Dorothy Garlock (35 page)

Drained, Ana turned her head toward him when he fell away from her. She reflected with wonder at what had happened. She couldn’t get over the tempest of emotion that his body had aroused in hers.

“Oh, Owen, now I know what you meant. This time it was different.”

“I’ve read that women can reach the same peak of pleasure as men. I wanted you to experience it.” He spoke in a strained whisper.

She turned on her side and stroked the damp, crisp hairs on his chest and ran her hand down over his hard-muscled belly. He grabbed her hand and held it palm down on his lower stomach. She sensed a tenseness in him that had nothing to do with what they had experienced.

“I never knew such things happened between a man and a woman. Oh, I knew what they did, but I didn’t know there was so much pleasure in it.” She slid upward in his hold and kissed the corner of his mouth. She lay against him while his fingers traced the shape of her side. Then he encircled her body again with his arms and nuzzled his face against her neck.

“Ana, my love, I have something to tell you.” His voice was firm and a little too loud. “I’d rather give up my right arm than to tell you this, but I must. I’ll not be able to face myself in the morning if I don’t.”

The stab of fear that shot through her almost took her breath. She went very still as if her blood was draining away. She felt a moistness on her neck that could be tears, and she felt her happiness slipping away. She held onto him with all her strength, unable to speak.

“I’d made up my mind to tell you before . . . we—before it went this far. But I wanted you. God, how I’ve wanted you since that day we talked on the back porch!” He burrowed his face deeper in the side of her neck and held her as if his life depended on keeping her close.

“What’s bothering you? Does it have anything to do with me?” She tried to pull away so that she could see his face, but he held her to him. “Are you sorry for what we just did?” she asked almost choking on the words.

“Lord, no! I’ll cherish forever the gift of your sweet surrender.”

“I didn’t
surrender.
What we did, we did together out of our love for each other. Please tell me this terrible thing that’s tearing you to pieces.”

“I’ve got generations of bad blood in me, Ana!” he blurted. “My father and grandfather, damn them to hell, were . . . rotten to the core.”

“That’s all?” she breathed in relief.

“I was going to tell you tonight. Then I saw you in that pretty nightgown with your hair hanging down your back—”

She pulled back his head and pressed her trembling mouth to his. “Oh, sweet and gentle man. You think I’ll leave you because of something your father and your grandfather did?”

She felt a tremor ripple through his powerful body and it frightened her.

“I don’t know, Ana. I honestly don’t know.”

“I won’t! Darling, I won’t!”

“Don’t say that until you’ve heard what I’ve got to tell you.” Owen met her questioning eyes directly. The pain of longing marked his face with sadness. She was everything in the world to him. “Don’t make a promise you can’t keep,” he cautioned.

“Don’t talk like that, Owen.” Her eyes pleaded with him and her chin quivered. “You’re scaring me.”

O
wen
sat up on the side of the bed, hunched over, his forearms on his thighs. Ana sat behind him, curled against his back with her arms around his waist, her mouth and nose against his tangy flesh. She hated the idea that he was hurting. She wanted to share his pain and unhappiness. She wanted to give him everything he needed to be happy.

“You don’t have much faith in me, Owen, if you think I’ll be put off now about something your ancestors did. Were they horse thieves, traitors, slavers? Tell me about it. A trouble shared is half the burden.”

“It’s uglier than that, Ana.” His rough hands caressed her forearms locked across his middle.

“I’m not a young girl; I know about ugliness. Tell me what’s bothering you,” she said, as her lips traveled from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. “Tell me and don’t leave anything out.”

Owen let out a low miserable moan and began to tell her about his grandfather who came to the new world from Norway and settled in northeastern Iowa along with others from the Scandinavian countries.

*    *    *

Shortly after the Sac and Fox Indians were compelled to cede to the United States the tract of land about fifty miles wide lying west of the Mississippi, settlers pushed into this strip. Owen’s grandfather, Ludvig Jamison, was among the first to stake a claim in the fertile land. With a sod-breaking plow and the three oxen necessary to pull it, he plowed his own land and that of his neighbors, charging the exorbitant price of two dollars an acre for the work.

With the money, he built a barn ten times larger than the house he built for his growing family. He bought a bellows, an anvil, and a slave with blacksmithing skills. Owning the only blacksmith within fifty miles, he soon became a rich man. Ludvig Jamison was tough and he was mean. He respected no man unless he was tougher, meaner and stronger than himself.

As far as Ludvig was concerned, women were put on this earth to work, pleasure their men, and produce sons to work. He fathered four stillborn children, three who died in infancy, four who lived to despise him, and one who was his image in both looks and temperament. It was rumored that he worked the slave to death and buried him someplace on the farm. His wife, worn out at the age of thirty-two, died giving birth to yet another stillborn child and was buried in the church cemetery at White Oak. As soon as his sons were old enough to strike out on their own, they left home. The youngest son, Eustace, more like his father than any of the others, stayed.

Eustace Jamison married Olga Halverson, Gus’s sister, and the daughter of a neighboring farmer. He brought her to the farm to keep house for him and his father.

Olga was a quiet, frail woman. By the time she was twenty-five she had given birth to eight children; four were stillborn, one died in infancy. The three children who survived grew up in a house ruled by a father who firmly believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Whippings were almost a daily occurrence.

Eustace also believed, as his father had before him, that he owned his wife body and soul. She was his, as his livestock was his, to work and obey his every command. Owen recalled that when he was a young child he often heard his mother pleading with his father during the night. It terrified him. He would put his pillow over his head to keep from hearing her cries.

Esther, the oldest, was her mother’s pride and joy. By the time Esther was ten or eleven, she was able to take over the household duties when her mother took to her bed. Olga and Grandpa Jamison both died the same winter. One morning Esther went in to wake her mother and found her dead. The young girl was devastated with grief. Eustace allowed her to mourn until after the burial. After that he whipped her if so much as a tear showed in her eyes.

By the age of ten, Owen was doing a man’s work in the fields, and a hatred for his father seethed in his young heart. Hardly a day went by that Eustace didn’t whip one of the children. But when the neighbors came to call, he told a different story. He boasted about how well Esther ran the house and took care of his motherless boys. He bragged that Owen could do a man’s work and that little Paul could recite the alphabet. When they went to church on Sunday, Eustace played the role of devoted father to his motherless brood.

When Owen turned seventeen, he had taken all the abuse he was going to take from his father. With the full blessing of Uncle Gus, he and Soren left home. They found jobs on the riverboats and worked their way up and down the Mississippi. A few times they went up the Missouri to Kansas City and a time or two up the Ohio to Pittsburgh. It would have been the happiest time of Owen’s life had he not felt so guilty about leaving Esther and Paul at the mercy of their father.

Owen came home as often as he could to see his brother and sister. He dreamed of making enough money so that he could take them away from the farm. But when he mentioned it to Esther, she was shocked that he would even suggest that she leave her mother’s house. After that, when he tried to bring it up, she refused to talk about it.

One year, Owen and Soren came home for Christmas to discover that Esther had married Jens Knutson—and with her father’s blessing. Eustace had given Jens a sum of money, calling it Esther’s inheritance. The wedding was held in the church at White Oak with all the neighbors attending. Owen thought the arrangement was a strange one. Esther came to the farm everyday to do the household chores just as she had always done.

Then came the accident when Eustace was gored by the bull, and Owen had been injured. Eustace had a puncture wound just below his shoulder blade and one in his thigh. Neither of the wounds were considered serious.

It was while Owen and Eustace Jamison were recovering from their encounter with the bull, that Owen discovered a family secret that changed his life forever.

Determined not to let his leg become stiff, Owen was up and about within a week. He walked some each day. One afternoon, after a trip to the barn to see about his horse, he limped into the house to hear Eustace bellowing from where he lay in the bedroom upstairs.

“Esther! Goddammit, get in here!”

After the second roar, and thinking Esther had gone to the cellar, Owen started up the stairs to see what the old man needed. Halfway up, he heard a door open and close softly, followed by footsteps crossing the hall. He started back down the stairs, but stopped when Eustace shouted again.

“Goddammit, Esther, I’d better not call you again.”

“What do you want, Papa?”

“Ya ugly bitch. Ya know what I want. Hoist up yore skirt, and come’ere.”

“N-nooo, Papa. Owen is outside. He could . . . he could c-come in.”

“To hell with that namby-pamby son-of-a-bitch. He ain’t got no man parts atall. Get over here. I need ya to get rid of this here itch.”

“Not now! Please, Papa—”

“Don’t give me none of yore sass, girl. Get on ’n’ ride me good or I’ll slap yore jaws!”

“Shhhh . . . please don’t be loud—”

“Straddle me ’n’ ride, damn you!”

The shockingly ugly words, uttered by a father to his daughter, burned into Owen’s mind and would remain there for as long as he lived. Enraged by what he had heard, he pulled himself the rest of the way up the stairs and staggered down the hall.

“Take it all, ya ugly slut—”

Owen threw open the door with a force that sent it crashing back against the wall. The sight of Esther astride their father, his beefy hands holding her by the ears, her stiffened arms braced against the bed, and the look of anguish on her face, was a nightmare he had lived again and again.

A murderous rage consumed him. Somehow he was able to get across the room. With the strength of a mad man, he snatched Esther from the bed as if she were a bag of grain and dropped her on the floor. With his fist knotted and raised, he stood over the man on the bed.

“You rotten, filthy . . . bastard,” he whispered hoarsely when he found his voice. “I should kill you!”

“Owen . . . don’t! Please . . . please—” Esther wrapped her arms around her brother’s leg.

“He ain’t gonna do nothin’, sister. He ain’t got the guts.” The feverish eyes looked up at Owen defiantly.

“You think not!” Owen shouted. “You tried to beat all the guts out of us when we couldn’t help ourselves. God, how I hate to think that I’ve got one ounce of your blood in my veins.”

“Ya didn’t get much of my blood. Ya got yours from that whining bitch that whelped ya.”

“You filthy old son-of-a-bitch! I wish to hell I’d left you in that cowpen. You’re shit!”

“I may be shit, but I’m a
man.
If ya was, ya’d be gettin’ yours same as me.” His contemptuous glance settled on Esther who lay crumpled on the floor.

Knowing that if he stayed a minute longer he would kill him. Owen spat full in his father’s face and stumbled from the room.

It was the last time he would see him. Blood poisoning set in, and within a few days Eustace Jamison was dead.

Sobbing with humiliation and despair, Esther had crawled from the room. In the hours that followed, she told Owen that their father had used her since the day after their mother was buried. When she had become pregnant with his child, he had made arrangements with Jens Knutson to marry her in order to protect his standing in the community. Shortly after the wedding she had lost the baby and had never become pregnant again.

As bad as it was, there was more. Esther told her brother that since the day she came to the farm as a bride, their mother had been used by both her husband and her father-in-law. It was her duty, her new husband had told her.

The days that followed were the bleakest of Owen’s life. He holed up in the little house in the grove and refused to attend the funeral services for Eustace. Without Uncle Gus, he told Ana, he might have killed himself to rid the world of the Jamison shame.