“What it comes down to is, she ain’t a little girl no more,” he
said. “It ain’t fittin, Billy.”
Bill leaned on his ax and looked perplexed. “Oh hell, Daddy,
Momma doesn’t think ...I mean, Sweet Jesus, Joey’s my little
sister
.
I’d never
in hell
. . . you know . . .”
“Well of course not, goddammit. It’s just your momma
thinks . . . well . . . it ain’t fittin. You know? It ain’t”—he gestured
vaguely—“
fittin
.”
Bill tamped the ground with the nose of the ax head. “No ...I
guess it ain’t.”
“I know she’s special to you and it’s hard to deny her,” Will said.
“She’s always been prone to the jimjams but she takes ease from you
and Lord knows she’s one to have her way or know the reason why.
I don’t understand the first thing about her and won’t pretend I do.
Mary’s always done like she’s been told and never been one to backsass, and little Jenny the same. But that Josephine, I swear . . .” He
shook his head and again made the vague gesture.
“I’ll tell her quit it,” Bill said.
The next day as he was reinforcing a cracked windlass post she
sat on the well rim to keep him company and he told her about his
talk with their father.
“I guess they’re right,” he said, keeping his attention on his work
as he talked but sensing the intensity of her gaze. “You ain’t a baby
anymore, you know.”
He chuckled to try to make light of the matter but she was having none of it. She irritably brushed her brown hair from her eyes as
if it hampered understanding.
“I can’t go and hold to you the next time I wake up scared in the
dark?”
“They don’t think you ought,” Bill said.
“What do
you
think?”
He turned and looked at her. She would always lack the social
grace and the conventionally rounded prettiness of her big sister
Mary, who was the only blonde of them. And she was certainly not
the naturalborn beauty or charmer that little Jenny had already
proved. But she was keenly striking in her dusky complexion and
leanly supple form, her dark violet eyes. Since early girlhood she had
carried a mysterious air that unsettled him even as it quickened his
blood whenever she stared at him intently. As she now did.
He gave his attention back to the windlass post and said, “I think
it’s how it’s got to be, Joey.” He was the only one she permitted to
call her by that nickname.
As he hammered a support board in place against the post he
could feel her gaze still on him. Her fingers lightly brushed his forearm under his rolled sleeve but he kept his eyes on his work. When
he looked up a minute later she was headed back to the house.
A few weeks later there struck a mean storm in the night and he
was wakened by the crash of thunder. He listened to it for a brief
while and then had just fallen back to sleep when he was waked
again, this time by the press of Josephine against his back. He turned
to face her and she hugged his neck tightly and her freshly washed
hair was in his face and he could feel her trembling under her thin
nightshirt.
“I told you quit this,” he whispered.
“I just got to hold to you, Billy,” she said. Her breath was warm
against his neck. Their voices so low they could barely hear each
other.
He raised his head and looked over at Jim’s bunk and concentrated intensely but did not sense that his brother was awake.
“You’re way too grown up to be scared of a storm, goddammit.”
“I’ll get back to my bed before anybody else wakes up,” she said.
“I can make myself wake up real early, you’ll see.”
“Joey . . .”
“
Biiillll
.” She hugged him tighter, snuggled closer into him.
Now one of her hands left his neck and gently stroked his face.
He was still cleanshaved back then and her fingers felt cool on his
cheeks and jaw. Then she searched out his hand and brought it to her
hip and she whispered, “Hold to me, Billy. I’m scared.”
He held her.
She sighed softly. “That’s nice.”
“Hush up,” he whispered. He stroked her back and gently patted
her bottom. “Go to sleep.”
But they neither one went to sleep and after a time her hand was
into his underclothes and found him as it had found him for the first
time some months before. And just as he had not pushed her hand
away then or any of the times since, he did not push it away now but
only lay there in quickened pulse with her hand on him and felt her
smiling against his neck.
“I know you like it,” she breathed into his ear, her fingers moving gently on him. She kissed his cheek and caressed his neck with
her free hand and just as they had first done those months ago they
kissed softly and couldn’t help smiling as they did. His hands went
under her shirt and he felt of her small breasts and fondled her bottom and it was all they could to keep from giggling out loud with
their pleasurable play.
It never went beyond that. He was sworn to himself never to let
it go beyond the kissing and stroking and he would forever be true to
the vow.
For her part, she at first seemed content enough with the limits
he put on their game. But then came a new winter and she began easing to his bed sometimes even when she was unspooked. He had to
make her promise not to do it more than once a week. By the light of
the moon at the window they could see their breaths mingling palely.
They huddled under his quilt and petted and kissed until they fell
asleep in each other’s arms. And then true to her word she always
woke well before dawn and slipped away to her own bed as noiseless
as a shadow.
One night when they lay together she whispered, “Let’s do it,
Billy.”
He raised up on an elbow and gaped at her in the darkness.
“What?”
“You heard.”
He put his hand to her face and held it and whispered fiercely,
“Never, never,
never
. Understand me, girl?
Never
.”
“I saw Ike Berry and Ida Mullen doing it one afternoon on a
horseblanket by the creek where I’d gone to get dandelions. I
watched from the bushes. It looked fun.”
“Nev-er!”
he said through his teeth.
She had him in her hand and gave a quick hard squeeze and he
gasped loudly and she giggled and they quickly clapped a hand over
each other’s mouth and he felt her grinning under his palm. They lay
utterly still and listened and heard Jim toss and snort and mutter
unintelligibly in his sleep and again settle into a deep and steady
breathing.
She eased his hand away and whispered, “Why not? I love you,
Billy. I’ll never love no other man, not ever.”
“
No
.”
“Why not?”
“It ain’t done! Can’t you get it in your wood head? It’s the worst
thing in the
world
a body can do is lay with his own blood. And
don’t make like you didn’t know that. You
know
it.”
“Even if they love each other more than they love anybody else
or ever will?”
“Yes! Yes,
even
. Especially.”
“How come?”
“Oh
Jesus
...It just—look, we’re not going to do any such a
thing, you and me, not
ever,
and that’s an end of it.”
She moved her hand on him and put her mouth to his ear and
whispered, “Don’t you
want
to, though?”
Yes he did—and he felt damned for the desire. And further
damned for cavorting with her in even such restrained fashion as
they did cavort. And damned worst of all by the perverse circumstance of being free to lay with women he loved not at all but denied
by the laws of man and God from lying with the one he adored. He
cared not a whit what might happen to his own soul—he was anyway no believer, not like his mother—but, because no one could say
for certain what lay beyond the grave, he would not jeopardize the
soul of his sister. And more than that: he would not risk implanting
her with a child. An unmarried woman with child was a pariah, the
child itself a pitiful woods colt. And still more than that: he had
heard—as who had not?—so many terrible stories of children begat
of incestuous coupling. Idiots condemned to a life of drooling witlessness and wallowing in their own filth and evermore requiring
tending as closely as babes. Some born fingerless or clubfooted or
blind, some with a roofless mouth or with the sexual organs of both
male and female or with some other of a thousand horrifying afflictions. How could any woman who bore such a child—and it a bastard, to boot—not feel entered into hell even long before she was
dead? He would not now or ever endanger his sister that way.
“I said that’s an end on it, Josephine.”
And it was. She knew better than to press an argument beyond
his evocation of her Christian name.
Still, they had continued with their occasional nocturnal play
through the rest of that winter and into the new spring and were so
clever and careful about it that no one else in the family did suspect.
Except Jim, who had come awake late one winter night and heard
their low hissings and smothered giggles from Bill’s bunk in the darkest corner of the room and felt his heart sink with misgiving. But as
he strained his ears to catch bits and pieces of their low whisperings,
he came to comprehend the limits of their game. He felt sorry for
them for reasons he could not have made clear even to himself, but
he had not told Bill—and never would—that he knew.
Thus, on the morning they spied Josephine running for the
woods after she overheard their banter about the Reedy girls, Jim
well understood why Bill sighed as he did and then went to the
woods after her.
He found her in the meadow, sitting crosslegged at the creekbank in
the shade of an oak. She was pitching pebbles into the water and did
not look at him when he sat down beside her. Dragonflies wavered
over the grass. The air smelled of creekwater and moss. A family of
mockingbirds shrilled at them from their cottonwood nest. Sunlight
filtered through the leaves and mottled the water surface and flashed
on her hair.
She kept tossing pebbles. For a time he watched the splashes and
the ensuing ripples, and then he began to skip stones along the surface with sidearm throws. After a particularly good fling that
skipped a stone seven times he grinned and said, “Oh yes indeed!”
She snorted in disdain and searched the ground to both sides of
her and found a small flat rock and tried its heft, then crooked her
finger around it just right and got up on her knees and the tip of her
tongue showed between her lips as she cocked her arm and threw.
The stone left a trail of eight dimples on the surface before it sank.
She turned to him with a grin so beautiful his chest filled with
fluttering birdwings.
A betrothal
He shrugged and said, “You always been better at it than me.”
She quit the grin and studied him in her unnerving way and he
looked off to the creek to elude her eyes.
“I don’t know them Reedy girls you and Jimmy were talking
about,” she said, “but I hate them more than I can say. I guess there’s
others I could hate just as much for the same reason except I just
don’t know about them.”
He turned to her and put his hand to her cheek and she held it
there and nuzzled it.
“I hate that you can do with them what you can’t with me,” she
said “I hate it, Billy. I
know
it’s wrong, what I want, but I don’t care
and I wish you didn’t either. But I’ll always do like you say.” She
kissed his palm. “And I’ll always and always love you.”
He would know a number of grown women in his life who did
not possess even a small portion of the grace his middle sister owned
at the age of fourteen.
“I’ll always love you too, girl,” he said, and even as he made the
declaration he recognized its unalterable and crushing truth.
While Josephine could not reveal to anyone but Bill her desire for
him—and therefore suffered her heartsore yearning in secret—her
elder sister, just turned seventeen, was also in love that early spring
and fairly beaming with the rapture of it. Culminating a whirlwind
courtship of barely a month, Mary Anderson was now engaged to
one Arthur Baker, a fine-featured and well-spoken man fifteen years
her senior, a childless widower whose wife of eight months had been
killed two years before in a fall from a horse. He and Mary had been
introduced at an Agnes City dance and by evening’s end he was
already wooing her. He had since come calling at least two nights a
week. When he tendered his proposal in the shadows of the Anderson porch on a soft evening winking with fireflies, she had no doubt
about accepting.
Though he could play no instrument of music Baker sometimes
joined in the Anderson harmonizings. Only once did he yield to their
urgings to take a turn at stepdancing and then proved so comically
awkward that none of them, not even reticent Martha, not even Mary
herself who revered him, could keep from laughing at the spectacle he
presented. The women apologized profusely but the Anderson men
laughed and laughed and he was so thoroughly abashed he would
never again trip the boards and they would never again ask him to.
Despite his ungainliness as a dancer, Arthur Baker was the sort of
husband Will Anderson desired for all his daughters—a man of
property. Baker’s father had bequeathed to him a sprawling farm
maintained by capable hired hands and he was in addition the sole
proprietor of a prosperous supply store at Roan Creek Crossing on
the Santa Fe.
He was not without formal schooling, albeit his learning was
chiefly in the principles and tools of commerce. On his first visit to
the Anderson farm he was asked by Bill who his favorite poet was
and smilingly answered that he wasn’t much of a one for poetry and
preferred to leave that dainty subject to the ladies. His grin faltered
under Bill Anderson’s suddenly narrow gaze but Mrs. Anderson
cleared her throat loudly and gave her son a look. Bill Anderson
sighed and said “Never mind” and thereafter paid little heed to him
until the time to come when he would kill him.