Creative Spanko Wench Blog

by patty, copyright 2003 - 2007 (this is chapter 1 of 7 that are complete, I am working on 8,9 and 10 right now)

“Daylight!” Royal Lee hissed when the crust of fitful sleep released his eyelashes. Irish lace lifted away from the windowsill on the cold dawn breeze, billowed above his head. A fleet sprint of temptation to close his eyes and roll back under the quilts entered and then escaped his mind. Habit and convention took over and rousted him.Habit and convention born of a lifetime operating from the belief that only the sick or the infirm should be allowed in bed past the crack of dawn. Anyone else caught there was a “no account.” A “no account heathen” would have been his mother’s take on it, but for Royal, who had left off matters of the faith in recent years, “no account” was sufficient to describe the man who’d laze in bed on a perfectly good day.Even if his life was solitary and there was no one around for many miles to check, he was up and moving in short order, his own judgment of himself sufficient to coerce conformity.

“Ke Ri East! It’s cold!” he told the pump, when his damp palm stuck to the cast iron handle. Winter was late this year, but in the past week it was making up for lost time. There’d been only a few dustings but no heavy snowfalls yet, but the temperatures at night were plunging well below freezing, and the daytime temperatures were struggling even under full sunshine to find their way back up. Soon the pump outside would freeze up and Royal would be stuck shaving and washing up at pump and basin he’d put indoors.

He grimaced with that prospect, and stood to look up at the lonely stone near the ridge, and then out over the rocky mountainside vista down into the valley. That was Mary’s view for eternity now, and the pump inside was hers too. He built the well first and the log cabin over it, so she wouldn’t have to tote and carry water. She’d used it for only one season before the fever took her.

Royal fought back tears, and cursed himself that sentimentality still took him so easily. His Mary’d been gone close to ten years now, she and the child both. The terrible loneliness of that winter still haunted him. First the mother was taken by a raging fever within days of giving the birth, and then two months later the infant succumbed to pneumonia.

Since that time, the only contact he had with the world was an odd traveler and his thrice-yearly trips to Grangeville for supplies and trade. A man who could hunt, tend a garden and a few cows, had very little need for people. Truth be told, he reasoned many times, it was his vices that kept him going to town. “A man ought not be allowed to acquire a sweet tooth, nor a taste for coffee and tobacco,” he told his horse on one trip. “Makes him beholding for things he can’t get on his own.”

When Mary was alive, his plan was to build a cattle ranch. He still owned the eight thousand acres of land, but he’d left off the ranch plans and settled on trapping and what farming he needed to be self-sufficient. He had few worries, and also few joys and pleasures.

Some of the nearby ranchers made overture to buy some of the land from him, but Royal held on to it. His aim now was more to keep the world at a distance than to use the land for any other purpose. It was working for the most part.

“Except for these damned pesky raccoons!” he cussed, when after tending his animals, he found the wood door to the root cellar pushed over. The critters were getting brazen with the cold weather. This was the fourth day in a row the door was moved like that. Lifting and moving it over all the way, he climbed down the ladder expecting to find his larder in a mess. It wasn’t. In fact except for the door, there was no evidence of four legged raiders having been down there at all. The flour and sugar sacks and bushel baskets were all neat and secure. The only thing out of place was the top on the milk can. It was dangling on its tether. Royal cursed again.

“Damn creatures just skimmed the cream!” He was surprised to find no debris or bugs had gotten into it, but thought nothing else of it after ladling enough for his biscuits and coffee, and topping up the supply with what he’d just taken from the cow. He returned and secured the lid. The fresh supply would refresh the cream and he’d use all of it to make cheese the next day.

With milk, a few potatoes, an apple, some carrots, a turnip, some bacon and venison he climbed the ladder and replaced the plank door. Knowing it was hopeless to foil the larcenous creatures, but determined anyway, he pushed the boulder back up over the cellar door before heading back up to the cabin.

“Damn!” he cursed again. “Three days and no eggs! You hens quit earning your keep and you’ll be headed for the fry pan!”

His day wasn’t getting off to a good start. No cream for his coffee, and no eggs. The troubles gave him something to mutter about while he made himself breakfast. Potatoes and bacon with no eggs, three days in a row, hardly seemed worth the effort.

He didn’t like the idea that he might have to replace his laying hens. He’d have to make up his mind to do it soon if he was going to. The trek to Miller’s place was a full day there and back as it was, after the snow fell, it would take two days, and would likely kill the damned birds in the process. It was that or go without eggs all winter, and that prospect did not set well at all.

By the time he finished breakfast, he’d made up his mind. If there were no eggs by morning, he would pack some venison and elk and head over to Miller’s to trade. Miller’s was a large-scale sheep ranch just over twenty miles to the west. He’d have chickens to spare for the right price.

After breakfast Royal set about some winterizing chores that he’d been able to put off thanks to the lateness of the change of seasons. The sun had made some progress warming that day, but the air was still crisp. The breeze up from the valley was brisk, and cut through the layers of Flannel he wore. Still, the day was one of those glorious mid December days where the air was clear and the sky was a deep blue that was only seen in winter. If there’d been snow on the ground it would have squeaked underfoot in the places where it was packed by foot traffic.

Royal hiked down to the creek bed with a shovel, and loaded a wheel barrel with clay and gravel. When that was delivered to a sheltered area on the lee side of the cabin, he headed up on the ridge to cut sod. He stopped for a few minutes to talk to Mary and share her view of the valley. While sitting with his wife, he relaxed enough to take in what his senses were able to, and on the breeze, he could have sworn he smelled bacon with eggs. The waft of aroma was transient, replaced almost immediately by the rich smell of spruce and juniper. He guessed it was just his mind playing tricks on him. Although he did smile and scold his long slumbering wife for teasing him with the one thing he had fixed in his mind.

In life, it would have been just like his impish bride to needle him with a mildly irritating detail like the smell of eggs he could not have. Memories of her spirited pranks surfaced and made him smile. His right palm tingled and a complimentary, but in that moment unwelcome, twinge pulse through his groin. Mary’s playfulness had always extended to their bedroom. For a few moments he let himself marvel at the way his wife would provoke him to be stern with her, as if that side of him was a thing that fed her. She became his in every way when he took her in hand, willing and eager, yet soft and compliant. A sound spanking now and again seemed the only intervention necessary to keep his home life peaceful, and if she wasn’t of a mind to need a stern spanking, Mary would play and prank with him to tease one anyway.

It was the way it should be Royal thought with a man and a woman. The way that suited him in any event, he thought.

By noon, Royal had made good progress chinking the cracks and seams of the cabin with the sod and gravel clay patchwork he concocted. Twice more while he worked he was haunted by the transient smell of the proper breakfast he did not get to eat. It came on the breeze, and was gone as quickly as it came.

Mild irritation with himself set in. He felt as if his senses were tormenting him, and over something so inconsequential as having missed his morning eggs. The resolve to make the trip to Miller’s became stronger. Royal found himself simmering quite a grudge against the hens that quit laying just as the weather was turning, and his mind for hounding him over minor things. If it kept up like this, the winter was going to be a long one. After all what was a man to do when even his own company is an aggravation.

He pushed himself harder for the remainder of the day. Determined to work out the demons of his own sour mood.

************

Connie shivered from her perch watching the tall man work on his home. She’d been watching him for several days since coming on his place by accident. Poorly equipped to survive on her own in the wilderness, she was deeply relieved to come across a homestead and people, two days after her horse went lame. Experience had made her wary though, and instead of stepping up to the door to say “howdy do,” she’d watched the place to get a feel for its occupants. After a day and a half she figured out that the man lived alone. The small graveyard up on the ridge above the cabin gave her a clue, and the fact that every day she’d watched the man visit the two graves and talk to the occupants, confirmed her guess that he was a widower.

The man had an air of decency about him, but Connie held back from approaching him. He was big, and he seemed to wear a perpetual frown, and her recent experiences with men had left her afraid.

The cold weather was beginning to pose problems for her. The small barn behind the cabin where his animals were sheltered was barely large enough for them. When the snow fell, there would be no way for her to come and go from it without her tracks being seen, and there was no place inside for her to hide. She would have trouble getting food from his stores undetected as well since the snow would show her tracks there too. Living in the bush was simply not an option. Connie was barely equipped for that as it was now.

Her hand would be forced soon enough. Either she took the man’s horse, and continued her way southwest, or she announced herself to him and asked him for help.

That morning, because the wind was higher than it had been, Connie took a chance and cooked the eggs and meat she’d taken from the man. It was a nice change. The bacon was smoked, and so cold it was still palatable, but the raw eggs had been hard to stomach. The warm meal just seemed to sit better. For the first time in weeks she felt satisfied, and even comfortable, even if worry still occupied much of her thoughts.

“Don’t go there again,” she whispered, when her throat threatened to tighten into sobs again. The past few months had been a spiral into some of the darkest places her mind could have imagined, and a few she never could have conjured on her own.

When she let her mind go back over it all, she realized that the bad times really began a little over a year ago with her mother’s remarriage. Arranged by mail as a means to an income, it turned out badly from the start. The Swede was a brutal man, sullen and harsh in his attitude toward women, and crude and possessive in his carnal demands of his new wife.

Connie watched her mother change over the year from a beautiful, happy, and carefree soul, to a tired, worn and frightened shell. When his wife became pregnant, the Swede became even more brutal and demanding. Until then, eighteen year-old Connie had been almost ignored by the man. Except that he considered her a servant, and demanded obedience, the Swede showed no interest in her before then. He’d never asked about her aspirations of pursuits, and didn’t seem to care whether she was there or not. With his wife pregnant with his child, a child he demanded be a son, suddenly the house was unfit, and Connie and her mother were put to near slavery making it the way he thought it should be.

The man took his fists to his wife twice when she was too tired to finish some chore, and he threatened Connie with a bullwhip when she tried to intervene and take on the chore for her mother. More than once in the last month before she died, Connie begged her mother to leave with her, but the woman was afraid for the unborn child she carried. It would need a provider, and a father. Nothing Connie said, no argument or plea, reached her, and then fate intervened.

Labor pains began two months early, in the middle of the afternoon when the Swede was away. They came on suddenly, with a lot of bleeding. The progress of the labor was fast, and there was little Connie could do. Her mother and the infant, a perfectly formed baby boy, died before her eyes. Stricken with grief, Connie was not prepared for the Swede’s reaction.

When he arrived home to find his new wife and infant son dead, it was as if their corpses were little more than debris. His focus was on removing them from his home as quickly as possible. If not for Connie and his wife’s few friends, it is doubtful he would have allowed a funeral or services at all. The day of the funeral, as he re-entered their home behind Connie, her world fell completely apart. The Swede informed her that she had a choice to make. Come to his bed as his wife, or leave the household.

He gave her one night to make up her mind. By morning, Connie was out in the world, on her own. She had packed what she could carry, saddled the oldest of the horses they kept, hoping the Swede would at least allow her that, and made her way out onto the trail from Lowell to Kooskia before sunrise. She was leaving behind everything she’d ever known, with little but the clothes on her back four dollars and a small box of keepsakes from her life.

She was qualified to write the teaching exams, but her mother’s marriage and the distractions of life with that tyrant kept her from sitting them. Beyond that, Connie had no marketable skills. She had only marginal talent with a needle and thread, had, had very little opportunity to learn much in the way of cooking or running a household. She didn’t know what else besides teach a woman her age could do. Even so, she was determined to see what she could find in the way of work in Grangeville. It took her four days to get there.

By then she had eaten all the food she’d packed, and had had no sleep.

The weeks that followed her arrival in Grangeville were a blur of hunger, desperation and fear. The only job she could get was in the saloon, and in spite of promises to the contrary, she was soon being coerced to share drinks with, and act more friendly to the customers. Kisses and fondling progressed to rough handling. Filthy hands groped her constantly. Fat smelly drunks became surly when she tried to avoid their advances, and a few times she got cuffed hard across the cheekbone for trying to avoid being kissed on the mouth.

Connie cried herself to sleep every night, but diligently squirreled away every penny in tips she could get. The other girls regularly climbed the stairs with the customers, and told her that was where the money was, but Connie was a virgin, and could not bring her self to give that away to the likes of the patrons of the Whiskey Jack Saloon. All she wanted was enough money to be able to write the teaching exams, and then she could write away to towns and hamlets all over Idaho that were looking for teachers.

It wasn’t to be though. Connie cringed and huddled down into herself with the flashes of memory that had been impossible to suppress for weeks now. In the dark when she was sleeping, one of the old cowboys she’d served and rebuffed earlier in the night made his way into her room and took her. He took her virginity, the gold locked that had been her mothers’ and all of the money she’d managed to save. She fought him, but had been no match for him. His answer to her struggles was to beat her severely, until she couldn’t fight him any more.

Not a soul stepped in to help her, yet the rooms near hers were all occupied. That the owner even allowed her to keep the room for the three days she needed to be able to walk again afterward was a small mercy. One of the girls, Lois, did her best to tend Connie’s bruises, and even gave her twenty dollars and advice to leave. The word was out she was spoiled, and there was no chance she could fend off more advances without incurring worse than she already had now. No matter how it happened, she was a wonton woman now. No one would stand for her virtue, and few would support her if she tried.

Connie took the advice, and went some better. In the wee hours of the morning, as soon as she was fit to travel, she stole men’s clothes, a rifle and a pistol, enough food for a week, and another sixty dollars from the till in the saloon, and made her way back out on the trail. This time she headed south. Her plan was to find a wagon train and go west to California. If she had to pass herself off as a boy to get there that’s what she would do.

She made it just over sixty miles when her horse went lame, and she found herself on foot. Four more days of travel on foot, and here she was, hiding out and living off the stores of a hermit widower, miles from nowhere, with winter moving in on her. The question, “where to go from here?” looming in front of her with very few options in the mix.

*********

Connie did manage to choke back the tears this time, thanks to the big man she’d been watching. He rolled his wheelbarrow within twenty feet of her hiding place. Startled and caught off guard, she nearly let out a scream. Her heart pounding alone sounded like a heard of buffalo stampeding. As soon as the man was safely out of earshot, Connie stretched her legs, and moved to a spot farther out from the cabin.

The sun was getting low, and even though the wind was dying, it was becoming bitterly cold. The damp sharp smell of snow was in the air too. The late season had been her reprieve, only now she knew she was running out of time. Taking the man’s horse and moving on was becoming the most attractive option as Connie weighed the possibilities.

The prospect of spending the winter alone with a man, especially a man she didn’t know, and who so obviously lived alone by choice was frightening. He would probably send her packing anyway, and be watching to make sure she went. Just taking the horse and whatever supplies she could carry before he even knew she was there was probably the wisest option. Stealing his horse could get her hung or at least put in jail, but the man would be on foot, so how would he catch her? On top of that, it would take him days to reach help on foot and she’d be long gone. It seemed like a fairly safe choice.

Connie considered leaving the man thirty dollars of her money with a written promise to pay the rest back when she could, but what would he do with the money out here? The IOU would have to do. To go with that, she would have liked to get into the cabin and find out who the man was. That way when she got herself situated, she could send his horse back to him with thanks and payment for the use of it, but so far the man never ventured far enough away for her to dare make the intrusion. The idea struck her that she could stop in a nearby town and ask about him, as if she were looking for him. Folks would give her directions she wouldn’t need, but if she played her cards right they’d give her his name too.

With plans bouncing around in her mind, Connie returned to the small camp she’d made, and collected her things. It was getting too cold to sleep out. She would hover out of sight in the woods near the cabin until she was sure the man was settled inside for the night, get herself what she could fit in her pack out of his larder, and find a space in the barn until day break when she would saddle up his horse and set out.

With what remained of daylight, Connie wrote that IOU letter that she planned to leave tacked up in the barn. The only thing she had to write on was the back of an old letter her father wrote to her mother, so she added a request to the bottom that the man save the paper for her because she would be needing it back some day for sentimental reasons.

It was well after dark, before the man went inside. He spent a long time in the barn. Much longer than it normally took him to tend the horse and milk the cow. Then he puttered for the longest time at something Connie couldn’t get a good look at. “What the hell are you doing! I’m freezing out here!” she hissed when he kept going back and forth into the barn.

Finally he went inside. Connie waited for the smell of cooking to signal that the man was really settled in for the night. He was certainly a creature of habit. Even though his day ended later than it usually did, everything seemed to get back into his routine as soon as he trudged up onto the stoop that evening. He sat on the rocker by the door, stomped his feet several times, and kicked off his boots before going inside. Once inside he lit the oil lamp near the window, and then the wood stove. It never took more than twenty minutes before Connie could smell what he was having for his supper. That had become her signal to get something for herself. Her reasoning being, that if he was occupied by his own activity and kitchen clatter, he wouldn’t hear what she was up to.

That night she waited until the lamp nearest the window was dimmed, signaling the man had cleaned up after his meal and was doing whatever it was that he did with his evenings. While she waited, her bedroll was barely enough cover for warmth, and it offered very little protection for her hands and feet. The horse would not be the only thing she needed to take with her if she left this place. Some of the furs and skins the man had tacked up on the side of his barn would be needed too.

Finally, when all was quiet in the cabin, Connie made her way into the root cellar, and bagged as much as she could carry, praying it would be enough to sustain her until she got to the next town, and would not leave the man in hardship. He was better suited for survival than she was though, she thought to herself. He at least knew how to hunt and obtain food from the land. Even without a horse, he would probably fair better than she was going to over the next week or so until she got herself somewhere safe. Her mind chattered over every justification she could muster for the crime she planned to carry out the next day, while she fashioned a mound of skins and furs in the corner of the barn away from the horse and the cow and the roosts used by the laying hens.

It was the first warm night’s sleep she had in weeks, and it took her deep into exhausted dreams.

The screech made by the heavy wood door on its rusting hinges didn’t even disturb Connie’s dreams. Royal came in the barn, milked the cow, and then saddled and packed his horse just before dawn the next morning, and never noticed the slumbering pile of fur just out of his line of sight in the corner. Connie slept through all of the commotion made by a man making ready for a forty mile ride he didn’t want to make, to trade for new laying hens he was not happy to be needing. She didn’t even hear him promise the hens he had that their days were numbered.

The silence that followed Royal’s departure was lost on all but the cow. It was mid morning before Connie woke up with a startle. Stiff from having slept in one position most of the night, she struggled to get up and get her bearings. The pack full of contraband food next to her brought her to reality, and then the missing horse got her blood pumping and her heart pounding.

“Someone else stole the horse!” she stood, looking furtively around the space, afraid that the man would come in any moment and accuse her. Panic took hold briefly, until Connie saw the full bucket of milk set against the wall near the cow. The man had been in and already done the milking. Then a new wave of worry set in. Did he see her? Surely not, she argued with herself. If he had he would have shaken her awake and wanted to know who she was and what she was doing there? She peeked out around the door. There was no sign of him of his horse.

“Where is he gone?” she hissed, and then she set about cursing herself, and setting the barn to rights. She would have to wait out another night before she could get on her way. Impatience and fatigue conspired to force tears and animate Connie’s temper. Several of the skins and furs she was replacing neatly on their hooks ended up launched across the barn. One slapped the cow hard across her muzzle. The startled animal kicked over the bucket of milk.

The sight of the spill, and dismay at the waste was enough to stop Connie’s tirade. She collected the mess she’d scattered, and tucked her pack away behind an old crate. It would be safer there than back out in the bush where she’d have to stay with it to keep stray critters out of it. She kept an apple and a small piece of cheese out for her breakfast, and climbed down into the root cellar to get milk to go with it.

A thick layer of cream protected the milk, and tempted Connie. “It would go nicely with some sugar,” she thought. “And even better with some coffee.”

“Do I dare?” she asked herself, peeking her head up out of the cellar toward the door of the cabin. “He took the horse. Maybe he’s hunting, or even gone to visit somewhere?”

It was the first opportunity she had to get inside the cabin and look around. Maybe it was better that her plan to leave that morning was foiled. Now she could find out more about the man, and at least know his name to send back what she owed him, with word of where he could reclaim his horse.

The coffee pot was still hot thanks to the banked coals in the wood stove. Although it was a little on the barky and burnt side, Connie savored it as if it were the finest wine. With the cream and a heaping tablespoon of sugar added, it was ambrosia. Enough venison stew to feed four or five people steeped in the large pot next to the coffee.

“He’s not gone too far if he left his supper cooking,” she made a mental note to herself.

The contents of the pot was well cooked she realized when she helped herself to a taste. Too well cooked to be something started that morning. No doubt it was last night supper, cooked up to stretch for several days. Steeping the way it was, it would remain edible, and even taste better as the days passed. Even if the coals under it went cold, the air would cool it quickly enough that it would be unlikely to spoil.

Connie helped herself to a good-sized plate full, and ate it while she walked around the two large rooms that comprised the cabin’s interior. Women’s touches were evident in many little things. Lace hung on all the windows except the one over the water pump near the stove. Porcelain figures lined a small curio cabinet that itself was delicate and feminine. But the thing that drew Connie most was the wall full of shelves lined with books and papers that she found in the bedroom.

“So this is how you keep yourself busy,” she whispered to the man whose presence she was beginning to feel. Some of the titles of the books were familiar, most were not. All of the books had been read, some many times, from the look of their worn leather binding. Fictions from England and writers from the east, science and engineering texts, poems and essays about topics from trees and farming, to medicine and bridge building, all shared space in the man’s library. He even had a large collection of Ned Buntline’s penny and dime novels of outlaws and Indian desperados.

Connie became lost for several hours as she flipped through pages.

The sound of a hawk screeching outside broke here reverie. The startle brought her back to her goal, which was to ferret out what information she could about the man, before he returned and caught her there. She didn’t notice that snow had begun to fall outside.

It took another hour of rifling through boxes of papers she pulled from under the man’s bed, until she found what she needed. A marriage license and a small clutch of old letters, kept much the way her mother had kept the mementos of her life with Connie’s father. Connie settled down on the wood floor by the bed and opened some of the letters.

All of them were to Mary. The woman whose name Connie knew from the headstone in the small cemetery the man maintained on the ridge. The hand that wrote them and his voice were loving and gentle. Connie was entranced from the first letter, and in tears by the time she read the last. The man had loved his wife from the minute he saw her. His letters so openly showed his heart, that Connie felt she knew him. She wished she were Mary, and then found herself feeling shame for her sneaky intrusion into something so private between two people she didn’t even know.

The letters opened something within her. Connie wanted to know the man more. Her goal to find out the man’s name achieved, and now all but forgotten, she pulled out another box. This one was locked, but the lock proved no barrier to Connie’s efforts with a small hairpin found in the other. Inside were several tintype pictures and six richly bound diaries. Connie recognized the man, and guessed that the woman in some of the pictures with him was Mary.

She was the most beautiful woman Connie had ever seen. Mary’s eyes shone from the pictures, and seemed to twinkle with fun and mischief. Raven curls literally poured from her head down to her hips, and in every image the beauty defied the convention of her times, which should have had her locks secured and properly tied up on her head. Her figure was beautifully full, making Connie self conscious of her own slim boyish curves.

“No wonder he loved you,” Connie spoke. “Any man would.”

As beautiful as Mary’s pictures were, her diaries shared the thoughts of a woman whose soul was just as captivating. Connie read several pages of the one on the top of the pile, and realized she was reading from what seemed like the middle of a story about the couple. Mary wrote of the child growing within her, and her excitement for the coming birth. She detailed how Mary marveled and found great joy in how happy the man was.

“Roy. She called you Roy,” Connie whispered to the man’s picture. The name suited him, and the decency she’d sensed as she watched him those last few days was now fleshed out and whole.

The diary kept nothing back. Roy loved his wife, and she loved him. Even the details of how he showed his love to Mary in their bed were written down. Connie put the first diary down, and rifled through the others looking for the beginning. The earliest volume began two months after the date on the marriage certificate.

Connie began to read.

December 25, 1867

I could cry if I wasn’t so angry. He is so stern and unyielding, this man I married. True to his word he has done this thing. This book is my Christmas! I wanted some combs! I wanted silk, and he gave me this. I can have the silk and the combs he said, only if I put my stories to paper. Why can’t I just speak them to him like always? The children like them spoken. Well I will show him! I will use this for writing, but I will write my thoughts in it not sill children’s tales made up in my head. He can write the damnable stories himself if he likes them so well.

He threatened me with spanking if I pout over this any longer! If I did not love him so much I would shoot him! That horrible woman heard him say it too. I swear I will scratch her eyes out if she smirks at me again. I don’t even care if Roy bares my tail in front of the whole camp for it either. If she smirks at me again I will maim her!

This protracted camp is making all of us restless. The snow was not supposed to reach this far south. The wagon master promised the travel west through Texas would go quickly all the way to the canyon at the Colorado River. He promises it will only be a few days more, but we are also tired and cold. I look at Roy and his eyes scream “patience Mary” but it is beyond me! I hate these women so much! All but Lilia. She’s my only friend. At least when we’re moving, hard as the trail is, I don’t have to see them except in the morning and at night. Here they are everywhere! The want to talk incessantly!

Lilia’s Caleb is so like Royal. They are like peas in a pod, though they argue so much, two strong men with firm ideas about life. It is so funny to watch them dispute a point! They don’t even know they agree. Poor Lilia shouldn’t have laughed so hard at them tonight. Caleb was so stern with her. Royal looked at me as if it was my fault too! My poor behind! I wasn’t even guilty and it quivered in fear. I will have to be sure and give Lilia some of my salve in the morning because I fear Caleb means business tonight. Her Christmas is ruined I fear, unless Caleb is like Royal after such matters.

December 26, 1867

Oh Royal my love! You were so mean with this gift. I have plenty to occupy my mind I swear! You did not need to punish my moodiness and restlessness this way! Now I must write here every day! I must write every time my mouth escapes me! I will surely go insane. All I did was tell that woman to put her face in the wagon master’s boot. It is the truth that foul air will surely improve her disposition.

It is so! No matter how hard you spank me husband! It is still so, and I will say it again! Poor Lilia she couldn’t help laughing when I had my screaming fit. If Caleb whips her again so help me I will have to shoot him.

December 27, 1867

We are underway again, and my tail throbs on this seat. I cannot survive another camp. If I have to spend more time in close quarters with that woman I will have no hide left to sit upon.

Royal has been so surly these last few days. I admit my mood has not been much better. This gift is cruelty. Again I am banished to silence and ordered to write. My heart wants to day dream. I want to watch the trail. How can I take it all in when I must bury my head in this book! He showed me the empty volumes. Two more like this, and I have filled only a page! I will go insane. Yes I have said it already, but it is true.

My husband is a randy creature! Perhaps if I use these books to tell these truths he will free me from this punishment. I am not ashamed. These are my pages. I will write my heart. Yes I provoke him. It is a diversion sometimes, and I know he will want my attentions when I make him attend to my surly moods. I see the glint in his eyes when I test him too. I think he knows.

His organ was hard even before he took my trousers down this morning. It bulged even as he scolded me for cursing that woman. And as he spanked my naked hind end it poked my side. Even as I cried and promised obedience, it grew. He reveled when I fell to my knees next to him, and took him from his own trousers. My hind end did not throb, nor was it as hot as his member was while I kissed and caressed it.

Does God know I love him so, and need his flesh more? Is there sin in me that my husband’s flesh excites me so? That his hand sets fire to my backside only to ignite a flame of desire in us both?

Peace will reign again for a while, I know. Long days on the trail make for tired husbands. With luck mine will become too tired to remember this curse, that I am to write everyday.

********************** 

Connie found her heart pounding as she read, and finally had to stop. The guilt she felt now, with her invasion into the man’s secrets so complete, made her stomach roll. She wanted to read all of it, all of what Mary had written, but she couldn’t. There wasn’t enough time, or was there? A throbbing awareness was awake in her. Would the man notice if she took these diaries with her? She desperately wanted to read more, but there simply wasn’t enough time.

Thoughts of time stirred her back to activity, and for the first time, she looked out the window to see that there was more than two feet of snow on the ground, and that the wind was piling it quickly into drifts.

It was Christmas Eve, today, Connie realized. Tears struggled against her resolve to find their way out. They won. This man had lost as much as she had, maybe more. Something inside her broke with the sadness of all of it, her losses and his. But her fears won out, and galvanized her to action. She had to get moving. But the snow! It came so late this year, but for Connie, in that moment, it came too soon.

“Where is he?” she worried out loud. Suddenly afraid the man might get lost and never return. For a few brief minutes she forgot he wasn’t part of her life, and that in another day she would be gone from his, as fleeting as her intrusion was. Connie realized it was much later than she thought when she found the stove and the stew and coffee pots on it were cold. The Cuckoo clock confirmed it. It was 4 PM. No wonder the light was so dim in the cabin. It would be dusk soon.

The snow was deep enough outside that she would leave tracks in it that only a blind man would miss, the man would surely find her anyway if she went back to the barn now. If she was lucky the wind might hide her tracks for her, but surely he would be home any minute. There wasn’t time. If she stayed inside he would find her there too. Worry and then panic set in, while Connie’s mind bounced from one option to another. Hide in the barn another night praying her tracks weren’t discovered, stay inside and be warm, and pray the man didn’t shoot her for a thief. If he found her in his barn he might surely think she was a thief.

The icy wind made up her mind, at least in the moment when she started to make her way back to the barn. Closing the door with resignation, Connie turned back into the room. There was more than enough wood to keep a fire in the stove for two days. “If I can get a campfire lit, I can get a stove lit,” she told herself, and then she set about to do just that.

As dusk set in, and it became dark inside the cabin, Connie wrestled with the idea of lighting one of the oil lamps. The man would know someone was inside if he saw lights as he rode up. She argued with herself about the fire in the stove giving her presence away just as surely. In the end, she lit one of the lamps, and curled up on the rocker next to the stove. Hours passed, and there was no sign of the man.

“Where are you Royal Lee? I could have been safe in the barn after all you contrary man!” Connie spoke to the black window that faced the barn.

She had concocted at least four versions of a story to tell him that would explain her being there, and knew that depending on his reactions to her, none of them would be the version she actually told. Nervousness and anxiety waned as the hours passed, and before long the urge to sleep surpassed all of it. The warm bed called to her, and with her belly full, her body warm, Connie succumbed.

She added three large logs to the fire, and stoked the coals under them as best she could. After washing her face with warm water for the first time in more than a month, Connie crawled into Royal Lee’s bed, and went to sleep.

************

The twenty-mile ride to the Miller’s was long. Royal was saddle weary and stiff when he dismounted and climbed the steps to the front door of the ranch. Three carriages and a buckboard were lined up outside, and he wondered what was up. He found out when his knock at the door was answered. His neighbor’s pretty wife, stood in front of him all decked out in finery.

“Royal Lee! How nice of you to join us. Caleb didn’t tell me you were coming. Come in!” Lilia’s voice chimed with laughter as she pulled the door wide for her guest.

“Invite? Lilia, I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. I’m here to talk to Caleb about a trade,” Royal explained as he reluctantly stepped into the house.

“A trade? On Christmas Eve? Oh Royal! Surely you will stay and have some cider and a meal with us?” Lilia seemed genuinely disappointed that Royal was not there as a guest. Mary had been one of her closest friends, and she really missed the man’s company.

“I have to get back by nightfall Lilia. There’s snow in the air and I left the animals with only a day’s provision. Fetch your man for me please,” Royal leaned down to accept the kiss and greeting from her.

“No! You take your boots off Royal Lee, and you come in and be sociable for a few minutes. If you won’t I’ll tell Caleb to send you away,” Lilia frowned, and crossed her arms across her chest looking for all-the world like a pouting child.

“Lilia,” Royal’s answer to her petulance was a warning growl.

“Don’t you growl at me you old coot!” Lilia laughed. Before the discussion could get any further, Caleb came out into the hallway to check on his wife.

“Royal! What a pleasant surprise! Come in! Come in!” the man laughed and embraced his friend.

“I can’t stay Caleb. I’m here to trade for some laying hens. Mine quit and I’m too old to face winter without eggs,” Royal laughed.

“Nonsense! You can and you will stay. At least long enough for a cup of cider and a meal. We’re just about to sit down anyway,” Caleb was firm.

“I have animals to get back to man!” Royal objected.

“And an hour won’t matter to you one way or another,” Caleb nodded and agreed.

Royal was committed. The smell of turkey and baking helped to sway him too. It was nice to get in out of the cold, and the meal was enjoyable. Caleb would not entertain discussion about the hens until Royal downed two helpings of the full meal.

It had been a very long time since Royal saw the trappings of Christmas, and even longer since he’s sat down to dinner with a group of people. Everyone was cordial, but all were too interested in how he was doing without Mary. By the time Caleb relented and stepped away with him to see to a deal, Royal was simmering with quiet resentment. It had been ten years since Mary passed after all, why couldn’t people let things be. It was the main reason he’d pulled away from people that they could not relate to him without constantly bringing up his dead wife.

The pain of her loss flooded back to him every time, and this was no exception. Seeing Lilia and remembering the holidays made it worse. Caleb seemed to sense it, and did what he could to lighten the mood for his friend.

The trade was perfunctory and the business concluded quickly. Royal took five hens for a hind quarter of venison and twenty beaver pelts. He accused his friend of robbery, and the two squabbled like brothers. The good natured deal was sealed with a handshake, and there was little to do but make the exchange. By then the snow had begun to fall, and the wind with it promised to become a problem.

“You should wait it out Royal in case it’s a blizzard. You know we have plenty of room here, and Lilia will be delighted to have you stay,” Caleb offered.

“I have animals to tend. It’s a straight trail. I’ll be fine,” was Royal’s answer.

“If you saw more of people, and found a new wife, the pain would ease my friend,” Caleb spoke bluntly, but he knew there would be no swaying his friend, so he simply offered a sack filled with baked goods and turkey still hot from the platter. The meat alone was enough to feed Royal for two days. The pastries and cookies would last a good deal longer.

Royal smiled and thanked his friend. His sweet tooth was his weakness, one he was not too proud to indulge.

Before he was an hour into the return trip, he realized that the ride home was shaping up to be exactly what he’d feared most. He vowed that if these hens died before he got home, he would swear off eggs for life. The deer skin cover and layers of pelts should protect the cages from the worst of the wind, but it would not keep them from pecking at each other from fear.

The wind was in his face, and the going was slow. Royal distracted himself with a series of the tales Mary used to tell the children on the wagon trail. She never had written them down, not even after he’d tried to force her to. Instead she’d written her diaries.

The discovery had hurt him initially when he made it months after her death, but now those diaries were his last connections to the woman he had loved more than life. Her thoughts made him smile now, and they made him love her all the more deeply. She was everything he though she was and more.

No woman on earth could be what she was. Not a one.

His right palm itched as his mind wandered back over the last week. No eggs, no cream, things moved in his larder. The smell of the breakfast he wanted on the air. It was all Mary’s doing, he knew it.

The barn was wrong when he pulled the door open. It would not be dawn for another hour, but the clouds, snow and wind had cleared and a full moon reflected off of the snow. Milk was frozen on the dirt near the wall, and there were scuffed boot prints everywhere. Royal followed them around and realized that daylight would not have shown what the moon light did. The shadows were different. Who was here he wondered? No tracks left the house or the barn. Whoever it was, was either long gone or inside somewhere.

The hens he traded for survived the trip, and there were no less than nine eggs waiting for him in the nests of the laying stock he had already. Royal rolled his eyes. “Good will toward hens is not in your plans lord!” he chuckled.

Two of his new hens strutted off to peck at what looked like an empty crate. When Royal investigated, he found it wasn’t empty. He found a pack. A pack that was clearly stowed for a purpose and on top of a hefty pile of his food was an IOU note; an IOU note written in the hand of a youngster who was very likely still nearby.

Royal’s right palm began to itch even more.

“Mary if you’ve had a hand in this you will not sit for eternity” he vowed, as he trudged up to his home under the light of an early morning Christmas full moon………

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