Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2008 02:45:00 -0800 (PST)
From: Gale Adams <tothestable@yahoo.com>
Subject: f'/f incest "She Came to Me" Chapter 5

    She Came to Me
        Chapter 5

      (A toast to W.G. who steered these ideas for Chapter 5--the flaws
are solely mine)


      Trina was from the West Indies. She was the servant-girl of the Marsh
family. This Saturday morning, she was scrubbing their kitchen floor.  The
wood was varnished and shiny. The house was full of dark corners and
brightly lit windows in the daytime. It was a largish house. She had never
seen one this big before. She was 18 and lived with her 12-year-old sister
in a small parlor in the back of this house. She and Hebbie had lived in
America for 2 years now. They were bright girls, both. Their parents had
died on the boat coming over. The world was suddenly larger than large for
the both of them.  They had had only each other to comfort and to care for.

      Until they were hired here at the Marsh's. The girls, Ivory and
Melody, were so terribly nice to her. Their parents were--distant--it
seemed--of course from the servant-girls, which of course was the right
thing to do. But the girls' parents seemed distant from each other, from
their daughters, and, in a way she could not explain, from themselves as
well. The mother seemed as though stillborn inside. The father was a man
who seemed to have a small nervous facial tick at times and seemed as
though a look over his shoulder were to happen every minute, and in truth
did happen some, as Trina had seen. It was past November now, and winter
had set in.

      The snows were blowing, the first of the season, this Friday morning,
as Trina scrubbed the kitchen floor, preparing afterwards to do the
laundry, to make the beds, to wash the dishes, to gather more wood. Hebbie
was at school with as she called them "her adopted sisters." Hebbie and
Trina had been alone mostly always when they got to this New Land of
Opportunity, so the books said, and had worked where they could, and when,
in not the most salubrious of conditions. Here they found nirvana. Here
they found luxury of horsehair couches and shiny silver, that of course she
and Hebbie made shine.  The luxury had an aroma to it. An aroma of
propriety and straight angles and a house that had a purpose.

      Trina was not a virgin. She scrubbed with the bucket and the water
and the cloth, on her knees, her back in pain from all the housework, that
devolved on her, since Hebbie was, though tacitly a servant-girl as well,
the Marshes did not want to pay her and so she was considered just a "free
loader" Mr. Marsh said, with a decidedly ugly laugh that shook his well-fed
pot belly stomach The house was cold for even all the heat they could
muster did not fare well against the shivers even though the house was
quite well constructed and free mostly of chins and slivers where wind of
winter could get in.

      Trina wore her heaviest coat, bought for her by Mrs. Marsh down at
the mercantile store, heavy and warm and insular with a soft lining and
dark blue of color. Trina and Hebbie were not used to winter, though this
was the third they had survived here. It always gave Hebbie the sniffles
and sometimes it gave her a cold deep so that Trina was always afraid it
was pneumonia, along with a hacking cough. Mrs. Marsh provided elixir for
both girls if they needed it in the coming months.

      Trina was actively trying to forget what she had seen last night,
this her and Hebbie's second month at this mansion, for they considered it
such, with big heavy thick wooden doors and silence that was like the
sucking of sound out of the air. The parents were gone to bed some time
before, last night. Trina had exited her and Hebbie's parlor, for a glass
of milk for she and her sister. In making her way carefully through the
dark and the cold, shivering, her nightgown, bought by the Marshes, who
were, she felt, good people underneath their distraction and fear and
uncomfortable ness for whatever reason she did not know, trying not to stub
her foot on any of the heavy furniture, making her way across the warm rugs
and the cold wood in-between, she had heard, not so much as a sound, but an
absence of sound, from the girl's room, she thought it thus being Melody's.

      Not that of course, girls were un-allowed to make sounds or
non-sounds in their own house, even late at night, because, the parents'
room were across a vestibule and then past stairways to the dark attic
which scared Hebbie no end, though they had not had to go up there yet to
clean, it could wait till Spring, Mrs. Marsh said, for it was nothing but a
storage room and far too wintry up there even to stay a moment, which
relieved Hebbie and, truth to tell, relieved her older sister too.

      Trina had been relating a children's story from their home country,
to Hebbie; about fairy tale kings and soft seas and bright golden sand and
a diamond that the sea brought up from its very depths, out of which
dazzled two girls' eyes, as this fairy opened the diamond up from the
inside, and in her tiny sprite hands, delivered golden doubloons to the two
girls so they would be poor no more, and would always be living in comfort
and style, so this night Trina was trying to forget by throwing herself
almost bodily into her chores, she had gone to Melody's room.

      Though she knew it wrong, and had opened the door very slightly
indeed, for fear was in her, of being caught, and she and her sister being
put out in the cold like in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" though she for sure hated
that book, though she and Hebbie were readers, for their parents taught
Trina at an early age--they had told her once, and she passed this along
to Hebbie--friends will let you down sometimes, things are not always as
they appear, sometimes people will lead you astray and use you---but books
will always be your friends-they will never harm you nor betray you nor
leave you feeling the fool--there are bad books certainly--but read the
ones that commune with you, that minister to you, and you will have
happiness all your days.

      There was candle light in Melody's room and Trina, her head still
filled with the fairy story, thought the two girls were indeed yin and yank
of that diamond fairy, making up gold doubloons from their own bodies,
wearing odd looking nightgowns and being so close together in apparently
each other's arms as though one or the other was crying, which touched
Trina's heart, for she had a very generous one, which made her start in to
see if she could help and succor, but something pulled her back and hiding
more into the comfort of the safe shadows of the hall way, the door only a
sliver open, as she realized the reason the nightgowns looked odd and out
of place in this very proper world was that they were not nightgowns at
all, but the sisters' naked bodies.

      It roiled her heart when she realized, with a start, like a lightning
bolt inside her, as though her mouth made a whoosh of an O for the air to
rush out of her, as she leaned cantilevered against the wall and closed her
eyes for a moment or two. But she could not close her ears. How she wished
she and Hebbie were back home, there on the beach in the forever-warm
nights and the hot days, where skies were blue and you could run for miles
on the sand and through the grass and lie on the grass or beach and hold
each other and feel the very life rushing through sister to sister. As
though they were one.

      And because Trina blinded herself to what she was seeing/what she was
not seeing, she pictured herself and Hebbie on that golden sand, close
together, in raggedy beach clothes, her sister not wearing a shirt,
Hebbie's chest like a boy's, Trina's chest very womanly already and, save
for baths, always clothed. She saw her sister's nipples, there on the beach
a million years and a million miles away--differently she saw them now,
not as just part of her younger sister, not to be even noticed or thought
of in any particular way, but at this particular moment, she somehow wanted
to---touch them--to remind herself what hers had looked like, before they
became breasts.

      NO. But she now saw Melody and Ivory in candlelight that was far too
bright, as it seemed to her scalded eyes. The girls were naked and they
were doing things to each other--forbidden things---things that were
above all else, wrong, things that tingled her in a way, that made her want
to rush to her parlor room, awaken Hebbie and thus get dressed, and flee
this dreadful devil suddenly here place.

      Instead she watched and she heard inviolate words from them, she
heard pantings and sighs and words from a book she had read parts of one
time, then spent it far away from her as though it were filled with
dreadful loathsome spiders crawling from it, and hopping on her, she
actually brushed the invisible spiders away. Books do not always
commune. Books can sometimes slap you and hurt you and make you ashamed of
yourself as though you were the writer, writing these odorous things, o
Mama dear, you were so right about their being good books as well as
bad. Words between covers can shake you to the core.

      So this morning of Saturday, Trina finished the kitchen floor, she
washed and soaped and dried her hands, then went to the dishes to be
cleaned. Her hair was tangled in back and in front with the sweat of her
exertions even though the house was cold and she needed to wear that heavy
coat. The heat came from inside her, and when she managed to pull away like
adhesive to a horrible bad wound that taking place that late night in the
room of Melody, she lay in bed with her sister who slept always deeply and
profoundly. When Hebbie curled to Trina and put her arms and body next to
her, Trina for the very first time pulled away from this usual way the
sisters slept together. Though not far enough, for their single bed was
very narrowsome.

      Trina had gotten out of bed and had looked at the moon for the rest
of the night as she huddled cold in their unheated room, with only the warm
covered stone iron in their bed to keep them warm, though the coal fired
iron lost much of its heat by the middle of the night. She thought the
sisters were so alabaster. While she and Hebbie were the color of
cocoa. She thought Melody and Ivory were cold looking, like the moon, cold
looking like cats without fur to protect them on a wintry night.

      She had looked at the all of them, and unwillingly, unwittingly, had
compared them to she and her own sister. She thought of the preacher back
home of the barrel chest and the huge laugh and the wise eyes and his
sermons of sin and wickedness, of which she and her sister had seen some,
the saloons they passed by, the occasional school fights, a boy trying to
kiss a girl in class before the teacher walked in, the smell of poverty,
the heinousness of some of the people they had stayed with for a small
time, the offal of the grunty dirty work they had to do, and the terrible
horrible squalor, but that was for them, this was not for the oh so
respectable oh so can't be separated from each other for a moment--and
now, thought Trina, I can see very well why.

      She drifted off into day dreams, washing the dishes and finishing,
then on the cleaning and washing the cupboard doors, and in the day dreams,
the preacher was telling her to take clean tongs, put the tongs into the
hot fireplace in the living room and burn out her eyes with them because
she had seen---

      "We know you were looking."

      Trina turned round so swiftly she almost lost her balance and had to
hold onto the sink to regain it.

      It was Melody who thus ran to Trina and put her arms around the
servant-girl who wanted to pull back, to forever pull away, but Melody was
crying and looked up at Trina with doleful doe eyes. "Please don't tell
mama and Father Daddy, please don't. Ivory and I are lovers. We've done
nothing wrong. Please don't."

      "I have chores to do, child," Trina said as she pushed the girl like
a puppy dog from her, and feeling so guilty of doing that to Melody.

      Trina could not stop looking down at Melody who was dressed in a wool
skirt of dark hue and a blouse of glaring white, with rich girls shoes and
stockings. Trina looked down at her and remembered vividly, frantically the
girls naked and--say it-at least think of it--having sex with each
other. God protect me, and God protect Hebbie, she thought, wondering if
the girls were like Varny the Vampire or like Camella plus one. Might these
polite, seemingly God-fearing seemingly normal-girls--attack her and
Hebbie one late night? Might they fall on their very necks and suck out the
blood and make themselves young forever on virgin's blood?

      Then Ivory was standing beside her sister. Trina had been looking at
Melody for so long and for such a disjointed time that she had not seen
Ivory there at all, till the older girl spoke.

      "Be kind, please," Ivory said. "Do not tell. Do not worry.  It's all
right."

      Which was when Trina threw down the washing material and accidentally
kicked water out of the bucket next to her left foot that had sent the
bucket spinning and falling, perplexed and over-laden with so many whirls
of thoughts and conflicts of feelings, and bafflements, and remembering her
sister in bed with her and half naked as they had lain on the beach in the
West Indies, and thus losing all sensibilities about her, she threw up her
hands and simply began to helplessly weep.

      The sisters as if sharing by osmosis, knew not to come closer to her,
knew not to comfort her, for that would make it far worse.  Hebbie was
still asleep. Master was at the bank, working. Missus was still abed. Trina
and her friends, as she had thought of them during this term of employment,
Melody and Ivory never treating them as inferiors, and standing by them
when unruly children at school called Trina and Hebbie names, even Ivory
socking one boy with a pasty ugly smart mouth in the jaw when he would not
let Melody's and Ivory's friends alone, and was it a lead up to this? Was
this seduction? Being used? Lead along? As their mother had told them, and
Trina always having prided herself on reading people, on knowing people
easily, behind their words, behind their smiles, and she had failed, here,
Hebbie and herself too, utterly.

      She ran to her room. Parting with her arms the sisters she ran
between and to the bed where Hebbie was just awakening and stretching her
arms as Trina fell into them, weeping, frightening Hebbie who had never
seen her protector, her level-headed sister in such a state before, for in
the past it had always been the other way around.

      Heebie brushed the hair and the back of Trina as Trina completely
broke down into her, feeling the warm breast, hearing the beating heart of
her sister who suddenly was even more precious to her than before, and she
had always been precious beyond words and real worth.

      "Sister, sister," Hebbie said, holding her little arms round Trina,
"whatever is the matter?"