ripped stump on the right was the one lost to the cannon shot. It was the longer of the two; badly sewn, it was jagged and lumpy just above the knee, part of the useless joint still inside. The left stump was infinitely neater. Cut cleanly at midthigh with a surgeon’s saw, it was carefully covered over with a flap of skin and stitched with the capable competence of a physician who did a dozen amputations per day.

The front of his short trousers buttoned, he was clothed and ready to start the morning. He had long since given up such civil niceties as washing and shaving. Under no circumstances would he bathe naked in the creek as Moss did. And he was far to proud to ask his nephew to carry water to fill a tub in the cabin for him. He swiped off with a rag from time to time, frequently enough to keep the lice at bay. And he just allowed his beard to grow as it would. He didn’t see anybody and nobody ever saw him. There was no purpose in his life for dandifying. There was no purpose in his life at all.

Grasping the headboard for balance, Jeptha leaned over and felt beneath the bed until he found his cart. His movements were slower and more deliberate than usual. Carelessness had caused more than one tumble onto the floor. He didn’t relish the bruises at any time, but now that he no longer had his privacy, pride was at issue as well.

He slid down the side of the bed onto the cart without much trouble. He glanced up at the children. None were looking directly at him, but he felt their surreptitious gaze. They were curious and could hardly be blamed for that, he reminded himself. The whole world seemed to be drawn to the sight. The
young were just honest enough to be unable to hide the morbid fascination.

Jeptha understood that. He’d been a boy once himself. A curious, cheerful, adventuresome boy, full of hopes and aspiration, though he tried not to remember it.

The dreams were the worst. In the dreams it was often as it had been last night. He was Jigging Jeptha Barnes once more. Young and full of life. A delight to the ladies’ eyes, not an abhorrence they couldn’t take their gaze from.

Jeptha picked up his “oars,” the two little blocks of wood that he used to propel himself forward. Forward, into another sunrise, another day, another eternity of hell on earth.

He hadn’t thought that he would live. In the field hospital, when they’d cut off his other leg, putrid with gangrene, he hadn’t even offered an argument. He hadn’t believed that he would live.

Why should he live? Neither of his brothers had. Nils had been cut down by a blunted saber at Antietam. And young Zackary, just fourteen, had been blown to bits by a canon shot at Piney Ridge. DeWitt Collier, his sister’s husband, had fallen at Gettysburg before ever getting a glimpse of his baby boy. Claude Pusser and Madison Pierce. Judd Browning and Tom Leight. Even his old rival, Pomper Dickson—they were all long since dead. People said that they were lucky the war had never come to the Sweetwood. Seemed that it couldn’t have got much closer than touching every family.

Jeptha had come home in the back of a wagon, willing himself to live long enough to be buried on his own home ground His days were numbered; the doctors
had said so and he was certain it was true. Now, after twenty-two years, the number seemed an infinitely larger one than he had ever counted.

The children began filing out of the room, apparently intent upon getting breakfast.

“Don’t go down to the kitchen,” he ordered gruffly.

The little group turned to look at him as if he’d suddenly grown legs.

“Why not?” Clara asked with sincere innocence.

“We’re all washed,” one twin said.

“And dressed,” finished the other.

“I’m hungry,” young Minnie declared, her tone typically whining.

“I do as I see fit, old man,” Rans declared.

Jeptha wanted to knock their youthful heads together. But it wouldn’t give them one bit more of understanding. Time would soon enough teach them the ways of the world.

He didn’t answer, but rolled his cart past them, over to the doorway. From the corner of the porch, in the faint gray light of daybreak, he could see the little kitchen building.

It was the morning after his nephew’s wedding night. Unlike the children, he was quite aware of that significance. He wasn’t about to go busting in upon a couple’s privacy. Or to let the young ones do it either.

They had followed him out on the porch and were now also staring with curiosity at the little building.

“Ain’t none stirring down that way,” he said.

“How strange,” Clara said. “Eulie is always the first one up.”

“Look,” a twin said. “There’s no smoke coming from the chimney.”

“If she ain’t even got a fire going,” her sister concluded. “When will we ever eat?”

“I’m hungry,” the youngest complained.

“Oh, shut your mouths!” the boy ordered. “If you weren’t all so dad blamed ignorant you’d know they just got married yesterday.”

The girls looked at him blankly.

“We do know they got married yesterday,” Clara said. “What does that have to do with …” The pretty young woman’s eyes widened in horror and her cheeks were suddenly stained bright red. “You don’t think …”

She glanced down at the strangely quiet kitchen and then at Jeptha. He deliberately refused to look her in the eye. With a gasp of horrified embarrassment, she turned and rushed into the cabin.

The other girls watched her departure with puzzled confusion.

“What’s wrong with her?” one twin asked.

“She sure got blushed and befuddled over something,” the other declared.

“Clara’s just realized that a new married pair would have spent their night shagging,” Rans explained, his tone condescending and worldly wise.

“Shagging?” The twins had obviously never heard the term.

“What’s shagging?” Little Minnie asked.

“That’s not a proper word to be speaking to young girls,” Jeptha told the boy sternly.

Rans gave Jeptha a cursory glance, his gaze lingering on the wheeled cart. Deliberately he ignored the older man’s advice.

“I don’t know how gals can live as long as they do and know nothing about how things is,” Rans commented
with superior sarcasm. “Shagging is how men and women is just like the animals,” he began.

“I don’t think it’s your place to be explaining things to your little sisters,” Jeptha interrupted. “Eulie should do that, or perhaps Clara. They are both older and female.”

The boy bristled.

“They’s my sisters,” Rans answered, his voice full of challenge. “I’m the man of my family. I can tell them whatever I want.”

“Well, I’m telling you to keep your knowledge to yourself,” Jeptha warned.

“And what are you going to do about it, old man?”

Jeptha gave Rans a long, narrow-eyed look.

The boy relaxed, apparently accepting the silence as impotence. He was completely unconcerned, nearly grinning. But he’d made the mistake of standing too close. Like a flash, Jeptha reached out and grabbed him by the flesh of his collarbone.

The girls gasped and stepped back. Rans, succumbing to the pressure at his neck, dropped to his knees beside the cripple cart. Moderating his grip, but keeping it steady, Jeptha eyeballed the youngster.

Having used his hands and arms to propel himself through life for more than twenty years, he was extremely strong. He could have snapped the boy’s neck like a chicken bone. But Jeptha was careful not to hurt him. He was simply trying to get the young fellow’s attention.

“Your sisters,” he said quietly, “will all grow up and learn the ways of men and women soon enough. As man of the family, it’s your job to keep them sheltered from that knowledge till they’re done with childhood.”

Rans glared at the man in mingled humiliation and disbelief, as if it were impossible that he could be held as securely as a chained prisoner by one crippled man at arm’s length.

Jeptha’s tone was soft, almost conciliatory. Now that he had the youngster in his power, it was possible to see him as simply an orphan boy with no parental guidance. A strange tug pulled at Jeptha’s heart. He could recall what it was like to be young and cocky and oh, so very sure of oneself. He didn’t envy the young Rans even a bit.

“An important part of being a man,” he told the boy, “is knowing when to speak and when to keep your silence. It’s a hard lesson to learn. But I think you can start here today.”

Jeptha could see that the boy’s skin beneath his grip was completely white and bloodless.

“Are you ready to start practicing that lesson?” Jeptha asked him.

The boy didn’t immediately answer. He didn’t want to give in. He didn’t want to be bested. Jeptha understood that. Nobody liked it But it was a thing a man had to learn to take with grace.