A House Where Nobody Lives

It was 5 AM when the windup alarm clock began its revelry. Sylva reached across the bedside and pushed the pin down on top of the bell. Her arm had grazed the naked belly of a man next to her and for a moment thought nothing of it. It was John's bed of course. Then her eyes shot open and the mind emptied itself of any morning fog and dross as the stark realization hit her.

"Wendell! What are you doing here?" The question was almost as absurd as her asking it. He was lying in the bed naked with his morning erection on full display even in the dark of the morning predawn.

He didn't answer. Instead he pulled her back onto the bed and in a swift motion mounted her even with fury in her eyes. It didn't matter. In a single moment he had begun his invasion holding her arms above her head. There was no need for lubrication; she was already moist. He fucked her for perhaps 10 minutes before she surrendered to another vaginal orgasm and Wendell took his time enjoying the morning fuck.

When he finished, Sylvia lay there trying to come to grips with what she had done. He arose without a word and left the room. For her part she grabbed a washcloth and with the cold water in the wash basin attempted to remedy her condition. By the time she had dressed for morning chores she heard the breeder man's truck come to life with his beastly bull in its trailer.

She watched him pull out of the drive waving at her with a large grin on his face and she could hear the lyrical whistling of a happy and content man about his business. He would be back and she feared the consequences.

Later that day John Dawes returned to his farmhouse on Howell's Bend Road, tired from the exertions and back breaking work needed to put a neighbor's need to right. All three of his cows had been freshened by the time he returned and as he stepped out of his truck, he noticed the trailer was gone along with Wendell Acker's truck...

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The snow witch sitting in the top of the upper reaches of the sap grove maples could be heard blowing and screeching as the snow continued to pile down on the surrendered earth below. Darkness had fallen like a deep over the woods as John Dawes stoked the fire with another thick hardwood chunk. Occasionally a puff of white fresh snow would blow through the miniscule crack at the bottom of the doorway.

The fire popped and crackled as the evening wore on and as if invitations had been sent and received a small fury visitor appeared on the cross member leading to the enclave above the stove and bunk bed. The visitor stopped and twitched his whiskers while sitting on its small haunches; staring at the giant who had visited his winter abode.

The man and mouse observed each other for a few moments before the creature scurried off to its safe place on the other side of the timber. Picking a morsel of brown bread off the table, John reached up and set it on the end of the beam where the mouse had disappeared.

When he was younger he and his brothers would set traps to rid the camp of the pests but now in his old age he welcomed the occasional visitor as a guest. They never spoke, never intruded or challenged his view and they didn't stink if they stayed too long; his kind of visitors given his inclinations.

Over many seasons the camp had served a variety of purposes aside from that of refuge. There were over a hundred sugar maples rising up on the slopes above it. A low weatherworn sap house sat off to the side nearly buried in drifts of snow waiting to be made ready for next spring's sugar run. The brothers fashioned a rubber lined trough that ran down through the grove to carry the sweet sap collected in buckets on each tree through spigots tapped in as soon as the weather began to warm during the day.

In a good season the three of them would boil off a hundred gallons of maple syrup, most of it sold to the supply store out to town. They would still be doing it today were they alive. The younger brother was killed in '57 in a skidder accident up in Monson trying to pull too much wood with tired chains. Cancer claimed the older brother in '82.

John whittled a piece of pine with the shavings dropping to his feet in front of the crackling stove. He thought of both brothers often. The younger brother's widow remarried a few years after his death to the feed store owner out to town and she buried him just a few years ago. They buried her the following year. Every once in a while their sons would make the trek out to the camp to remanence with him; talk about the old times when they were kids and the uncles taught them the ways of life. They would speak fondly of their mother and long passed father but they were too young to remember the other woman. Time seemed to have swallowed her up like the last embers of a long since extinguished flame...

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Thursday, July 15th, 1937 was much like many other along Howells Bend Road. The afternoon temps hovered around 70 degrees, a bit cooler than normal. John Dawes had just finished driving a dozen new fence posts along the side fence to his lower field when he heard the soft plaintive cry from the house.

"Come quick, Mr. Dawes. She's about ready." Sandy Peabody was frantically waving her hands to get his attention.

"I'm coming." He hollered back at her.

Sylvia had her water break during the night so he knew it was time for delivery. Doc Bradson drove out from town with his midwife assistant Sandy to get her through it. Normally Sandy would have handled the deliveries but this one was a breach and she needed help.

"Push, woman, push like that. That's right, just like that." Doc had his hand up the birth canal and struggled to turn the baby to help position it better for birth. They went back and forth like that for what seemed like hours.

John paced the floor as the noise in the bedroom escalated and Sandy went back and forth with steaming water from off the stove. Several minutes later he heard the cry of a baby; the child crying out and filling the lungs with fresh air for the first time.

"It's a boy, John. I'm guessing about eight pounds. He's looking a bit blue but he'll get over that soon enough. He had quite a battle getting here." Doc held him up for John to see.

John looked from the baby to Sylvia with an odd expression on his face and she looked away rather than address it and looked back at the baby to quell the inquisitive struggle in her own mind. Mabel Clay had stopped by a few days ago to look in on her and had her youngest brood with her, the twin boys who clutched each side of her gingham skirt. She was forty years old when she had them a couple years earlier having been nearly 12 years since she'd given birth to her last one.

The twins were cute enough if not for being a double handful to their mother. Everybody who met them marveled at their bright shocks of red hair and brilliant blue eyes. The Clays were both fair haired and of brown eye stock yet all assumed there were some redheads somewhere in the line like most families in the county.

Sylvia studied her infant son and noted his features. She saw his father's seriousness of expression and her general shape of the face. It's hard to tell with newborns. They all look alike to some degree to most of us. However, the struggle was with the hair and eyes; strongly red and bright blue.

John noticed it too but said nothing. He held the child when offered and smiled down upon him. He was an innocent babe brought into a struggling world and without being overly religious the man with the child knew it deserved a fair shake if nothing at all.

The Clays and Dawes were not the only families with redheads in the mix. Mrs. Stone from the far end of the road gave birth to a red haired little girl last year. It was her first and the nineteen year old fresh farmwife struggled with the delivery. They didn't know if she'd have other children or not.

When all was settled down and Sandy had taken up space in the made up room, John excused himself to the barn. For all its plainness and empty spaces the barn was a refuge of sorts on the farm. It was a place where thoughts gelled and plans could be formed whether for the next year's harvest or livestock decisions. It was a place to sit and think. He did and a few days later he was cracking walnut shells on a stump outside the camp.

"John, I've been thinking about this a long time, I have." Melvin Clay said to him as he pushed another piece of tobacco between his lips.

"We've all got the same problem and I'm pretty much in agreement with you on your solution."

Melvin nodded toward Tim Stone before continuing. They were fifty acres deep in the woods at this point with not an ear or eye within cover except for the gaze of the starling sitting on the peak of the sap house roof.

"Why winter, John?" Tim Stone asked.

John looked between the two men and kicked at the shells collected at his feet.

"It seems fitting, is all. Besides, he'll be over at the Grange for New Year's like always."

The Grange Hall was down on Four Corners, a cross roads to points in the county and on to Bangor. Every year after Christmas the local organization would put on a New Year's Eve dinner and dance with a fiddle band from Milo usually holding court 'til the clock struck midnight.

The menfolk of Howells Bend would come out of the woods for the holiday week between Christmas and New Year's setting the wood cutting and hauling activities aside for a spell. The woods would still be there when they returned. Besides, the pulp trucks wouldn't start crossing the frozen surface of the lake until after the start of the New Year when the ice was about a foot thick.

Tim Stone stared anxiously at the ground and spit an angry chew at the clump of moss off to his side. All three of them had strong cause but Tim had heard it from his wife's lips and the offense burned at his soul.

She waited until after the girl was born but there was no way it could be hidden. She knew as soon as the child made her appearance. Hell, she knew before that. She knew when he held her down on her marital bed and fastened his large prick deep inside her young pussy and emptied a pent-up two weeks of the breeder man's seed straight into her fertile womb.

Oh, it wasn't a rape by any means. It was carelessness that led another man besides her husband to impregnate her young firm body. It was lust that caused her to kneel at the kitchen chair and do what she did; what he told her about those Parisian girls his father told tales about when he was fighting in the Great War. She sucked his cock in her kitchen because she wanted to, not because he made her.

She begged her husband to forgive her so that they might continue in peace under the same roof. This latter point was well understood among the families of the 1930s in rural Maine. Unlike the modern day an aggrieved party didn't walk into the courtroom and receive a no fault divorce. It was a dirty affair; there had to be cause and reputations ruined before public recriminations.

Just as strong an influence was the church. Both Tim and Sarah Stone were Roman Catholics and divorce was not an easy thing when forgiveness and mercy were the bargaining chips of the day, at least from the public spectacle. So peace under the same roof was needed if just for sanity's sake.

That didn't assuage Tim's anger any and as the plans were formulated he allowed himself to seethe. It wasn't lost on the other two men either. Melvin Clay, while a simple farmer, was no simpleton. He knew the score and was biding his time to make things right. Mabel Clay knew it too and quickly learned to surrender all at the drop of his hat.

John had contained an unforgiving knowledge inside himself masked with a friendly smile and hearty handshake. Melvin was mad. Tim was suffering with the knowledge. John on the other hand was determined.

John Dawes had been robbed and his own woman was in on the caper...

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Light was just beginning to filter into the camp as daybreak attempted to announce its arrival on the blustery, stormy morning. It continued to rage and pile feet of powder against anything in its path. There had been several years pass since a northeaster had struck so hard and the temps were sitting at zero degrees if the old Esso thermometer on the side of the sap house was accurate.

John had tapped down the powder with several passes on the snowshoes around the heavy door. He had added fresh seed to the feeder and tied a piece of suet up to assuage the winter hunger of the assortment of jays and chickadees that had come to rely on his largesse.

With the light of day granting a reprieve from the darkness overhead John chewed on a biscuit and spooned cold beans onto a saltine cracker. That and a small tin of pickled herring would be his usual fare on mornings like this, swallowed down with a mug of woodsman coffee.

Years ago when deep in the woods cutting pulpwood a crew would break for coffee made in a time honored traditional manner. A cup of ground coffee would be tossed into a pot of steaming water and allowed to steep for a few minutes before being strained through a cheese cloth. It was never for the faint of heart; its strength matched only by the chicory robustness of our Acadian cousins down in Louisiana.

Down the hill from the camp was a cedar thicket next to the south end of an old beaver bog. The bog is full of brook trout and in the summer months the moose would graze its aquatic vegetation. This time of year the cedar thicket provided a yard for numerous deer trying to survive the winter.

John picked up his bird glasses off the table next to the window and scanned the bog and the thicket. His eyes rested on the small herd of does sheltering a half a mile from the camp. Late last fall he had run in a load of hay using an ATV and stored it in the sap house before running a bunch of it down to the thicket before the snows got heavy. That would keep them fed through the worst of the winter.

By midday the snow had let up and skies began to lighten. Soon after lunch the first sign of sunlight began its descent as the clouds began to dissipate and when the day began to end the sky had cleared to a bright blue as the temperatures started their precipitous decline. By nightfall the mercury had dipped to 25 degrees below zero.

As John stoked the fire he was reminded of another very cold wintery night...

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The Bangor & Aroostook rail line leased out several of its commercial trucks in the 1930s to deliver pulpwood to their yard out to Dover. In the winter of '37 the lake had frozen to sufficient depth to allow the pulp crossings before Christmas. A good load would be a couple ton of wood and if the snow pack were hard enough a good crew could drag tree length on a steel skid with a team of horses.

It was hard work but when a yard was filled the quickest way to get it to the rail yard was going across the lake. The menfolk of Howell's Bend Road would work together once the ice was solid and split the proceeds when they were paid. After a few trips there was an almost regular highway from one side to the other.

On the north end of the lake road was a well- known fishery providing an abundance of trout and landlocked salmon for the patient ice fisherman. On occasion a crew would raise a shanty on the ice, drill a few holes with an auger and sip homemade applejack.

On a cold and blustery winter day during Christmas week, John Dawes, Melvin Clay and Tim Stone were huddled together in a shanty on the north side of the lake dropping baited lines into the cold water. The trout liked to feed in the middle of the depth while the salmon would be found much deeper. The water here was 120 feet deep in the summer and about 20 feet less in late fall when they opened the gates on the damn.

"I heard Billy Mitchell's fiddle band was playing at the Grange this New Year's Eve. Being a Friday night I'm guessing there'll be a big bunch of folks there." Melvin mused over his smoke.

"Yeah, a lot of folks are talking about it." Tim offered.

John just kicked at the snow a bit and glanced at his two fellows with a serious look. "Just be ready when the time comes."...

A few months earlier Cecil Dawes had been named after his maternal grandfather a couple days after his birth. The following month the couple buried him in the family plot across the road from the Community Church after he passed away from what the country doctors thought was influenza. For the next couple months Sylvia would slip away during the day for an hour or so and spend her time at the small plot fighting a growing depression.

One afternoon in late October she stopped going to the grave site and threw off whatever yoke had burdened her and turned her attentions to the affairs of the farm.

A couple weeks after that Wendell Acker pulled into the yard with his horned beast in tow accompanied with a mischievous grin. John was down at the Stutzman place helping run a load of logs through a portable sawmill.

Wendell caught a glimpse of Sylvia out at the clothesline hanging a basket of laundry in the chilly mid-day sun. He felt his prick stir in his trousers as he remembered back to that first time he took her going on three years earlier. He had made it a point to fuck her again on each of his several return trips to the neighborhood.

He had made another conquest on his last visit the previous spring when one of the new families back down the road a piece hired him to tend to their freshening. The family's oldest daughter was getting ready to graduate from the Academy and had just turned eighteen and was going to go to the teachers college down at Orono. Well, Wendell being an expert on all things Orono pushed his way into the young girl's affections and before the visit was complete he had broken her virgin and introduced her to the decadent art of ministering to his fat prick with her small mouth and delicate hands.

The girl was away to school that fall and saved from the breeder man's affections.

"Well, Sylvia, you looking damn good enough to eat this afternoon." Wendell whistled as he snuck up behind her. He didn't see it coming. The stick of oak caught him right behind his ear. When he came to a few moments later two women stood over him, Sylvia and her mother.

If he wasn't seeing stars he was seeing the business end of a Winchester lever action 38-40 rifle pointed right at his head. Sylvia's mother did the talking.

"Pay attention you piece of hog shit. Carry your wretched soul off this property and don't come back or I'll put two of these stump busters right between your beady little eyes." She then spit at his feet.

Wendell eyed the two women cautiously and crab walked backwards a few feet before raising himself to his feet and uttered a simple reply. "Yes, ma'am."

The breeder man reasoned with himself as he pulled off the Dawes property and cursed the two women under his breath. He didn't need her pussy for nothing in any event. He already had a couple other women in the county he was fucking on a regular basis. He'd miss it for sure just like he missed the Clay woman and that pretty little Stone girl but there were always others to take their place...

"Sylvia, you about ready to go?" John asked his wife.

Their marriage was being tested greatly since the birth and death of little Cecil. In the modern day there would be no doubt a divorce would have proceeded but this was a different era and a different people. Things were done differently.

"Please give me another five minutes, John." She replied as he stoked a couple more pieces of wood into the firebox.

The weather had turned bone chilling cold over the past three days after Christmas with the mercury dipping down into the low 20s below zero overnight. The Grange Hall had a huge stoker wood furnace with a six foot firebox that fed four iron grate registers to the main floor. The dinner and dance would go on as planned.