Tina Mcelroy Ansa (39 page)

The first night they made love in the barn, when Lena scooted down to the end of the big striped blanket and began playing with the tip of his penis with the tip of her tongue, Herman had looked down and laughed in genuine surprise and amusement.

“Well, well, well,” is what he said as she took his hard brown penis into her mouth, picking a few pieces of straw off first.

“Shucks, Lena, you do
that?!”

He threw his big head back and chuckled, then moaned in such delight that it spooked the horses beneath them.

“Lena,” he said between moaning and sucking his teeth and clutching her braids, “you som’um.”

Lena had a generous-sized mouth and Herman’s engorged penis, he noticed, fit neatly into her mouth.

“Your pleasure is my pleasure, Herman,” Lena said as she let his penis slip from her lips.

Later, as they lay sweaty and sated in the straw, he told her, “Lena, you couldn’t even hardly
pay a ’oman
in Middle Georgia to suck yo’ dick when I was ’live, and here you are, the one woman in all creation I woulda dreamed of doin’ it. And you lookin’ forward to it. Lena, you som’um, baby!”

“Do me again, Lena, baby,” he had leaned down to her ear and whispered. She reached up and gently pulled his neck and shoulders down for one long embrace and a luscious kiss. Then, feeling as strong as a horse herself, she went back to sucking his dick.

When she and Herman made love there in the stables the first time, Baby, Goldie and Keba below them whinnying from time to time in their freshly cleaned wooden stalls, he teased her by becoming what he was to her at the beginning—a puff of wind.

The first time he came that night, lying beneath her naked body in the fresh-smelling straw, he turned from Herman the man to Herman a swirl of wind that wound up her legs, around her hips, over her clitoris, up into her like a sweet cramp, through her head and enfolded her skull before exploding in a pouf of wind that lifted Lena and all the straw in the place into the air. Lena settled back down in a shower of straw needles and flakes of Herman that landed like manna from heaven and settled on the straw like sweet hoarfrost. Lena just lay back and yelled, “Whoooooaaa,” because she felt if she didn’t her head might burst open.

As Lena lay there moaning and breathing hard, Herman collected himself back into naked human form, threw his long legs astride her naked hips and slipped quickly—more quickly than he had meant—inside her. As he sucked his breath in and out with each stroke he slid
into Lena, he whistled a little impromptu tune that made Lena raise her hips in welcome greeting to each one of his sweet thrusts. As they both came, heaving and bucking against each other, each searching for the other’s mouth, they screamed in such release and joy that it really did upset the horses.

It took a while for every living creature and the one dead one in the stables to settle down. And when they did, Lena and Herman lay back in the sweet straw and spent the night sticky and sweaty all curled up together in the hay.

“Oh, Herman,” she said as she awoke and stretched the next morning, “I’m so sore. I feel like I been thrown by a horse.”

“I always been wild, Lena,” Herman said by way of apology. Then, he stretched her out in the hay and massaged all her sore parts.

Over the entrance to Lena’s back door was nailed a horseshoe that the first horse she owned, the original Baby, had thrown when she was brought onto the property. The horseshoe had gone flying through the air, missing Lena’s right temple by a hair. She had heard it whizzing by her ear. After that, she saw the horseshoe as part of the good luck of the place. Now, Herman seemed a major part of that luck.

He fell right in with the routine of the place with the horses. It had been his idea, in fact, to get Keba impregnated now that he was there to help out.

“Herman, isn’t it too risky with Keba way out here? Suppose we can’t get in touch with the vet?” Lena had asked anxiously. She hadn’t expected to be this nervous, but she had never been through a birth of any kind.

“Just ’bout ten months. Le’s see. It’s May, no June when she gets wid foal. She’ll gi’ birth sometime in April. That’s just ’bout right,” he said. He could see Lena was still unsure.

“It’ll be okay, baby. I seen plen’y horses foal. And everythang was just fine. I ain’t gon’ let nothin’ happen if I can he’p it.”

“Oh, Herman, I’m worried.”

“Have some faith, Lena, baby,” Herman said as close to sternly as he ever was with her.

Now, in late summer, Keba was heavy with foal, nearly halfway through her term, moving more slowly but enjoying the careful friskiness. Lena and Herman loved to curry her after she had been out in the fields and to pat her tight rounding belly.

Waking in the night to go to the bathroom, Lena often found that Herman had slipped out of bed and gone down to the stables to check on the expectant mother. His caring for life was so deep, it was palpable.

Lena was surprised that the horses let Herman anywhere near them, let alone on their backs. At least two of their backs. Baby still allowed no one to ride her but Lena. Not even Rick Little, the stable manager, could safely climb on Baby’s back. Baby was so spoiled. Herman said so.

“Lena, ya’ll done spoiled this hoss so,” he declared as he ran the horses around the exercise rink in the corral.

Equestrian organizations all over the South had tried to rope Lena into putting her beautiful estate with the heated stables on their list of party sites during the riding season. Lena just laughed at the overtures and invitations. She didn’t have time to spend with people she liked and loved, let alone with strangers.

“I love to ride,” she explained to Sister when she gave her friend her first riding lesson. “But I do believe there is something to what they say about horses. Shoot, for me, the horses are better than a whole pack of guard dogs or a bodyguard.” The main reason Lena had been drawn to owning horses was their legendary sensitivity to the presence of ghosts.

And it had seemed to work.

“Shoot, it ain’t the living I got to be worried about,” Lena said, bringing up a subject that she had forbade Sister to discuss any further, “it’s the dead.”

But if horses were true harbingers of spirits nearby, kicking their stalls and neighing wildly, one would never know it by the way those animals seemed to love Herman.

He sat a horse beautifully. Relaxed but regal; in control as Lena
imagined Nelson Mandela would ride. And the animals seemed to sense his comfort and look forward to him climbing on their backs.

Sometimes, she and Herman even rode bareback, alone and together. Herman would take Lena’s forearm and pull her up onto Goldie’s back with him. He’d lift her lightly as if she didn’t weigh an ounce. Then, he’d scoot back a bit and settle her in the space over his crotch and pull her back to his chest as Goldie, he and Lena trotted off, her body rolling rhythmically against his with each step the horse took. Riding her land that way, sometimes for miles to the end of her property, in the hollow of her man’s body left the front and inseam of her riding britches wet and sticky. Herman would sometimes stop, lift Lena under her arms and turn her around on Goldie’s back to face him. Then, they would ride off, her face to his face, her breast to his chest, her matchbox to his dick.

Lena had wanted to buy Herman his own saddle, but he just waved the suggestion away with a quick wide-open gesture toward all the beautiful hand-tooled leather saddles on the walls of the stables.

“Let’s use some a’ this tack we got,” he told her as he took his pick.

“Race ya to the bend in the river,” Herman would yell suddenly as they rode, trying to catch Lena unprepared. Then, he would take off racing for the water’s edge.

Herman had no interest in automobiles. Lena had asked him a number of times when they were out driving if he wanted to take the wheel, but he declined each time. He had never driven and had no desire to.

Whenever Lena suggested, “Come ride to town with me, Herman,” he usually shook his head and pointed toward the stable, then down at his own feet.

“Those hosses out there and these ’hosses’ right here all I need,” he would tell Lena in all seriousness. After a while, she would suggest car trips just to hear him say it. “These hosses takes me to and fro, Lena, baby. They takes me to and fro.”

They both loved caring for the horses, truly caring for them.

As Lena curried the horses, lovingly brushing their silky heavy horsehair free of briars and cucabugs and ticks and clumps of red dirt, she’d think of her own times of being “curried”:

Tender-headed Lena sitting between her mama’s legs getting her thick heavy coarse hair combed, tears standing in her eyes and her mother’s.

Sister scratching out her head and giving her braids all over her head one night while they looked through old photographs.

Falling under the hypnotic spell of Mamie, the magical assistant at Delores’ Beauty Parlor, with her head thrown back into the steel shampoo sink.

When Lena got to Baby’s strong thin legs, she stopped and smiled. “Thinking ’bout yo’ mama?” Herman asked from the stall next to her.

Herman had a real knack for being able to slip into Lena’s head at those times she wouldn’t feel violated by the intrusion. But then, Herman had a knack for a lot of things.

In life, he had acquired considerable skill as a blacksmith. On hot days in summer, as he struck and struck and struck the white-hot iron anvil shooting red and golden sparks all around him and into the air at the stable doors, Lena would watch mesmerized.

She had gotten Red, one of her boys from The Place, to scour the countryside to find an authentic smithy’s black leather apron for Herman. It was old but still pliable. Lena washed it and cleaned it with love and saddle soap from the supply room. Then, she rubbed it and rubbed it with mink oil until it crushed and recoiled under her hand like her thigh-high leather boots.

While Herman worked over the pounding hot anvil, he wore the apron without a shirt, just the way he knew Lena wanted him to. The sweat beading up on his taut smooth brown skin ran down his chest in rivulets. Lena sat on easy-chair-sized bales of hay and watched Herman work for hours, forgetting any responsibilities she had except to Herman and herself.

The first couple of times she saw him that way, she resisted the
temptation to go over to him and touch the tip of her tongue to one drop on his sweaty chest. She wanted to go over and lick his chest and suck his licorice nipples. One day, Herman, who knew what she was thinking all the time, stopped his pounding and called her over to his arms. He enjoyed fulfilling her fantasies.

Shoeing horses seemed to take all day, and Lena was ready for a break long before Herman stopped swinging his hammer onto the anvil. Lying across the bales of fresh hay, Lena began to fall asleep to the rhythm of the hammer.

But she came awake when Herman took Baby’s last hoof down from the hoof stand and turned to her.

“Hey, Lena, baby, you got a silk stockin’?” he asked with a smile playing up under his mustache.

“A silk stocking?” Lena was more than intrigued. She could only imagine what Herman’s nineteenth-century mind was thinking of doing with one silk stocking and her in the barn. Now, Lena was happy and grateful that none of her plans to fuck other men in the barn had ever come to fruition.

Talking to Herman as they cleaned the barn, lying with him in the sweet hay, she felt like his woman from his time. She felt like the woman in the play
The Drinking Gourd
making secret, intimate plans among the hay of a barn, looking to the night sky, plotting their escape. The only difference: She and Herman would be looking south, not north.

“Uh-huh, yeah. A silk stockin’,” he answered, shaking his big handsome head free of sweat as he untied the red cotton kerchief from around his throat to mop his brow. Then, he stood back in his legs like a sexy country woman and stretched.

“If anybody in this here town got a silk stockin’, Lena McPherson, it oughta be you!” Herman laughed, pleased with himself for knowing his woman.

“Yeah, I got a silk stocking. Got more than one, as a matter of fact,” Lena said. The idea of the silk stocking and the barn was making
her hotter and hotter. She felt as if she weren’t wearing panties. “What shade stocking you want?”

“Yo’ choice, Miss Lena.” Herman loved playing with his woman so much he couldn’t resist the temptation she always offered.

Back in early summer, when Lena was still going to work three or four days a week, she would walk through the bedroom dressed in thigh-high sheer hose with black lace garters holding them up, a soft satin champagne bra with one wide satin strap hanging down on the vaccination mark on her arm, and champagne-colored silk bikini panties trimmed in the same black lace of the garters barely covering what Herman delighted in calling her “matchbox.” She was wearing gold-toned mules and holding her braids up by the back of her hands, checking the gold clasp of her forty-five-inch-long string of pearls from Tiffany looped around her throat twice and hanging to her breasts. Herman couldn’t stop himself from chuckling and shaking his head in admiration.

“Damn, Lena, baby, you look like the very Whore a’ Babylon in that outfit.” He stroked his mustache and rubbed his hairy jaw in the kind of appreciation that made Lena strut through the house.

Now Herman knew what Miss Cora, the pretty little brown woman who had taught him to read from a stolen copy of the Bible more than a hundred years before, was trying to say about the kind of woman who could make a man commit murder. Herman would do anything for this woman, Lena, standing half-naked in front of him. This woman who swathed herself in the most luxurious fabrics and materials Herman had ever seen and wanted to pamper the rest of the world in the same way. She wanted to swaddle the world in bolts and bolts of satin, silk, fine linen, cotton and cashmere. To make it comfortable so everybody could get along, get along with their lives in grace, not scuffling and struggling along. He knew it was Lena’s dream. He had seen her dreams, had tried at one time to embed himself in her dreams before he became real to her. He knew her inner thoughts, even the ones hidden from herself.