It had been her cousin Laurie who’d taught her. Laurie sixteen, she eleven. Jessie conscious of the weight of those five years but Laurie reassuring, serene. Ripe with knowledge and, willing Madonna, generous with it too.
They went down to the park to sit on the swings. Jessie wore her cousin’s old suede coat with the fringe. She picked at the tassels and swung her arms to make them shake. If she thought Laurie was not looking, she took the sleeve to her face and smelled it. Peppermint and old fur and a nutty, warm shampoo. That scent made her dizzy, yes: it was knowledge. It was those five years and everything that might spiral out of them, clutch her by the wrists, and shake her good.
Geese in the sky: high November, a brown cold day. The ground hard like shin bones. The playground creaking in that shiver-wind.
Watch me, Jessie said. Hand over hand on the monkey bars. Thin legs dragging on the ground, already too tall. White ankles stretching out of frill-collared socks. And Laurie on the swings, self-contained, legs pumping up-down, up-down, corn-flax hair flying high behind her. Dervish and the wind itself. Mysterious Laurie, sixteen.
Come here, Laurie said. I’m going to teach you something.
Jessie dropped to the ground. Wood chips on soft palms. Red welt imprints, suck out the splinters.
Farm girls are best at it, Laurie said to Jessie. We know how to drag it out of them because of the cows. Stroke by stroke.
Laurie spoke with authority, preacher at her pulpit, outlining from the shadows a sudden miraculous maleness, red-plum fullness, blood and heat and precious softness, the rise, slow rise, of something sentient and seeking; Jessie marveled at the anatomy unveiled, that unknown-known nubbin, the thing, suddenly transformed into a veiny disattached organ, a rope of flesh and blood and sinew and twitches and yearnings: animal thing of anatomy books. Truffle-scented flesh and salt. The body at its bodily work. This was a thing with a mind that could be won. This was a thing you could touch.
When they’re ready you can tell, Laurie said. Under your fingers. Under your tongue. A rush—like bubbles up your nose. Only in them, not you.
Jessie wondered at her cousin’s craftsman pride. Bubbles, she murmured. She sniffed the suede jacket. Gnawed on the trim a little.
They’ll look like it’s hurting them, Laurie said. But it’s not. Her gray eyes lightly lashed, catching sun. They love it.
Jessie wondered about this, the intersection of love and pain. Wondered how to delicately probe this question, of how to tell when pain was pain and when the pain was love.
Now catch me! Laurie cried, and she whirled away again. Up the slide, down the slide: reverse, Laurie a verse of herself. Laurie plain and simple on the slide.
Bubbles, Jessie whispered again.
See them both, two girls on a neighborhood park swing set. Autumn oaks blowing leaves with satisfied gusts. The blackwing night approaching, though yet the lamps are unlit. The girls’ heads bent together, thick with conspiracy. They are shelter. They are girlish love. They are everything they ought to be.
Jessie loved the way the boys looked like calves at a bottle when she took them in her mouth: the way their eyes rolled and shut in pleasure, how they tipped their heads back a little, necks stretching, their skin jumpy and hot when she massaged their thighs. How they shivered little moans of happiness when she suckled on their cocks, her hands working with even firm strokes to bring them to finish—a hard hand, harder than you’d think was all right, the same as with the milking. You were never going to tug off a teat, so grab it hard.
They came to her for what they wanted because they knew she gave it, and she gave it free because she liked it. Took no thought that they were quiet about it, church mice peeping for their bread in the shadows of the altar, penitent and pleading and pleased when she said yes. It bothered her none that they drove to the map’s edge to park in wayside places. In school her name was a mosquito in their mouths, but in the shelter of her arms they breathed her living glory. Jessie, whose hair smelled of the grass and who could potshot a tin can from fifty yards with a ball made of clay. Jessie of tick quilting and cold-running rivers. A sleek fish swishing her pretty tail.
Jessie lived in the house with her mother and her brother, and in the attic was Tobias Mane, come down from Menasha for the calving. A hundred head and more of Holstein ready to drop, and they didn’t have hands enough. Not hands enough indeed.
Tobias Mane: itchy-foot wanderer, a man with a car and hunger. He wore his black hair long, tied it up when he put his back to work. And Jessie did notice that strip of skin pulled freshly clean above his collar when he bent to braid his hair.
Tobias Mane, she asked one day. How old do you think you are?
He popped a shoulder at her. And why, he said, do you think you get to know?
Tell me, she insisted. No pout on her: she called for knowledge as deserved. She stood up tall to his estimation. Let his eyes run over the length of her and make his mind up straight.
Twenty, he finally said. It was true enough. Now he looked at her and smirked. And you, he said, jackrabbit: scrawny little thing.
Sixteen! she shrieked. Birds caught in her throat and released. She said, Sixteen. When she could wait no more for an answer to that she said, Well, what do you know anyway?
Just about enough, he said, and flicked his cigarette into the dirt before he stomped away. But Jessie knew that was no dismissal—knew men, now, like the rattle-bones scarecrow in the threshing field: bluster and bluff but at their center nothing more than last-season straw. Needles if you put your hand right down upon it, but approach from the side and it was smooth as ice.
So Jessie went about her business the way she always did. Sang in the cows and measured feed in the troughs; ignored her mother and her brother calling for her when the sun was close to down. Come inside, they said, there’s dinner on the board. But Jessie wanted to feed on love and nothing more than that. She laughed her pretty laugh and drove down the roads with boys from the town. Couldn’t keep her head from notching to the mirror to see if Tobias Mane noticed when she left, but she left all the same. She was a farm girl and no fool: wasn’t going to wait on something that wouldn’t help itself.
And all the time, was she noticed? Did he care? Could anything be said about the way he stood at ease and saw just how strong her shoulders were when she chained up the swinging gate, laughing while the dogs yawped at her knees? He closed his eyes: her body, chained to his. Endless shackles. No key for the padlock. Or: he’d eaten the key. Could feel it in his gullet where it slipped and bumped his spine.
Tobias Mane, his hostess chided. You’re standing like a dope.
He shrugged his sorries to her. Shook Jessie from his mind.
Jessie, in cars with boys. Driving down the sumac roads to places where the dirt flew about, and when the car was parked ice dripped slow in the wheel wells, soaking up heat from the run-rubber tires. Jessie of generous love and revenge. Jessie of algebra and soccer games and spit and swallow and movies with vampires and pain.
She is becoming who she is, can feel it every day.
Then one morning: in the stables at dawn. Ice-jawed March twisting its nose in the frost. Jessie hanging over the fenceline to watch Tobias Mane muck the yard.
Tobias Mane, she said. Do you know how to read?
He set his spade and stood. You think I’m pretty dumb, he said.
I’m just wondering about you, she said.
Tobias Mane put his hand on the fence. Looked her square in the eye. You should wonder a little less, he said. You’re too smart to wonder like that.
You threatening me? she said. Got her dander up and spitting. You think this is your house to tell?
I’d be careful if I were you, he said.
Oh, would you? she snipped. I could tell you something about being me.
And what would you tell me? he asked. Softer in his voice but still that rasp of mean.
And what would she tell him? Oh, she’d tell him the world, that ocean inside her: the rheumy-eyed hound who thumped his tail at her every day, and the sour Skittles she ate by the handful, stolen when the cashier wasn’t looking—the bitter sugar, tongue-shrivel taste. Her awe of her brother, his solemn weight at the head of the table, no more her playmate. No more, none of that. The willow tree in the spring. Cicadas sawing through the night. Fearsome winter, days of staring dizzy into the snow until her eyes burned and she felt thinned and pure. Boys against her chest. Her nipples hardening, hard. She could tell him that part of being her, the hot giddy love she had for the boys, how it felt to be tender to their secret desire. Tender to their pride and shame. She could tell him something about generosity. She could tell him something about power.
I’d tell you to throw yourself in the pond! she hissed.
And Jessie, then: gone.
I see you look at that Tobias Mane, her mother said.
Can’t avoid looking at someone who’s here, Jessie said. She pounded the dough flat on the table.
Don’t see you trying to avoid it. Her mother’s hands white with flour. Red arms thick and strong.
I’m not stupid, Jessie said.
You know where your cousin Laurie’s gone, don’t you? her mother said. You know why she’s in Nevarre?
I wonder what she’ll name it, Jessie said.
That’s the wrong question, you miss! her mother said.
Jessie thought of the fringe-tailed coat in her closet. The smell, musk and peppermint. The glorious shimmy-shake of that fringe.
She slapped the dough with an open palm. It resisted, firm and plump.
I hope she names it after me, she said.
Jessie stepping from a car. March slush stomped under her boots.
Then, behind her: a shadow—Tobias Mane. His heart beat so very fast.
Where you coming from? he asked.
And why do you want to know? She stood at the door and smirked.
He thought: pinking her cheek with his hand. He thought: his lips on that pink, on her hair. Because, he said. Because.
Tell me why, she said, pouting. Tell me why.
A memory came into his mind, he a small boy with his nose at the table’s edge. Tell me why, he said—to whom? He did not know anymore; that life was gone—tell me why the moon is round.
Jessie watched him from the car. Oh, that wicked smile she had. Tobias Mane burned to make it his own. Those others, the boys, they could not treat her right. It was not possible they knew anything of how to make her body move. It was not possible they deserved her.
I’ll tell you my secrets, he said. I’ll tell you what I’m thinking when I think it.
He saw her perk and listen. His secrets—so. It worked. She took a step closer, then another.
I know where it is you’re coming from, Tobias Mane said to her. All those boys.
So what? she spit. Not your business. Not at all.
Maybe so, he said. In his mind her little pink tongue flicked, her teeth snapped. He nearly stopped his breath for want.
She waited for his offer. Cheeks red from that late-season wind.
But with me, he said. You’ll never need that again. I’ll give you everything.
It struck him that it was a lie—but was it not the truth too, that he wanted to pour himself into Jessie and fill her like the deepest well? Water into water: she would be a second skin for him.
Yes, he nodded. Everything.
They lay in the attic together. She cupped him from behind, nestled his rear in her belly-bend. This way she could put her hand on his heart and her ear on it, too, from the back. All of him, hers. All that flowing blood and body was hers.
Do you know, Tobias Mane asked, about icebergs? Those great big chunks of ice?
Jessie thought of water the color of a wolf-dog’s eye. Whales the shade of the moon.
Most of them is hidden, he said. They’re even bigger underneath.
So what? she said. You tell me what’s special about that.
Tobias Mane shrugged. Maybe nothing, he said. But. But sometimes they break. Sometimes they pull apart.
Jessie heard the baseball-bat crack: a white sheet crashing down. Wolf-dog’s eye splintering from the glassy iris.
Know what it’s called? he asked. Calving. He paused a moment. Said, Isn’t that funny? Calving.
It is, she said. Something so strange and mysterious called the same as was happening in their very barn, which was not mysterious at all. Fat cows dropping their bawling young. She liked the other calving better: the fresh cold ice. Clean and pure.
Tobias Mane, she said. Tell me what you’re thinking. She squeezed a little tighter. She wondered, Could you do the opposite of calving? Could you fuse two skins together if you tried hard enough?
She felt him take a breath. Waited for his voice—but nothing. He was asleep. Her heart moved in tenderness for his limp body, so bare, in her arms. They were always like that when they were through, those child- boys. He was no different. And she loved him for it: for that silly mistake in thinking he were anyone other than one of her boys. They all wanted that, and she was happy to let them think so. Why make them come to grief? They would know themselves soon enough in life.
She was Jessie of love and mercy. Generous to all. She held Tobias Mane and slept.
What are you smiling about? her mother asked.
Jessie turned, turned in the kitchen. Spun on her sock feet and laughed.
Better not be what I think. Her mother worried a dishtowel. No one likes a whore.
Was it love he had for her? Maybe, and maybe not. He could not decide upon it. When he watched her at the stables, a bale upon her back, he thought there was no sight more lovely for his eyes: she so serene in her life, so fit for who she was. And what they did in the attic—well. The construction of her body was a universe. It was an unending field. It was an entry to himself.
But that itch, that want, that wanderlust: warm dirt waking up and Tobias Mane wondering should he rise in the dawn and drive away to anywhere he pleased. He was alone and had never found this bothersome. Did the mountains seek their mates? Tobias Mane would be a wind of his own in the world.
Jessie called to him from the yard. Lazy, she said. Get on up here and work. Hands cupped around her mouth, an O, oh—Tobias Mane tore his thoughts from the mountains, let them fly straight to her lips, down her throat, tumbling down into her darkness: swallowed by Jessie. Protected by her body, carried about in a warm aqueous world. What was inside her? What would it be like seeing Jessie from the inside out?
He felt his cock grow warm with blood.
Jessie girl, he called. She turned to his voice and smiled.
Some days they drove to the edge of the woods and lay in the truck bed to look at the way the branches made a latticework in the sky. Jessie asking him questions and he telling her what she wanted to hear: the sky was blue to match her eyes. He’d seen a red bird swim in the river. Throw ice over your shoulder into a fire and it would turn to stone. There was no mystery of the world he would not turn into a smile upon her face.
And other days they shirked the yard and went to the attic, tiptoed, slipping clothes as fast as they could. Tobias Mane nuzzling into her warmest space while the sun turned circles outside, her mother calling and calling, but no voice could reach them then. Jessie beneath him and around him. He would drink from her forever. His Jessie. Yes, he would say it: his.
The way she winced when he drove into her: precious! He would break himself upon her. Love, he knew, should carve you to the bone. Stretch you on the rack until your skin split down your spine.
Less and less Jessie drove the roads alone, for Tobias Mane took her time. Sometimes it poked her lungs a bit to think of the boys, so lonely without her. Who would love them if she didn’t? Who would answer their voices when they pleaded, little spring peepers, for her attention?
(She mourned their loss. She would be their hands if she could. Their flesh and blood and bones.)
In the yard, early April. Patchy snow. The herd swollen with their brood. Shit steaming on the frozen ground. The planks in the house groaning with damp.
The calves were almost come.
Sudden, sidling up to her. Tobias Mane put a question to her then. You come run with me, he said. Halfway a question and the answer. She looked at his hands, not his eyes, to see what he was about.
A quiver in his pinky. She thought: good. It cost him something to say.
Run where? she asked.
Anywhere! he said. His eyes flit around. She thought again: good. Let him shiver on the hook. She thought of what her cousin Laurie told her long ago: you’ll know when they’re ready. Feel it bubbling up from below.
When? she asked.
Tonight, he said.
She looked around and searched for something that would keep her there. The herd with their calves ready to drop, the stink from their bodies, dripping udders and cracked teats. Her mother in the house keeping time with the sweep of a broom. Her life had never seemed small until Tobias Mane drew her attention to it, and now the outlines stared her in the face. The clean lines of a fence were pretty enough until you made it all the way around, and then you were only still where you started.
All right, she said. We’ll go.
They took the back roads out. Cleared the farm fields in an hour and then: gone, gone, into the flatlands where the skyline ran straight with the car on all sides. They were marbles rolling in a box. They were a stone dropped in a well. Jessie wore her cousin’s suede-fringed coat and luxuriated in the deerskin smell. She hung her head out the window and opened her mouth to the night air. She would be a fish swimming in the world. Let her skin become transparent. Let her hair be reeds in the deep.
Fifty miles. One hundred. The odometer sang its song. Jessie thought of the boys she’d left behind. She wondered if what she felt was grief. How much did she owe the boys in the barns, the boys on their truck- bed mattresses? Nothing, and that was what she loved. She had no need for obligations. She had only her unconditional love.
But there would be boys wherever they went. Her heart raised itself a little. And there was Tobias Mane too.
She cupped his hand beneath hers. Keep driving, she told him. Keep on.
Dawn, and they pulled into a rest stop on the stateline, the kind with pit toilets in a shack and a hand pump for water. Big jack pines let their needles float down. The air felt warmer. The gravel was patched with wet from days of rain.
They stood and stretched their legs. Theirs was the only car in the lot. A couple bikes leaned cattywampus against the rest-stop sign.
Jessie girl, Tobias Mane said. She turned, saw him with a hand on his jeans. Erection showing through.
Yes, she knew what power was. And joy as well in that.
The gravel cut her knees, but she did not mind the pain. She gripped the back of his thighs and nuzzled up closer. That velvet skin—why did they say that women were the soft ones? This was pleasure, consuming a man’s body and watching him winnow away from himself.
Then: a rustle. A ripple at the edges of the lot. Two men came forth from the darkness where they’d walked to piss on the trees. Jessie saw them before Tobias Mane. The two men in the corner of her eye. She stopped what she was doing, Tobias Mane’s hand tangled in her hair. He gave a little tug, and when she did not keep at her work he opened his eyes.
Ten feet away, the two men. Dirt-kneed jeans and T-shirts with the necks sweated out. When they moved, their bellies brushed out against their shirts, so light. And they were men, Jessie thought, not boys. Not her boys. These creatures with scraggle beards and hard faces. They were something different from the boys she held in her arms. But close enough to wonder—
In her mind a thought about their bodies, the planes and angles promised by their tilted hips, thumbs through their belt loops. Surely there was something soft underneath that she could cherish. Something they could not show anyone but her. She could take them in her body and show them their own hearts. Say, this is yours; do you know it?
Tobias Mane gave a shudder. She looked up.
What do you want me to do? she asked him. He said nothing. His cock still hard, waiting. She could feel its heat on her cheek.
One of the men took a step forward. Hey, he called. Hey. Pretty girl. You got some for us?
See, then, the moment. Jessie on her knees. The men waiting, each of them, for something different.
What do you want me to do? she asked again.
His voice hollow. Say no, he said. Tell them no.
She rocked back on her heels and stood. You go home, she said. There’s nothing here for you.
That what you want? the second man said. Or what your pissant boyfriend says?
She looked at the men. Nothing seemed too terrible about them. That wondering feeling again. A wildness up her spine. They were only men. And she was Jessie, pure and proud.
She turned to Tobias Mane. I don’t mind, she said to him. They’ll leave us alone after.
The look on his face: Jessie thought of the way certain ice was so thin it looked like the water underneath. Hard but not hard. Glossy with the effort of what it wanted to be.
I can’t stop you, he said.
A pinch in her chest. Disappointment. But she would do what she needed to do. She turned back to the men.
No, she said. Go on home. I won’t say it again.
The men stared sour, but there was no fight in them. Bold by circumstance but not by nature, they left easily enough, kicking their boots, but still, the rocks rolling from their heels, gone. The trees closed behind them. The scene began again.
Jessie smiled. Dropped to her knees and grabbed at Tobias Mane.
Well, she said. Now.
Jessie, he said.
She felt the back of Tobias Mane’s leg jump. A pause. A quiet. She thought of the way with the cows, when things went wrong with the calving, you sometimes had to put your arm right up inside them to feel the calf. How you could feel bones and muscles so strong it hurt you. And then, under your fingers: a face. A nose and ears and eyes. And you’d hook your fingers right into its nostrils and mouth, and then with all your strength you’d pull it right into the world. Always you felt good when the rush of blood and gunk and shit was over, and there was a bawling calf on the ground. But for a second there was nothing except your arm inside that cow, and knowing that what would happen next was not up to you. No—not up to you at all.
She leaned back and looked up at him. What she saw then, she did not have a name for. But it was this: contempt.
I said no, she said. She knew it was not enough, though, because she had not meant it. I said no.
Let’s go back, he said.
So they did.
He left her at the farm gate. Didn’t shut the door behind her—let her do that herself. See how she liked the inconvenience. His pettiness ate a hole in his skin to match the one she’d put there herself. Pretty Jessie’s wicked smile. Pretty Jessie’s wicked ways.
Tobias Mane, she called through the open window. Will you come back?
He knew then: he didn’t love her anymore. She’d said no but still. They’d had no qualms in asking, and she had none in giving.
No, he said. He did not care to lie.
Then go! she shrieked. She hunched her shoulders and did not turn to see him leave. Only turned into the dust he left behind.
It was quiet on the farm. The huffing of the herd as they stood in the chill and waited, flicking horseflies from their backs. See Jessie, standing there. A girl with her hair in the wind. Fringe shaking on her shoulders, a caramel suede coat that smelled like must and mint.
Go, she said. Just go.
She is herself alone. Becoming more and more who she is. She can feel it churning up in her. Like bubbles. Like something ready to spill.
A native of Wisconsin, Bridget Apfeld currently lives in Austin, TX, where she works as an editor, production assistant, writing consultant, and reader for Carve Magazine. Her previous and forthcoming work can be found in a variety of journals, including So to Speak, Midwestern Gothic, Able Muse, The Fem, Brevity, and The Alaska Quarterly Review.