Cursed by Christ

by Matthew Warner

  “Stop it, no, stop …” The voice she heard, torn with sobs and constricted by his hand, wasn’t her own.

  The angel’s wings came alive. In moments, Forney’s thoughts engulfed her like water: Dirty dirty dirty …

  In deft movements, as if well practiced, he tore away the last of her undergarments. His own clothes fell away faster.

  … not worth your skin.

  Jesus against her. No goodness in the world, only this, for there was Satan and there was Jesus, and they were brothers. She radiated hurt.

  His penis entered her, Forney’s pockmarked face sharing her vision with the crucifix on the wall. He collapsed onto her, crushing her with his weight. Until now, she’d been a virgin. As he pumped, his tongue moved in her ear: “You must be cleansed, my child.”

  And it flooded in through the angel’s wings, from Forney’s mind into hers: Poppa died not for punishment, but because of Forney’s jealousy. And Momma died because of Forney’s anger. As simple as that. Oh, the minister felt it was willed by Jesus, but he’d killed her parents for baser reasons than their supposed affronts to the holy order.

  It was too terrible to bear, that Jesus enjoyed the sex, the killing and petty vengeance. Jesus wallowed in the anger and carnal pleasures He’d been denied while alive in Palestine.

  Her skin heated, enveloping them in her despair. Reverend Forney’s moan caught in his throat. He looked into her face with surprise and pain. What, whatwhatwhat, his mind voice said. What is she—

  Heat and sorrow cocooned them both, squeezing, pulling him closer and forcing air from his lungs. He struggled to get away. Alice remembered Momma’s roses, blackening and shriveling. Fanning her fingers over his ears, Alice poured hatred and hurt from her palms in waves of energy. Inside Forney’s head, portions of his brain scorched like wood and split open.

  “Demon!” he screamed, unable to free himself. He couldn’t even withdraw his penis.

  That only made her angrier, and with a pinch of thought Alice reflected outward the agony he’d created in her loins. To Forney, her vagina ignited into a fissure of lava. He shrieked. She didn’t know a man could be so loud. His crucifix necklace danced against her lips.

  She continued to destroy his head, squeezing and burning. Her angel’s wings sensed hundreds of arteries exploding at once. Blood trickled from his mouth to land on her face.

  A man shouted from the sanctuary doorway: “Good God!”

  He yanked Reverend Forney’s dead body off of her. Grunted as he picked her up in strong arms.

  Thorne Norwick.

  Thorne looked Forney over but only saw a corpse with blood in its mouth and a penis that might have been red from chafing. There was no visible evidence that she’d killed him.

  Outside, old Martin waited upon Alice’s carriage like a gargoyle. When they were seated, Thorne said—perhaps unnecessarily—”Drive those horses if you value your life. Now!”

  And in seconds, they were sprinting across the countryside.

  Chapter 5

  Aweek after their departure from Herbstown, Major Thorne Norwick sent Martin the carriage driver walking back home with this letter:

  3rd September 1860

  To Whom It May Concern:

  Your Reverend Forney died of a brain embolism while raping Alice Wharton. I assure you upon the most sacred vows of honor, both Southern and otherwise, that I witnessed this spectacle and that Miss Wharton must be absolved of all suspicion. Despondent at the deaths of her parents, and facing a house corrupted with malicious rumor concerning her role in the same, Alice has requested, and I have consented, to give her a new home. We shall be betrothed at our earliest convenience. Solicitors may contact me via the office of Colonel Richards, 3rd Cavalry.

  Major Thorton Norwick

  As Thorne composed this letter, bearing down upon the wood of the carriage driver’s seat, Alice had felt a mixture of vindication and fear. Vindication because she was finally getting what she’d always desired: a husband. She wished she could witness the surprise of Gramma Wharton, Hannah the slave girl, and her former friends. “What?” they would say. “That spinster?” She also felt fear because of the finality of what they were doing. After a letter like this, she could never go home. Looking over Thorne’s shoulder, she imagined the damage that would be inflicted by the phrase “facing a house corrupted with malicious rumor,” referring to Gramma’s suspicions concerning her role in Momma’s and Poppa’s deaths.

  “Thorne, perhaps you should strike that phrase,” Alice had said, pointing.

  “It’s true, isn’t it? Or did you lie to me about that old woman?”

  Alice was shaken for a moment, but separated the scorn from his words. Yes, it was true. There had been no mistaking the quiet hostility in Gramma’s stare. “You’re right. Keep it in.”

  As their campsite darkened with evening, and with Martin’s receding footsteps hours past, Alice finally put the letter out of her mind. What was done was done. Besides, other thoughts had supplanted the worry—other feelings. Although she found Thorne attractive, it wasn’t arousal she felt. Her body and senses were still traumatized from Forney’s attack, and perhaps would be forever. No, it was the desire to repay Thorne in some way. After all, he’d just rescued her, and now she was completely dependant on him.

  She looked at Thorne over the whispering campfire, her fingers curling as she wondered if she could overcome the effects of the crime long enough to touch him. As they talked, Thorne stood up to stretch, then sat down much closer.

  Feeling completely safe with him, Alice found herself telling him things she’d never told anyone—stories about her childhood, and the times she’d secretly peeped into slaves’ cabins, seeing lifestyles so strange to her. The only thing she held back was the story of the angel’s wings, and how Christ had cursed four generations of her mother’s bloodline. No sense revealing such things to the man whose children she might bear—children she still wanted to have, but who asked in dreams whether their births were morally permissible in light of her curse. Thorne believed the story he’d proffered in his letter, and that was good enough. Alice did say, however, “I hope you will understand when I say I desire a civil ceremony.”

  He blinked. “Not even a minister?”

  “Please, Thorne.” She hesitated, then brushed her fingers under his ear. She didn’t want to do it—didn’t want to touch anyone or be touched—but knew that it was what Thorne wanted. “Please. You surely understand that churches have become uncomfortable places for me. In fact, I feel as if the whole establishment were conspiring against me.” There, that was as close as she’d come to stating the truth.

  He contemplated the ground. Alice’s angel’s wings, fairly dormant during the time they’d been on the road, detected a whiff of his thoughts: a measure of uncertainty about what had truly happened in that church, and suspicion that she hadn’t told the whole truth. She held her breath until she felt those thoughts recede.

  As if testing her temperature, he touched her knee. He looked into her eyes. “Of course. I understand.”

  The relief washed over her like the campfire’s heat. She barely had time to register this, however, before Thorne leaned in and smashed his mouth against hers. She recoiled—it was too much like Forney.

  Thankfully, he stayed still as she scooted away.

  She stared at him and touched her lips with trembling fingers, wanting to run. Could she do this tonight? She owed him, after all, but would he grow angry if she said she wanted to wait until marriage?

  He cocked his head, regarding her. “It’s all right,” he said, and this time moved in more slowly. Alice forced herself to stay still as he pushed her dress off her shoulders. She tried not to think of Forney—tried not to think of him on top of her, his face in hers. Dirty dirty dirty, he’d thought, the words echoing through her head. …

  Thorne stopped undressing her when she tensed. He stared, much as he probably sized-up other soldiers, trying to ascertain their mood and weaknesses.
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  Gulping, Alice reached out and began unfastening his shirt. She exposed a chest as hairy as bear’s. She giggled nervously.

  Thorne smiled and moved in again. His kissing was sloppy, and his tongue reminded her of an uncooked piece of liver. She tried not to grimace—tried not to remember that Thorne was a good twenty years older than her, the age of her father. Instead, she reached down and stroked his back.

  It dawned on her that she really didn’t know what to do. She’d never truly made love to a man before—Forney didn’t count, and neither did the Davidson boy when she was a child, when they spent an hour in the woods, thrusting their hands into each other’s clothes.

  Thorne, meanwhile, seemed to be fighting his nature. He was a hardnosed cavalry officer, used to giving orders and having his way, and she knew her rebuffs had infuriated him, while making her more of a conquest. Now that he had her, he kept trying to lie on top of her—maybe trying to control her like he was used to controlling horses.

  Alice gave up forcing herself to touch him. She pushed Thorne off of her and slid away, not caring that dust smeared her dress. Yes, she felt safe with him, but Forney had lain on top of her; Forney had seized control.

  Why didn’t she feel anything? She had heard tales of delicious sexual excitement, the urge to taste a man’s sweat, to hold his most private of areas, and the rare, short-lived instances of feeling as if one were flying. But she felt nothing, and yet she wanted to repay him for saving her life. It didn’t matter that she would have been content simply to hold his hands and talk through the night. This was about obligations.

  Thorne made one last grab for her—a leer on his face that conveyed both playfulness and anger—and then stood up. Alice stood also and faced him across the campfire. They said nothing.

  She watched comprehension dawn on his face and didn’t need the angel’s wings to guess his thoughts: no, the direct approach wasn’t working. Time to try a new strategy.

  Bringing his feet smartly together and locking his legs, he tucked one hand behind his back and held the other out to her, palm up—a gentleman’s way of asking for a lady’s hand. Would you like to dance? the pose said.

  Because he was reaching over the campfire, the smoke rose into his face. It watered his eyes and gave him the aspect of a spirit. So much taller than her. Would he pull her into the flames? Her chest heaving now, Alice reached for his hand but drew away the instant before touching it.

  He hesitated, and then let his hand drop. Hard determination appeared to descend over him, and in his glare, touched as it was by smoke, sweat and firelight, she saw the face of a soldier. Blood had risen into his cheeks either with excitement or anger, and for the first time near him, Alice no longer felt safe.

  She jumped when his hands rose suddenly, but he wasn’t reaching for her, only to his clothes. The articles soon fell off his body in untidy clumps. When at last he stood naked on the other side of the fire, Alice looked down at his erection, then up at the wiry muscles under that mass of hair and sweat. She listened to the growing feeling in her body that she’d thought Forney had killed and began to pull at her own clothes.

  Her dress still lay about her ankles when Thorne came for her.

  The rest was surprisingly short-lived. She stopped resisting him, allowed him to push her gently down onto the bare earth and to pry her legs apart with his own. She did not cry out when he penetrated her. It was different this time, not dry and forced.

  In fact, it didn’t pain her until Thorne started moaning. By that time, his weight was crushing her, and the thought had crossed her mind that she couldn’t get up if she wanted to, which brought back memories of Forney.

  “Thorne, Thorne, please stop.”

  His leg hair chafed the insides of her thighs, and he was squeezing her breasts too hard. He bit her shoulder.

  “Ouch! Please stop!”

  Then he was stopping because he’d ejaculated. And before she knew what had happened, he was off of her completely.

  She lay there on the ground feeling discarded, ruptured, his semen between her legs marking her as his property, her breasts pinched and aching, her shoulder sore.

  Thorne stood away from the campfire, putting on his clothes. He didn’t look at her. Didn’t speak. But with her sixth sense, she detected the triumph he felt. With the wings, she saw him remembering a time as a child, when after having been beaten by an older boy, Thorne had stalked him in the woods, knocked him out with a rock, and left him tied to a tree. That’s what Thorne felt now—that sense of accomplishment, of having planned carefully and worked to achieve a goal.

  Well, so be it then. If that’s what makes him happy, then I owe it to him.

  A wave of disgust followed. She wondered if she deserved more and wished he would hold her and say she was worth something to him even if she wasn’t valued by God. But she stuffed it down.

  Later that night, she occupied herself with worry.

  Alice knew she shouldn’t hold back from Thorne about how Reverend Forney died. Dishonesty wasn’t the best foot on which to begin the journey of marriage. Nor was sex, for that matter, as it was not uncommon for one’s second or third kiss ever to be on the wedding night. That, however, was a moral learned from Reverend Forney’s church—Jesus Christ—and as such could be ignored. She would follow her own code.

  Nodding to herself, Alice sat up on one elbow and watched her future husband’s hairy chest rise and fall with sleep. This will get better, she told herself, and willed her lingering doubt to drift away with the campfire smoke.

  Chapter 6

  The farming community of Norwicktown, Georgia, had a long and bloody history on the simple question of its name. When Thorne’s grandfather, Abraham Norwick, and his wife and six children founded the township in 1802, the church elders held him right up there with the Apostles. They knew him to be reliable and courteous, and willing to loan you his right arm if he could. Once, he carried four adult hogs on his back, one after the other, across a swollen river to a young family cut off from food by spring flooding.

  The problems started when that same family’s young wife took a liking to him, and he didn’t reciprocate. Rumors, likely spread by her, started circulating about how Abraham frequently became “tight”—that is, drunk—and how he cheated at cards and business. This eroded his name as surely as the spring floods eroded the ground beneath that woman’s house and eventually sucked it into the Ogeechee River, and by that time, Abraham’s reputation had deteriorated to such a point that the disaster was rumored to be his doing.

  So when, in the War of 1812, Abraham Norwick was discovered on the road, staunching the fatal flow of blood from a lone British soldier’s neck, the label of traitor stuck faster than any of the jealous wife’s rumors. It didn’t matter to the township that he had inflicted the soldier’s wound himself (in self defense), nor that he habitually heaped praise and good will upon all his enemies, large or small. Facts were facts, and a popular opinion grew like a sail filling with wind that the town shouldn’t bear the name of so dishonorable a man.

  Within a year, a vote on whether to change the name was put on the town council’s docket. It reached a head before that, however, when Elijah Standish, while arguing the matter with another customer at the Straight Furrow Inn, urinated into his opponent’s ale. The ensuing fight, then bar brawl, then full-scale riot complete with discharging muskets, left one dead, fourteen injured, and a fifth of the town in flames.

  The council’s debate was tabled indefinitely.

  The issue sometimes reappeared, however, as there were still old-timers who could focus on the causes and not the effects of the “Battle of Norwicktown”—people who thusly called it the “Name Riot”—but the grumblings that reappeared on the council’s docket were always quashed by procedural matters. The consensus, though—spoken only in the wee hours, when the poker cards were soaked with spilled liquor—was that if another unprincipled Norwick raised his stinking head, the town name would finally change. In recent
years, the name of that folk-hero Georgian senator, Robert Toombs, had been floated as a possibility.

  Thorne, explaining all this to Alice as they rode the carriage the final mile to his brother Pierce’s plantation, which was on the outskirts of the Norwicktown limits, said, “It is for this reason that Pierce keeps quiet about his … lifestyle, shall we say?”

  The subtext he was implying shocked Alice into grabbing his sleeve. “You mean he’s an—an abolitionist?” The very word shuddered with scandal.

  “No, nothing so silly.” He frowned at her, then leaned close. “Pierce has a weakness for … men.”

  “I don’t understand. He’s a weak man?”

  “That too, but I mean he prefers—” Thorne grabbed his crotch meaningfully. “Do you understand me?”

  It took her a moment, but she did. She huffed with shock. Sex was such a new thing to her, already troublesome, thanks to Forney—and now this? She had thought same-sex relations died out with Sodom and Gomorrah, and had never encountered it herself.

  “But keeping it a secret has become more difficult lately,” Thorne said. “You see, as a boy, Pierce was raped by a male miscreant—which I think caused him to grow up this way—and the criminal was covered with syphilis lesions. Pierce came down with sores and fever a few months later, and when it cleared up we thought he’d gotten over it. But recently it’s come back, and the doctor says it’s taken residence in his brain.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “So for months now, Obie Redger—the overseer—has kept him secluded. Obie pretends he doesn’t hear the ravings, and he tells the slaves not to hear them either.”

  “Does Obie run the plantation in his absence?”

  “Yes, but not very well, so I’m glad I’m returning in time for boll harvesting. He’s inexperienced, only been there a year.”

  Alice swallowed—and swallowed again as she digested this information. The horse pulling the carriage snorted as if commenting on things.