by Jay Lake
(03/20/02)

Katherine Dunham found her wedding ring again, gleaming in the stinking green mud at the bottom of the stock tank. She'd taken to walking the bed of the pond once the summer's drought had stolen the last of the water. The water had stolen her husband David the year before, drowned in two feet of it. The day of the funeral, she'd thrown the ring in where he'd died, cursing and crying, then gone back to running the farm.

Now this. The well going dry, the creek running with dust, and Maggie Blaylock coming to haul off her last sixteen head of cattle before they died too, lowing their thirst at the edge of the stock tank. Nineteen years of marriage and hard work, and all she had to show was drying mud in the heart of Caldwell County, Texas. Katherine sat down in the reeking ooze with the ring in her hands and cried as if she could fill the tank.

The heat took everything. With the water went the garden and every growing thing, with the well went the house, so that it stank of dust and compost and hot, resentful cats. Waist-length blonde hair pinned above her head, Katherine lay naked in the empty tub, the porcelain beneath her covered with the op-art Mona Lisa David had painted in their youth, stealing the last bit of cool from the tub's chipped walls. She stole, as well, the last bit of comfort from her memories in the flooding morning light.

Cicadas buzzed. David had loved her body, saying she had girlish breasts with nipples like cured dates. She ran a hand across her flat belly, teasing the delicate hairs. She remembered his larger hand, still fine even with his rancher's calluses, but strong, the fingers blunt. David's fingers had been unafraid to voyage anywhere across her body, messengers of his passion.

A rusty drip from the faucet landed on her foot, tracing a discolored trail like a line of old kisses. Katherine licked the fingers of her left hand and gently rolled her nipple, pressuring the little raisin to swell into one of David's dates. Her breast shifted under her palm, the tiny stretch marks of age sliding across her hand.

Katherine's right hand drifted below the curve of her belly, the cold tub and the hot sunlight reminding her of making love with David on the roof, in the back of the pick-up, on the bank of the stock tank. She rolled the little pad above her labia the way David did before he knelt to his feasting, and she smiled at the memory of being interrupted by chickens in the barn. Her legs slipped open, knees against the scarred lip of the tub.

"Kath? You in there?" It was Maggie's voice, calling from the yard.

"Shit!" Katherine jumped as the screen door banged. Scrambling for a towel, she caught the top of her foot on the old faucet, tearing skin away in a grating line. Her crotch slammed on the edge of the tub, and she rolled down onto the filthy little rug whimpering, staring up at the cobwebbed ceiling. She focused on the metallic reek of the hard water in the toilet tank, trying to chase the pain of her foot and her pelvis away.

Maggie stuck her head in the bathroom door. "What happ-- Well. Excuse me." She smiled, shaking her head. "Aren't you a little old for this?"

Katherine realized she was massaging her aching crotch. "Just a minute," she gasped. "I was taking a bath."

Maggie glanced at the dry tub, then back at Katherine, still smiling. "Uh-huh. Take your time. I'll be out at the corral."

Nipples aching in synch with her throbbing crotch and stinging foot, Katherine drew on one of David's old oxford shirts -- his go-to-town shirts. She always threw a few drops of his cologne onto the cloth when she hung them on the line. It kept him close.

Katherine stood on the porch and looked out. Scattered clouds lied their way toward the horizon, carrying her water toward Louisiana or Arkansas. Vultures circled, silhouetted in the shining vault of the sky. Below them, dusty live oaks and mesquite and juniper lined the fences, stood behind the rusted roof of the barn.

Framed amid it all, Maggie's curly brown hair was a mop top above a broad ruddy face. She wore a checkered shirt with the sleeves torn off, worn jeans stretched over broad hips that might have brought forth a whole generation, in another era.

She'd known Maggie for years, as close as anyone outside her marriage. Maggie and David had been closer, sharing the secrets of agriculture, home brew and old pick-ups, and sometimes even sharing smiling glances at Katherine. No matter how much Katherine liked the other woman, being caught rolling on the floor naked was downright embarrassing. At least it was Maggie. Somewhere inside, she was almost glad it was Maggie.

Katherine watched Maggie among the few cattle in the corral, all that was left of two hundred head of hopes and dreams, before the water failed over the past decade. Maggie knew her work, a cattleman like David had been. She wasn't pretty, Maggie, but Katherine had always loved the way Maggie's smile could leap across a room and seize you -- like lightning in the brush.

Maggie noticed Katherine staring. She motioned Katherine over. Katherine had finished dressing in a teal prairie skirt David had loved, and her working boots. She didn't bother with panties, and she only ever wore a bra to go to town. David had liked that too.

"Hey, girl." Maggie stepped up onto the useless rain barrel and hopped the fence, landing on her old shit-kicker boots like a dancer. Katherine admired the way Maggie moved, for all her middle-aged size.

"Maggie, I'm sorry. You caught me at a weird moment." Katherine was blushing. "It's not what you think."

Maggie laughed, her smile flooding her face. "I certainly hope it was what I think." She swung her hips and winked as she pulled a sheaf of paper from her shirt pocket. "I've got the contract for the cattle right here. They're looking okay, but I can't get Opal and Earl's trailer until next week. If you want to execute today, I'll pay a per diem boarding fee and drop off some fodder."

Katherine glanced at the fields west of the corral, where the stock tank lay hidden from the house by the rising land. The grass had colored past gold to a dusty, failed tan. Nothing out there now but cow shit and flies. The cattle had been gnawing the bark on the trees along the fence line. The money from the sale of the main herd was almost gone. Katherine sighed. "Keep them here as long as you want. Every bit counts."

"Kath." Maggie looked at her boots. "It's not my business, but what are you going to do? My money will take you through the fall, maybe. But you've got nothing in the ground, nothing left to sell but the land."

"You offering?" Katherine heard the false note in her voice, like a lie told in church.

"That's not what I'm saying."

"I can't sell. Maggie, it's...it's..."

"David," said Maggie.

Katherine started to cry again. She opened her hand to show Maggie the wedding ring. "I can't go."

Awkwardly, Maggie pulled Katherine into a hug, stroking her hair. Katherine's sobs slowed, but she settled into the crook of Maggie's neck, feeling the other woman's breath on her ear. To Katherine's surprise, her nipples swelled under the pressure of Maggie's chest.

Suddenly Maggie let her go, breathing ragged herself. "Sorry," Maggie said. "I've got to go." Her smile was shy, for once. "You smell nice, whatever that scent is."

Sorry for what, Katherine wondered as Maggie almost ran for her truck. Sorry about David? For the hug? Or for letting go? She stood there wrapped in David's scent and the memory of Maggie's hug.

That night there was lightning high in the west, another lie told by the summer weather. The cats were out administering small, furry death in the darkness. The chickens were up in their pecan tree. Katherine lay almost naked in the old brass bed, wearing only David's oxford shirt, unbuttoned and open against the heat. She watched the flashes in the sky and thought of the drying stock tank and the death of their farm. David. Her fingers strayed to her nipples. Then she found she was thinking of Maggie.

"I've always been with men," Katherine whispered to herself. She remembered her lovers. Danny, in high school, with the crooked, freckled cock. Her first blow job, a prom night gift for him, but they'd never fucked, no matter how hard he begged. It was all dry humping. He'd tried to eat her once, but just made a fumble of it and came all over the carpet in her mom's den.

Ronnie, in junior college. She smiled, gently rubbing her clitoris. Ronnie had known how to do yeoman's work at her genitals -- clitoris, vagina, his to command. After her sixth orgasm one evening he'd just, well, slipped on in. Katherine giggled, fingers straying down to begin spreading her labia, opening herself as she dampened.

Then Ronnie had taken her camping with his roommate Butch, and somewhere inside the tequila and the laughs and the skinny-dipping she'd slept with both of them at once. She didn't feel good about being around Butch afterwards, so she broke up with Ronnie, which meant she was free when she met David.

She smiled again. David. There'd been no one else since they met, no need for anyone. She was his Feast Dish and his Heart's Desire and his Rack of Pleasure and a dozen other names whispered in passion and in lazy love.

David.

Tears stinging her eyes, Katherine paused to slip her ring onto the knuckle of her index finger. The ring was still crusted with mud from the stock tank. Lying on her side with one leg cocked upward, she pushed into her vagina with the ring, using her thumb and middle fingers to spread her labia. Pinching her nipple, lit by summer lightning, Katherine pushed and shoved and fucked herself with the ring, tearing and bruising at her vagina, cutting her nipple with her fingernails, as if pleasure and pain together could draw her husband back from the darkness.

She screamed into the summer night, screaming her orgasm and her pain, bloodying the sheets like red rain on parched soil. Shivering, throat raw, she cried herself to sleep with the thought of a sleeveless checkered shirt.

Katherine woke the next day with her wedding ring loose inside her vagina. She had to limp to the bathroom and work with lotion to remove it, she was so dry and tight. It took a while to clean up herself, her clothes, and her bed, using precious water, but she felt better than she had since David died. Katherine found an old jar of silver paste and slipped the bloody ring into it. She hid the jar in the back of the medicine shelf. Then she went and found a worn flannel shirt, checkered like Maggie's, and put it on, heedless of the heat.

In the kitchen, she checked the calendar, wondering when Maggie would be back. She was glad of the days of waiting, because she needed to heal a little more.

Sunday brought a squall line out of the north, one of those Texas storms that looks like God's fury but turns into sixty mile per hour winds with a trace of rain so light it might be the tears of His angels. Still and all, it was the first real hint of rain the lying weather had brought in three months.

Katherine stood in the cracking mud of the stock tank and watched the black line on the horizon stalking forth on blazing legs of light. She wore another of David's oxfords, with the flannel shirt open over it, flapping in the wind.

"David," she asked the wind, "are you okay?"

Live oak leaves, musty cutouts of brown, swirled around her feet.

"I'm not doing so well, David. I had to sell the last of the cattle. The tractor's gone. I still have your truck, though." She stared into the wind, eyes watering, or maybe crying. It didn't matter which, not now.

She could hear a hail of pecans knocked loose by the wind, rattling on the barn roof.

"I'm going to have to take a job in Lockhart, maybe all the way to Austin."

A few stray drops struck her face. Not rain, but at least the remembrance that water still existed somewhere in the world. Katherine drew a deep breath, smelling the ozone of the storm and the swirling dust driven before it. David's cologne touched her nose for a moment on wind, as the tears of angels wetted her face again.

She sighed and was happy.

Monday her body felt better, but her heart ached. Maggie didn't come. That night Katherine touched herself for hours, but never needed the orgasm.

Tuesday Maggie called, a hurried monologue. "I'm sorry, Kath, the truck's got a flat and Opal said Earl would fix it but Earl's nephew Big Billy has the shop jack down in Fentress and I can't tow with the Pontiac since I broke the leaf springs, and my God, look at the time, I'll call tomorrow."

"Are you okay?" Katherine asked the dial tone.

On Wednesday Katherine wept, and tried to find peace sitting in the dried stock tank, but the squall that had brought David to her on Sunday had taken him away again. The lying clouds changed direction and moved closer together, and for the first time in almost sixty days the thermometer on the porch didn't crack one hundred. Back in the tub, she couldn't come no matter how much she needed to.

The phone rang that night as she sat in the cool, dry bathtub counting cobwebs. It took her a while to get out and answer, but the caller was patient.

"I'm sorry," Maggie said. "I'll come tomorrow."

"Please," Katherine whispered.

She smiled at the dial tone until the operator came on to see if she needed assistance.

Thursday Katherine got the cattle back in the corral for Maggie. Then she ran a full bath for the first time in seven weeks. She was sick of sponging clean, and she wanted to be ready for Maggie. Katherine washed her hair, twice, and shaved her legs, which she hadn't bothered with since David died. Then she did her nails, and added a tiny bit of makeup to her face. She even found a bottle of her perfume which she hadn't worn since the funeral.

"What the hell am I doing?" Katherine asked the mirror. She couldn't decide if she was worried about cheating on David, or scared of being attracted to Maggie. It didn't matter, she told herself. What mattered was that she might be happy again.

Katherine put on the teal skirt again, and her good boots, brown leather that came up to her knees. In a box in the attic she found an old gauze blouse from college, one that hid the curve of her breast but showed the brown of her nipples.

She left her hair down, brushing it out two hundred strokes on each side. Katherine went out on the porch, smiled at the driveway, and said, "I'm ready."

Katherine waited an hour or more, not enough to sap her contentment but sufficient to put an edge on. The faithless clouds were piling in the southeast. The wind was different, different than it had been in months. As Katherine stared at the sky, she heard the gravel crunch of tires: Maggie's truck, an old navy blue Dodge with dinner plate headlights, towing a thirty-foot livestock trailer.

Katherine stepped off the porch, walked toward the truck. Maggie smiled through the bug-smeared windshield, then got out.

Maggie's curly brown hair shone. She wore a different flannel shirt, sleeves torn off this one as well, and clean black jeans with silver-tipped roach-stomper boots.

Katherine's voice was light, like tiny bells. "You going to herd cattle in those boots?"

"Never know what might happen." Maggie extended her hands palm down, reaching for Katherine's. "You feeling better?"

Katherine took Maggie's hands, pushed them together as if in prayer, then pulled them to her lips. She kissed the fingertips. "Much better, now."

Maggie stepped so they were standing almost nose-to-nose. "I'm sorry I took so long. I had to think."

This is it, Katherine told herself. "Me, too." She laughed. "Thinking, I mean, not being sorry."

Maggie traced Katherine's chin with one blunt finger. "Good thoughts?" Maggie whispered.

"Oh, very good." Katherine took a deep breath, remembering David, and gathered Maggie to a full-bodied hug, kissing the other woman. Katherine meant to go lightly, slowly, like a first date should, but she was betrayed by the hunger of the last empty year. Maggie parted her lips and their tongues slipped together. Katherine shivered.

"I've never..." Katherine whispered, pulling away. She wasn't sure what came next.

"Don't worry," Maggie said. "I have."

Lightning struck the woods, the thunder almost immediate. The chickens shrieked and as the wind whipped up, twirling Katherine's skirt and spreading her long hair like a banner. Leaves whirled, carrying the scents of storm and forest.

It was David, Katherine thought, come back again on the wind and driving the water before him like heaven's cattle. "Yes!" she screamed. "Give me my goddamned water!"

Holding hands, she and Maggie danced in the yard as the giant raindrops fell. It began to pour, a real Texas frog-strangler that would close roads and carry off bridges.

"Come on," Katherine shouted, tugging Maggie's hand. "The stock tank!"

They ran through the gate into the west fields. Katherine skidded them up the little rise to the edge of the dried pond.

It was still baked at the bottom, greenish slime piled around, but already the mud was running with little tiny floods, cracked edges softening and crumbling even as the two of them watched. The feeder creek ran with a strengthening trickle. The heavens dumped water straight down.

Katherine could feel her nipples like giant candied dates. She wanted Maggie, right there, under the falling water, in the pond, where she'd found the wedding ring. She wanted Maggie so she could bid farewell to David. Katherine wanted love to return from its drowning pool. She pointed at the ground, tugging Maggie's arm downward.

"What?" shouted Maggie over the pounding of the rain. "Here?"

Katherine cupped one hand over Maggie's ear, holding her other hand. "No, silly, down in there."

They tumbled down the bank, rolling in the mud. Katherine let Maggie pull her into a deep kiss, hands tugging through Katherine's long blonde hair as Katherine rubbed Maggie's scalp, her back, her broad ass through the jeans. Maggie wiggled downward towards Katherine's dark nipples standing like beacons through the soaked gauze blouse.

She kissed like a greedy child, sucking and gnawing right through the gauze. Katherine hugged Maggie close, face up, drinking the rain as the other woman knelt before her, hungry at her breasts. The gauze itched, tweaked, even burned as Maggie's tongue and lips and teeth worked at Katherine's nipple. Maggie's hand massaged Katherine's right breast, while the other worked up under her prairie skirt, stroking Katherine's thigh, along the inside, up the tendon, across her ass, around to the front, a broken fingernail snagging in a curl of pubic hair, an inviting tension.

Katherine released Maggie's head and unfastened her skirt. Still wearing knee-high boots and her translucent gauze blouse, Katherine lay backward in the mud, the rising water at her ankles. Maggie mouthed loving words at Katherine, unheard over the pounding rain, then gently spread Katherine's thighs, kissed her belly button, smoothed hands over her flanks, began to chew at the top of her pubic hair. The rain fell so hard it bruised them both.

Lightning struck again, thunder crackling. Rain steamed from the parched ground. The mud deepened, smelling green and brown. The cattle bellowed fear in the corral as Maggie licked at Katherine's clitoris, holding back her labia with spread fingers. Maggie's other hand supported Katherine's ass, spreading the cheeks and gently working a muddy thumb into her anus. Katherine breathed hard, missing her rhythm for a moment, but the fingers were damp and gentle, so she relaxed into it and pushed her pubic bone into Maggie's face.

Maggie worked harder in the pounding rain, scraping Katherine's clitoris between tongue and teeth, fingering her vagina with one hand and her anus with the other, all the penetrations in the world at once. Over and over Maggie drove Katherine past the edge of screaming orgasm -- three, five, seven times. Maggie's touch kept changing -- blowing air, then sucking it in through clenched teeth, kissing, teasing, gentle, rough. Katherine drank rain and shrieked to the sky as water lapped her calves and filled her boots. Her body split open again and again and again.

"Ahhh...my sweet..." Katherine said as Maggie rolled over, almost waist deep in the stock tank.

"Your hair, darling," Maggie began, then laughed. Katherine could feel the weight of the mud.

"You too," she told Maggie. Maggie's boots were coated with mud, her jeans all but ruined. "My turn, now."

Maggie pulled back, just a bit, rolling away. "I don't, I don't look like you. Oh Kath, you're like some kind of goddess. I'm old, and fat, and..."

"And beautiful," Katherine said. She pulled off the drenched, torn gauze, wearing only the tall leather boots now. "With your smile and my hair and juice all over your lips." She crawled through the mud, licked Maggie's face and hands clean of rain and mucus and salt and little curled blonde hairs.

Then she undid the pearl buttons of Maggie's checkered shirt, pulling it open to show the heavy underwire bra.

"Your breasts are so small and pointed," Maggie whispered.

Katherine undid the hooks. "Yours are so large and glorious." She had never kissed a woman's nipple. It was larger and fuller than a man's, and the breast beneath, pressing like a pad against her face, was a completely new experience. Maggie's breasts were enormous. They were Maggie.

"I want to taste you, every part of you," Katherine whispered in Maggie's ear. She set to work practicing what Maggie had preached on her.

They made muddy love in the pond, naked but for Katherine's boots, for two hours, crawling slowly up the bank as the water rose, clothes forgotten under the rising tide. As the rain moved off, they lay along the top of the bank. Katherine traced the lines of Maggie's swollen labia and clitoris as Maggie gently ran her tongue over Katherine's inner thigh, and across her genitals. They were mapping, now, studying the territory into which the rain had earlier rushed them.

Katherine adored Maggie's thighs, like tree trunks, the way they had enfolded her head as she went down on Maggie, the way Maggie cracked Katherine's neck when she came, thighs closed and shivering. Katherine adored Maggie's great breasts, could lose herself in their huge pink areola and the broad, shallow buttons of her nipples.

Water dripped from the trees, burbled in the grass, changed the smell of the fields as utterly as if it were a different country. Katherine listened to the sounds of renewal for a while, enjoying the warmth of Maggie's tongue. Her world felt right again.

"Maggie," she said.

"Mmmm?"

"You asked what I was going to do."

Maggie sat up on her elbow, looking Katherine in the eyes. "And?"

Katherine swung herself around and kissed Maggie, pressing their bodies together, her wet leather boots wrapped around Maggie's left leg. "I'm going to remember David, and work at loving you, and accept whatever the rain brings me."

Maggie glanced at the stock tank, swollen full from three hours of hard Texas rain. "Maybe I'll leave those cattle here for a while, now that you've got water again."

Together they swam the stock tank, diving for their clothes and Maggie's boots. Later, Katherine gave her wedding ring back to the brown water, this time with blessings.

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