Thunder In Her Body (35 page)

Father Gibbons sincerely wanted them to return to the Church as practicing Catholics.  Difficult as the decision was, there were just too many differences now that they had grown away from doctrinal practices of the Church.    Besides, they were both divorced, and they had no regrets about terminating their individual marriages.  Each had entered into their first marriage willingly and with a full understanding of what they were doing.  Those marriages could not be annulled by the Church.  Therefore, Father Gibbons would officiate at their wedding in his capacity as a licensed minister in the state of New Mexico.  The chief elder would co-officiate as a representative of the Apache Tribe.

The four people poured over the order of ceremony, and made a few minor changes.  The officiants-to-be gave their individual blessings on this upcoming union.

Thank goodness for pretty stationary paper and Blaze’s computer.  Lynette was able to print out the program for the ceremony with ease and it looked as though it had been professionally done.  The background paper was a pale blue, with a rainbow running from the bottom to the top.  She imported a photo they had taken together with her digital camera, and situated it in the upper right corner.  That being done, it was time to feed the puppies.

Lynette managed to get away the next morning for her only fitting of her wedding dress.
  It was gorgeous.  The seamstress was, indeed, a meticulous master of the art of dress- making.  The creamy suede garment hung just perfectly, and from tiny strips of the cloth, she had woven a macramé type belt with turquoise beads braided into it.  The belt was designed to hang loosely around Lynette, below the waist line and just above the hip bone.  She sashayed around the lady’s living room watching how the fringes moved with her.  It was a soundless symphony of movement.  As she watched herself in the full-length mirror, placed at an angle against the living room wall, she cautiously stroked the suede fibers that covered her, with visible reverence.  The women who were Blaze’s ancestors would have worked many hours to turn an animal skin into a supple piece of cloth from which a wedding garment like this could be made.  Lynette wondered how many cut fingers and raw, bleeding hands it took to lay out this much cloth; how many sore backs and strained muscles it would have taken to scrape and pound a piece of deer skin into this much wearable fabric.  She knew that it was the woman’s job to scrape all the flesh and sinew from the skin using, at first specially shaped stone tools, and later metal knives.  Once the skin was free of extraneous matter, it was then pounded mercilessly against rocks and rinsed in a running stream for endless hours until it was clean.  She was glad that no woman had to toil in that manner for her to have this magnificent garment.  But in her thoughts, she honored the women who did.  The seamstress took note of her seriousness.  She could see the pride on Lynette’s face, and how she held her breasts high and her back straight as she modeled her wedding dress.

“It is perfect.  Just perfect,” she said, complimenting the seamstress for her skills.

“He will love you even more when he sees you,” the wise old woman, with the tiny, wrinkled hands said to her.

“I’m not sure it’s humanly possible for a man to love more than he does.  And I love him equally,” she said with tears forming in her eye.  “You and your family will come to the wedding as a special guest, won’t you?” Lynette asked, pleadingly.  She had already given the lady a written invitation, but now it was a personal request.

“Yes we will.  It will just be my husband and myself.  We’ll take your bus from the village here,” she said.  “We don’t drive much anymore.”

Covered in a specially purchased, heavy, black plastic dress bag, Lynette laid her wedding dress carefully on the back seat of her red Chevy Cobalt sedan.  She had purposely driven it instead of the truck specifically for this purpose.  The trick was to get it into the house without Blaze seeing the bag.  She didn’t want any questions, which she would refuse to answer.  With a planned diversion from Janette, she slipped the dress into the house from the garage and scurried down the hallway to the guest room where she hid it.

Now, the evening before the wedding, the house turned into “family central”!  Aaron’s children, grandchildren and Lynette’s daughter, Janette, came in together in a rented SUV the day before.  Some close friends and Clare arrived earlier in the day.   Trapper and Merrilynn, came in later that night.  The house was swarming with people, yelling, loud laughter and
“lies, all lies,”
the about-to-be married couple hollered playfully back at their adult children who were totally intent on roasting them over the coals.  They told outrageous stories of child abuse and neglect.  Janette complained that she was not allowed to have her own bathroom as a child.  She had to share one with her sister!  It was a crime against nature, she declared!  She accused her mother of being heartless for taking her on a camping trip where there was no electric outlet for her to plug her hair rollers into.  Trapper denied ever allowing his dad to beat him at baseball, knowing all the while that Blaze let him win to bolster his confidence as he grew up.  Merrilynn called him Scrooge because he wouldn’t buy her a new car for her sixteenth birthday.  She had to drive one that was three years old!  The indignity of it all!  Aaron, who’d known Blaze the longest of course, got his licks in and Clare related some of Lynette’s less than stellar moments.  She told how Lynette embarrassed her during a class on the day Lynette turned forty-two.  Someone asked how old she was, and Lynette replied that she was one year older than her bra size!!  There was stunned silence in the classroom for a few seconds, before the classmates pounced on the inquirer for his rude question.  It was all in good fun, and Hawk and Maurice, who were certainly included in the pre-nuptial evening, laughed a lot and watched all the gorgeous women in their body-hugging shorts and jeans.  Blaze could see them deciding which ones they may try to hit on

Lynette, the ever protective mother, banned more than two people in the laundry room at one time to see and pet the puppies.  Suzie Q had to be kept outside because she was none to fond of all those strangers handling “her babies.”   Gentle though she was, she’d growl menacingly.

The mood turned a bit somber when someone asked how the puppies’ mother died.  Blaze stepped into that question right away, protecting Lynn, but he turned it into a hilarious story by concentrating on the killing, burning and dispatching of the snake’s thousand pieces.  People screamed in raucous laughter as he detailed the many ways she killed and burned the snake.  After he’d regain his composure and stopped coughing in laughter himself, he’d start again, “And then, once she poured more cooking oil on it and struck the match………”  And for the first time it seemed that something was redeemable about that sad event.  Ordered in from a pizza parlor in Crystal Bend, boxes of pizza, green salad, bread sticks, soda and beer was the fare of the evening.   An awesome peach cobbler sat cooling on the kitchen counter, which Lynette, somehow, had found time to make.

Around 10 p.m., it was time for all the “chillins’” old and young, to head for their designated hotels, condo, or bedrooms.  “We have a busy day tomorrow, and morning will come real quickly,” Blaze announced.

“I want my beautiful bride to have a full nights sleep before we jump the broom,” he added, smiling lovingly at Lynette.

Hawk stayed for a while, ostensibly to help Janette clean up so there wouldn’t be as much mess to deal with in the morning.  Maurice volunteered to take some of the other ladies to the condo, and hotel, especially since he got to drive the big white Cadillac.  He made sure that Dena, Janette’s best friend,  got in the front seat and a second lady sat next to her.  That meant Dena had to sit right up against him.  Clare watched the departing actions with amusement and nudged Aaron.

“These boys here don’t have a chance at any of those educated, live wire, career women,” Aaron posited.

“You never know,” Clare replied, “you just never know.”

C
HAPTER 24

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The Wedding

N
either Blaze nor Lynette slept much that night, despite their fatigue from the day before.  Lynette kept running lists in her head. 
What all still needs to be done?
At one point, she rolled over in the dark and scribbled something on an empty page in her yellow tablet.  She didn’t think she disturbed Blaze, but he wasn’t sleep.

Blaze spent the night looking back at where he’d come from, and then to the future, where he hoped they would go as a couple.  He saw them in their old age, holding hands as they walked slowly, and possibly with halted gait, but always together.  He saw his grandchildren, yet to be born, riding their horses across their land.  He saw happiness in their two, joined, lives.  He was grateful for the love and friendship of his brother, Aaron, who had always been there for him.  When there was precious little other family, Aaron was his rock.  He wished that his mother could be at the ceremony to welcome Lynette into the family.  He hoped that she would be with him in spirit on his special day.

Lynette had kept her wedding dress a monumental secret.  He had no idea what she would wear.  Only two people knew - Clare and Janette, and she had jokingly sworn to cut their tongues from their mouths if they
uttered so much as a hint of what it looked like.  After seeing the work she did on the snake, he thought she could probably do it, and he chuckled in the dark.

“What are you laughing at?” Lynette asked, rolling over to him.

“Just something that came across my mind,” he answered, now laughing full out.

She started to laugh too.  She didn’t know what she was laughing at, but it was funny to be lying and laughing in the dark, in the middle of the night.  They rolled over together, hugging each other, and they laughed, and laughed until tears rolled down the sides of their faces and into their ears.  When they regained their composure, they lay on their backs looking up at the invisible ceiling.  They talked for a little while about the few loose ends still to be taken care of.  Blaze had his list of “to dos.”  She had hers.  Everyone else had been thoroughly briefed on what each needed to do on this very special morning. Lynette had given each a short, typed list so nothing important would fall through the cracks.  Again, he marveled at her organizational skills, and in fact, had complimented her several times on how easy she had made a potentially complicated and stressful event.

Blaze started rubbing her softly.  He didn’t mean his actions to be a prelude to love making.  He just liked to feel her naked body.  He liked the way she felt when she had on something slinky.  He liked taking the slinky thing off of her, too.  He liked the way she smelled.  She always bathed with some sort of exotic fragrance that lingered on her skin.  He could tell when she was in her bath, because the whole wing of the house was permeated with sweet, sensual aromas.  And when they were in the throws of passionate lovemaking, when her skin was slick with moisture, the smell that came from her wafted into his nostrils, heightening his arousal.  He would sometimes lick her skin, to taste her, to sample her from the outside as he took her from within.  She was surely the love of his life.  If they had been young lovers, he thought, he would have put babies into her body and watched his seed grow inside this wonderful nest.  She was a full woman, possessed of pure, unadulterated passion.  And she was his.  She draped her arm over his shoulder.  She rubbed the back of his neck and pulled his long locks forward so she could bury her face in them and smell his hair.  She found his lips in the dark and kissed them softly.  She loved the feel of his lips.  Sometimes he didn’t kiss her back.  He just let his mouth go soft so she could explore the full smoothness of his lips.  She licked the bottom, then the top.  She bit gently at the lower one, and stuck her tongue under the top one.  She smeared her lips back and forth on his.  Sometimes she would make darting motions in and out of his mouth, like a lizard testing the temperature; at other times she would slowly insert her whole tongue into his mouth, moving it back and forth like a sexual organ.  She would do this without an expectation of intercourse.  She would do this when they were in the kitchen and he’d take her in his arms.  She would do this when they showered together, with rivulets of water running into both of their mouths.  His passion, and his total acceptance of her passionate being, reached to the realm of the spiritual.

“This is the last time we can practice living in sin,” she teased lovingly, pinching his cheek.

“We’ve never lived in sin,” he replied huskily.  “There can be no sin in the kind of love we have.  What we do together is a sacrament, not a sin,” he said, and he breathed her in through his nostrils.  “Tonight,” he whispered, “tonight.”

They were awakened from a very short sleep by the alarm clock.  Stretching and yawning, they rose for their special day.  When they walked down the hallway, there were already voices in the living area.  The aromatic smell of freshly brewing coffee filled the air, and Aaron, Janette, Dena, Clare and Aaron’s son, Brian, hung limply over the kitchen island, with cups in hand, waiting for the coffee maker to drip its last drop.