The Truest Pleasure (10 page)

When Tom got under the quilt I moved over to make room for him, but I scooted too far and had to shift back. His skin was a little cool from being outside. The bed tilted to his side as he laid down, making the mattress feel different.

“What time do you get up?” I said. But he didn't answer. I thought maybe he hadn't heard. “What do you like for breakfast?”

“Shhhhh,” he said, like he was afraid of waking Pa.

Tom was completely still, though he was close against me. He brushed my lips with his and his mustache tickled my nose. I giggled a little, and he giggled too. It was the first time I had heard him laugh all day.

“Shhhhh,” I said, and put a hand on his hard shoulder.

It is strange to have someone else in your bed, I thought. But it didn't feel strange in the way I expected. I felt curious as a little girl. What is going to happen? I thought.

And then I felt my gown moving. It was sliding up under the covers. The soft sateen slipped over my knees and over my
upper legs. It was tickling, but it was a good feeling. The cloth slipped over my skin whispering as it rubbed and pulled away. It was like I was sliding free as I had not been in a long time. The gown slipped over my hips and I thought, I haven't felt this free since before I can remember. Long ago I had that kind of naked freedom, maybe. My belly felt the center around which everything moved. And I thought, This pleasure is me. It is mine. For some reason I thought of tomatoes in the sun and fresh chips from chopped oak. Tom moved so slow he made me wait for every touch until it seemed like I couldn't hardly wait any longer. Easy does it, I could hear him thinking. And I kept smelling those warm tomatoes in the sun. What I felt was both less and more than I expected.

We got married at the end of summer. It was the time for cane cutting, molasses making, a job I always hated but Tom seemed to relish. It was terrible work, stripping the cane while it stood in the field, going down every row and breaking your back. Then it had to be cut at the ground and carried to the mill. I don't reckon there is any more boring job than feeding cane stalks bottom first to the rollers of a mill. You have to be careful not to get fingers caught; otherwise you could do it asleep. There is tens of thousands of stalks in a field and you push them in one by one while the horse goes turning the mill, leading hisself around. Yellow jackets get all crusted on the trough running down to the pan over the furnace.

Now cane always seemed to be just big grass. You bust the stalks to get the juice and cook it. But really you're fixing the sap from grass. I grant you that sorghum has a smoky dark
taste that is special. And if you forget where it comes from it's even better. But if they're undercooked, molasses are green and look like juice squeezed out of crabgrass and taste that way too.

Tom had learned to boil molasses at the Lewis place. I reckon it was work he took to from the first. He didn't seem to mind stripping the rows of slender stalks, and carrying the stalks to a pile beside the mill. He cleaned off the mill and oiled the rollers where they had rusted since last year. He started at daylight when the field and pasture was covered with dew. By dinnertime the horse had wore a circle in the grass around the mill, and the horse was wore out too. But Tom didn't even want to stop for dinner. He brushed away yellow jackets on the trough and when one fell in the sap he flicked it away.

The worst job by far was standing over the steaming pan, skimming and stirring. Tom had piled a heap of stovewood by the furnace and he kept the fire roaring. With the dipper he scooped bits of trash and yellow jackets that had got in the syrup.

Yellow jackets was worse that year than ever before. People said it was because of the drought. Their holes in the ground had not been flooded and all the young ones had hatched and gone looking for sweet things. Apples that fell in the orchard was tunneled and eat out by yellow jackets. Wherever you peeled apples and peaches there was jackets buzzing in your face. I got stung twice canning peaches. “Jassackets,” Pa called them and laughed. They buzzed around your lips and hands, and around your eyes. Maybe they liked the taste of tears. I didn't see how we could make molasses, there was such swarms of them fogging around.

Tom dug a hole to put the skimmings in. It was soon filled by dipperfuls of foam and trash scooped off the boiling pan. It's hard to describe the color of molasses skimmings. They are like scum and slime, and sometimes kind of green and sometimes brown and almost pink. Yellow jackets crusted the hole and swarmed a yard high every time Tom come near it.

“You watch out for jackets,” I said.

But he didn't answer. He was too busy skimming and stirring. The pan bubbled its sweet steam into the sky, and the steam mixed with the smoke of the furnace.

“And don't go and fall in,” I said as he leaned way over the middle of the long pan. What comes to the surface of boiling sorghum is partly dirt and flecks of crushed stalk. If the syrup is to be clear you've got to skim them off. A kind of shiny suds foams at the top and has to be dipped off.

“Good molasses have the color of fresh coffee when you hold them up to the light,” Tom said.

I scraped yellow jackets off the edge of the pan and throwed them in the hole with gobs of foam. Pa was feeding the mill and I helped at the furnace. Every time I scraped off a dozen jackets a hundred more appeared. I don't know where they all come from. There was jackets everywhere. I got stung again, and the horse got stung. Pa got stung at the mill. The long sweetening was calling every yellow jacket for miles. Honeybees joined the feast too, and where you see one bee you'll soon see a hundred.

But so far Tom hadn't been stung, even though he stood right over the pan. “Don't fall in,” I said again.

Tom was stirring the pan so the syrup would be evenly cooked. Juice run in the upper end and I figured the syrup in
the middle, where the pan was hottest, cooked first. Tom reached the dipper into the middle and only got more foam. He reached in again.

You know how it is when you go off balance and hardly know it until you hit something. I saw Tom's feet start to slip on the gravel and his stand give way. He tried to brace hisself but overreached with the dipper. Maybe the skimmer full of syrup was too heavy, or maybe he was dizzy from the steam.

I saw Tom falling, face down, right into the boiling molasses. The steam coming off the pan was thick as grease and he was pitching right through it toward the sap dark as licorice and root extracts. I don't know if I screamed or not as he fell. It was his neck and face I thought about, how the hot syrup would scald them. He must have squeezed his eyes shut. What I don't understand is how he got his elbows down in time to break the fall. I didn't even have time to reach out and catch him.

His elbows went into the boiling pan, and then his chest and armpits. It looked like he was drowning. This is what it is like to see a death, I thought. I will be a widow no sooner than I am married. His strong body will be burned to a blister, and I will never know my pleasure with him again.

I jerked Tom by the waist. He jumped back at the same time, and I flung him on the grass with the sorghum smoking off his arms and chest like the hottest compress you could imagine.

“Take it off,” I screamed. “Take your shirt off.” I tried to tear at the buttons, but the syrup burned my hands. It felt like he was covered with blistering slime.

Then the yellow jackets found him. They started buzzing in his face, and it seemed every yellow jacket in the valley come at once. It looked like he was wearing a shirt of them humming and crawling on every inch of him. Some caught in his mustache.

“Get the bucket,” he hollered, and pointed to the pail of water we used to rinse the dipper. I picked up the bucket and splashed it over his face and shoulders. That must have cooled off the syrup and drowned a few yellow jackets, but mostly it made them mad. They boiled up like they was spitting at his face and started to sting him. “Oh!” he hollered, and tried to get at the buttons on his shirt. But the buttons was all sticky.

“Run away from them,” I yelled. I fanned at the yellow jackets with my apron. I tried to think of what else I could do.

Tom started running across the pasture. I didn't know where he was running to, but I followed. And then I saw he was heading toward the river. There was a little field beyond the fence, and then the swimming hole where Joe and Locke used to go after working in the corn patch.

I followed Tom all the way to the river bank and saw him jump into the swimming hole. He dived in up to his neck, but the jackets kept hitting his face. He ducked into the cold water and stayed under a long time. I thought he wasn't going to come back up. I must have screamed and started into the river. Suddenly he raised his head out of the water and I saw the stream was carrying away hundreds of yellow jackets.

The water both hardened and melted the molasses a little. You could smell the smoky sweetness mixed with river water. Tom rubbed his face like he was washing it. I could see the red spots where the jackets had stung him on the neck.

But the yellow jackets was gone. Maybe there was one or two buzzing around his head, but he didn't even notice them. He acted dazed by the burns and stings. I reckon a bee sting always makes you shivery and cold. He shuddered in the icy water.

“Come on out,” I said. I wanted to put tobacco juice or ragweed juice on the stings. He would need a drink from the jug to stir his blood. Nothing will stand up to venom like liquor.

But Tom climbed up the far bank because it was closer. There was birches on that side hung with grape vines from their tops. A high bank rose where we used to climb and swing out on the vines when we was younguns. Tom pulled hisself up the bank with a vine. I reckon he wanted to get in the sun, away from the cold water, and far from the molasses furnace and yellow jackets.

With the burns and stings on Tom's face and elbows and chest I wondered how we would manage our lovemaking. But when young people are in love they always find a way. We just went slow at first and took more care. And the care and limitations made it go even better. I felt I was bringing him back to health. We give a whole new meaning to the term “home remedies.”

Another thing Tom liked to make was cider. He had never had his own apple trees before. Pa had set out two orchards right after the war, one on the top of the mountain and one on the hill above the house. In fall we had Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Winesaps, Ben Davis, and a tree of
big Wolf Rivers for pies and sauce. We also had a plum tree and a pear tree.

It took Tom less than a week to recover from the yellow jacket stings. Turned out the burns didn't amount to much. I guess his shirt had protected him and he had jumped back so fast the only real burns was on his elbows. But the places there formed scabs and begun to heal. I think he was lucky. He never was the kind of man who could set around for long. The day after he was stung he moped on the porch and didn't say anything when Pa and me went out to finish the molasses. The stings made him weak and the scratch marks on his side made him sore. He didn't complain.

I found Tom was the sort of man that had to be moving toward a goal or he couldn't stand it. I reckon it was the way he felt in control of things. And he wouldn't ever do anything else. He never did go hunting, and he never did drive stobs in the ground and play horseshoes. He liked to eat good, but he never did drink any liquor. Even Pa liked to take a drink from time to time, as I did myself, when it wouldn't hurt anybody.

Like I said, I found out early Tom liked the pleasures of the bed. He liked to sleep when he was tired, and he liked love things too. For somebody that didn't have anything to say he liked loving a lot. I reckon all men do, and most women too, for that matter. I don't have any way to compare him to anybody, but it occurred to me he did his talking through loving. Being with Tom was like taking part in a long conversation that could begin anywhere and might go this way and that, but was always surprising at some point. From what I've heard other women say about such things, including Florrie, I believe Tom was special. I believe he
put his mind to loving the way he did to other work. Everything he did was careful and right, except for falling in the molasses. He worked his way along and most everything he touched turned out right. I even told Florrie how much I enjoyed Tom, which wasn't like me. And I later wished I never had.

Two weeks after he was burned Tom hitched up the wagon and drove to town to buy a cider mill. It cost him eight dollars, and took him another day to get it set up and oiled and working. Next he cut brush and shoveled the old road up the mountain so he could drive the wagon to the big orchard. It was the first time I could remember that we harvested all the apples. Usually we gathered some in sacks and carried them down the mountain. The rest got left for deer and birds and frost to turn to mush.

Tom went into the grove and picked every single apple. He put the different kinds in separate sacks, and he picked every good apple out of the grass. When he was finished the yellow jackets and birds had only the rotten ones and those half busted.

We wrapped the best apples in newspapers and put them in barrels in the cellar. All together we had more than twenty bushels, and Tom sold some at the village. But the apples he had picked up, those that had been stuck with straw or bruised, we washed for making cider. We worked every evening after he come in from the field, grinding fruit in the mill and squeezing juice out in the press. We sweated in the cool evenings, churning the apples into sweet smelling pieces, then screwing down the press to crush them. I loved to see the juice stream out the cracks of the press. You could smell every
fresh spurt foaming gold and winky. I kept a pine limb to brush away yellow jackets.

Apples don't smell like anything else unless it's flowers. The white flesh of an apple turning gold when it breaks open smells like the essence of earth. The sap is an extract of all the sun and wind and rain of the summer. Cider already tastes like a kind of liquor, even before it hardens.