Chapter 1

I cannot blame my downfall on the lie I told, just as spring is not at fault for melting frozen rivers. I would have died, from despair’s noose, if my last son had been taken to avenge the Yankee villains who killed his father and brother. So I lied to the man who wore gray rags proudly. I lied to his brave recruits who had lied about their ages, to avenge their families. I told them my boy was twelve. He was sixteen at the time. Neighbors did not betray us. All had lost sons and husbands. It helped that Hortense’s stature is slight, hardly taller than myself. When my boy eventually chose to grasp me, two years later, my diminutive build was as much at fault for casting me into mortal sin as was the lie.

Two years later, the Confederacy was enslaved. The black was freed, and carpet baggers cloyed their way into state offices, to intercept the funds of promised reconstruction. Liars lay with lies.

The farm my husband’s grandfather had first sown, had become half sty. One strong boy and a strong but small mother could not till nor tend the acres needed to sustain our lives. Pigs grew fat and profitable. Hortense and I could plant beets and squashes and let pigs forage unkempt rows pocked with weeds they ate as readily as the crops. Winters were mild, and there was open country to herd the pigs to, while replanting took hold.

Grandfather cursed us, tried to hit the boy, and tried to reach up my skirts. He hated the smell of the land he had wrestled into fertileness. He hated his long smashed leg, his social lapses, his sudden bursts of hate. “It’s all gone shit, Hory! Pig shit! I bet your mama sucked Yankee cock to get those pigs. She is slattern and succubus!”

“Hory, can you help with the smokehouse? The roof is leaking.” I reminded my son. Good oak, smoke wood took effort to find, and a leaking smokehouse meant burning more.

“Besha, you killed my son and grandson!” Grandfather Regis pointed and glowered at me. “Please, will you suck my cock?”

“Ma, you can use the ladder, after you fix it.” Hory smiled. He gave his great grandfather one of the fritters I had made earlier. “I hope it makes you choke, Greatgran.”

“When my leg mends, I’m going to choke you and your mother, in the night. She’s a bad influence, Hory. You’re 18 years today and still a welp. You’re nothing like your father. Where are your pregnant sows?” He chewed, smiled, swallowed, and coughed up the sweet, fried cornmeal. Hacking into his lap blanket, Regis scowled, not raising his head.

I had to pry nails from the outhouse to fix the ladder. Hortense walked out of the cabin and blinked at the sunset. His nose wrinkled at the foul air. “Better wait til morning, Ma. Don’t want you to fall, trying to mend a roof.” He was everything like his father, putting me to work. He looked me over and grinned. Right then and there, he decided how I would fall. “Come inside and give me my birthday present.”

A preacher once told me, small women have big souls, yet I held few convictions, other than I had saved my son from battlefields, and I was damned as a woman. I witnessed the power of women, survivors who had boys truthfully too young to go to war. They worked constantly to sustain and improve their farms. Some had prospered enough to hire blacks. Some had bedded carpetbaggers and bragged about the money that would send their sons to college. Many had forgotten it was a man’s world. Their men were gone. Some did not even morn the loss. I heard of two who had taken to living together, and the scandal was let go much too quickly for proper Baptists. I wanted to live in their new world, rein my misfortunes and ride them to better fields. I guessed my soul was small. When a man spoke, I listened. When he commanded, I obeyed. When he summoned me, I knelt before him. My father had put me and my mother to hard work. We were merely women. All women of our age worked hard, but my father was relentless. He picked my husband for me, to ensure I was not coddled. Thus I was worked and raped as God intended. I bore children, and I read telegrams that claimed to honor their deaths.

None of the widows of the township failed to warn their daughters against marrying a pig farmer. Nor did they need too. What daughter of women who had taken control of their destinies would suffer a stink filled life, to cleave unto a rare man their age. My son despaired to ever marry, three years after southern United States society, in 1867, considered him a man.

I had made fritters that morning alongside our best bacon, and a pudding for lunch. I had wished my son great happiness in his eighteenth year. It was all the present I could afford. I entered my home with some reservation. “Hory?”

“I’m in the loft, Mother. Climb up.” It was from my bed he called me. His own lay by the iron stove. Grandpa Regis had a room townsfolk would call a closet. My son had latched him shut in there. We did fear him at night. In the morning I would wipe the drool from his face and the stink from his flesh. Often he would grab my breasts and grin at me. Sometimes he barked like a raccoon. I suffered the man, for he was a lost soul. My son had a powerful soul in need of spiritual guidance. Mine was too small to lead, but I could protest.

I trembled and looked at the rungs nailed to the center house post. They would not break, but ascending them, I would fall this night. “You shouldn’t be up there, Son.”

“Mother, I’m in no mood to argue with you. Should I lock you in with Greatgran? Come to me, now.”

I took hold of a rung and gripped until it hurt. I felt tears rivulet my cheeks. “That’s my space to sleep, Hory. If your straw tick is moldy, I’ll freshen it.” I had put fresh straw in his mattress bag last week. “You can’t be in my bed.”

“It’ll be better in your bed.” My son’s head looked down at me. “Christ, I’m not going to hurt you.”

My son had never taken a switch to me, unlike his father and my father. His words were obeyed, and that was sufficient for his ego. The youngest child, his brothers had taken beatings for him. Then they would punish him. Hory would take a switch to me, I imagined, if he was seriously crossed. The fires I saw in his eyes burned my imagination into my soul. I stepped on a rung and pulled myself up. “You’re a good son. I’m a proud mama, Hory.” I sniffed and climbed another rung. “But the good lord does not want you in my bed.”

“He will forgive me, as surely as he has forsaken me, Ma.” Hory reached down and took my wrist. His palm sank heat into my arm. I trembled, but managed the next rung. “Climb.”

Two more rungs put my head above the loft’s floorboards. My son shuffled back for me but kept his hand on my wrist. I climbed. He pulled me over the splintered lip and onto my mattress of straw.

Hory sat like an Indian, legs crossed. Instead of a loin cloth, his manhood pointed freely. “Last year, I promised if I was without a woman by this time, I would take a woman.” His face was red, with shame. “I proposed to Sue Anne yesterday.” Hardly thirteen, the girl lived four miles away. Her mother, Mary, allowed her to trade with us, their corn, for our squashes and sometimes a ham. The girl disliked visiting, but she was the girl who spoke to Hory most often. “She told me I was a pig turd.”

“Her mama told her to say that.” I consoled. The neighbors were mostly widows, as I indicated earlier. They may have let my falsehood slide, at the time, but they would never forgive us for saving a boy’s life. “I’ll find a woman for you. If I have to go into town-”

“Did you fuck a Yankee for our pigs, Ma?” His voice was upset, because he knew better than to ask.

“Mr. Patterson sold the piglets to us, you know that. I did not lie with him. On your father’s grave, I swear. And neither is he a Yankee. He’s from Maryland, and he moved south to join the Confederacy.”

“I don’t like him.” My son’s eyes narrowed. “You shut up about him, Ma. I decided to bed you, and don’t you try to talk around it.”

My hand went to my mouth. “No, Son! It’s not right. You climb down, now. You wrestle with your manhood, if you must. I’ll go into town tomorrow.” I protested with all the authority I could muster.

“Ain’t nobody gonna listen to you, in town, Ma. They don’t sell wives there, and we can’t afford whores. Now you take that dress off, and you get on your hands and knees. I may not have done it before, but I seen the pigs.

My eyes filled with tears. “I can’t, Son. I can’t sin like that.”

“It’s my sin, Ma. Me and God will forgive you. I don’t care if he don’t forgive me.” My son pointed at my dress.

It was a nightmare. He was the man. He worked me hard, but he worked hard too. We had to, to survive. A man that works to feed his family is a man who deserves to bed a woman. I was almost willing to accept him into my valley of sin, for one night, but he wanted to rut like an animal!

“I am not a pig, Hory!” I gasped.

That quieted him for a moment. He wanted to ask how to do it, but could never ask a woman. It was a shame worse than man and woman fucking like pigs. “You take that off, Ma. I don’t care how I do it, I’m gonna put my cock in you and get my first fuck.”

I wiped my eyes on a sleeve, but only managed to get dirt in them and make mud on it. I pulled stays out of the loops that fastened the front of my dress. I sniffed and coughed. “You shame me, Son. Word will spread. The neighbors will shun us.” I unfastened the last toggle from its loop.