Chapter 1

The stars were just beginning to appear in the evening sky. They came out one by one, like shy virgins, and then twinkled magnificently in the clear deep dark blue of the early evening.

Lena hurried from the farmhouse with her milk pails in her hands. Her face was thrust into the dark heavy collar of her coat, and it scratched her soft cheek. The harsh words of her parents, screaming at each other, still rang in her ears, and it wasn't until she was halfway across the yard that she looked up and saw the bright stars in the sky. Then she stopped and gazed at them, and wished on the first one she had seen for a better life.

She didn't know any other kind of life except that which took place within the small confines of the little Iowa farm where she lived with her parents. Life had been better when her brother, Ret, had still lived with them. But he had grown up and gone away run away from the life of brutal words and harsh treatment that their father meted out to everyone on his land.

"You screaming bitch, you're no better than a whore! You deserve to be treated like a whore!"

Lena turned and saw her father's raised arm strike her mother to the floor through the lighted kitchen window. With a sob she turned again and hurried to the barn. She opened the big door and then closed it and went down the row of cows to Tess, her favorite cow.

Tess's udders were heavy tonight and Tess mooed in great pain and pleasure as she saw Lena approaching with her milking pails. Lena had barely positioned the pail under Tess and placed her hands on the cow's heavy tits when the milk began to come. Lena deftly directly the steaming hot stream into one pail, which quickly filled. Another pail was filled from the same udder, and then two more pails from the second udder.

She talked to the cow as she milked; "That's it Tessie, girl. Feel better now? Didn't you know I would come out here to milk you? You know I wouldn't forget all about my Tessie." She stroked the cow's hot sweaty flanks and the cow turned to look at her with her big, wordless cow eyes. Lena imagined that the animal understood Lena's own pain and sorrow. Every time she witnessed her father striking her mother she felt a sickness for which she knew no cure. She had been witnessing such scenes ever since she could remember. But now, as she approached puberty, the cruelty of her father toward her mother seemed to affect Lena's sensitive spirit even more.

She was twelve years old and a very pretty girl, wholesome and healthy looking with a good clean, farm girl's complexion: fair with a rosy blush on her cheeks from working outside, summer, winter, spring and fall.

She was well developed for a twelve-year-old, as so many farm girls are. Perhaps it was the environment in which she grew up, witnessing the farm animals in all the stages of their existence: from birth, infancy, mating, adulthood, and death. They kept pigs and chickens as well as cows on their farm, and there were four horses: two old plow horses which they had from the days when they had a horse drawn plow, and two beautiful stallions which her father kept for his own riding pleasure.

As she went down the line of milkcows, the barn filled with the warm soothing smell of fresh hot milk. Together with the smell of the hay in the loft, and the twinkling of the stars through the loft window, the barn seemed a world apart from the farmhouse across the yard. The barn was a place where Lena felt she could be alone, and dream.

Tonight Lena felt she had a lot to dream about. Tonight was a special night. She had gotten her very first period that very day. Now she was a woman, though the size and shape of her breasts and the shrinking of her waist had told her she was a woman for a few months now.

"If I am a woman, now," she thought to herself, "I should have plans. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life on this farm, after all." Thus ran her thoughts as she stooped under the cows' bellies with her pail, and spoke to them soothingly. She liked the feel of her hands against their smooth full udders. And the hot milk splashing against the pail and hitting her hands made her laugh. She licked her hands off when she finished Linda, the brown cow, and moved on to Millie. She had special names for each one of them, and she spoke to them and told them of her dreams.

She was just starting on the last of them when she felt a cold blast of air at her back and she didn't even have to turn around to sense that someone was standing behind her. Like an animal, the short hairs at the back of her neck told her of the man's presence. She turned around. It was her father.

She just stared up at him. He was wearing his riding boots under his greatcoat. Although it was still spring, it was still very cold in the little northern Iowa country. There might still be more snow this year.

"Finish your work, child," Roland Hanson said.

Lena turned back to Josie, a pretty dappled creature, but she could feel her father's eyes on her back and this made her nervous. She gripped the cow's tits clumsily and the milk squirted onto her feet, wetting her toes through her torn boots. Josie sensed Lena's nervousness, and let out a pained moo and swatted her tail furiously. Lena grasped her harder.

One hoof shot out and the pail was lying on the barn floor, the new milk flowing over the hay.

"Stupid cunt!" shouted her father. The milk had splattered him too.

Lena kept milking furiously.

She got only half a bucket from Josie and then stood up.

"Are you going riding, Poppa?" Lena asked. She was bending over, counting the buckets of milk she had filled. Under her coat, her long breasts fell against her wool sweater.

Her father stood right in front of her and he put his hand under her coat and squeezed the pendulous breasts.

"What are you... ?" Lena began. She had often been aware of him looking at her, these long winter months this year. But never before had he been so bold as to touch her.

"Shut up, cunt," he said and put his big, strong, knobbed hand over her mouth, effectively gagging her.

"What... ?" she tried to break away from him, but her struggles only made him grip her tighter. As if she was a package he was taking into town to mail, he picked her up under his arm and carried her in to a corner of the barn. He threw her down on the hay. He opened his greatcoat and Lena saw that he wore nothing underneath. She saw his huge erect genitalia which he seemed to be parading before her, for he just stood over her and let her look for a few moments, while he swung his cock a little and let it bounce on top of his balls.

She had seen the genitalia of all the animals on the farm before, but she had never seen the erect genitalia of a man.

Her father must have weighed 250 pounds. He was a big man who worked hard all year round and the work put muscles all over him, where city men have only flab. He fell on her now. She smelled the alcohol on his breath and tried to turn her face away from the loathsome smell. Harshly, he had pulled her wool sweater up over her breasts.

"Nice boobs," he was muttering more to himself than to her. "Nice, nice boobies," he was knocking them from side to side, batting at them and rubbing his unshaven chin in them.

One hand went down and pulled up her skirt and forced its way into her panties.

She tried to scream and move, but he held her tightly pinned, and his big knobby fingers forced their way between her tightly closed thighs.

"Fucking virgin tit-woman, fucking shrinking virgin," he was muttering as he pinned her legs apart with his legs. Each of his legs was like a pillar and Lena knew now there was going to be no escape. She looked down and saw the huge reddened cock taking aim between her thighs and then he rammed his cock at her unwilling opening.

Her flesh tore and she tried to scream but he had his hand over her mouth. Straw, hay, pubic hair all got sucked in to her battered hole as he rammed her again. The first time he had only managed to ram the head of his cock into her vagina. The hymen had held him out.

Now he battered this last defense. She screamed and screamed under his hot hand as now he just rammed and rammed his cock into her fully opened and bleeding hole, seeming to say with each plunge, "I am going to make a woman out of you. You want to know what it's like to be a woman? Here, I'll show you," and he'd ram his shaft into her bleeding vagina again.

When he was through he just stood up and left her lying there. He stood over her again for a moment. He didn't need to threaten her not to tell anyone what had just happened. She knew all his threats by now, even when they were silent.

Then he turned and stalked out of the barn, leaving her alone.

She lay there a long time, crying silently to herself. Was that what lovemaking was like? Was that what her mother suffered every time her parents lay down in their bed? Was this what her mother's frequent screams in the night signified?

Lena wondered if her mother knew where her husband was going when he left the house.

With some straw she wiped the blood away from her thighs. But her hole was still bleeding. She tried to stuff some soft grass up her to stem the bleeding, but it didn't seem to help. She wiped her eyes, and pulled her clothes back on.

Then she went to take the full milk pails around to the kitchen, where she emptied them into the vat. Then she had the rest of her evening chores to do.

She scattered feed to the chickens and then climbed up on the pigsty and threw the pigs their evening swill. Her walk was unbalanced, as if the ripped, torn and bleeding place between her legs had disjointed her legs. She had to walk a little bowlegged. The chickens gabbled at her feet like the Lilliputians around the giant Gulliver. The pigs snorted and rolled over in delight at receiving their slop. She balanced on the fence around their sty and put a hand to her crotch, as if to try to soothe it.

When she turned in to bed that night, she was in still more pain. The bleeding had stopped but the blood was all in clots now, and every time she tossed in her restless dreams, she felt a tearing of flesh around her vagina and she dreamed again and again that she was being raped.

"Good morning, sunshine!"

Lena opened her eyes to bright spring sunshine and the smell of bacon frying in the kitchen. The world seemed bright and beautiful. It was a Saturday and after her chores she would have the day to herself. She was young and she was a woman now--today was the second day of her first period. These were the first thoughts to run through her head.

She swung her legs off the cot.

"Ohhhhhhh!" she stopped short as the ripping pain between her legs brought back the most brutal memory of yesterday.

"What did you say, honey?" called her mother's voice from the kitchen.

"Nothing!" she called back. Slowly she raised her flannel nightie and surveyed the damage. Her menstrual flow was all over her thighs as well as some additional bleeding that had started up in the night from the torn membrane of her virginity. She cleaned herself up sadly, and very gently inserted a Kotex up her raw vagina.

She showered and got dressed, dreading to see her father again.

But her mother had good news for her.

"Your father left early this morning. He went in to town and he'll be away all day, until supper."

Lena said nothing. She sat down at the place her mother had fixed for her and hungrily devoured the eggs and bacon and biscuits. She and her mother never discussed her father, but there was an unacknowledged understanding between them, that mother and daughter were allies against the stern man. As allies, they were both helpless, but the flow of sympathy between them was strong, if unspoken, when, after he had abused mother or daughter with his blows, he left them alone to each other.

"What did he go to town for?" Lena asked sullenly.

"He went to see about Joe King's bull. He wants to mate it with our cows," said Mrs. Hanson. She had been a pretty woman in her youth, with long blonde hair and a creamy complexion that Lena, her daughter, had inherited.

But Mara Hanson, though all of 39 years old, was only a faded image of her former pretty self. Years of hard farm work, and her husband's contempt and brutality had made her blonde hair grey, and her face worn and anxious looking. She had brought five children into the world. One, the oldest, a son, had been born stillborn. Two had died in infancy. Then Clark and Lena had come. A sixth baby, unknown to her husband, had died under a local midwife's hand, in a barn. Mrs. Hanson's body, under her thin housedress, reminded Lena of an old cow that has birthed too many calves and has no milk to give any more.