by Joey W. Hill
“Miriam…Mistress—“
“Miriam is fine, Grady.” She glanced down at herself and his gaze followed hers to her naked breasts, and then he looked away again.
“I figured it might be fine to call ye such, but I didn’t…I don’t want you thinkin’ I’m taking anything for granted tonight. I know why we’re here isn’t what ye wanted, but I don’t want…I don’t want ye to do anything…” he took a deep breath, ran a palm over his face. “There’s a reason I beat metal for a livin’, Miriam. I talk like a cursed fool.”
Compassion speared her. Miriam sucked in a breath against its painful invasion. The desire to strike out at him for taking her numbness away was immediate, but by her second breath, the pain receded, and she was rational.
“You don’t sound like a fool to me, Grady,” she managed, raising a broken hand from the water and laying it on his wrist. Water dripped from both their fingers and reflected the firelight. Grady sighed, blessing the mixture of earth and firelit water with the spirit of wind.
Spirits of air, I welcome you. Be with me here tonight.
Bless your presence here tonight, all spirits of the four directions. Let my heart be open to the lessons you will teach, aid me in this task as the Lord and Mother will it.
“You are a man of few words, Grady Cole,” she said gently. “But when you looked at your sweet Sarah, I saw all the words that have been put down since the beginning of time in your eyes. So speak from that great heart of yours and tell me in simple phrases what’s plaguing you. What are you trying to say, man?”
He covered her hand, gripped it, but with a very tender pressure. “It’s not like that. It’s more about what’s plaguing you. Arthur…he wasn’t kind. I know that, saw that.” He stared intently at their joined hands. “I figure that isn’t the only way he wasna kind to you. No matter what else happens, I don’t want ye t’feel a moment’s fear, Miriam. I’ll be very, very gentle. Ye won’t be feeling any pain, I swear that on my very life.”
“I can’t breathe,” she gasped. Her body perversely began to slide back down into the water, where air would be denied her altogether.
Grady caught her, sliding his arms around her back, bringing her up. He knelt by the tub, holding her wet, gasping form against his chest, letting her head drop onto his shoulder. Miriam sobbed for air as he rubbed her back and murmured soothingly to her. It was a few moments before the roaring in her head died down enough to let her hear him.
“---just calm down, now, yer all right. Just an attack of nerves. My Sarah used to get them when something upset her a lot. You’re just not used to kindness, not really ready for it. You’ve been thinking that you had to be like a good cookpot, with no holes or cracks. A good cookpot keeps what’s inside it boiling, and you think that’s what’s helped you survive, and maybe yer right. But kindness turns down the flame, and you’re thinking ye won’t be able to keep makin’ the stew without it.”
She shook and he tightened his hold, but Miriam shook her head against his jaw and pushed at him with her feeble hands so he’d let her up and see her hitching, weak laughter.
“Grady, you are too much. Sarah used to warn me of your analogies.”
“Oh?” his face creased in a dozen places when he smiled, a well-furrowed field. He lifted his hand and knuckled away one of her nervous tears. “Did she, then? She always was a sassy woman. What did she say?”
“She said you could figure a way to compare the coming of Christ to feeding the chickens in the morning.”
“Well,” he considered it, his eyes twinkling a bit. “So I could. If ye think of the chickens as a flock--“
Miriam placed a finger on his lips, and the humor died out of his eyes as it disappeared in hers. “I can’t bear to laugh again right now, Grady.”
He nodded. “Sit back then, and let me finish your bath.”
He poured a bucket of warm water over her head and ran his strong hands through the locks of hair, squeaking them to make sure the soap was gone. Grady pushed it all back off her face, lifted it from her shoulders and over the edge of the trough before it could get the itchy, gluey feeling it left on drying skin. He eased her back against the rolled up blanket and added another bucket of hot water to the tub to keep it blissful. Then he took up the cloth again, soaped it, and started on her shoulders.
He rubbed in slow, round circles, taking off the dirt and loosening the muscles beneath, making them even more loose with his capable fingers. He lifted one of her arms out and ran the cloth up and down its length, taking great care between the curled fingers, not even bringing a murmur of complaint to her lips. Miriam’s eyelids drooped, and as Grady began humming a quiet tune, she closed them completely again, giving herself over to the smell of steam and soap, of warmth and the man next to her.
He switched sides, did the other arm in the same fashion, up and back, up and back, every expanse of skin cleansed and stroked. His arm came around her back, lifting her in the cradle of his shoulder and chest to run the cloth on the underside of her arm, back and forth in the moist indentation of each armpit. His breath whispered past her ear, his shoulder and chest a solid, generous pillow.
Grady shook her slightly, a gentle vibration as he dipped the rag and turned the soap on it again. The cloth came back to her shoulder again, only this time it ran up the column of her throat. His fingers stroked her neck, around, under her hair, up along the curved path behind her ear. Miriam lifted her chin, letting him have greater access, no longer wondering that cats liked it so much. She had never had such a bath.
He stayed at her neck a long time, and she continued to expose her throat to him, curling and uncurling her fingers on her thighs at each stroke as if she were indeed a feline kneading.
His finger traced her larynx through the cloth, down into the tender pocket where the edges of the collarbone met. Then, instead of going up again, the soapy rag traced a path down her sternum, right to the water’s edge. Miriam drew in a breath and the cloth changed direction, his fingertip and the cotton sliding across the top curve of her breast, etching the line where air and water met, the boundary between elements where magic was possible. So it was, for a hot surge of energy ignited where his fingers touched, and speared downward, tightening into a coil somewhere below her stomach, just above her…
“Grady,” she whispered, “What—“
“Ssshhh,” he murmured, raising his hand and laying it gently on her forehead, smoothing her wet brow with his thumb. “Just relax, lass.”
“I don’t know…”
“I know ye don’t, love. But I do, and ‘twill be all right.”
The cloth swept gracefully below the water’s surface, and tickled over her nipple like a fish’s fin as he traced the water line along the top of her other breast. Miriam swallowed, fighting a strange desire to lift her breast out of the water, let him cover it. What spell was this?
“Easy, girl,” he crooned. “Just relax, and stay with me.”
Several moments later, Miriam thought she would go mad if he stayed above the water much longer. His hand descended and the washcloth molded over her left breast, cupped in the strength of his hand. An animal-like moan wrenched from her throat, startling her. The knuckles of two of his fingers slid over her nipple and then the knuckles came together, a gentle pressure, close to pain but nothing like.
Arthur had pinched them all the time, making her flinch until his beatings taught her not to, but this was not that. Her body had become weightless and writhing in the water, without any propulsion or direction. Miriam lay helpless against the support of Grady’s arm around her back as his fingers kneaded and pressed, kneaded and pressed, swelling her nipple to twice its usual size. His hand moved to the other, but he put the washcloth in her hand first and guided it over the abandoned nipple, showing her how to pleasure herself as he brought the other one to the same blood filled state.
“Grady,” she whimpered. “What are you doing to me?”
“Giving you pleasure,” he murmured i
nto her ear, brushing her lips against the curve.
“I can’t,…I don’t,…oh…”
His hand left her breast, slid down her belly. Legs she forced open with a prayer for courage against Arthur’s punishment now fell open to Grady’s touch like a gift.
At his first touch there, she spasmed and hissed through her teeth. Miriam dropped the washcloth and her hand sought his shoulder, her good fingers clutching his hot skin beneath the coarse linen shirt. His fingers stroked and teased, butterflied against her sex, made circles and tiny dips, drew pictures of mindless things, things that dissolved into one slow torturous design.
Slowly, slowly his finger entered her, then two fingers. They filled her, big man that he was. Miriam whimpered, pressed her lips and teeth against his arm, and nearly screamed against his damp flesh when the fingers supporting her back inched forward over her breast and gently pinched her nipple again.
His knuckles pressed into the soft mound of flesh above where his fingers penetrated. She bucked up with a strangled moan. Lightning flashed, blinding her. Miriam fell, spun out of control, then spread her wings like a bird and shot out of the clouds to fly.
She bowed upwards, arching like a crescent moon toward the touch of his lips on the soft flesh right above her quivering stomach. The waves of pleasure crested, and kept cresting. Still she soared up, and his fingers did not stop their movement. Her mouth opened and she cried out his name, begging him…
Hours, days might have passed when Miriam finally floated back to the earth. She made her landing like a feather, barely touching earth, quivering in the grip of the wind that had carried her. She convulsed in small spasms as his fingers slid out of her. His whole hand cupped her, sealing in the pleasure, the gift he had given her.
Miriam slowly opened her eyes. He was still Grady, but different. The hand curved along the side of her face, the thumb brushing her lips gently, was not entirely steady, and his kind eyes were dark with arousal, and passion.
“Great God,” she managed at last. “What was that?”
He smiled, a slow, sensual gesture that transformed the blunt, strong features. “That was how it was meant to be, Miriam, between a man and a woman. It can be done with me inside ye, but,” the smile faltered and shy, wonderfully familiar Grady came through again. “It has been a lonely year for me, Miriam, and while I could promise ye I’d be gentle, I could not promise to hold back long enough to give ye that, and I wanted ye to know how it could be.”
She stared at him. “Well,” she said at last. “Damn Arthur to hell twice then, for what he did to me, and for what he didn’t do to me.”
No wonder magical energy could be raised from such an act. She had been taught it could be so, but had not believed it, knowing only Arthur’s nightly rapes. What Arthur had done to her was just another expression of violence. What Grady had done was pure magic.
“Can you help me out of the tub?” Miriam asked.
He nodded, and helped her stand. Grady swung a towel around her shoulders, slid his arms beneath her and carried her to the fire, setting her on the stool next to it.
“Just stay there and get warm,” he instructed, and went back to her tub. He retrieved another towel, and a white folded garment. When he brought it to her and shook it out, Miriam saw it was a simple white linen nightgown, edged with handmade lace at the cuffs and square neckline.
Miriam stayed the garment from her with a hand. “Should I,…I don’t think I should wear her things. It feels wrong.”
Grady’s eyes softened, and he threaded the garment over her head, working her hands into the light sleeves. “Bless ye, lass, for your kind heart. It was not hers, though. It was yours. She was making it for ye as a gift. When her sickness got too much, I forgot about giving it to you, and so did she, but she wanted it as a thank you for all ye did for us.”
“Is that what this is?” Miriam’s gaze stayed on him as he freed her hair from the collar and lifted her slightly off the stool to push the garment down her hips, over her legs. Perhaps it was the magic building in her body, warning her of wrong paths, but Miriam had the uncomfortable feeling her woman’s heart was involved in the question as well. She didn’t want it all to be for a debt Sarah owed her.
“No,” he said simply. He lifted the towel, laid it over her head.
Miriam closed her eyes and his strong hands massaged her scalp through the thick fabric of the towel. She inhaled fresh cut hay, and sunshine. She raised her hands and held it to her nose.
“Grady, how did you—“
“I left it out on the line today so it would smell like the things you’ve been missing.”
Miriam curled her fingers into the towel, pulled it down until it rested in her lap. She folded forward, pressing her face into it, feeling the drained exhaustion that was far beyond tears sweep over her. Desolation.
“What is it, lass? What pains ye?” Grady knelt before her and gently brought her out of the towel, prying her hands from her pale face. “Yer scaring me, now. Tell me what ‘tis, and I’ll fix it.”
“I keep waiting for it to be another part of the nightmare,” she stared at his face. “Oh, Grady, it’s so awful, what fear does to you.”
His big hands touched her face and tenderness filled his eyes.
“I don’t want to burn or hang,” she murmured, “But until this moment, I thought all I had left in my heart was hate, and that isn’t a life worth living. I’ve never felt anything like…what you just did, so now I’m thinking, maybe I’ve got something else left, something I can use to do what I need to do to start over, renew my life.”
“So why does that cause ye such pain?”
“Because,” she leaned forward, shyly touched his face with the tip of her index finger. He turned into her hand but otherwise let her feel the way of it. Miriam wanted to touch the side of his face, cup that strong jaw and trace her fingers through the tips of his unevenly cut hair, and as soon as she wanted, she did it.
The feel of his skin beneath her fingertips, the texture of his face, the way his eyes looked as she touched him, the smell of him, the sound of his breathing, she wanted to imprint it on her heart. A wonderful moment was as fleeting as a breath, but like breathing, she wanted to do this over and over again, to bring life back into her heart, to find out the secret to this life that she had lost. She felt so close, with her body vibrating with Grady’s magic.
“I’m wasting the gift of this moment you’ve given me,” she whispered, close to tears. “In anticipation of that future I don’t now, for what I might not have tomorrow, might never have again.”
“It doesna work that way, Miriam,” Grady pressed a kiss to her fingers. “I fed my wife, cleaned her each day. A thousand times I thought, why am I doing all this, over and over, when we both knew she was dyin’? Maybe it was the comfort of havin’ something to do, not feelin’ so helpless. But when I think of it now,” his expression turned inward and Miriam did it without thought, caressed the side of his face in comfort. His gaze came back to her, his eyes glistening with tears.
“It was my way of tellin’ her how much I loved her. The Lord gave me this precious gift, and I was determined to take care of her every second He gave her to me, even if He was about to take her away. Maybe it wasna how we wanted to be spending our time together, and what might happen tomorrow or the next day was always a shadow over us, but when ye think of it, isn’t all life like that? When I was plowin’ and I saw bluebells growing beside a rock, I took the time to stop and bring them to her, sit and hold her hand a moment before I went back to the field. And she wanted to sit out on the front stoop when the weather would let her, and watch me go back and forth at my chores. We took joy in every moment we had together, every moment.”
Grady covered Miriam’s hand against his face and the firelight caught a spark of fierceness in his expression that surprised her. “Whatever we have to do to get you to that new beginning,” he said, “We aren’t wasting this moment. It’s a memory you can hold onto, no matt
er where it takes you, and your memories form the shape of your soul, keepin’ it from shrivelin’ into a dry corn husk.”
A lump formed in her throat, and did not allow Miriam to speak. She nodded, bowed her head. He rose, took up the brush, and began to stroke it through her hair, using his fingers to painlessly work out the last knots.
He spoke again, but now his words were a quiet rumble, no more intrusive than the crackle of the fire, or the soft scratching of the brush on her scalp. He considered how the bees were making extra honey this year, how the cow Mrs. Darby claimed dried up from Miriam’s hex hadn’t given milk or calf in ten years. He murmured the chant of the earth, soothing the uneasy writhings of her soul, opening her heart and mind further to the possibilities that she had been afraid to hope existed.
At length he laid down the brush, put both hands on the crown of her head.
“So then, Miriam. Let’s do what we must to give you a tomorrow.”
“You know they’ll kill you for this.” The fear of it clamped around her heart, squeezed as mercilessly as the screws.
“Maybe,” he nodded, unafraid. “’Tis all right. You’re worth dyin’ for, Miriam.”
Arthur dead, no friends, parents or siblings, no one to claim or protect her any more than the packed dirt beneath parishioners’ feet on the way to Meeting was claimed or protected, yet suddenly there was this, this man, out of nowhere, elevating her into a light that blinded her. It burned.
Miriam could bear the light of his soul, but the reflection of her own in it caused her pain, made her shrink in fear. Her soul had existed in shadow for so long….but Grady saw her, saw all of her.
He had not come out of nowhere. Miriam remembered now every time his eyes met hers on the way out of Meeting House, the kindly fingers giving her a hand up into their wagon when Arthur was tied up with the church elders. Grady had come to the farm several times, trying to offer Arthur chickens or a bag of grain in thanks for her kindness, and Arthur had taken them out of greed, not in welcome, never letting Grady stay to speak to her.