The Backwoods

beautiful a wife.

The decades had blessed her body; she didn’t look at all like a woman in her mid-fifties, and the gray had barely touched her long, raven-black hair. Even her bosom barely sagged; her breasts glowed like lambent orbs in the moon’s light, centered with large, dark nipples. About her neck hung the pendant he’d made for her when they’d gotten married, a deep blue-and-scarlet pontica stone that diviners and mediums often wore, to maximize their visions. The stone hung between her breasts and seemed to change color when her own passions inflamed. Wilfrud himself wore the cross she’d given him just as long ago: two meticulously carved shavings from an eddo root.

For a moment Wilfrud felt bolted to the ground; he couldn’t move; he could only swallow up this nighttime image of her. Oh, heaven, he thought. I am such a lucky man. . . .

She pivoted on her bare feet, not looking down but staring out into the night, listening for the secrets it would tell her, and then in a second she quickly got down on her knees and bent over. Wilfrud almost collapsed now, his desires reeling. This alternate glimpse of her—kneeling, naked, buttocks jutting—was the last thing Wilfrud needed to see just then. He was supposed to be helping her. . . .

“Oooh, Wilfrud, look!” she nearly squealed in excitement. Her free hand tilled the soft earth between the vee of a tree’s roots. “We’re finding so many tonight!”

Only a woman after my own heart could be so enthused over finding morels, he realized absurdly. He walked over with his collection bag, tried to focus, but only remained dizzy in the fugue of his passion. Her breasts bobbed when she jerked upright, grinning. She extended her earth-smudged hand, which was full of morels.

“Five more!”

He smiled back, so distracted, and put the morels in the bag, then . . .

He dropped the bag.

“What are you doing?” she exclaimed.

“You know,” he whispered, embracing her. He urged her back against the tree, his groin pushing into hers. His voice was parched in his need. “Let me make love to you—right here. In the forest, with the moon and stars watching.” His hands ran up her bare sides; sweat misted her skin from the warm night. She felt so soft. . . .

He was tasting her neck, breathing hard already. The jasmine essence in her hair stiffened him at once.

Ethel giggled. Her fingers slipped around his back. She pressed her breasts more urgently against his chest, then raised one leg and half wrapped it around him. “Hmm,” she breathed into his ear. “So you want to take me right here, on the ground?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Hmm, let me think about that. . . .”

Her thigh slid up and down his leg. Her hand squeezed his buttocks; then it came back around, dawdled over his chest, then began to pop open his shirt buttons.

“Let me think,” she repeated.

Wilfrud was going nuts in his passion now. He kept trying to kiss her, but each time their lips met she jerked away, smiling. Eventually her fingers spidered down his unbuttoned chest, lingered a moment, then proceeded to his crotch, which she slowly—and excruciatingly—began to caress.

“My love, my love, my love,” he kept murmuring into her neck. “Please! Now!”

“Hmm, yes, let me think . . .” As her fingers were toying with the top button of his trousers, were just about to open them—

“On second thought,” she said abruptly, “no.”

Her hand pulled away, and she gently began to push him back.

“Don’t torment me!” he pleaded.

“Wilfrud, you’re so much fun to tease!” She was grinning at him in the moonlight, her bare breasts standing right out. Then she picked up the collection bag and gave it back to him. “We’ve got to get back to our gathering.” The grin sharpened. “We’ll make love later. When we get back home.”

Wilfrud groaned, his eyes rolling in agony.

“Thinking about me more will make you want me more,” she cooed at him.

“No, it won’t! I want you now!”

“Oh, Wilfrud. You’re a wonderful husband, but honestly, sometimes you’re just like a goat. You can wait a bit longer.” And then she disappeared around a stout tree to continue her search.

Wilfrud stood like a horny fool. Women, he thought uselessly. Oh, how they love to make idiots of men.

He shuffled after her into thicker woods. Denser networks of boughs overhead drained off the moonlight—he could barely see. After a time he wanted to call out but thought better of it: he mustn’t distract her while she was divining. Instead, then, he filled his mind back up with images of her nakedness, her breasts and the pebble-hard nipples, all that smooth, warm, white skin that he could indulge in, the nest of down between her legs soft as kitten fur. . . .

Minutes more, and he still hadn’t found her. He stood and listened . . . and heard no traces of her footfalls.

“Sweetheart?” he finally called out.

Ethel didn’t answer.

“Ethel?”

Another step, then—

“Oof!”

He stumbled and fell.

What a clumsy clod. . . . He must’ve tripped on a downed limb. But when he put his hand out to push himself up it landed on a bare foot. Alarmed, he patted upward, up a bare leg. . . .

In slivers of moonlight coming though the trees, he saw Ethel lying prone on the forest floor.

“Ethel! Are you all right?” He slid up to her, got an arm around her back to lean her up.

But her head just lolled on her shoulders.

And he noticed blood on her forehead.

No!

Wilfrud felt crazed in the sudden fear. “Ethel! Ethel!” He shook her. “Please be all right!”

A voice snapped behind him. “Don’t worry, Squatter. She ain’t dead. All’s I done is conk her lights out.”

In the dimmest darkness, he spotted the figure standing over him. Enraged, Wilfrud attempted to jump up, to fight.

“Yes, sir. Conked the bitch’s lights right out with this here beer bottle.”

Conk!

The unseen swipe knocked Wilfrud out cold.

It was a harsh gagging sound that Wilfrud regained consciousness to. Grainy, sooty vision began to fire in his eyes; each time his heart beat, a heavy thud of pain throbbed in his head. In a few more moments, he could see. . . .

Ethel lay naked on her back in some deep, moonlit clearing. A beefy man humped vigorously between her sprawled legs, his overalls pulled down to show pasty buttocks.

The atrocity raged but for a split second before Wilfrud’s mind managed to separate the horror from logic. What happened to me? The pain in his head felt like a nail had been driven into his brain. He and Ethel had been gathering morels, hadn’t they? Yes, the clan cookout was coming up. And she’d dashed off into darker woods with her divining bone. That’s when I found her, he remembered. I tripped over her and—

That figure . . . All Wilfrud recalled was the stocky shadow before he’d been hit in the head with something, and now he was waking up . . . to this.

Wilfrud realized now that he’d been tied to a tree, his wrists bound behind the trunk with rope, and a shorter length of rope had been tied around his head—between his teeth—to gag him. In horrid glimpses, he noticed that Ethel had been gagged similarly. All either of them could do was croak out some feeble noises, nothing even close to a scream that could be heard by others.