Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

  When she started walking again, an elderly couple in a pickup truck stopped.

  “If you don’t mind sharing, you can get in back,” the woman told her.

  Hattie went around back. The bed of the truck had wooden-slat sides. A boy in overalls was sitting in the front leaning against the cab, a boy with red curls showing beneath his billed cap and blue eyes and rosy cheeks and a mouth so pretty she had to look twice to make sure he was a boy. Her breath caught in her chest. That’s how her brother would have looked if he were still alive. And for an instant she wondered if her daydream had come true. If Patrick were still alive. But this boy was older than she was. Not younger.

  He nodded at her.

  She tossed the feed sack into the truck and climbed over the rusty tailgate. Once again using the sack for a pillow, she tried to make herself comfortable, but the road was rough, and the truck’s springs were shot. And besides, she was aware of the boy watching her.

  She scooted to the front of the truck to get out of the wind and to inspect the beautiful boy. He smiled at her. “Where are you headed?” he asked, raising his voice to make himself heard.

  “As far as they’ll take me,” she said, nodding toward the couple in the cab of the truck.

  “You running away from home?”

  Hattie pretended that she didn’t hear him.

  The boy dozed off and Hattie tried to do the same, but the bumps were too jarring.

  The truck slowed as it entered a town that Hattie recognized as Hayes, which seemed like a metropolis compared to dinky little Coal Town. The truck stopped in front of the county courthouse, and the elderly couple got out. “We got business in town, then we’re heading back home,” the old man told them.

  Hattie didn’t want to be in Hayes. It was too close to home. When the pretty boy jumped out of the truck and headed east, she followed. On the outskirts of town, he reached in his duffel bag and handed her an apple. “Name’s Josh.”

  “I’m Mary,” she lied.

  The apple was crunchy and tasted wonderful. When she finished, he handed her a canteen.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Eventually I hope to end up someplace where I can get paid to play baseball. A town with a farm club. But first I’ve got to make some money.”

  “Me, too,” Hattie said. “What’s a farm club?”

  Josh explained about baseball farm clubs as they trudged along and how a fellow had to play for peanuts in hopes of getting himself noticed. He was good though—damned good—and had no doubt his big break would come. He had played high school baseball over in Big Timber, but major league teams didn’t send scouts to little, no-account towns in Montana. So he was heading East. To Indiana maybe. Or Kentucky. States that had farm clubs. But in the meantime, he needed to find work. It was too early to get on with a combine crew, but he could do any kind of farmwork. He’d grown up on a hog farm. Nasty work. He never wanted to see another hog for as long as he lived.

  Then Josh wanted to know where she was from and why a girl was out hitchhiking. Didn’t she know that could be dangerous, especially for a pretty girl like her? She didn’t tell him much—just that her father died and she left home. She was flattered that he thought she was pretty and worried that she was blushing.

  A couple of miles out from Hayes, Josh stopped to study a large, white farmhouse in the middle of a field of sugar beets. “The beets need hoeing,” he pointed out.

  Hattie followed him down a rutted lane. Trash was blowing about the yard, and a rusting Chevy truck and a dust-covered Chrysler sedan stood in front of the barn. One of the barn doors was hanging on one hinge.

  They walked around the house and Josh knocked on the back door. A tall, angular woman with graying hair appeared at the screen door, drying her hands on an apron.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am,” Josh said as he took off his cap. “My sister and I are looking for work.”

  Hattie coughed a bit to cover up her surprise at his words. The boy who reminded her of her brother had just called her his sister!

  “I’ll have to talk to my husband,” the woman said.

  “We’ll work for food and a place to sleep and whatever you think we’re worth in pay,” Josh offered.

  Hattie felt the woman taking a second look at them. “How old are you?” she asked Josh.

  “Eighteen next month. My sister just turned fifteen. Our parents have both passed, and the sheriff sold our place up by Reed Point for back taxes. We’ve been on the road for two days now. We saw this fine-looking house and thought whoever lived here might need some help looking after things.”

  Just then there was a pounding sound overhead.

  The woman closed her eyes and drew in her breath. “I need to see to my husband.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Josh said. “You go ’bout your business. We’ll just sit here in the shade for a time, if that’s all right with you.”

  They sat on the stoop saying nothing. They could hear the woman bustling about the kitchen. Shortly the pounding began again. Through the screen door, they could see her carrying a tray down the hallway and starting up the stairs.

  “For the record, I’m sixteen,” Hattie informed Josh.

  He nodded.

  “You’ll full of blarney,” Hattie said.

  “Think so?”

  “Know so.”

  “Yeah, but does the lady of the house know I’m full of it?” He nudged Hattie in the ribs with his elbow.

  Hattie moved away from him. “I really am hungry.”

  “Tell the lady. Open those big blue eyes and get a pitiful look on your face.”

  When the lady came back to the screen door, they scrambled to their feet. Hattie took a step forward, then let her legs go limp under her. Josh kneeled beside her. “Please, ma’am,” he said. “We could sure use a bit of grub. Then we’ll quit bothering you and be on our way.”

  She brought them four fried-egg sandwiches stacked on a plate and a pitcher of water. She said if they would weed her garden, rake the chicken yard, and fix the barn door, she would feed them again that evening and they could sleep in the barn. The cow had died. They’d have the place to themselves.

  At dusk she brought out two bowls of stew and another pitcher of water, then went to inspect the garden, chicken yard, and barn door.

  When she returned, she said, “You can stay through the week. My husband is down on his back, and chores have gone undone.”

  Hattie was to work in the house, and for starters the woman wanted Josh to hoe the beets, clean out the barn, and whitewash the fences. If they did their work well, she would give Hattie four dollars and Josh seven at the end of the week.

  That night Hattie carried a bucket of water to the barn, leaving Josh to wash up at the pump. She went into a stall for privacy and washed herself as best she could. She had a nightgown in the feed sack but thought it would be improper to wear it when she and Josh would be sleeping in such proximity and pulled a clean dress over her damp body.

  She rinsed out her sweat-soaked dress and put it over the top fence rail to dry. With the blanket the woman had provided for her tucked under her arm, she climbed the ladder to the hayloft. Josh was already there, shirtless and stretched out on his blanket.

  “I’ve never been so tired in my life,” Hattie said as she spread out her own blanket on the hay some distance from his. “That woman expected me to do a week’s worth of cleaning in just one day.”

  Josh told her good night and turned his back to her.

  When Hattie closed her eyes, she still saw him—the young man who looked like her brother, Patrick. That was why she felt so kindly toward Josh, she decided. He reminded her of her brother.

  Myrna paused, trying to decide just how much more of her story she wanted to share with these women.

  She hadn’t thought of that time in any significant way for years, yet it represented a turning point in her life. If she had submitted to Mr. Sedgwick’s virgin-seeking son, would her life have taken a
different course? Would the experience have been so dreadful that she would have been frigid for the rest of her life and hated everyone with a penis? Maybe she would have entered a convent and become a nun so she would never have to be around men again.

  Perhaps she’d had sexual yearnings before that night in the hayloft of a barn east of Hayes, Montana, but she could not recall them. Unless her memory was playing tricks on her, she had never touched herself down there, never thought about sex. Her father had been the center of her life, the person she loved above all others, and in the last years of his life as she was changing from a child to a young woman, that relationship had taken on a somewhat sanctified meaning to her. Papa was the finest, dearest, gentlest, best person she had ever known. To this day she felt that way. No other man had ever even come close to his revered status in her life. And perhaps she had backed away from sexual thoughts because they would have somehow desanctified her relationship with her father. But whatever the reason, she was unprepared for her attraction to Josh, which had perhaps been tinged with incestuous overtones since he reminded her so much of the little brother she had loved and mothered.

  Josh’s breathing was peaceful and deep, not quite a snore but definitely the sound of sleep. Thanks to her mother’s warnings over the years, she was knowledgeable enough about male behavior to know that most males, no matter how exhausted they were from their day’s labors, would have forced themselves on a young, innocent, powerless runaway girl. Josh had chosen to do the honorable thing. She decided that he was the sort of young man Patrick would have grown up to be. And the urge to touch him was actually painful. In spite of her exhaustion, she desperately wanted to touch the skin on his chest. His hair. His lips. His chest. Her fingertips were on fire. Her heart was pounding.

  She moved her blanket closer to him. With just the tip of a finger she touched his hair, still damp from washing. Touched his ear. Then his shoulder.

  She wanted him to wake up.

  But maybe he had been awake all along. When he finally rolled over to face her, he asked, “Are you a virgin?”

  That word. Virgin. How strange to be hearing it again in such a short time. She’d heard the word before. The Virgin Mary. The Virgin Queen Elizabeth of England. The Virgin Islands, where Christopher Columbus landed on his second voyage. But she hadn’t known what the word meant until her mother told her.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “You’re supposed to save yourself for your wedding night. Every man wants his wife to be a virgin.”

  Hattie remembered her mother saying that the first time she had sex was on her wedding night and that she had been a virgin. Hattie wondered if it had been the first time for her father, too. “Are you a virgin?” she asked Josh.

  “I don’t think that’s a word you’re supposed to use for fellows, but I’ve never had sex before.”

  “Is it all right for a fellow who’s never had sex before to kiss a virgin?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then I want you to kiss me,” Hattie said.

  He leaned over her and planted a soft kiss on her lips. She hadn’t remembered putting her arms around his neck, but she must have because that’s where they were. And she was pulling him back for a second kiss. Which lasted longer than the first. And was very pleasant.

  But it ended too soon.

  He whispered, “Mary.” Again and again he said the word. At first Hattie wondered if he thought she was someone else. Then she remembered telling him that was her name.

  Hattie rolled onto her side and pulled his face to hers. “My name is Hattie.”

  “Not Mary?”

  “No, not Mary. Hattie.”

  “Hattie. Beautiful Hattie. Nice to meet you.”

  “Kiss me again.”

  This kiss was quite long with neither of them willing to end it.

  Then suddenly his hand was touching her breast through the fabric of her dress, which made her gasp. And her back arched. Did she want him to do that?

  His hand became motionless while he awaited her verdict.

  For an answer, she placed her hand over his.

  He groaned.

  Hattie couldn’t believe how wonderful it was to have him touch her breasts. A small mewing sound came from the back of her throat. Like a cat made when it was being stroked.

  He was kissing her again, and his leg came across her body and he pushed his crotch against her leg. She experienced a momentary shock when the tip of his tongue began to make its presence known, tentatively as though he wasn’t sure it was the proper thing to do. Hattie touched the tip of his tongue with the tip of hers, and her entire body responded as though it had been struck by lightning.

  Hattie wanted the kissing and touching to go on forever. It was the most delightful thing she had ever experienced in her life. She opened her mouth for him and his tongue darted farther. She felt possessed by his tongue. It was magic. Josh of the magic tongue. And the magic lips. And hands.

  And what about the rest of him?

  By then their bodies had plastered themselves against one another, and he was rubbing his pelvis against her stomach. And of its own accord, her body reciprocated. They both were making animal sounds. Sounds of pleasure and desire and need.

  He reached for her hand and placed it over the bulge in the front of his overalls. “I don’t understand,” Hattie whispered.

  “It’s because I want you,” he whispered back. “It’s what happens to a man when he wants a woman.”

  “Can I see it?”

  She made him turn over on his back so that the square of moonlight streaming through the open hay door illuminated this most amazing sight. She had seen Patrick’s little peepee many times when she changed his britches. And occasionally caught glimpses of her father’s privates when he washed up out by the pump in the backyard. But neither her father’s nor Patrick’s privates looked anything like what was now poking out of the fly in Josh’s overalls.

  She was even more amazed when she touched it. It was as hard as a post. No wonder a man could poke a hole in a virgin.

  But a man like Mr. Sedgwick’s son, a man who didn’t really like women, wanted to poke it in a virgin to hurt her. To make him feel big and strong and powerful and better than she was. Josh wasn’t like that. Josh was nice. As her father had been. She unfastened the clasp on Josh’s overalls. And he began inching her dress up her thigh.

  “I like you,” she told Josh, startled by the husky sound of her voice. “I want you to make me not be a virgin anymore.”

  Myrna closed her eyes and leaned her head against the high back of her chair. So long ago that had been, yet the memory of that night brought forth those same responses in her body.

  What she wouldn’t give to be young again. To have a man want her again.

  She realized that she was clutching the arms of her chair and forced herself to relax. To push sexual thoughts aside.

  “That young man in the barn was the father of your father,” Myrna told her listeners.

  “I’m glad he was someone nice,” Ellie said.

  “Did Josh ever get to play big-time baseball?” Georgiana asked. “Our father played baseball in high school. He had a framed certificate on his office wall that said he’d been named to the West Virginia All-State Baseball Team.”

  Myrna ignored Georgiana’s question. She was thinking about the creek that Josh had discovered at the bottom of the back pasture that had a lovely swimming hole surrounded by willows and the spreading branches of a box elder. At the end of their second day, after the woman had brought them their meal, they raced each other the length of the pasture, kicked off their shoes, and jumped in. Splashing and laughing and ducking, they managed to rid themselves of clothing and made love in the water and again on the moss-covered bank. Then they put on their wet clothes and walked back to the barn and made love in the loft.

  Making love was the most wonderful thing in the world. And Josh was the most beautiful boy in the world. Hattie found herself laughing
and crying at the same time so great was her delight. They had little knowledge of their own bodies and the mechanics of lovemaking. For all they knew they were the first people ever to discover the secrets and delights of sex. And when they were satiated and poor Josh’s penis could no longer be teased to erection, they fell asleep in each other’s arms but awoke after a time and made their plans.

  Deep into the night, they discussed and planned. They needed money. With enough money they could go anyplace they wanted and do whatever they wanted.

  And the place where one went to get a significant amount of money was a bank.

  Twenty-Four

  EACH morning, the woman told Hattie what she wanted done and scrutinized her carefully throughout the day. Hattie tried just once to engage her in conversation, asking how long her husband had been bedridden.

  “That is none of your concern,” the woman said, her lips drawn in a tight line.

  Even so, Hattie was able to learn a great deal about the occupants of the white farmhouse from their possessions. The framed photographs and certificates hanging on the walls revealed that the man was a Mason, a certified livestock auctioneer, and had fought in the war and was awarded a Purple Heart. The woman was past president of the John Coulter County Home Demonstration Club and a member of Eastern Star. They apparently had only one child—a son who had belonged to the Future Farmers of American and recently graduated from Eastern Montana College in Billings.

  The man must also have been an avid hunter, judging from the gun case in the hallway.

  And the woman liked to listen to radio programs in the afternoon: Young Widder Brown. Backstage Wife. The Guiding Light. The Romance of Helen Trent.

  The man glared at Hattie when she dusted his room. He kept a stick by the bed and pounded the floor with it when he wanted his wife to come tend to him—often during one of her programs—and spoke to her in a gruff voice that sounded as if he blamed her for his failing health. Hattie thought how her father had been sweet and kind through all his suffering.