Pamela Morsi (25 page)

She was relaxed beneath him, as if all her emptiness, both flesh and spirit, was, at last, full. He felt a surge of pure tenderness for her. He wanted to care for her, shield her, protect her from everything that might hurt her in the world. Including himself.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she answered.

“That’s the worst part,” he promised. “The rest will be better.”

He began to move within her, withdrawing and then pressing forward once more. The snug fit inside her was infinitely pleasurable. He had to clamp down tightly on his jaw to keep from losing control.

She lay docile beneath him, allowing him to do his will for perhaps a minute or more. Then she raised her knees, opening herself more fully to him. With more room, he was able to intensify his thrust, almost pulling out and then pressing fully within once more. With her feet beneath her on the ground, she gained a little leverage, and she began to meet his rhythmic movements with her own.

It was smoother, hotter, finer than anything he had ever felt. No woman, ever, had so filled his senses and thrilled his body this way.

His blood was pounding. His body aching. His seed screaming for release. He was not going to be able to hold off. He was going to spend himself early and then it would be over. There could only be one time and in another moment, it would be ended.

Determinedly he took his mind elsewhere. If he allowed himself to think of the hot, wetness, the tightness of her surrounding him, it would be all over. He had to think of something else. He had to think of somewhere else.

Moss took his heart to the place he’d always taken it. To that mystical haven that had always offered sanctuary from the cares of his day, the sorrows of his past, the pain of the present.

Deliberately he dreamed of Texas.

In his mind’s eye he saw the vast rolling prairie, with native bluestem high as the horse’s flank as he rode through it. Above him the sky was endless and unclouded. He could feel the warmth of the west wind against his face and hear the call of meadowlarks. Evidence of abundant game, both large and small, was all around him. Cattle grazed in the distance, sleek and healthy. The ground was fresh and new beneath the horse’s hooves, unsullied by scythe or plow.

He was there. He was there at last. And it was everything that he had ever imagined it to be. New visions. Unfamiliar vistas. A new earth, wholly his own and of his own making.

It was boldness, perfection. It was life at all its finest. And it was her. Eulie. The woman beneath him. The woman whose body now joined with his own. She was all. She was everything. She was his Texas.

The hot flood of dream and desire and the destiny of the human race shot from him in spurts so powerful they were akin to pain.

“I love you!” he cried out to her.

He could only hope that in her passion she hadn’t heard his words.

H
E
needed to leave. It was time to go. If he was ever to get away, it was now. Forget the crop and the sorghum, the apple picking and the root cellar. If he did not leave for Texas very soon, he might never get away at all.

Such were the thoughts of Moss Collier less than a week later as he walked in from the fields, sweat-soaked and aching. He worked hard, punishingly hard, attempting to exhaust himself. He hadn’t had a decent night of sleep since he’d held her in his arms out on the island. He would have thought that getting a fine measure of sexual relief would have made everything easier. But it was worse. It was much worse. His appetite was whetted, and it seemed that now that he knew what it was like to hold her, caress her, put himself inside her, he could no longer live without that satisfaction.

Beside him young Rans, leading the hitched jenny, was tight-lipped and sullen. Still angry, Moss suspected. He wasn’t quite sure what was the last thing they’d argued about, but for certain Moss had been as testy as a bear with his butt in a briar bush for days. He almost felt sorry for the fellow. Except, of course, it was almost impossible to feel sorry for anyone as prickly
and hardheaded as Eulie’s little brother. When he left, the bulk of the crop work would fall to the boy. That would be a tremendous job for one so young. But he had to leave it to him. He had to get away.

Eulie had not been herself for the last week either. Moss’s mood was bad, but he’d always been rough-spoken and grouchy. Eulie—endlessly, hopelessly, annoyingly cheerful Eulie—had turned into a fitful, unhappy complainer. She was sniping and grousing at everybody in earshot from daylight until dark. Nothing that anybody said or did seem to suit her. She wasn’t sleeping very much either. And it showed in the heaviness of her step and the dark circles under her eyes.

The Colliers were, Moss conceded, a decidedly miserable pair. The uneasy truce of two people selfishly seeking separate goals had been shattered by a consummation that had been more than physical communion. They, two souls, had become one flesh, and such a confluence was not so easily dissipated.

“Moss! Moss!”

He heard her calling his name and looked up. She was running up the ridge toward them at a frantic pace, her eyes wide and frightened.

Fear leaping into his heart, Moss raced toward her.

“What is it? What’s happened?” he called out.

The next moment she was in his arms and too breathless at first to even speak.

“Minnie,” she finally managed to get out.

Moss glanced up looking around, frantically surveying the distance as far as he could see. He saw nothing amiss and did not see Eulie’s little sister anywhere.

“What’s happened to Minnie?” he asked.

She was shaking her head now, tears in her eyes. Moss continued to hold her in his arms. She was shaking.

“I can’t find her,” Eulie said. “I can’t find her anywhere.”

“She has to be somewhere.”

“I noticed that she was gone,” Eulie said. “I started looking and I started calling. I’ve searched everywhere. She’s not anywhere. Oh, Moss, I don’t know if she’s wandered into the woods or fallen into the river.”

Neither choice was a good one. A little girl in a heavy dress, even one who was a good swimmer, which Minnie was not, would be rapidly sucked downstream and over the falls. The sharp, jagged rocks might not be fatal, but drowning would be likely. The woods were little better, laced with the traps and snares of hunters. Bears and panthers were more rare these days, but snakes, even bees could prove a danger to a young child lost.

“When did you last see her?” Moss asked. “What was she doing?”

“I … I don’t know. I … I saw her at breakfast and then after, I suppose. I was working in the garden. The twins were there. I thought she was there, but …”

She gave him a look of helpless anxiety.

“We’ve been calling and calling and she doesn’t answer,” she told him.

“Where is everyone else?”

“I sent Clara up to the bald point at the top of the ridge to see if she could spot her. The twins are tramping the edge of the river in either direction and Uncle Jeptha is searching the trees at the far side of the cabin.”

His heart pounding, Moss deliberately remained calm.

“Be easy, sweetheart,” he told Eulie. “You won’t make it better by losing your head. We’ll find her.”

She nodded as if she believed him, but her face was still stricken with fear.

“Find who?” Rans asked.

“Minnie is missing,” Eulie answered and then turned to Moss. “Should we send Rans down the mountain to gather more people to help us search?”

Before he could reply, the boy piped in with a chuckle. “Why don’t I just go down the mountain and tell her to come home,” he said. “She’s at the Pierces'.”

“What?” Eulie’s question was incredulous.

“I saw her getting her things together this morning,” Rans explained. “I asked her where she was going and she said ‘home.’ I think that probably means she is with Mr. and Mrs. Pierce.”

“Minnie told you that she was going to run away from home and you didn’t try to stop her?”

“Why should I?” Rans asked. “I run away all the time and nobody ever tries to stop me.”

Eulie was exasperated. “That’s totally different,” she said.

“How?”

“Well you are a lot older and know your way around the woods and …”

“Minnie surely knows her way to the Pierces',” Rans said. “That’s not the difference. The difference is that Minnie has someplace to go and I never do.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about.”

“I know exactly what I’m talking about,” he answered, his voice now raised in anger. “Minnie has
someplace to go. She’s got a home. One where she is happy. One that she stumbled into on her on. And you just can’t stand that, can you. If it wasn’t Eulie’s idea, if it wasn’t what Eulie wanted, then it can’t be good, it can’t be right.”

“Daddy told me to take care of all of you,” she insisted.

“Oh, Daddy,” he said, feigning respect. “You mean the miserable, lazy souse who spawned us? I don’t think you should take anything he said too much to heart. He never cared a whole lot about us when he was alive, I’m sure he cares even less as he rots in hell.”

The argument had gotten louder and had drawn the attention of the rest of the family, who were hurrying up the ridge toward them.

“Don’t talk about Daddy that way!” Eulie scolded him.

“Why not? Because it’s not true?” Rans was in a fine fury. “You know that it is. Virgil Toby was as low-down and worthless a man as ever walked this earth. He never cared for us or Mama or anything else. All he wanted was his bottle of whiskey and as long as he had that, nothing else in the world mattered to him.”

“He loved us,” Eulie insisted. “In his way, he loved us.”

“Well, I don’t love him,” Rans answered. “I’m ashamed that he was my father. I am ashamed to bear his name. In the Sweetwood being a Toby means being poor, laggard, drunken, and useless. That stain on who we are is the only thing dear Daddy has left us. And it’ll take a lifetime to wipe it out.”

“Is that what you think?” Eulie yelled at him.

“Yes, it is,” Rans answered. “And I think that if Minnie
has a chance to start over, begin clean, to leave the ‘nasty Toby children’ behind her forever, then I say let her do it. I wish the rest of us had such a chance.”

Eulie hauled back her hand and slapped her brother hard across the mouth. The contact stunned him. It stunned all of them. The whole family stood frozen in place, not believing what had happened.

“I am sick to death of your miserable complaints and bad temper,” Eulie hollered at him. “I’m trying to do what is best for this family, for all of us. You only ever think about yourself. Daddy was sick and miserable and unhappy, but you never feel sorry for him, mourn for him. You just think about you and how everything that happened, no matter what happened, it happened to you. You blame Daddy for every slight and wrong and miserable moment that you’ve ever lived. Well, it’s high time that you take some of that responsibility onto yourself. If people don’t like you, maybe it’s because you are sour, quick-tempered, and disagreeable, not that you are Virgil Toby’s son.”

Hands on hips, she stood nose-to-nose with her brother, steaming with fury. He tried to step around her, and she grabbed his arm.

“Running away?” she taunted him. “Isn’t that what you always do? When things get tough, Rans Toby runs way. Every time things don’t go like he wants, he runs away.”

“Leave me alone,” he growled out.

“Well, do us all a favor,” Eulie said furiously. “Next time just keep on running. If you don’t want to be in our family, then we don’t want you around, either.”

He jerked away from her then, stiff with anger and injured pride. He began a brisk pace toward the cabin.
Eulie didn’t even glance back in his direction. She focused her attention on Moss.

“Can you take me to the Pierces’ on your horse?” she asked.

He nodded. “If that’s what you want,” he said.

“I’m bringing my sister back home where she belongs, whether she likes it or not.”

The clearing around the cabin was quiet and peaceful for a change. Jeptha should have been grateful for it. The noise and constant upheaval of a passel of younguns was a little wearying for a man of his age and disposition. But somehow this afternoon the quiet was disturbing. It was almost too quiet.

Moss and Eulie had headed off to fetch Little Minnie more than an hour ago. Clara and the twins had been so stunned at her strange behavior and worried that she might get into an equally unkind argument with Minnie that they decided to go down the ridge to the Pierces’ themselves. Jeptha had no idea what help they could possibly be, but he hadn’t tried to dissuade them. He had his own worries to consider. His own thoughts to plague him.

Seeing Sary again, talking with her at long last, had been both heaven and hell. To hear that she had loved him, that she loved him still, had been a sweet balm to the wounds of his heart. But her inability to see his side, to understand that he rejected her out of love for her, that was a very bitter pill. She doubted his motivations. And she’d made him doubt them himself.

He
had
done it for her. He was certain of that. Or at least he had been. He’d not wanted to shackle her with a man who was only half a man.

Working in the quiet solitude of the garden, he allowed himself to dwell at length on what she’d said, what he’d said, and all the things that he wished had been said.

He knew that she was partly right as well. He had hidden out, hoping that he would die, hoping that he would never have to face his life, or what was left of it. He chose not to face Sary, for fear that he would see her horror, her rejection. It was easier to be noble and set her free than to try to make a life with her, when he didn’t have the courage to live.

But of course, all that was before, he thought. It was before … before what, he didn’t know. Somehow in the last few weeks everything had changed for him. Having Eulie and the children here had affected him in away he’d not anticipated. It was as if seeing himself as part of a family again had made his leglessness seem more an inconvenience than an incapacity.

Of course, nothing was really different. He still had no legs. He still pushed himself around in a cart He would never dance again or run in the woods. But for all the things he couldn’t do, there were still a good many that he could.

Oh, my mistake,
Sary had said to him, facetiously.
I didn’t realize they’d cut off that part of you as well.

That part of him was still in perfect working order. And a plaguey inconvenience it was. It seemed almost unfair that if a man was never to have sex again that he should retain the will and the means to do so. It might have been easier if that cannonball had gelded him when he was gimped. Idly, he began to wonder if a man with no legs could make love to a woman. There didn’t seem to be any reason why not. It might require a bit of
imagination and modification. Lust, however, was a great innovator. A man trying to fulfill his passions, or those of a woman he cared about, always found a way. But would a woman even want that? Wouldn’t she be repulsed by him?

It wasn’t
a
woman that concerned him, as if any other ever entered his mind It was only Sary.

I loved you, Jeptha,
she had said.
I loved you and I love you and nothing you can do now nor ever can make me stop.

Surely she couldn’t have meant that. Yet he knew that Sary would never lie to him.

In some deeply buried place in his heart, a little flame of hope had ignited.

He thought about the letters. It was amazing that he’d forgotten about them. He would have sworn that he knew every word in them by heart. They had, in some way, been the making of him. When he’d walked away from the Sweetwood, he’d been little more than a wild-eyed kid, full of vinegar … and confusion.

The war had changed that. It was as if he’d had opportunity for a close-up look at all that was real and valuable in life. Men facing battle laughed and joked together in the hours beforehand, unwilling to allow the fears and finality to ruin what little time they had left.

He’d learned the priorities of human existence. Warmth was more important than food. But food more than comfort. The camaraderie of other men was very basic. And the memory of those back home who loved you and missed you was not as far down on the list as he might have imagined.

The letters had been his adulthood. That was how he thought of them. They were the life he’d had between childhood and amputation.

Jeptha rarely thought about that time. Of course, he tried not to think of the past at all, but even when he did, it was the hazy, nostalgic vision of youth. He thought now of the sober, thoughtful, considered man that he had become in that time. He was so glad that he’d shared that time with Sary. It had been his best time. It had been a time he could look back upon with some pride. It was surprising that he never did.

Perhaps it was because he was not so changed.