Chapter 5

Meg should have noticed, when they left the bathroom, that all four of the other women seemed to have something to do in the dining room, but she was too busy trying to act completely normal.

"I see you fared a little better tonight," said Mavis, looking at Meg's dress, an odd look on her face.

"Yes, Bobby is a good boy, and learns very quickly," said Meg. She saw Sally looking oddly at her too, one eyebrow raised, but ignored her rather than ask what was troubling her. Instead she went about finding Bobby's night shirt, which she'd purposely put in the wash so it would be in the pile. She got it on him and took his hand.

"I'll go with you," said Sally suddenly.

"Oh" said Meg. "All right."

Bobby led the way, climbing the steps, turning the corner and climbing another flight as the two women followed him. Sally followed Meg as they entered his room with the lantern she had picked up. They didn't use electricity unless they had to, due to the war.

They tucked Bobby in and Sally watched as Meg leaned down to kiss him on his forehead. Then, to Meg's surprise, Sally leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Sally wasn't one to exhibit feelings like that.

When they left the room Sally went first and was waiting for Meg.

"What happened in the bathroom?" asked Sally, her voice low.

"Whatever do you mean?" asked Meg. She was glad it was dark, because she was blushing.

Sally's finger came up and pointed at Meg's chest. "Your dress was properly buttoned when you went in there," she said simply.

Meg looked down and was horrified to see that she had missed a button, and the top three were in the wrong holes.

"Surely ... you're mistaken," said Meg weakly.

Sally folded her arms under her meager breasts. "I'm not mistaken Meg. Your dress was not buttoned like that when you went into that room."

Meg felt her stomach knot. She was in trouble and she knew it. She threw herself on Sally's mercy.

"It's just that he splashes so much," she started, wringing her hands. "And I just thought that ... if I took my dress off then it wouldn't get ruined, and I wouldn't have to change into a new one..." She stared at Sally, for some sign that her story was being accepted ... or at least understood.

"You let him see you naked?" Sally's voice rose above a whisper.

"He's such a good boy Sally, so sweet and helpless. And he's been so abused. It didn't hurt anything. Why he barely even responded." She bit off that last part. She hadn't meant to say anything about his response to her nudity. But her tongue had run away with itself. It always had, and it had always gotten her into trouble.

"But he did respond ... didn't he Meg?" probed Sally. She knew what that response was too.

"Well ... yes ... a little," admitted Meg.

"What did you do?" asked Sally.

Meg was confused. Sally never talked about anything for long ... never probed like this ... asked so many questions. This was a different Sally than the one Meg knew.

"Please, Sally, I didn't hurt anything. He's just a poor boy. Don't tell Mavis. She'll throw me out Sally."

"What did you do, Meg?" asked Sally again. "You touched him, didn't you?"

"Sally..." Meg pleaded.

"Did you touch him?" asked Sally, her voice low.

Meg dropped her head and shook it, not wanting to have to admit this to this strange woman.

"Don't lie to me Meg. I may be quiet, but I'm not stupid, and neither is Mavis. If you don't think she saw your dress buttoned wrong then you're a silly goose! That boy's ... penis ... was limp as a noodle when you brought him out of there. If you didn't do something then it shouldn't have been limp like that."

Meg knew it was over. And that made her mad. She knew that what she and Bobby had done was wrong, at least by the standards of this house, but she hadn't hurt him, and it had been something wonderful and warm and lovely for them both. She believed that.

"What I did in there is my business," she said, raising her head and standing tall. "I did not hurt him or coerce him in any way. If you feel compelled to take this to Mavis then I suppose you will. But I'll not let you make me feel like I did something wrong. Everything that happened in there was good, and sweet and full of love."

She started to push around Sally, who lifted her hands and placed them firmly on Meg's chest, above her breasts.

"Stop" she said.

This certainly wasn't the Sally Meg knew. Sally didn't have an assertive bone in her body.

"I want to know," said Sally softly. "I just want to know what it was like. That's all."

"I don't understand," said Meg.

"Meg, look at me. I know I'm not attractive, like you. No man has ever even kissed me, much less anything else. I know I'll die a spinster, never knowing a man's touch or ... what you did in there. At least let me hear what it's like to be fully a woman." Sally dropped her hands.

Meg's eyes grew round and white in the dark. "We didn't do that!!" she whispered loudly. "Please believe that I wouldn't do that with him. He's just a boy!"

"But you did do something, " Sally probed again.

Meg took a breath and nodded.

"Will you tell me about it?" pleaded Sally, leaning forward.

Her attitude was so yearning that Meg believed her. "Yes, but not now. They're probably already wondering what's taking us so long. I'll tell you, but later. I promise."

"Done!" said Sally. She grinned, also something that came strangely to her face.

When they got downstairs Donna and Prudence had already gone home. Mavis was sitting and darning socks by the stove. She looked up at the two women.

"Well, took you long enough. How much tucking in does one skinny boy need?" She arched an eyebrow.

"Oh!" said Meg. "He's been in bed a while now. Sally and I were just talking."

"That's nice." said Mavis, looking back down at her mending. "I thought you'd have fixed that dress by now Meg."

Meg's hand went to the buttons immediately and her shoulders slumped. She'd completely forgotten about that during Sally's interrogation. She waited for the questions she knew Mavis was now going to ask.

But when Mavis looked up all she said was "Off to bed with you. We've an early morning tomorrow getting them all off to school."

That night, the Umpelty Oog struck again. This time it was in Jenny, Emily and June Bug's room, and it was Emily who screamed out her horror in the night. Meg got there first, since she stayed in the room next door. Patrick and Terrence were next, and then Bobby arrived from upstairs as Sally ghosted down the hallway, belting a robe around her.

Emily cried that, when they'd scared it out of Patrick's room, it came to hers and was hiding in her closet now. June Bug huddled under her blankets, her head firmly covered. Jenny was in the same bed as June Bug, but peeked out, the covers up to her chin.

Meg was cross. With all that had happened, she didn't need this foolishness, and she didn't feel like screaming again at the top of her lungs.

Bobby held up a finger though, and everybody looked at him. He squared his shoulders and then began dancing around, throwing boxer's punches at nothing. Then he straightened up again, and pointed to himself, and then at the closet. He took Meg by her arms and moved her close to Emily's bed. He shooed the two boys to the open doorway.

Then he marched to the closet door, opened it, stepped inside, and slammed the door closed. He felt immediately for the stick he had hidden there earlier. Once he had it in his hand he began banging the walls with it, and throwing his body around inside the closet. He laid the stick on the floor, opened the door and thrust himself out into the room, falling to the floor and rolling. There were screams from Emily and the boys. Bobby hauled himself up and went back in the closet, leaving the door halfway open this time. He retrieved the stick, bounced himself off the walls a few more times and then broke the stick over his knee with a sharp crack.

Bobby stuffed the broken pieces of the branch up under some clothes on the top shelf. Then he walked out of the closet, dusting off his hands, slapping his palms together and smiling widely. He stopped, and put his hands on his hips, like he'd seen in a picture of Peter Pan in one of the books downstairs. He looked at the women first. Meg was covering a smile with her hand. Sally looked on, her mouth open. Mavis had arrived during the incident, and Meg had one hand on her arm, restraining her.

"What happened?" asked Patrick in a squeaky voice.

Bobby pantomimed boxing again, and then made the same motions he would as if breaking something in half with his hands. He let his head flop sideways and made his tongue hang out, slumping.

"You killed him?!" squealed Emily. "You killed the Umpelty Oog?!"

Bobby straightened up and dusted his hands again, smiling. Then he went to the closet door and swung it wide, as if to show them it was now empty.

Patrick edged into the room, craning his neck to see. "Where is he?" he asked, holding on to Mavis' night dress in a grip that threatened to pull it off her shoulders.

Bobby had thought of that too. He stuffed imaginary things in his mouth, chewed and swallowed, and then rubbed his stomach.

"You ate the Umpelty Oog?!" squealed Emily. She bounded out of bed and threw herself at Bobby, hugging his legs fiercely.

"Wow." said Patrick in a hushed voice. He looked up at Mavis, who was holding her nightdress on. "He killed the Umpelty Oog." he said, his voice hushed.

"He most certainly did." said Mavis, her voice loud in the room. "And I, for one, am glad the ugly beast will trouble us no more. At last we can get a good night's sleep. Off to bed children. School starts again tomorrow."

Mavis took charge of the two boys and herded them toward their room.

Emily looked up at Bobby.

"I could kiss you Bobby." she said, mimicking something she'd heard an adult say one time.

"Well," said Sally, coming across the room. "I'll kiss him for you, and you get to bed!" She reached down to swat Emily's backside.

Emily squealed and laughed and ran, jumping up on the bed and burrowing under her covers.

Sally looked calmly in Bobby's eyes and pulled his face down for a kiss.

Sally had never kissed a man. She'd kissed her pillow, and a few dogs as she was growing up, before she realized that men weren't interested in her. And she'd kissed the babies and cooed at them. So she knew, in theory, how to kiss. She pressed her soft lips to Bobby's in an attempt to tell him how powerfully thankful she was for what he'd just done.

Bobby, having already decided that he liked this kissing business, kissed her back. He kissed her the only way he knew how to kiss ... the way he kissed Meg.

Sally's world changed forever in that kiss. It left her weak-kneed and gasping for breath. She was suddenly quite sure she'd have been a lot happier if she hadn't done it, because now she knew she'd never be happy unless she had a man to kiss her like that whenever she wanted to. But she took what was offered, as she did in the rest of her life, and enjoyed it to the maximum. When she finally sank back down on her heels and turned around, her glazed eyes took in the three other females in the room, all watching her intently.

Meg stepped forward. "And I will kiss him for June Bug and Jenny." she said.

She reacted to that kiss much as Sally had. She hoped, more than she had hoped for many things in her life, that she'd get the chance to kiss him again.

The girls, however, were having none of it.

"I can hug him myself." said Emily, sitting up in bed and holding out her arms.

Bobby went over between the beds and hugged the little girl, planting a quick kiss on her lips. Then he turned to find Jenny and June Bug standing up in their bed, holding out their arms too. June Bug hugged him fiercely and planted five or six kisses on his cheeks and lips before dropping like a stone and getting back under the covers. Jenny, being older, gave him a quick hug and a peck on the lips, and joined her bedmate.

Then, walking very normally, Bobby went past the two women, turned and went toward the stairs.

"You have to tell me!" whispered Sally, her hand gripping Meg's arm.

"I will." said Meg. "I keep my promises."

Miss Rachael Templeton slogged through the door of her two room schoolhouse, stomping the snow off her feet and going to the stove to get it going. Once she had a blaze of wood burning, she fed it some coal and closed the pot bellied stove up, adjusting the draft so it wouldn't smoke too badly.

Next she went to the sink and looked inside. Sure enough, there was a glaze of ice in the bottom. She tried the pump handle, and sighed with relief when she heard the gurgle that meant it wasn't frozen up.

There wasn't anything else to do until the children arrived ... if they arrived. She normally had fourteen students, the vast majority of them from Mrs. Milleson's orphanage. Other than them there were the twelve-year-old Halsted twins, Patsy Brown, who was fourteen and too old to still be going to a combined school, but did anyway because it was the only school available within twenty miles, and Mike Simpson, who only came to school when his father didn't need him on the farm. That occurrence was rare, even in the dead of winter for some reason.

She left her coat and gloves on, as the room wouldn't warm up for an hour or two. She had stuffed rags in the chinks around windows, and had managed to get the town fathers to supply heavy curtains that helped a little. But all there was between them and the cold, cruel world outside were clapboards nailed to studs. The whole place shook in the wind if it was strong enough.

She wandered over to the rope that hung down in the center of the room and grasped it, putting her whole weight on it as she pulled downward. She heard the doleful tolling of the big brass bell up above and knew that it was being heard all over town.

Then she pulled up a chair next to the stove and sat, huddling, wondering yet again how she had ended up in Hampstead Nebraska in the middle of the coldest winter she'd ever seen in her life. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Rachel came from a good family back east, in Philadelphia, where things were civilized, even during the war. Her role models had been the beautiful and talented teachers who taught there, women who were respected and revered. She had looked at her teachers, dreaming about being one of them who, with the wave of a hand, could have a boy taken out and paddled.

Rachel had gone to college to be a teacher. She did that mostly because that's really what she wanted to do ... to make a difference in young people's lives. But she also did it because she saw what other choices women had. She happened to have entered college a year before Pearl Harbor was attacked, which gave her precedence when things started to get tight. She shuddered at the thought of what she'd be doing if she hadn't been in teacher's college. She'd heard of women welding, for pity's sake, carrying heavy things, building airplanes and tanks and such, and getting filthy. So she applied herself to make sure she got that sheepskin, and one of those cushy jobs back east.

Except that it hadn't worked out that way. What no one told her was that there were very few cushy jobs any more, for teachers or anyone else. And for the cushy jobs that did exist, there were twenty ... fifty ... a hundred women lined up who would do anything to get them.

Rachel could have gotten one. All she'd have had to do was sleep with Horace Vandermeister. But his knowing sneer and his fat belly when he told her "the facts of life" left her so nauseated that she actually cursed at him. He had promptly, somehow, arranged for her to be assigned to the Hampstead Nebraska Consolidated School.

She had appealed to her father to get her out of her assignment, but she couldn't tell him the real reason why. He had harrumphed and told her that adversity built character, and that pressure made diamonds and probably six or seven more worn out cliché's before she quit listening and resigned herself to go to Nebraska. Besides, wasn't middle America just full of strong, tall men who worked the earth and were windblown and sun-creased and handsome?

That stereotype had bitten the bullet as soon as she stepped off the train and had to carry her own bags. No one met her. She was expected to find her way around, arrange for her lodgings herself and introduce herself to the superintendent of schools, Hiram Hochstedder who, when he wasn't conducting extremely important school business, ran Duffy's Tavern over on "B" street. "These hicks," she had muttered to herself, "can't even name a street, much less treat me with the respect a school teacher deserves." She conveniently failed to remember that she had absolutely no experience at all in actually teaching.

That first day had been tough on Rachel. When she asked around for the superintendent of schools, she was referred to a saloon, which no lady of any standing would think of entering. But she had to, because she had no money, and needed a place to stay. Her "room" was out back of that very same saloon in a tidy little building with three actual rooms, including a tiny kitchen. The whole place smelled faintly of manure, but it was somewhere to hang her hat, so she settled in. It was six months before someone told her she was living in what used to be the stables.

But by then, she had learned a large number of important life lessons, chief among them that, if you aren't nice to people, then they very well may shit on you if they have the chance. And there was a lot of shit in this town. She had adjusted slowly and painfully though, and even though she wouldn't have thought it, she was a better person for what she'd gone through. It was soon clear that she had no hopes for bagging a rich man in this town, or even a young one.

And so, her cherished virginity was perfectly safe and intact ... and in Hampstead Nebraska she didn't see much of an opportunity for that to change.

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