Chapter 1

1973 - Spring

In early April, Tim Appleton was faced with a difficult decision. Though it had never been talked about, his draft number was such that he had always half expected to receive a letter from the President of the United States. Nowadays, that would be cause for excitement, but everyone back then knew that such letters contained a draft notice. Or had until 1972, anyway. When the draft stopped, Tim felt a great sense of relief. On the other hand, his dream of going to college wasn’t panning out. His grades in high school had been all right, but nothing that would get him enough money to complete college. He was serious about Constance, and wanted to marry her, but his dream of being married also included a better job than he could get with just a high school education.

It was, in fact, a friend of his who had been drafted who came back to Granger, who put the idea in Tim’s head for a solution. He told Tim about the GI bill. Wanting to “be a man”, Tim stopped by the Army Recruiting Office. Somehow he ended up taking a test, which revealed that he was elligible for Officer’s Candidate School. A glowing description from a sharp looking Staff Sergeant made it all sound so simple. Join the Army. Go to OCS, spend a little time serving Uncle Sam - during which you could be married - and the job offers would pour in. That didn’t even count the GI Bill, which would also pay for a lot of college. And Viet Nam? “Don’t worry about that,” said the Sergeant. “That’s winding down anyway. It will probably be over before you graduate from OCS.”

He hadn’t intended on signing up. He only went there for information. But the Staff Sergeant was highly motivated and good at his job.

When he left, he had orders to report for induction and basic training on the twenty-third of April. The document instructed him to bring only the clothes on his back. Everything he would need would be provided.

The reaction to his “decision” was much more tumultuous than he expected. His mother cried. Constance cried, and then raged at him. His father said nothing, initially, but Tim saw something in his father’s eyes that scared him.

Tim’s father had served in the Korean conflict, and there were many late nights when he sat with his son, while they both sipped whiskey, and he told his son about memories he had never planned to tell anyone about. Constance was panic stricken, but Tim did a masterful job of calming her fears, reassuring her that nothing would happen to him, and that everything would be all right.

She believed him because she wanted to believe him.

April of 1973 was almost as tumultuous for Bobby Dalton as July of 1971 had been. That had been the month in which he had met, and become intimately involved with Jill Trimble. His sister Florence had discovered he was having a sexual relationship with another sister, Bev, and he had had full intercourse with his oldest sister, Mary, for the first time, just before her wedding. He had also offered to have sex with his mother that month, though she put that off for a while, letting him masturbate her instead, to settle her frazzled nerves. Tilly Johnson, who had already had one of his babies, decided she wanted another, and he spent a lot of that month with her, in bed. His mother, and Prudence Harris, began a wild sexual relationship with Ted Brandywine. Mary turned out to be pregnant, when she returned from her honeymoon, and Florence and Linda, another of his sisters, started kissing him, after they caught him eating Bev’s pussy.

That month had been a wild ride, and April of this year was shaping up to be just as wild. A lot had happened, since July of 1971, and a lot of that was coming to a head, of sorts.

The first thing that happened blew everybody away. Mary had her second baby. Her first had been, at least to family members, obviously created by her egg and Bobby’s sperm. Little Jordan, born on April Fool’s Day, 1972, had been the spitting image of Bobby.

Now, on April the first of 1973, pregnant again, her water had broken, and she was in the process of delivering a second baby, on one-year-old Jordan’s birthday. Bobby and his mother had taken over the care of Jordan, when they got the news, and he was in his father’s arms, at the farmhouse where Bobby still lived, despite the fact that he was now twenty-four years old. Of seven younger sisters, only four were left at home. Linda, the eldest still at home, had gone to the hospital, and would bring them news when it became available.

Theodore, Mirriam’s baby, who also bore a startling resemblance to Bobby, was happily sucking at his mother’s breast while she complained that he should be weaned by now.

“I know how he feels,” said Bobby, grinning at his topless mother. “I’ll want to suck them for as long as I can, too.”

“That’s different,” said Mirriam, archly. “You’re just a terrible boy who torments his poor mother.”

“If we didn’t have all these babies around,” said Bobby, bouncing his namesake in his arms, “I could torment you right now.”

“We have all these babies around,” said Mirriam firmly, “because of you, Robert Jordan!”

Susie, Mirriam’s almost seventeen-year-old daughter, came wandering into the room. She took Jordan from her brother’s arms and cuddled him. He wiggled, though, wanting down, and she set him carefully on his feet, holding his hands. He had recently decided that walking was fun, though he wasn’t very good at it yet.

“Mamma?” said the girl.

“Yes dear?”

“I want to go to college.”

“You’ve wanted to go to college for years, darling,” said Mirriam, changing Theodore to her other breast.

“Yes,” said Susie, “but I’m trying to plan it out, except that I can’t, because it’s all too expensive.”

“Your grades are excellent,” said Mirriam. “I’m sure you can get a scholarship.”

“How will I know, until I apply to a college?” asked Suzie. “I think I want to be a doctor, anyway, and that takes a long, long time. I won’t be able to get scholarships for all of that.”

“A doctor?” asked Mirriam, obviously delighted. “I knew you liked biology. I think that’s a wonderful goal,” she said.

“I’ve taken all the courses I can, in high school,” said Suzie. “I mean that have anything to do with being a doctor. I have another whole year of high school left, and the only two things I have left to take are Calculus, and Applied Physics. Everything else is stupid stuff, like Phys Ed, and World History and Speech. My counselor at school says that there’s a summer program, for people interested in med school, but it’s in Wichita, and it costs a lot of money.”

“How much?” asked Bobby.

Suzie looked at him. She didn’t know quite how she felt about her big brother. She wasn’t stupid. She knew some of what was going on in the house. Just looking at the two babies in the room right now made it pretty clear that her brother was some kind of satyr. She knew about other babies that looked just like these too. She knew that Linda went into Bobby’s room at night, sometimes, and stayed there a long time - much too long to just talk a little bit and say goodnight. She had kept away from boys for that very reason. If her own sisters ... and mother too (!) couldn’t resist him, she wasn’t about to expose herself to him, or any other temptation. She was serious about her future. Instead of dating, she took extra classes in school. Even then, the work seemed easy, so she got books about medicine from the library in town and read everything she could get her hands on.

“What difference does it make?” she asked.

“I might be able to help you,” he said.

“It’s three hundred dollars,” she said.

“Your birthday is coming up,” he said, intently. “Why don’t you talk to your counselor about signing up?”

Suzie was shocked. Just like that he had offered her three hundred dollars!

“That’s very nice of you, Bobby,” said her mother, as if he had only held the door for her or something like that.

“Do you mean it?” Suzie asked, her breath hushed.

“Of course I mean it,” he said. “When was the last time I teased you?”

“Yesterday,” she said, promptly. “You said my hair looked like I’d been struck by lightning.”

“That wasn’t teasing,” he said, grinning. “That was the simple truth.”

“Can I talk to you about this?” asked Suzie. “Privately?” she added.

“I can take care of these two,” said Mirriam, setting Theodore down on the floor and pulling her dress back up to cover her naked breasts.

She took him outside, because it felt ... safer, somehow.

As soon as they were ten or fifteen feet away from the house, she whirled.

“I’m not going to have sex with you!” she said.

Bobby didn’t smile. “Of course you’re not,” he said.

“I know about the others!” she said, sticking her chin out.

“Oh you do, do you?” he responded.

“I know you got Mary pregnant ... and Mamma too!”

“You’re a pretty good doctor already,” said Bobby. This time he did smile, but it wasn’t a mean smile.

“I know Linda goes to your room at night!” she insisted.

“What does that have to do with you going to summer school?” he asked.

“I’m not going to take anything from you,” she said, her voice urgent, “if it means I have to have sex with you.”

“Suzie,” Bobby sighed. “What in the world makes you think I’d make you do something like that?”

“I know about all those other women too,” she said, still on guard. “You do something to them. I don’t know what it is, but you cast some kind of spell on them, or something. It scares me.”

“Look,” said Bobby. “I don’t know what you know, or think you know, but the fact is that I will never do anything to you, or to hurt you, in any way. I love you. I’m not planning on having sex with you. I’m not going to ask for anything if you go to school, except that you apply yourself and do the best you can. There are no strings attached to this. It’s a birthday present to my sister ... that’s all.”

Suzie felt doubt, but it wasn’t doubt in him. She had lived with him for seventeen years. Only in the last few years had he started doing all these weird things ... these sexual things.

“You look at me sometimes,” she said, her voice still edgy.

“You’re a beautiful young woman,” he said. “Lots of guys look at you.”

Suzie didn’t think she was beautiful at all. “That’s what I mean,” she said. “Boys just think about sex all the time.”

“Just because I think you’re beautiful doesn’t mean I want to have sex with you,” he said. “I can’t speak for other men, of course. All I can say is that you have nothing to worry about, concerning me.”

“I want to believe you,” she said softly.

“I’m telling you the truth,” he said.

“You don’t want to have sex with me?” she asked.

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “What I said was that just because I think you’re beautiful doesn’t mean I want to have sex with you.”

“What does that mean?” she moaned. “Do you or don’t you?”

“It’s not that simple,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you, but you need to remember that there are some answers in life that you might not like, when you get them.”

“Just tell me!” she barked.

“I don’t want to have sex with you,” he said. “Because you don’t want to have sex with me.”

“That’s right!” she said. “I don’t!”

“Okay then,” he said. “Problem solved.”

“But if I did want that ... I don’t! ... but if I did ... then would you?”

“Of course,” he said. “I love you.”

“Ooooo, that does not make me feel any better!” she moaned.

“Why? I thought you didn’t want that.”

“I don’t! But I’ve been around a lot of girls who didn’t one day and then the next they went crazy or something. I don’t now what causes it but at least two of my sisters and my mother caught it and I might, too. I was hoping you weren’t interested.”

“I’m not,” he said, smiling. “Unless you are.”

“That does not help!” She stamped one foot.

“I told you to be careful what questions you ask,” he reminded her.

“I just want to be able to hug my own big brother and not worry that he’s going to rape me!” she said.

“I’ve never forced a woman in my whole life,” he said. “I’m not going to start.”

“I don’t understand that,” she said. “Why do all these women want to ... with you?”

“That’s something I can’t explain,” he said simply. “Maybe you’ll understand that when you get a little older. One of these days you’ll meet a guy, and he’ll be interesting to you, and you’ll want to get to know him better. You’ll probably want other things too. That’s fine, if it happens. It’s also fine if it doesn’t.”

“I just want to be a doctor,” she sighed.

“Then that’s what you should pay attention to,” he said.

“How will I get to Wichita?” she asked, feeling hope for the first time.

“Maybe we should get you a car of your own,” he said.

She goggled. “We can’t afford that!” she said.

“I can. A used one, anyway.”

She stared at him.

“You’d do that for me?” she asked weakly.

“I told you, silly, I love you. I think you’d make a great doctor, and somebody from this family needs to go to college.”

“No strings?” she asked, feeling her heart almost burst.

“None at all,” said Bobby.

It wasn’t until after the hug, that Suzie realized she hadn’t been scared or nervous at all. It had been a good hug. She felt much better about things.

Mary’s second child was also a boy. Just as it was obvious that Jordan had been Bobby’s baby, it was equally obvious, to those people who paid attention to such things, that Hamilton, Jordan’s younger brother, had issued from Fred’s loins. While Mary never felt any guilt about letting her brother impregnate her, and was very happy that Fred was blissfully ignorant of that fact, she felt much better, now that her husband had fathered a child in her.

Of course, the fact that both her babies shared the same birthday caused an uproar. When Linda got home with the news that everything had gone perfectly, and that mother and baby were both fine, it was only natural to center on the fact that Mary now had presented two April Fools babies to her husband.

She never once said that to Fred, though. She didn’t have to. Everybody else they knew greeted him with “April Fools!” for months after both births, and occasionally for years afterward.

Meanwhile, during that April, Bobby was also taking care of the sexual needs of three other women. Felicity Chumley and her maid, Annie, had due dates only two days apart. Bobby was responsible for both of those babies, and the mothers-to-be were both ecstatic about that. He had been seeing them each Friday, but they had allowed him to move to a different night, when he took his consulting job with Amanda Griggs, who ran the KDEF radio station in Hutchinson, sixty miles away.

Bobby was still making that drive twice a week too, to take care of Amanda.

It was getting harder and harder for Felicity and Annie to make love, as their pregnant bellies bulged ever larger. Both babies were very active, and more than once, while one of them was sitting on Bobby’s stiff prick, his baby had put a foot out, clearly visible as it moved under stretched skin. Elbows were a frequent sight too, sliding across their bellies.

Christy Brown and Jill Trimble had already had Bobby’s babies, and both were proud of them. He still visited them almost once a week too, both to spend time with his children ... and to spend time with their mothers.

Christy’s husband came home, that April, from the Vietnam war where he had spent two tours in Saigon as a supply clerk. She hadn’t told him she’d had a baby. Jillian was now eight months old, and the last time he’d been home had been in December of 1971. They had stopped writing to each other, and it was obvious that the marriage was dead. He offered to stay, because of Jillian, and Christy, who now ran a thriving photography studio, simply admitted that Jillian wasn’t his. He left, not telling her that a bad case of syphilis, caught from a whore in Vietnam, had made him sterile.

Christy mourned the death of the relationship, though, and Bobby spent hours with her, just holding her while she cried.

As fate sometimes decrees, when one man came back from Vietnam, another would receive orders to go. Eighty percent of those being inducted into the Army were being sent to Viet Nam.

Constance Harris would do a lot of crying over that.

The last thing that happened in April of that year was that Amanda Griggs missed a period. She’d been expecting it ... anticipating it, even. It was something she couldn’t explain, even to her father. She wasn’t interested in getting married, but she wanted to have Bobby’s baby. She didn’t even understand it herself.

But when she found out, Bobby was the first person she told.

May was pretty routine, for Bobby. June, though, threatened to be another month to remember.

On the ninth, two days before she was supposed to, Felicity went into labor. It would be forever believed, in the Chumley household, that what sent her into labor was Annie’s water breaking. The ambulance carried them both to the hospital at the same time. They went through labor in the same room, at their own request. Annie actually delivered first, producing a perfectly formed little girl, who she promptly named Felicity, in honor of the woman who had brought the little girl’s father into the house.

Barely an hour later, Felicity gave an exhausted sigh of relief and fell back, after her last push finally got a little boy out of her belly. She named him Charles, after her husband’s father. Eighty-two-year-old Chester, her husband, sat patiently in the waiting room the whole time. He was the first to hold “his” son, and the first to hand the baby to his wife. The baby had black hair and a thick chest, just like Bobby.

Three days later, the same doctor and nurses delivered another baby boy, with black hair and a thick chest. All of them noticed the resemblance between that baby, who was named Christopher, and baby Charles, who had just been sent home with his mother. More than one eyebrow was raised in the delivery room, as Beverly Gregory, formerly Beverly Dalton, had this baby.

Within three days, when all of Bev’s sisters had gotten to see and hold little Christopher, Susie Dalton got the chance to punch Bobby in the stomach.

“Bev too?!“ she squealed.