“You win.” He straightened his clothing and left her there.
For the rest of that month, Wilma called the shots around the store. She managed to outfit herself completely. Joe Ambler was greatly relieved when September rolled around and she had to go back to school. But he wasn’t completely rid of her. Part of the price of her silence was a commission deal with Joe supplying dirty pictures for Wilma to sell to her fellow students. It was a fact of human nature which she filed away in the back of her mind when she discovered that the girls were even more eager to buy her wares than the boys . . . .
And other incidents, all of which had combined to teach Wilma that sex was indeed a weapon to be used. Each of them also taught her of the wide variety of ways in which this weapon might be used. All this knowledge acquired, yet at the age of nineteen still a virgin!
That was the year of the exception, the year she used sex not as a weapon but for its own sake, the year she ceased being a virgin. Her nineteenth year it was, on a bitter-cold winter night, sleet biting at the window-panes, the wind fighting to break loose from the echo chamber of the farmhouse chimney. And the torch of Wilma’s body twisting hungrily beneath the rough blankets of her bed.
She was all alone in the house. But she was used to that. She’d spent much of her home life in solitude. Her mother had died giving birth to her. Wilma was the first baby the poor woman had ever conceived and, in expelling the infant from her body, her heart collapsed as though in protest against what was being spawned upon the world. From then on, Wilma’s father was the only family she had.
Ben Malden was only twenty-one years old when his daughter was born. It was young to be a widower, but Ben accepted his wife’s death fatalistically, as he accepted all the bad luck which seemed to be the ordained lot of himself and his family. His own parents had been killed in an auto accident when he was seventeen. They’d left him this farm -- and all the hardships and heartaches which went with it.
The farm lay in the west of the township of Glenville. Ben’s father had managed to make a living out of it by rotating various vegetable crops. When Ben took over, he followed his father’s example. But a combination of factors doomed his efforts to failure. Drought rendered the land fallow two years in a row. Changing times brought large farming cartels which set the prices on produce and Ben found himself unable to compete. Seed and fertilizer prices went up. The large outfits were working their lands with modern machinery while Ben’s plow and tractor were quickly wearing out, becoming obsolete; his labor and production costs were almost double those of the big farms. Even when the federal government stepped in with their handout of parity, Ben continued to find himself being squeezed out of business.
He wasn’t alone. The story was much the same throughout Glenville County and the surrounding farming areas. Seemingly, not a day went by without the bank foreclosing on some small farm. The organized farming industry took over whole tracts of land which had once given a livelihood to perhaps a dozen families. One machine replaced half-a-dozen farmhands. The men and their families left the land and the County of Glenville, made their way to the big industrial cities where they were swallowed up in the factories. The face of the land itself changed; where once men had walked proud and erect through their fields, now giant insects of rubber and steel crawled; where once there had sounded voices and laughter, now was heard only the whining rumble and whir of machinery.
But Ben Malden was a stubborn man. Four generations of his family had tilled this soil. This farm was his home and he was determined not to lose it.
Nor was Ben a stupid man. He could see that if things went on the way they were going, he would be forced off his farm regardless of his determination. He took stock and realized that the only part of his operation which was showing a consistent profit had nothing to do with the crops he reaped. It was the hogs he raised for slaughter which, year in, year out, helped make up the deficit of his agricultural activities.
So, Ben voluntarily went to the office of the Glenville Farming Company and arranged to sell them three-quarters of the acreage which made up his farm. With the money he received, he paid off a few of his more pressing debts. But the balance of it went for lumber for pens and a flock of choice breeding hogs.
Ben was buying time. While his neighbors were being forced from the land, he was building for future security. If he could only hold out, he might yet manage to build the kind of going business which couldn’t be taken from him.
By Wilma’s nineteenth year the issue was still in doubt. Hog-breeding had proven profitable for Ben, but he’d had to pour the profits back in to fulfill the expansion requirements necessary just to stay in business and compete with the large breeding farms. Still, he told himself, five more years was all he needed to be completely secure.
With these things on his mind, Ben had developed a gruff, silent exterior. This had never fooled Wilma. She’d always sensed both the kindly nature and iron resolution of the man beneath the surface. She adored her father. She adored him single-mindedly. She would do anything in the world for him. Anything. Indeed, he was the only person outside of herself for whom she had any feeling at all. Other men, the boys she had known -- they were gelatin to be molded for her own purposes. Not one could compare with her father. Not one could stir the emotions in her breast which he aroused without knowing he was doing so.
Perhaps she didn’t understand these feelings. Or perhaps, perverse creature that she was, she understood them all too well. In any case, they lay behind the smoldering desire which possessed her body as she writhed in her bed that night during the winter of her nineteenth year.
There was the crack of the front door flung open by the wind. Then the duller thud of someone closing it against the power of the storm. Wilma crept from her bed to the top of the stairs and saw her father taking off his coat in the hallway.
Ben didn’t see her. He was past noticing much of anything. He was quite drunk.
Ordinarily, Ben wasn’t much of a drinker. However, once or twice a year he allowed himself some relief from the austere life he’d forced upon himself by tying one on. At such times he never made any trouble. He simply sat in one of Glenville’s four bars and drank until his vision of the world began to blur into something more pleasant than reality. Then he went home to sleep it off.
Wilma recognized his condition. She went back to her room as he lumbered up the stairs. She got back into bed and lay quietly for what seemed a very long time. Then she got up once again and went to the door of her father’s bedroom.
Ben was sleeping deeply. Also, a layer of liquor was fogging his brain. Thus the dream, while so very real as to involve all his senses, was oddly disjointed, filled with blanks, jumping from one sensual experience to another, a jumbled series of erotic experiences.
First there was the insinuating heat of the girl-body grinding against his loins. Some kind of thin material over the naked body—a nightgown riding up arched, seeking legs, straps pushed down from the shoulders and a small, naked breast quivering in the cold night air. Hands caressing the length of his body, pausing to stroke the muscles of his haunches. Then red hair cascading over his chest—red hair like that of his wife, his passionate young bride, so quickly dead, gone and longed for these many years. The nostalgia of her body aroma filling his nostrils. A sweet, natural perfume exuded by a young girl awakened to desire. And the building of his own desire. The feel of the girl-breast nipple swelling in the palm of his hand. The soft lips parting beneath his own, the gentle closing of teeth over his searching tongue. Young, supple thighs separating at the touch of his hand. A soft moan now. Nails digging into the back of his neck, pressing his mouth to her breast as though she wished to be devoured.