Samson and Sunset
Samson and Sunset
Midpoint
Table of Contents
Title Page
Praise for Samson and Sunset
DEDICATED TO MY WONDERFUL PARENTS
Acknowledgements
1963-1964
The Wrong Side Of The Tracks
Water Rising
A Day’s Work For A Day’s Food
Five Little Magic Words
Thrills, Chills And Lies
1965
Motel Angel
The Threshold
The Auction
The Big Caper
Wild Woman
Christmas
The Arrival
1966
The Tanning of The Shrew
Parting Gift
The Surprise
The Straw House
Sexual Healing
Hard Liquor
1967-1968
A Cool Head
Marie
Sleeping Angel
Brownies
Missing
Distractions
1970
Above The Bones
Safe
A Love Like Ours
1978
Outrunning Trouble
Like A Thief In The Night
Look Me In The Eyes And Swear It
The Dance
1979-1980
The Discovery
The News
The Hand Of Grace
Take Me Home
Starling Darling Chapter One
Starling Darling Chapter Two
About the Author
Samson and Sunset
by
Dorothy Annie Schritt
Second Edition
SAMSON AND SUNSET © 2013 by Dorothy Annie Schritt. All rights reserved. Created in digital format in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9918565-0-3
Cover art by:
JIM WARREN
www.jimwarren.com
Thank you for allowing me to use your beautiful painting, “Together Again.”
Edited by:
Wendy Reis www.wendyreiseditingandproofreading.com
Digitally formatted by Contented Press www.carolmcleod.net
Praise for Samson and Sunset
“Samson and Sunset by Dorothy Annie Schritt is an emotionally charged story populated by characters that are sure to grip readers hearts and not let go until the very end. The front cover is stunning and will stand out on crowded bookstore shelves. The back cover copy is titillating and will compel people who like physical passion in their stories to pick up the book and start reading... The characters are extremely well drawn and sympathetic. All the dialogue is natural and true to each character.” (Writer's Digest)
Finalist, 20th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards (2012)
DEDICATED TO MY WONDERFUL PARENTS
John and Martha Schritt
YOU HAD NOTHING
BUT YOU GAVE ME EVERYTHING
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank the following people who helped breathe life into this book: My Soulmate, Gene Meakins, Elaine Beistline, Phil Beistline, Corina Woodville, Michelle Reeves, John Blomberg, Kelly Richards, Jill Meakins, Stacy Denman, Alizabeth Denman Cochrane, Katherine Woodville, Micheal McLeavy, Mary Sebers, and Jaralee Aby .
1963-1964
The Wrong Side Of The Tracks
A delivery table, I couldn’t believe I was on a delivery table. This was the last direction I thought my life, at 21, would take. I wanted nothing more than to be a wife and mother, but I didn’t plan for it to happen so soon, and certainly not under these circumstances. I thought if I were having a baby, there would be a father. Oh, there was a father, but not one that was pacing up and down in the waiting room with great expectations of our first child, a precious little gift from God. No, the father was a man who married me just to give this child a name, not for the sake of the child, but the sake of his parents’ good name. How did I know all this? He told me.
Life plays many dirty tricks on us and Dane Dalton, the father of my baby, was one of those dirty tricks. To Dane Dalton I was a fish—easy to catch, easy to throw back. In the short time that I had dated Dane, he told his friends, “I know this fish that will give us money to buy a case of beer—the catch is, we’ll have to drag her along with us.” Then he would call me and ask me to go riding around. He knew I had a checkbook, and I was generous to a fault. If Dane asked me for money for a case of beer, I’d be more than willing to give him the money. After all, they were of legal age to drink. I got this little tidbit from one of Dane’s close friends after our marriage. A marriage that only lasted three hours, the three hours it took to drive from Centerville, Kansas, home to Hudson, Nebraska.
“Push, Kathrine,” the doctor was saying. “Just a couple more pushes and we’ll have a baby.”
Dane was from the right side of the tracks. I was from the wrong side. That information alone seemed to make people think I was easy. I remember shopping for baby clothes in downtown Hudson one time, carrying this little baby in my womb. It was misting very gently and Dane and several of his friends rode by on motorcycles.
“There’s a whore!” he shouted at the top of his voice as he passed me.
Now I was glad it was misting rain, it masked the tears rolling down my cheeks.
Dane knew I was no such thing. He damned well knew he was my first.
“Push, Kathrine, I see the head. All right, we’ve got her. We’ve got her… A beautiful, perfect baby girl.”
I craned my neck to see her, but they whisked her away to clean her up. I sighed and lay back, exhausted. As I lay there, recovering, I began to think about my life and how I’d ended up here.
I was born Kathrine Anne Mitchell, July 5th, 1942, in a small house in a town called Hudson, Nebraska. My grandparents had emigrated from Russia, although they were German-blooded. Years before, Katherine the Great had promised good German farmers that if they came to Russia to farm the land they wouldn’t have to go to war. They were called Germans from Russia, or Volga-Germans.
My father’s parents lived in a little mud hut in the side of a hill. They had nine children and one milk cow. One night some Russian townspeople, drunk, and having fun, came down the hill and shot their only milk cow. A few weeks later, the Russian police came to the door and wanted to talk to my dad’s grandfather who had been a scientist in Germany. They took him away and his family never saw him again. As my father told me, you didn’t question the Russian police, the family always assumed they sent my great-grandfather to a Russian gulag. My dad’s father, Fredrick, went to work for a rich Russian farmer. One day when the farm overseer was whipping the horses with a leather whip, my grandfather yelled at him to stop! He did, but he turned the whip on my grandfather and beat him in front of his four sons, including my father who watched in horror. The next day, the four boys, my father age four at the time, lay waiting to jump the overseer. They beat him horribly and dragged him into a field, then ran home and told their parents what they had done. Fearing they may have killed him, my grandparents took the family and fled that night, working their way through the countryside, until they had enough money to come to America in steerage. Their youngest child, my Aunt Anne, who I was named after,
died on the ship. She was only three years old at the time of her death.
My mother, Marie Minnie was from Hanover, Germany. Mom came to America when she was 10 years old with her mother and four siblings. My mother’s father had been killed in WWI in the trenches, so it was a long journey for my grandmother alone with five children, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in steerage. After spending two weeks on Ellis Island, they were allowed to enter the USA. They headed for their new home in Nebraska to live with relatives.
I had one older sister, Martha Marie. Even though we didn’t have much money growing up, Martha and I always considered ourselves very lucky; our parents were extremely loving and supportive.
In Hudson, the railroad ran down the center of our town—west was upper, east was lower, known to the townspeople as the right and the wrong side of the tracks. As a kid I used to stand on the tracks and wonder who decided which side was wrong.
By high school every girl I knew had the perfect guy she wanted in her mind. Mine was at least six feet tall, dark-haired and handsome—a real head-turner, as we called them. He’d have a nice car and be a catch. I never gave up on what I wanted. Dane Dalton was the one boy I liked in high school, but he was from the Upper Side and never gave a poor girl like me a second look.
When I graduated high school in 1960, I worked so I could go to the Bette Bonn International School of Fashion and Design in Lincoln. I didn’t have time to date, and I never saw anything out there I’d want anyway.
I mostly kept to myself. I had God and my inner Indian spirit (I know ‘Indian’ isn’t the politically correct term these days, but I think it’s just so beautiful and romantic.) I was raised Christian and I’ve always spoken with God and loved Jesus; but I’ve also always felt the presence of an inner Indian spirit. I feel sure I lived an Indian lifetime. Of course I never told anyone this. It was just something I’d always felt.
One evening I was home from Bette Bonn and I went with my best friend, Susie, to a community dance at the Winston Ballroom. I wore a turquoise, multi-striped cotton skirt with a matching jacket, a white turtleneck, and white bobby socks with white canvas Keds, as was the fashion. While Susie was dancing and I was sitting in a booth, an older guy, probably in his mid-forties, came up to me and said:
“Young lady, do you know you resemble Marilyn Monroe?”
I was a sun-worshipper, tan and tiny (5 feet 6 inches tall and 102 pounds,) with a mass of curly blond hair that I wore in a short bouffant. I sort of laughed in response—this had to be a pick-up line—but later (especially after I started bleaching my hair blonder) many people did say this to me. I always saw myself as a plain Jane. I didn’t think I had any especially defining features.
“Would you like to dance?”
I whirled around to tell the older guy no, but there in his place stood Dane Dalton, my high school crush. He was wearing tight blue jeans and a nice grey sweater, his brown hair neatly combed, his grey eyes looking right at me. He smiled and I near fell to the floor. He’d buffed up and grown at least five inches in the four years since I’d seen him last, standing now about five foot eleven.
“Is your name Dane Dalton?” I asked.
“Yes. And you’re Kathrine Mitchell.”
I nodded. He asked me to dance and I accepted. We made small talk as we danced. I asked what he’d been doing since graduation; he said he’d been in the Air Force for the last four years. He asked if I was seeing anyone, I told him no. After dancing for a little while, he escorted me back to my seat and that was it. But it made my night—Dane Dalton knew my name.
Several nights later there was a knock on my door. When I answered I had to do a retake. There was Dane in blue jeans, a plaid preppie shirt, a hunter green sweater and biker boots—his jean jacket tucked under his arm. He gave me a little grin and asked if I’d like to go to King’s Drive-Thru for a Cherry Coke.
“Okay,” I said, a little flustered. “But you’ll have to come in while I get ready.”
I introduced him to my parents; not much reaction from either side. I hurried and put on jeans, white Keds, and a white blouse with the collar pulled out at the neckline of my bright red sweatshirt. We wore a lot of ghtre a red in Nebraska, the official color of the state football team, the Nebraska Huskers. It worked out well for me, as red was my favorite color.
We drove to King’s in Dane’s 1940 Ford Coupe. It was a simple night out. I didn’t sit close to him; wasn't that kind of girl. Years ago I’d set morals for myself and vowed I’d be true to my decisions.
One night, after we’d been dating about six weeks, Dane took me to a party at his friend’s home. A virgin in every sense of the word, I was completely naïve. I’d never had a swallow of alcohol. His friends, Rick and Patricia Newman, were married with a new baby son, and Dane kept picking up the baby and playing with it. That just stole my heart. They served drinks. I said no, he said yes.
“Don’t you trust me?” he asked.
“Of course I trust you.”
Well, maybe just one, I thought. He gave me something in a tall frosty glass and I drank it down real fast to get it over with (didn’t want him to think I was a prude.) Then my drink was empty and everyone else was still drinking theirs.
“See, you’re fine. Just have one more.”
I drank one more and everything seemed fine, until all of a sudden I couldn’t feel my skin. I told Dane I thought I couldn’t breathe. We went outside so I could get some air and I guess he thought this was a good time to whisk me away and go park. I had no idea what was happening, didn’t care.
I was floating on air. The world was great and I loved everyone and everything. We drove to the new cemetery, where they’d just finished planting the trees.
“Look,” Dane said, pointing to a tree, around 8 feet tall. “Let’s park under the tallest one.”
As soon as he cut the engine, he started cuddling up to me. We did a little necking and I felt his hands on my breasts. I moved them off saying, “No, no, no,” in a sweet soft voice. He told me he wanted me. I told him I’d never had sex and I didn’t want to do it here or now, but he kept unbuttoning my jeans. Finally, he pushed me down in the front seat.
“Just look at the stars,” he said as he forced himself on me. “Count the stars, Kathrine.”
Afterward, he took his t-shirt off and held it between my legs to soak up the blood.
“Wow, you weren’t lying about being a virgin,” he said as he started up the car. Adding, “You can keep the shirt.”
Big of him.
Three weeks later he found a girl from the right side of the tracks. Well, as we said back then, the rabbit died. I was pregnant. I called Dane up and told him. He wanted to meet at Harbor Park, at 10 p.m., so no one would see us together. We met at the designated time and place and he laid out his terms. I call it plan A. It would be expensive, but he would pay for the abortion, as his professor parents’ good name could not be ruined. Then I laid out my terms: I would never, ever have an abortion.
“We don’t need you. You do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do for this baby and myself,” I told him and left.
He called me a week later and set up another meeting; same time, same place. We went (baby and me) for a second meeting in the park. Dane was there waiting. He’d come up with plan B. Now remember he’s the guy with the great, wonderful, intelligent family and I’m the idiot from across the tracks.
Samson and Sunset Page 1