Planting Season

Marie collected the scattered pins from her hair and stuck them into the hair near her temple where they'd be safe. "I'm always ready to comfort you," she said. "All you have to do is ask."

"You could ask me once in a while. The way things have been, you forget there's any joy in the world. I hate these times. What the hell has happened in this country? Things were going great, and now it's all going to hell."

"'Nothing to fear but fear itself,'" Marie said.

"Spoken by one who never in his life had to worry about his crops," Anton said, although he had heard the sarcasm in her voice.

Marie settled more closely into his lap and followed his gaze to the fire. She had nothing to say to that. He hadn't talked this much about anything other than day-to-day things in years, it seemed. When had the silence set in? After they'd figured out that the crash of the stock market was going to affect everyone else, not just those fellows jumping out of windows in New York? After the first year of abnormally light rainfall? She couldn't recall.

Her thoughts strayed to the event that in her mind had led to where they were. When Anton had come in and shaved in the evening, a long-established signal of his. As soon as she was sure the kids were down for the night, she'd turned down the bed, lit the bedside lamp, done her own spot-washing, and donned her best nightgown. That was her signal. Yet somehow, here they were, naked and dusty, sitting next to a fire in the middle of all outdoors.

"Why are we here?"

"What—you mean you haven't enjoyed yourself? My, you could have fooled me," Anton said. The squint and laugh lines deepened around his eyes.

"It was, um, nice, not having to worry about disturbing the children," she said. "But darling—I did put on my best nightgown for you."

"Don't think I didn't notice. When I saw you there in that transparent gown with the light behind you, I almost said to hell with it and took you into the bedroom. But—the idea that came to me earlier today—I couldn't get it out of my mind."

"Tell me."

"I was out here, looking at the planted rows, thinking of those seedlings pushing themselves out of the ground, and wondering how high they'd get if they didn't get any more rainfall than we've had so far."

Marie made a murmur that meant Go on. Their last crop had been of such poor quality, they'd sold it at a loss. The new machinery Anton had hoped to buy went by the board. They could not go hungry as long as she could tend a garden and a flock of poultry, but the kids had no new clothing that year, and worse, no new shoes. Clothes could be let out, up to a point, but cobbling was not in her line.

"Then I got to thinking about all the bad news that's been going around, and all of a sudden, I couldn't stand to anymore. Instead I started remembering the way it was when we were first married, when things were booming and the kids hadn't come along. Those times when Dad wasn't around and I'd come in for dinner and make love to you in the middle of the day...remember?"

Another time...again, in the kitchen. Anton sitting on a chair with his trousers down around his ankles, she with her dress pushed up to her hips, riding astride him, gripping his shoulders. His strong hands clasping and supporting her buttocks as she rose and fell and tilted and churned on his shaft, her sensations narrowed down to scratching that delicious mad suspenseful feeling inside her, crying out when it gathered like a storm and crashed through her body. The look on his face when he felt his own climax approaching... A strange pang, half pleasurable, half painful, constricted her chest when she thought of it.

"Yes," she said, feeling her breath coming short. Even though she had come a few minutes before, a fresh throb of arousal swelled her tender inner lips and made her clit harden.

"Suddenly I was so damn horny—I couldn't remember being that hard since I was a kid. I wanted...I wanted you...I was going to run home and take you whether you wanted it or not—"

"Oh, Anton..." Marie squirmed on her husband's lap.

"But I was too excited—I couldn't wait. I knew I wouldn't be able to make it. It was either shoot off while running and make a mess in my drawers, or get off right then and there. It only took about three pulls and I was spilling my seed into the dirt at my feet."

"The sin of Onan," Marie sniffed, feeling obscurely cheated, although she had been busy at that time and hadn't been thinking of sex at all.

"That's a common misconception," Anton said seriously. "Onan pulled out, and I guess we'll never know whether he'd have been any more successful than we were." When they'd tried this method it had resulted in kid number three. "Afterward I felt lonely and a little ashamed, and I kicked some dirt over it. That's when I remembered something I'd read a long time ago."

"What was that?"

Well, of course—something he'd read. The first time she laid eyes on him, she thought he had a nice body, but that was as far as her interest might have gone had she not seen, as he turned away, the chapbook sticking out of his back pocket. He had called on her at her lodgings, and after a few days acquaintance, he offered to show her his library. How her traveling companions had hooted when she told them that!

His library?! Ooh, la la!

Is that what they call etchings hereabouts?

Careful, Marie—they say no girl was ever ruined by a book but there's a first time for everything!

But there had been a library—there was a library. Polyglot and directionless, it was still a pretty good effort for someone who'd had to fight his father tooth and nail to graduate high school. It filled a small room in the house. In it were books he had bought by the box at rummage sales, pamphlets from the government that he'd sent off for, books he'd ordered by mail, books he'd borrowed and neglected to return, and a growing collection of National Geographic magazines.

"Something about how people in primitive parts of the world mate in their fields, to bring luck to their crops..."

Marie didn't know whether to be shocked or to laugh. She succeeded in doing neither, but she did say, "Isn't that a little bit...well, pagan?"

"Every farmer is a little bit pagan at heart," Anton said. "It's because of having to depend so much on the mercy of nature."

One of the farmers they knew was a deacon in the Baptist church. She wondered if that was true of him, too. Marie sat up and twisted around so that she could see his face. It was unreadable in the firelight. "Do you really believe in this?"

Anton looked down. "I don't know. I shouldn't...I've been a Freethinker since I was twelve. This shouldn't make any more sense than what I learned in Sunday school."

"Anton, are things that bad?"

"Not yet. But if this crop fails, we'll be in debt...debt always leads to more debt, maybe debt we can't handle...in Kansas and Oklahoma farmers are having their land taken by the bank, taken up for taxes...I don't want that happening to us."

"Of course not," she said.

"I've never told you anything about the people my dad came from, did I?"

"Well, I didn't ask. When I asked the people in town who you were, they called you and your father 'those Hungarians'."

"I didn't tell you anything because there wasn't anything to tell. God—you hear people say they've come up from nothing, and we really did. Just a bunch of dirt farmers scattered through the Carpathian Mountains, not a one of them known for anything...Hungarians? That's a laugh. Damn Hungarians just about owned us, but they didn't value us as much as the oxen we tilled their fields with—they couldn't get cash for us. So...we came to America if we could. And bought land as soon as we had the money. Dad said you can't feel like a whole man if you don't own land. Working someone else's land...I'd spill more than my seed to avoid that—I'd spill my own blood."

A cold chill ran through Marie's body, thinking of the stories going around of desperate men who died defending their farms when the sheriff's men came to put them out. "Hush, Anton," she said. "Let's pray it doesn't come to that." An idea popped into her mind. "Did your ancestors practice this ritual too?"

Anton smiled. "I don't think so," he said. "They were probably a pretty superstitious lot but this seems a little too pagan even for them. I'm not saying they never coupled outdoors, but they probably chose warm summer nights. No, I think the people I read about were on some island...throw that piece of tree root on the fire, won't you?" Marie got up to do so. The fire accepted its new fuel with an upward rush of sparks.

"I'm getting cold," she said.

"That's because we let ourselves cool down and then we quit moving. Come back here." Marie settled on Anton's lap again, but he was no longer in a mood to cuddle. His tongue rimmed her ear, and when she turned her head to face him, he kissed her, hard and hungry, almost brutal. With a tiny moan of desire, she drew his tongue deeper into her mouth. She could feel his cock hardening under her thighs as he ran his hands over her body. He broke the kiss and looked at her, his eyes brilliant. "How about it, Princess? I'm up for it if you are. If it works, so be it. If not, at least we can have a good laugh and a damn good dirty fuck to remember when we're old and decrepit. You want to bless the planting again?"

She slid off his lap, looking at him as if seeing him for the first time. With the firelight limning his body, his phallus rampant, he looked as if he could have been the avatar of some fertility god of ancient times. She gave herself up to the intensity of his feeling, and the mixture of whimsical craziness and unvoiced hope in his plan, and her surrender set her free. She cast aside millennia of civilization and propriety and tucked her Christian faith into a corner of her mind. When she had done that, there was no blasphemy in being goddess or priestess to him. The desire his touch and the sight of his readiness had raised in her became a need to serve, to offer herself as a gateway to the mortal world. Lust suffused her body like possession. She had no more words than a beast; so Io might have felt, transformed by the god for his bullish pleasure. She got up on all fours like a beast and presented to him, flexing her fingers and planting her knees in the soil, bending her back so as to let him see her lust-swollen cunt as plainly as possible.

"You want it like that, do you?" The hot, husky tone of his voice was an intimate caress.

She looked back at him, her eyes burning, her expression fierce. "Yes!" She had never been much for ass-wiggling, never having been well-endowed in that area, but she did so now, as if to flick aside a tail she did not possess. "Come on, man...do it now!"

With a rush of movement, Anton was behind her, grasping her hips to bring her more fully into alignment, and plunged his cock into her hot, slippery opening. He was still for a few seconds so that she might know how hard, how deep in he was, and to regain the control he had very nearly lost. She felt the underside of his shaft pressing against the sweet spot in the anterior wall of her passage and thrust back at him, begging him to move. Either because her arousal was so ferocious or because of the alchemy of the night, his every stroke was right and true. Impending ecstasy electrified her skin, heated her blood in its channels. As it built up and hit, and its strong, wild contractions seized her, she released deep lioness cries into the fire-lit darkness. He gave an exultant laugh and dropped down to cover her, his hot, muscular body curved over her back, holding her down. His thrusts were hard and exuberant and heedless; he would have his own pleasure now, and nothing in the world would stop him. The air around them was filled with the smack of flesh upon flesh and hard breathing, grunts of effort and impact. He bit her neck and shoulders, and it did not hurt; she gloried in it and in the ramming blows of his cock. With an inarticulate cry of his own, he surged forward one more time and finished in her, transfixing her. They sank into a heap, exhausted, changed back as if by the stroke of midnight to just a sturdy farmer and his lean wife, naked and covered with dirt.

Presently he withdrew from her and sat back, pulling her into his arms. She leaned against his sweat-damp chest. His still-hot spunk dribbled out of her vagina, soaking into the soil beneath them.

"Marie, honey, my Lord," he said. "That was something. That was strong. We might not have done anything out of the ordinary, but that sure as hell didn't feel ordinary...Whatever got into us, we outdid ourselves."

"I think we did." Her body reverberated inside like a struck gong. "I'm tired. Could we just sleep out here?"

"Ah, we'd better not. We'll catch cold sleeping in the night air. Let's just get our breath and then we'll put out the fire and go back. We've got a regular day ahead of us. Besides, what if someone sees us after the sun comes up?"

"We're on our own land," Marie said. "It shouldn't matter." Anton hugged her and laughed softly into her unbound hair.

"Come on, Princess. Up, up, up. It won't get any easier the longer we sit here." He got up and pulled her up with him.

"What's that smell?"

Startled, Anton turned his face into the breeze that had sprung up. "That's not—" He sniffed the air, then turned back to her, his eyes wide. "It can't be. It can't be...but it is. It is! My God! I don't believe it!"

They both smelled it now, a breeze that was heavy and cool with the wet dust and ozone scent of approaching rain. They looked up. In their preoccupation, they had failed to notice the clouds gathering overhead. As they watched, one swift-moving cumulonimbus mass rushed up, its edge momentarily illuminated by the moon and starlight; then it covered that one remaining hole in the sky. The first large cold raindrops spattered on their skin.

Whooping with wonder and delight, Marie and Anton joined hands and spun in a dizzy circle. Lightning cracked overhead, showing them up in its strange spectral light. "Let's go!" Anton said. They broke apart and scrambled for their clothes. More big raindrops came down; it was too late to get dressed now, although Anton did jam his feet into his shoes. This was no time to be the tallest objects around for miles. They took off across the field, holding hands. The dirt under their feet turned into mud and splashed their legs to above the knee as they ran. Once Marie's foot struck a rock, and she stumbled; Anton pulled her to her feet and almost dragged her until she could get her footing again. It was much darker going back than it had been setting out, except when another lightning flash briefly showed them where they were. Each bolt of lightning was followed by a monster clap of thunder, so close together as to be almost simultaneous. They had just reached the garden when Marie felt the hair lift from the back of her neck, and the fine hairs on her skin stood on end. "Down!" shouted Anton, and he went into a crouch, bringing her down with him. The very air seemed to burst into light. The boom of thunder sounded like an explosion, and a tingle of electricity skittered over their skin. They jumped up and kept on running.

At last they gained the house, and dashed up the back steps and onto the porch. The lantern that Anton had set down there had gone out, as he'd said it would. He caught it up and they burst into the kitchen. They looked at each other in the light of the kitchen lamp, naked, their hair plastered to their skin, daubed with mud like savages, and laughed. "Damn, that was close!" Anton said. They threw their wet, mud-spattered clothing into the pile of garments that awaited the next wash-day and grabbed the dry towel from the hook next to the washstand. They cleaned up as well as they could with cold water from the kitchen pump and rubbed each other to warmth and pinkness with the towel.

In the middle of all this, a small, night-shirted figure appeared in the kitchen door. It was Eugene, their youngest, a stolid, unflappable child, the spit of his father. Marie positioned the towel so as to cover as much of herself and Anton as possible.

"The thunder woke me up," the boy explained. "I came out to get a drink of water."

"Go on and get it," Anton told him. "Then back to bed."

"What were you doing out there?" Eugene filled the drinking cup and got his water.

"Praying for rain," Marie said crisply. "You've had your drink—now scoot!"

They fell into the bed that Marie had laid out so invitingly earlier in the evening, just as they were. The rain had settled down into a steady, light fall that would probably last the night and maybe into the dawn. She moved closer to Anton's warm body, and he gathered her in, tucking her head under his chin. He smelled of rain-washed skin and soil. She remembered the way they had been, out there in the field, and she smiled. She fell asleep smiling.

In the smallest hour between midnight and dawn, she woke up. Anton was still pressed closed to her, and his hand was cupped over one of her breasts; as soon as she realized this, her nipple tightened into a point; her clit seemed to do likewise. She ran her hand down the length of his belly; his cock was half-hard. She played with it until it was hard all the way. He roused enough to realize what was happening and nudged it into her hand and against her hip. She turned to face him and threw one leg over his body

"Lord have mercy, Princess," he murmured. "Didn't you get enough out there?"

"I'm up for it if you are," she said. "And it seems that you are." She maneuvered her pussy onto the head of his cock and tightened her leg around him; at the same time, he put his hand on the small of her back and pressed. She uttered a small grunt of delectation as his hard shaft slid into her.

Anton nipped at her lower lip. "You're gonna have to keep quiet this time." She heard the smile in his voice.

"I'm used to it," she replied. "What we did out there—that was for the crop. This is for us."