Little House Lewd: Chapter 1

With a heavy heart Laura watched Pa’s sled grow smaller as he drove away, leaving her on her own. It had been only twenty seconds and already she was so homesick she could have cried. She did not cry though. She was eighteen, too old to cry, and she was well aware that this was the best opportunity she would have to make any substantial earnings. Sewing in town was enough to help get the family by as far as clothing her and her younger sisters, but if they hoped to keep Mary in college she needed to teach school. To teach this school, she had to leave home.

The cold wind pushed her into the little claim shanty that would be her home for the coming eight weeks. Inside was not much warmer than the outside, but the plank walls and tar paper blocked out the wind and snow. It was very dark after the blinding brilliance of the snowy sunny day outside. Some light came from the little windows on either side of the tiny front room, but for a few seconds she was nearly blind.

Mr. Brewster greeted her. “This is Mrs. Brewster, and Liv, here’s the teacher.”

A sullen-looking woman stood by the stove, stirring something in a  frying pan. A little boy was hanging onto her skirts and crying.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Brewster,” Laura said, as cheerfully as she could manage.

Without turning from the stove the woman snapped, “Just go in the other room and take off your wraps. Hang them behind the curtain where the sofa is.”

Laura did not know what to think. She had barely entered the room, let alone had time to do anything to offend Mrs. Brewster.

Mr. Brewster led her to a small bedroom that was almost as cold as outdoors. He pulled back a curtain that partitioned off the smallest end of the room to reveal a narrow sofa made up like a bed under a window, and a shelf with nails below it to hang clothes.

“You can unpack and get into more comfortable clothes here,” Mr. Brewster said. “Dinner is about ready.”

With that, he dropped the white curtain and left. Dimly she heard his boots on the floorboards, and quickly set to removing her warm layers and riding outfit, changing instead into an every-day calico dress and apron with a warm shawl. After tucking Ma’s satchel under the sofa she moved to grab the edge of the curtain, but stopped when she heard something like the creaking of ropes and a quick shuffle of boots out of the room. For a moment she stood stock still, her ears alert for any little noise. The horrifying implications of what the sounds could have meant flitted across her mind, but she forced them down before they could take full shape.

For several seconds she took long, deep breaths to calm her racing heart and still the shaking in her hands, but soon she was too cold to stay in the little room any longer. Laura made herself go into the warmer front room and act as if she had not noticed anything out of the ordinary.

In the other room Mr. Brewster sat by the stove holding the little boy on his lap. Mrs. Brewster was scraping gravy into a bowl with an expression on her face so sour Laura was again struck with a moment of fear. She glanced at the table to see it set with plates and knives carelessly askew on a dirty white cloth that sat crookedly.

“May I help you, Mrs. Brewster?” Laura said bravely. The other woman did not answer. She dumped potatoes angrily into a dish and thumped it on the table. The clock on the wall whirred to strike the hour, and Laura saw it was four o’clock.

“Nowadays breakfast is so late, we eat only two meals a day,” Mr. Brewster said conversationally, only to be cut off by his wife’s angry voice.

“Whose fault is it, I’d like to know!” Mrs. Brewster blazed out. “As if I didn’t do enough, slaving from morning to night in this-”

Mr. Brewster raised his voice to be heard over her shouting ,”I only meant the days are so short!”

She leveled a glare at him. “Then say what you mean!” she snapped as she slammed the high chair to the table and sat the little boy down in it hard.

Mr. Brewster turned to Laura, whose face had gone a sickly pale, and said dowerly, “Dinner’s ready.”

She sat down shakily in the vacant place near the window. Mr. Brewster passed her the potatoes and salt pork and gravy in her turn, though Mrs. Brewster would not even look at her. The food was good, but the hostile silence was so unpleasant that Laura could hardly swallow it.

Determined to be cheerful, Laura tried again to instigate conversation.

“Is the schoolhouse far from here?” she tried to ask cheerily.

Mr. Brewster said, “Half a mile, cross-lots. It’s a claim shanty The fellow that homesteaded that quarter section couldn’t stick it out; he gave up and went back East.”

After this brief explanation he too was silent.

The little boy fretted, trying to reach everything on the table. When he suddenly flung his tin plate of food on the floor Mrs. Brewster erupted, yelling at him and slapping his hands so hard that he screamed. Even when she stopped he went on wailing, waiving his little hands and kicking the table.

At long last that meal was over. Mr. Brewster took the milk pail and left for the stable. Mrs. Brewster sat the little boy on the floor where he gradually stopped crying. Laura helped to clear the table and dried the dished while Mrs. Brewster washed them.

With some effort, Laura tried to prompt a polite chat. “What is your little boy’s name, Mrs. Brewster?” she asked, hoping the other woman would be more pleasant now.

“John,” she responded shortly.

“That’s such a nice name,” Laura commented with a friendly smile. “People can call him Johnny while he’s little, and then when he grows up John is a good name for a man. Do you call him Johnny now?”

Despite her attempts, Mrs. Brewster did not answer. The silence grew more and more dreadful until Laura’s face burned with embarrassment from even trying.

She went on wiping the dishes blindly until when they were done Mrs. Brewster threw the water out and hung up the pans. Then the older woman plunked herself down in a rocking chair near the stove and rocked idly, her face staring out the window as though she didn’t even see it. Even when Johnny dragged the cat out by its tail and it scratched him, causing him to bawl, she did not look away from the window or make motion as if she knew what happened around her. Laura imagined she must be focusing so hard on  ignoring her that she had become blind and deaf to everything around her.

Not daring to interfere and risk angering Mrs. Brewster further, Laura sat in her chair at the table and looked out the window at the prairie thinking of home. While she imagined what must be happening back home, the Brewster’s home grew dark and darker. When Laura could no longer see the little road  cutting through the prairie beyond the window Mr. Brewster came in with the milk.

Mrs. Brewster finally stirred. She strained the milk and set the pan away while Br. Brewster sat down to read the newspaper. They did not speak to each other or her, and soon the unpleasant silence was too much for Laura. She didn’t know what to do. It was too early to go to bed, there was no other paper nor a book in the room to read. She remembered her schoolbooks tucked in Ma’s satchel in the other room, and went quickly to fetch her history book and bring it back to the kitchen table to study.

At least nothing hinders my studying, she thought grimly. She felt hurt and sore as if she had been beaten by the horrid afternoon, but gradually she forgot where she was by keeping her mind fixed on history. At last she heard the clock strike eight, late enough to excuse herself without seeming rude.

She stood up and politely said goodnight. Mrs. Brewster only scowled deeper. Mr. Brewster stood and lit a candle for her to take with her into the dark other room.

“Good night,” he said, handing it to her.

“Thank you; good night Mr. Brewster,” she said politely. She took the candle carefully, unable to meet his gaze as the memory of what she thought she had heard earlier in the bedroom came back to her. Surly she had only imagined it.

In the dark room she went behind the curtain and set the candle on the shelf to light the little space. She unpacked her nightgown and quickly began undressing, shivering in the cold, when she heard the quietest scrape of a boot. Instantly she froze, listening hard. For a long time she did not hear another sound. The cold was rapidly making her fingers go numb, and she decided it best to finish undressing before her fingers were too stiff to continue. As quickly as possible she got into her nightgown, blew out the candle, and bundled under the pile of quilts on the narrow bed.

Only once she was still, without the rustling of fabric and quilts, did she notice a soft shlick shlick  sound from only feet away across the tiny room. Her whole chilly body seemed  to go numb at the sound, recognizing it but trying desperately to excuse it for something, anything else. In a flash she made a horrible realization. When she undressed she had been between the candle flame and the curtain. And earlier she had been between the light of the window and the curtain. If someone had been in the room, surely they could have easily seen her silhouette disrobing like some obscene brothel show she had heard the older boys in class whisper about.

She buried her burning ashamed face into the pillow and covered her head with the quilts, desperate to block out the sound. Even from under the quilts the noise berated her for long minutes. She prayed silently to herself, running through psalms in an attempt to distract herself until finally the sound ended with a nearly silent chuff of air as if someone were trying not to gasp. A moment later the creak of rope that held up the mattress on the bedstead and a scrape of boots signaled that finally, Laura was alone.

She had only a moment to be thankful before Mrs. Brewster’s angry voice came from the other room.

“...suits you, but I won’t keep such a hussy for a boarder!” Mrs. Brewster raged. “A school teacher indeed! Comes into a woman’s home dressed up like that and acting like a kitten to swindle a husband for herself out of this hateful country! And there you are fawning for the…”

Laura plugged her ears with her fingers to shut out the rest of what Mrs. Brewster said.

She doesn’t want to board the teacher, that is all. Likely has the same opinion about any woman teacher who would have taken the job. She’d be as cross to anybody else,, Laura did her best to convince herself. She kept her ears shut with a pillow over her head and willed herself to sleep.

She thought about being home in bed. She imagined the muffled shouting of Mrs. Brewster to be the saloon crowd from the inn in Burr Oak Iowa when she was younger. She was in bed with Mary listening to Pa play the fiddle to drown out some drunk customer in the saloon. She was warm and comfortable, but the bed was shrinking, and now Mary was gone. She was alone in the small cot she had slept in when she stayed with the Rowland’s to help them with the chores and smaller children. Confused, Laura looked around for the source of the schlick schlick schlick sound in the dark. There in the shadowed doorway stood Mr. Rowland. She squinted, and saw that his pants were open, his hand working quickly back and forth while he bit down on the other hand to stifle the gasp that had alerted her to his presence.

“Mr. Rowland?” she whispered, unsure what was happening.

He came towards her in the dark, shushing her with the hand he had been biting while the other continued  to move at the front of his pants. He stepped into a shaft of moonlight and all the strength in her body evaporated when Laura saw what his hand had been toying with. She opened her mouth in shock, and he reached for her, the schlick schlick sound louder than ever.

Suddenly, Laura woke to a cold dark room. She had rolled in her sleep so that she was facing the wall with her head still covered. For a brief moment she wasn't sure what had woken her, until she heard the schlick schlick sound so close to her that she was afraid even to breathe, scared it would alert that she was not asleep and invite more of the trouble she had narrowly escaped in Burr Oak.

Like earlier, the encounter did not last long, but it felt like a lifetime before Laura heard the sound stop. She worried for a moment that things were about to escalate, but breathed a silent sigh of relief when she heard the curtain settle back against the wall. She listened to large footsteps quietly cross the few feet to the bed, then the straining sound of the ropes beneath the straw tick mattress as weight settled onto it.

“Get your hands off me!” Mrs. Brewster’s venomous voice broke through the darkness. “Don’t come to me after what you were just-”

The sound of a body dragging across fabric interrupted Mrs. Brewster. There was struggling, Mrs. Brewster cursing at her husband. Laura listened to the encounter from her place balled up as small as she could get under the quilts. She was more afraid than she had ever been in her life, too afraid to move. The room was full of the sounds of fabric rustling, the struggling sounds of someone trying to fight, a skin-on-skin slapping that slowly became a wet squelch, light sobbing muffled against a mattress.

It felt like a long, long time before a man’s grunting came from the other side of the room, accompanied shortly after with a wet pop and the rustling of straw. The room quieted menacingly.

I have to do this for Mary, Laura said to herself like a prayer. This is my only opportunity to earn enough money to keep Mary in college. I promised Ma and Pa I would do whatever it took to help.

She repeated this to herself over and over, drowning out the terrifying fact that it would be eight weeks before anyone would be able  to help her if things worsened.