The wedding feast of Lydia Freihaus to Benjamin Stutzman occurred the day before and the mess still lingered, cluttering the small house and the field between it and the barn with discarded remnants of festivities. Leafy celery stalks sat in water filled mason jars surrounded by the skeletal remains of turkeys, chickens, and roasts on platters.
Lydia gathered a load of crockery and passed it to her younger sister Samantha who accepted with a grunt in arms still pudgy with baby fat. Lydia sighed as she watched her sister trundle up the grassy slope and into the house, fifteen, the youngest of the four Freihaus daughters and still clad in the blue cotton dress of an unmarried woman.
Samantha was so much like their mother it pained Lydia to leave her. The girl had the same field mouse-colored hair and strong features hidden just beneath a layer of fat still holding on despite her burgeoning adolescence. Lydia was like her other sisters, with her father’s black hair, sharp nose, and eyes like dark pools of oil. Samantha returned, wiping her hands on her white apron, a smile across her face beaming despite the obvious concern on Lydia’s.
“Your husband is receiving another lecture from our father on loyalty,” Samantha said in their native Deitsch. “I expect he will have father’s whole speech memorized before you leave for Uncle David’s.”
“I expect you’re right,” Lydia said. She glanced into the sky, the gas giant looming large as always though more red than usual. “But if he does not hurry, we will be leaving in darkness.”
Samantha searched the sky also, finding the same evidence of a coming eclipse. They happened so often this time of year. “You should collect him then,” Samantha said. “It is no good to travel that far in darkness. I can clean up the rest.”
Lydia hesitated, her fists pressing against her hips as a curl of black hair slipped from its tie. She blew it back and was left with a cockeyed expression.
“What?” asked Samantha, half laughing.
“I just…” Lydia stopped and busied herself by wringing her hands within the folds of her apron. “I just want to be certain that you will be all right.”
“Of course I will,” Samantha said with a laugh. “I will not have my big sister to annoy any longer but I think I can survive.”
“It’s just that with father…”
“He has his moods,” Samantha said. “But I think I can handle him until I find a nice man to marry.”
“Of course,” Lydia said. The sadness in her eyes broke and she reached for a hug. The sisters embraced and continued until Samantha wriggled out.
She glanced up and saw the mist forming over Lydia’s eyes and squeezed her sister’s hands. “I will be fine,” Samantha said. “I will.”
With her father alone and smoking in his armchair, Samantha finished cleaning the house. The process involved cycles of first washing, then drying, and returning to washing since the available counter space was too small to allow all the dirty dishes to dry at once. It was a small house, little bigger than a cabin, built by her father when he was still a young man. By the time Samantha was born, it had already become too small for the whole Freihaus family much less the church service hosted once a year. But as her sisters married and moved away, Samantha discovered that it might have become more spacious if her father’s books had not taken up what had been vacated. Their most recent incursion had been into the kitchen, leaving just enough room to prepare the daily meals and clean up after. The wedding had thrown off the delicate balance.
By the twentieth hour of the day, very near the moon’s mid-night, the eclipse had long passed and the full darkness of night had fallen. Samantha finished the last of her chores and dried her hands for the final time. She paused in the doorway of the common room and watched as Jacob read by the fire, a candle wavering in the air drafting through the room.
Jacob scratched at his unkempt black beard, the sign of a married man serving the dual purpose of hiding his pockmarked cheeks. He coughed on a drag from his pipe and turned the page, glancing back and finding his daughter lingering.
“Is it finished?” Jacob asked, his baritone voice low in the stillness of the night.
“It is,” she said. “Finally.”
“Then if you are going to bed,” he said, his attention returning to the page. “Hang a kettle in the fire so I may have tea.”
“Yes, father,” Samantha said. She released a petulant sigh and returned to the kitchen for the iron kettle, fetching it down off a high rack only her father could reach without a stepladder. She opened a door from the kitchen to the back porch, shivering in the damp air. The pump to the well was just off the porch and Samantha worked the lever six times before a trickle of water started and another six to fill the kettle. With it snuggled against her chest, Samantha darted back inside, returning to the common room to hang the kettle from a hook inside the fireplace and warm up.
Samantha didn’t even wait for the grunt that passed a thank you from Jacob. She climbed the rough-hued timbers stairs and down the narrow hall to her small room. She changed into a long flannel shirt before climbing into bed and wrapping herself, neck to feet, in a heavy goose down blanket. But she still trembled from the deep cold outside.
The first rays of light had yet to break over the horizon in Samantha’s window when she awoke. She was startled at first, shocked by how cold she felt. Then a dawning awareness that someone else was there. But the light was too weak to recognize the intruder.
Samantha reached down, realizing the cold stemmed from covers drawn down and the hem of her night shirt riding up on her thigh. She pulled it over her knees and solved the second mystery as she heard the familiar whistle of her father breathing through his nose.
“Father?” she asked, unsure in the darkness.
A weight lifted off the bed and she heard the clomping sound of lead-heeled shoes against creaking floorboards. “Go back to sleep,” he said. He lingered by the door before closing it with an abrupt wooden thunk.
Samantha pulled the bedding up to her neck and lay awake until the sun reappeared, as bright as she was confused, as warm as she remained cold.
Jacob did not return the next night, nor the night after. But he did return and soon his watching turned into more as he felt the curves of his daughter’s legs with his rough hands, exploring places only a husband should go. At first, Samantha pretended to remain asleep, trembling in the darkness from the freezing draft that passed over her exposed body and with confusion at what was happening. But a month after his first visit, Jacob seemed to want her awake, touching her with a roughness that no one could sleep through.
Each morning brought a new light that erased the events of the previous night from Jacob’s memory. In the day he acted as if nothing happened and he treated her as he always had. He tilled his fields, harvested their meager produce, and read late into the night. The prayers he said before each meal were the few words she heard beyond his orders to tidy this or prepare that. But the nights became more and more aggressive. Never a word was spoken, just his hands and soon his lips probing Samantha’s intimate places.
Samantha lived in fear, crawling into bed at the end of each day with a sense of dread. There was no lock on her door, she had no object big or heavy enough to block the way. She had no way to protect herself from a man who could do to her as he wished and justify it to himself after. She was his and it was her duty to obey him.
She cried in silence, gasping as Jacob penetrated her, the culmination of three months of terror. All she felt was pain and all she smelled was her father’s acid breath as he did what he liked with her, Samantha’s hands pinned to the bed by his own, thighs forced open.
Samantha could not find the strength to rise the next morning, too sore to move, too ashamed to complain, certain that, somehow, she had invited what happened. Jacob said nothing, allowing her to remain alone all day and into the night. But the next day she was forced out of bed and that evening he returned again.
Her monthly did not arrive on schedule. She said nothing and none of the visitors to Jacob’s house commented as her belly grew. She had always been a bit pudgy. Perhaps a father’s indulgence of his youngest child had allowed her to become more so.
As it became more apparent that she was pregnant, her father’s visitations became more infrequent. Samantha thanked God each night in her prayers even as a constant reminder of him grew within like a parasite to which she was host.
It was in her seventh month, on the verge of her sixteenth birthday, that even the blind spot people had acquired could no longer hide what was plain. She had no brothers. And everyone would have known about a suitor. So there was only one conclusion to be drawn. But instead of punishing Jacob for his sins, it was Samantha who received a two-month shunning by the community.
Lydia visited on the Saturday after, while Jacob and Benjamin tended to a neighbor. She sat on the edge of Samantha’s bed, stroking her sister’s hair, matted from days of refusing to get up. Samantha’s eyes were bloodshot and swollen from crying. Even the quilts against the constant drafts through the room could not hide the size of her stomach.
“We know it isn’t fair,” said Lydia.
“Then why?” Samantha asked. She swiped at her nose but it was no use. The steady stream of tears kept it in a perpetual drip. “I didn’t do anything.”
“It’s not,” Lydia said before stopping. She bit her lip, glancing at the rough timber ceiling. “It’s… It’s too difficult to look at you and know what’s happened.”
“They think I tempted him.”
“Some do,” Lydia said. “But they don’t matter. It’s more about father’s status. It’s easier to blame you than confront him.”
Tears trickled down Samantha’s cheeks. She felt the baby kicking inside but, instead of being reassured, it was one more punishment.
“You’ll be welcome back once the child is born,” Lydia said, patting her sister’s shoulder. She wrung her hands in an awkward silence before giving Samantha a final look and excusing herself without another word.
When the baby was born, Samantha kept her father at bay with short but graphic descriptions of the female problems she was experiencing. She nursed the child, Isaac, named for her father’s father, as any good mother would but no motherly bond formed. The suckling hardened and cracked her nipples despite every suggested remedy and added more pain to an act that she already loathed. There was no calming effect from letting down her milk. Instead, a fresh fear was building up inside each time Isaac was put to her breast. She caught an increasing number of sideways looks and she dreaded what would happen if her excuses didn’t stopped working. She knew they couldn’t work forever. And they did not.
Samantha’s seventeenth birthday was celebrated with her father climbing into her bed anew, despite explanations and then pleas. He waited a week before visiting again then three days for the next time. When it again became a nightly event, Samantha realized there was nothing she could do to prevent another pregnancy but resolved that it would be her last.
The five-month shunning handed down in the middle of her second trimester did not come as a surprise. But it surprised Jacob when the community punished him as well. Samantha found herself bursting into small fits of laughter throughout the day, trying in vain to muffle the sound. But Jacob heard and that night she didn’t laugh at all.
With a strap and all the savage intent the man could summon, Jacob punished her for the shame he blamed her for. The leather snapped across her bare bottom, thighs, and back, scarring where it broke the skin. But it did not stop Jacob from fucking his daughter after exhausting his arm.
Samantha was eight months pregnant when the Horst boy came by for a pail of milk. Rolled up in his back pocket was a glossy magazine–the cover bright with splashes of brilliant blue. She moved as she’d learned in her last pregnancy, slow but deliberate, the bruises gone but her body still healing and sore.
“I’ll milk the cow myself,” Daniel said. He toyed with the brim of his straw hat, stealing glances around the home of the distinguished Jacob Freihaus. “And my mother promises to repay it when ours delivers its calf. Any day now, says father.”
Samantha watched Daniel, a bemused smile sneaking across her pudgy face, and let him have his look. The magazine caught her eye and she asked, “What’s in your pocket?”
Daniel turned the color of a crimson apple, his ears cherry red. He reached behind and tickled the magazine, as if unsure as to what she was pointing to. Samantha held out a hand and he surrendered it with little enthusiasm. She flipped through the pages, glossy and filled with pictures of people and places so unfamiliar that her mind spun. The words, all in English, were unknown and provided no context. Daniel watched with a sullen look, knowing any chance of it being returned diminished with each page turned.
Samantha flipped to the end and stared out the rough, handmade window, her eyes glassy and unfocused, her breath frozen. She snapped back from where she had gone and turned to Daniel. “You can take two pails of milk if you let me keep this.”
He weighed the exchange in his mind, eyes darting to the magazine and back again.
“And you won’t have to repay us,” she said.
Daniel remained doubtful, longing for his treasure but weighing the deal. “Okay,” he said with no enthusiasm.
“Where did you find this?”
“My father let me ride with him out to where the traders land,” he said. “They’d thrown it into a junk pile.”
Samantha shooed Daniel out of the house with a wave of a hand and followed him into the yard. She turned in circles just beyond the porch, searching the sky for any clue of the trader’s existence but finding none. There was just farmland stretching to the horizon in every direction. And the ever-looming gas giant that hung in the sky, dull red with wild stripes of orange and pale yellow. Its were somewhat colors diminished by the daylight and had taking on the slightest bluish of hues.
“Where do they land?” she called.
Daniel pointed to the north-east. “They sound like thunder.”
This post uses art generated by GPT Image 2 based on prompts created by Claude based on the story above.
