Making Hay (6 page)

His thoughts whirling in confusion, Vass imagined that he saw Lessy, his Lessy, laying back on a tattered bedroll that smelled of men. Her eyes were not trusting and innocent, but earthy and eager. And he saw himself kneeling down before her. In his mind he clutched the hem of her calico work dress and raised it to her waist with indecent haste.

He quickly tried to think of Grandma Rooker. But this time the old trick didn’t work.

“Nothing happened!” Lessy’s nervous insistence finally brought Vass back to reality.

“Of course not, Lessy,” he assured her, although he gripped her hand a bit tightly. “With a woman like you, I know that nothing untoward would happen.”

Lessy hesitated a moment before responding with a tentative thank-you.

They continued their walk silently in the direction of the pond. Vass kept his eyes straight ahead, trying not to think of Lessy in sinful ways. Although it was hard since she was right beside him, smelling of soap and starch.

Lessy’s mind was also in turmoil. Did he trust her so completely because he believed her to be so virtuous or because he saw her as so undesirable?

In the growing darkness near the pond, neither saw the puddled evidence of the day’s rain until Lessy slipped in the mud. Her boot slid out from beneath her, and she was headed for an indecorous splat on the soggy ground.

“Oh!”

Her cry was hardly out of her mouth before Vassar was there. He more than caught her—he wrapped his arms around her and whisked her out of the mud, lifting her against his chest.

For Lessy the moment was almost heart-stopping. The startled surprise of a near splash in a mud puddle was immediately followed by this evidence of masculine strength as the man after her own heart held her closely against his.

Vass stepped back and held her only a moment longer than necessary. The welcome weight of the woman in his arms nearly stunned him brain-numb. He wanted to bury his face in the cool softness of her throat, taste her lips, and explore her with his tongue. He wanted to send his hands a-roving the sensuous hills and valleys of the woman in his arms. He did none of these.

“I’m sorry, Lessy, I led you right into the mud,” he said as he stood her upright on what seemed to Lessy to be very shaky solid firmament.

Her feet touched the ground, and he dropped his arms from her. But Lessy did not move away.

“Vass?” Her voice was only a whisper.

He looked at her face only inches from his own and swallowed nervously.

“Vass?” she whispered again.

“Lessy.” Her name came out a gravelly plea.

“Kiss me.”

“Lessy.”

“Kiss me.”

He swallowed. His heart was pounding like an infantry drum during full frontal attack. The scent and warmth of her skin still clung to his shirtfront. His hands trembled with desire. Kiss her? Oh, yes, he would kiss her. He would kiss her and hold her and pull her to the ground, right here in the mud, and make her his, truly his, as he had always wanted.

Painfully he set his jaw against his inclination and forced himself to step back.

His retreat stabbed Lessy like a wound, and tears stung her eyes.

“Don’t you want to kiss me?”

“Of course I do,” he insisted. His voice was still a little shaky, and he wiped his sweating palms against his trousers before he placed his hands gently on her shoulders. Leaning down he brushed her lips as lightly as he had before. It was the way Lessy might have kissed her mother. Even Lessy’s inexperience in such matters could not hide from her that his was not a lover’s kiss.

“We’d best go back to the house,” he said.

Lessy nodded, her heart in her throat. With a kiss like that she was sure a man might easily be thinking about what occupied her thoughts during Sunday School.

“
Y
oohoo
! Yoohoo!”

Lessy was pouring the last cup of breakfast coffee around the table when the rattle of a rig on the drive captured her attention only an instant before she heard the call.

“Yoohoo! Lessy!”

Rip looked up from a conversation with Angus, his glance furrowing to incredulity.

“Who is that?”

Lessy waved her arm broadly in greeting.

Dressed in a bright pink gingham that was cut much too form-fitting for farm work, Sugie Jo Mouwers bounced excitedly on the wagon seat, her blond curls fluttering in the breeze as she waved a dainty pink handkerchief.

Beside the pretty young woman, Joseph Mouwers sat stem and stoic as was his nature, making it difficult for all to imagine how such a straight and narrow worker ant, solemnly doing his duty, could have ever fathered such a frivolous butterfly as Sugie Jo.

“Morning, Mr. Mouwers.” Vass offered the greeting as the wagon pulled up before the house. “Morning, Miss Sugie Jo.”

“Is it true? Is it finally true?” Sugie Jo’s questions were high-pitched with excitement and aimed at both Vass and Lessy. Not waiting for an answer, she scrambled down from the wagon with only minimal assistance from Vass to wrap her arms eagerly around Lessy. ‘Tell me! I couldn’t wait another day to hear it for myself. Are you and Vass really getting married?”

Lessy blushed and gave Vass a shy glance before nodding affirmatively.

“Yeeeek!” Sugie Jo began jumping up and down, her arms around Lessy, taking her along. “I’m so excited! It finally happened! I knew it would. I just knew it.”

Joseph Mouwers managed to ignore his daughter’s girlish glee as if he were both deaf and blind. “Figured after that storm you all wouldn’t be in the fields today,” he said to Vass with a nod to Roscoe coming up beside him. “Suspect you’ll be checking harness and sharpening implements today.”

Vassar nodded.

“With all these men drawing wages,” Mouwers said with a disapproving gesture at the men still seated at the breakfast table, “I thought you might as well work on mine, too.” He indicated the plow blade he carried in his wagon and the disk harrow that trailed behind. “If you are bringing your crew to my place next, I don’t want you getting used to loafing away your time.”

Doobervale bristled.

Joseph Mouwers had a way of bringing out the devil in the best of Christians. Vass was used to stepping in to smooth things over.

With familiarity that made for unconcern, Sugie Jo pulled Lessy away from the men. “I want to hear everything!” she declared dramatically. “Don’t even keep the most private of details from me!”

Lessy smiled and shook her head at her exuberant friend. “Sugie Jo, there really isn’t that much to tell.”

“I don’t believe a word of it! I want the whole truth. Was the moon full? Did he go down on one knee? Did you say yes right away or leave him dangling a week or two?”

Lessy giggled at the ridiculousness of the idea. From the comer of her eye she spotted Rip and immediately motioned for him to come over.

“I want you to meet this really sweet fellow that’s come with the haying crew,” Lessy said as Rip walked toward them. “I know you two are just going to like each other immediately.”

Sugie Jo looked up, but her expression darkened. By the time Rip stood at their side, his face was a mask of disapproval and his mouth was drawn into one thin line.

“Sugie Jo, this is Rip Ripley. He works on Mr. Doobervale’s crew, and he designs the most impressive- looking farm machines you ever saw.” Lessy turned back to Rip. “This is Sugie Jo Mouwers. She and her family are our closest neighbors, and we’ve been friends since we fit in the same laundry basket.”

Lessy’s smile was wide with pleasure at the introduction but faltered slightly at the curt nods of acknowledgment her friends exchanged.

“Miss Mouwers.”

“Mr. Ripley.”

Rip’s smile was reserved for Lessy as he took his leave, professing an urgent desire to help the other men. Surprised, Lessy turned to her friend in question.

“Do you two know each other?”

Sugie Jo shook her head. “No, I don’t know him. But I know his type.”

“His type?”

The pretty blonde nodded, her curls bouncing affirmatively. “He’s one of those sweet-talking heartbreakers,” she said. “As pretty as a baby skunk and a whole lot more dangerous. You’d best stay away from that one, Lessy. He’s nothing but trouble.”

Lessy’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “He seems like a perfectly nice young man to me.”

Sugie Jo nodded sagely. “I’m sure that Eve thought the serpent to be just a friendly lizard, too.”

Later as the two picked beans in the garden, Lessy told about her engagement.

“So it’s really not going to be that big of a change,” she said with an air of feigned maturity. “We’ll just go on living the lives we’ve always lived.”

Sugie Jo didn’t giggle at that—she laughed out loud. “Lessy Green, I swear you’ve got no more sense of things than a rabbit.” She stopped to pull off the bright pink bonnet and shake her curls in the barest of morning breezes. “Here you are just weeks away from doing the big naughty with the fellow you’ve been pining after for four years. And you talk as if it’s of no more importance than switching Sunday School classes.”

Lessy raised her chin defiantly. “I think all the stories we’ve heard about this man-woman thing are just made up. I think it’s not really so much.”

“Well, you’re wrong,” Sugie Jo insisted. “The big naughty is even bigger than we ever thought.”

Lessy was skeptical. “It’s just nature, like growing up or having a baby. All those things they say about getting weak-kneed and falling off the edge of the world, that’s just talk.”

“It’s not just talk,” her friend insisted.

“How would you know? I’m the one that’s betrothed.”

Sugie Jo raised an eyebrow loftily. “I guess you’ve forgot that I was engaged to Homer Deathridge all last winter.”

Staring at her friend for a long moment, the import of Sugie Jo’s words finally soaked in and Lessy squealed in scandal-shocked delight as she leapt across a half dozen rows of snap beans to grasp her friend around the waist.

“You did the big naughty with Homer Deathridge?” Lessy’s whisper was half awe—half horror.

“Not the whole thing,” Sugie Jo assured her with a nervous glance around to assure herself there was no one within earshot.

“How much?”

Sugie Jo hesitated. “I let him touch me.”

“On your bosom?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Sugie Jo complained, shaking her pretty blond curls with disbelief. “You can’t even get engaged without letting them touch you there! No, silly goose, I let him really touch me, touch me down there.”

Her eyes widening with shock, Lessy gave an involuntary glance toward Sugie Jo’s skirts.

“Down there?”

“Through my clothes, of course.”

“Of course!”

A hushed, uncomfortable silence fell between them. Lessy swallowed nervously.

“So how did it feel?” she asked finally.

Again Sugie Jo hesitated, as if wavering about her admission. “Wonderful.” The word exploded from her, and Sugie Jo blushed furiously before covering her mouth with her hand and emitting an earsplitting screech.

The two young women clasped hands in giggling glee.

“You just wait,” Sugie Jo promised. “When Vassar lays his hands on you, you are going to think you’ve died and gone to glory.”

Lessy hugged her tightly, trying to hold in the thrill and anxiety and fear that curled up inside her.

“If it was so wonderful,” she asked finally, “why did you break off with Homer?”

Sugie Jo shrugged. “Oh, I’m not silly enough to think that Homer’s the only fellow who could make me feel that way. And I think Daddy liked him better than I did. That, in itself, is enough to worry a gal into breaking it off.”

It was near noontime before Joseph Mouwers had his blades all honed to his liking. He flatly refused an invitation to luncheon, stating tactlessly that the Widow Green’s cooking never set well on his stomach.

“I hope I see you again before the wedding,” Sugie Jo told Lessy as they parted. “ ’Cause I’m sure I won’t see much of you afterward. I bet that Vassar keeps you within hugging reach from then on.”

Lessy smiled with delight at the prospect, but reality couldn’t quite be ignored. As she watched the Mouwerses driving away, Sugie Jo bouncing up and down on the seat, her father staring straight at the horses in front of him as if he were completely alone, Lessy couldn’t help but worry. Would Vassar ever want to touch her? And if he did, would she really think that she’d died and gone to glory? Or was that special feeling only for pretty girls like Sugie Jo?

“
C
ome help me pick peaches
.” Lessy’s words were more in the nature of a command than a request, and Rip immediately discarded the gearing box design he was working on to follow her.

The sun was shining brightly this afternoon, making it hot and muggy, but all were hopeful that by tomorrow the fields would be dry enough for haying.

Lessy had been uncharacteristically quiet both at breakfast and the noon meal. Even now her thoughts appeared to be elsewhere as she made her way to the orchard, an empty bushel basket hanging from her left hand.

Ripley had to hurry to catch up with her, and when he took the basket, her smile of thanks seemed more sad than grateful.

“Not many peaches left,” he said conversationally as they walked through the neat rows of tall, well-tended trees.

“It’s late in the year,” she agreed. “But I never let a peach go to waste.” She spied a bright yellow fruit with a rusty red blush on its cheek and reached up on her tiptoes to pull it down. “It really takes more time to pick what’s left than when the trees are full, because you have to move the ladder with you constantly.”

Taking her words as a suggestion, Rip retrieved the folding ladder that leaned against a nearby tree trunk and began following Lessy with it in hand. They stopped at first one tree and then the next as she climbed up the ladder to reach the higher limbs that held a few stray ripe peaches.

Her thoughtful expression caused worry lines to form on her brow.

“This is a mighty fine orchard, Miss Lessy,” Rip told her, trying to lighten her mood.

Lessy smiled gently, her voice a soft whisper. “My grandmother planted it. When I was young, I thought of it as my own secret hideaway where everything that I ever wanted would always come true.” Suddenly recalling herself, she cast off the hint of dreaminess in her expression. “Vass said pecans would have been better.”

Rip’s expression was puzzled as he raised an eyebrow in disagreement. “I like peaches.”

“Me, too,” Lessy agreed as she climbed up the ladder. ‘There is nothing better than fresh peach cobbler. But Vass is right, pecans would have been more practical.”

Rip held the ladder steady as she reached a high and heavy branch. Lessy could feel the heat of his gaze upon her. The strangeness of the feeling caused her to speak more rapidly than she would have.

“Pecans are easier to grow,” she said. “And they keep much better than peaches, even when they are in preserves. And when there’s a need to cull the trees, the wood of the pecan is valuable in itself. Peachwood is good for nothing.”

“I don’t know about that,” Rip said with a smile. “My mama used to make some mighty fine switches from the tree in our yard.”

Lessy giggled at his comical expression of remembered pain as she gently placed another bright, blushing peach in the basket. “With pecans you’re free of the time spent handpicking. You can simply shake the nuts down from the trees without a worry about breaking or bruising them.” Lessy nodded determinedly. “Pecans are definitely a more practical orchard tree.”

Rip brought a handful of sweet-smelling ripe peaches and laid most of them carefully in the basket. One, the darkest, ripest, most perfect, he held out to her like the temptation in the Garden of Eden. “Practical should not be a woman’s first concern,” he said. “And what’s most fine to have in this world is not always the easiest to get. Lots of the best things in life are clearly not practical.” He waved the peach slowly under her nose. The sultry, sweet scent assailed her. “Music and dancing and laughing aren’t what you’d call practical, but life wouldn’t be nearly so happy without them.”

“Well, certainly we wouldn’t want to give up our humanity for practicality,” she said, grabbing the peach from him, unable to resist taking a large greedy bite. It was sweet and juicy, and Lessy’s tongue darted out to capture the juice that threatened to drip down her chin. “But pecans over peaches seems a very small compromise to make.”

Rip came to stand in front of her, holding the ladder between them. “It’s the little compromises like that, Miss Lessy, that will take all the sweetness out of a life.” Lessy let his words pass, hastily dropping her gaze and moving along to the next tree. But as they continued their way through the cooling shade of peach boughs, her mind dwelled upon them.

Stopping, she took another bite from the peach he’d given her, tasting the sweet, sticky smoothness that could never be supplanted by the finest-tasting pecans. “Ripley,” she asked, as if she could no longer keep her silence, “how important is it to a man that his wife be pretty?”

The young man was a bit startled by the question. She was unwilling to look at him directly, which gave him opportunity to observe her discomfiture. “You thinking of your friend, Miss Mouwers?”

“Oh, no,” Lessy insisted. “I was just asking. But you didn’t like Sugie Jo.”

“I liked her fine,” he said. “What’s not to like? She’s a fine looker for sure.”

Lessy was puzzled. “You didn’t act like you liked her.”

“Just being careful,” he replied. “She’s one fine looker who is a-looking to get married. So I don’t want her looking in my direction.”

“But she’s very pretty.”

Rip nodded in agreement.

“So how important is it to a man that his woman be pretty?”

Ripley turned to look at her. “For most men it’s very important,” he said at first and then hesitated as if thinking. “Well, I guess it’s pretty important.” Stopping completely, he shook his head, and with a light chuckle as he bent over to catch her downcast eyes he told her finally, “Maybe it ain’t a bit important at all.”