Chapter 1

Sargasso Sea

And so the hot and dry summer came and went, and soon the first icy winds of November blew bitter as the lush and fragrant days of Fall metamorphosed into a winter’s chill, the soft morning mists giving way to biting winds and a witch’s caress of early snow. And, as Lizzie’s belly fattened and grew with the child inside her, her body, too, began to change and lose its girlish dimensions. And, though she never grew any taller - there were some things that even God couldn’t change, after all - her hips filled out and her thighs fattened, and she began to develop a woman’s gait as she hobbled her big belly around the frost-caressed farm doing her chores.

But, perhaps most miraculously of all, her breasts began to bulge, not with the normal pregnancy swell of milk for the coming infant, but physically alter in character, going, almost overnight it seemed to the barefoot boys who swung in the old magnolia tree behind McIver’s Stores, from girlish mosquito-bite-sized poached egg tits to heavy womanly breasts, her big sugar-pink nipples darkening to a deep cranberry red, the already obvious areolas growing to the size of old British copper pennies. And when Tom Junior was born - she insisted on calling him that, even though Tom the First had vanished in the night and was last spotted crossing the State line - they flowed with such an abundance of sweet milk that mothers came from miles around just to watch him feed.

And that could have been our story right here and now, where Lizzie would bring up the little guy alone until some kindly farmer who needed a bit of warmth around his fireplace would have come a-courting, turning a blind eye to the boy that he’d eventually get used to calling his own. In fact, it was a tale often told around these parts, and it probably would have happened for Lizzie too if were not for Em Ljunggren and her scheming.

And her greed.

And Lizzie was such a trusting child too, so she didn’t seem to hear any warning bells when her aunt told her that they were all going out. Two women alone with a baby, late one night when the magnolias were in bloom and the heat was rising, the night alive with a brain-fever chorus of cicadas as a huge blood moon rose behind the skeletal silhouette of the rusty windmill that had stopped working many years since, but still creaked like an arthritic old woman in the summer breeze.

And the radio was playing plaintive Delta Blues songs as they sped along the deserted road and on past the sleeping town, where even McIver’s was closed and boarded for the evening, McIver and his young wife sitting on their stoop, taking the air before bed as Em drove sedately past, her face stony and her eyes front.

The baby was more or less asleep now, his little head heavy on Lizzie’s breast; though the girl was a trifle uneasy now as the old Ford truck ate up the miles across the vast ocean of gently undulating corn fields, where a hundred homesteads had once stood before the bank took the land and brought in tractors; but she still sat quiet, feeling his warmth against her skin, happy to accept whatever fate was going to throw in her path.

Though she would never have imagined what was about to be in store for her.

*********

The moon was high in the night sky by now, a beneficent heavy-jowled old Wizard of Oz beaming down from amidst his personal Milky Ways of twinkling stars, and they had left the town and any familiar landmarks well behind by now, the battered truck like a tiny boat upon the vast sea of ripe maize that rustled like brittle paper in the hot night air.

An eyeless scarecrow leered at them like a hanged man left bound to a stake for the rooks to peck; a crooked gate momentarily made Em falter at the wheel; and then, suddenly, the truck’s headlights picked out the old wooden sign at the crossroads, its blistered white boards pointing this way and that, directing the unwary traveller to ghost towns which no longer existed, highways that had fallen into disrepair, farmsteads long since ploughed into the rich loamy soil and left without epitaph.

“What we doing way out here, Aunt Em?” Lizzie finally asked as she watched her aunt scanning the dark road ahead, as if trying to detect some trace of human life amidst the phantoms of the night and the vast sea of corn which surrounded them.

But the old lady didn’t reply and continued to peer out into the darkness, and suddenly, as if in answer to her silent beseeching, a pair of yellow headlights flashed on and off just once, and Lizzie could just make out the shrouded form of big black Buick parked in the darkest shadows as her aunt drove across the crossroads and pulled up along side.

***

Em got out of the truck, motioning Lizzie to follow her, the baby slumbering at her breast, and they walked silently over to big sleeping Buick, the night silent save for the swish of wind in the maize fields and the occasional hooting of owls on the distant horizon.

“Why we out here, Aunt Em...?” Lizzie started to ask, but her aunt shushed her and further conversation was halted by the Buick’s rear window sliding silently open.

“Is this the girl?” a woman’s voice asked. An old, tired voice that has seen and heard many things in its time and has lost all trace of emotion. A voice with a deep husky timbre from too many cigarillos and glasses of brandy, perhaps, but still unmistakably female in its tone.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Em replied, making a foolish gesture of obeisance, halfway between a salute and a curtsy.

“Bring her closer.”

Then the spark of a cigarette lighter and the sharp scent of gasoline. A face lights up briefly in the car’s inky blackness. A woman. Perhaps old, perhaps not. Her features powered into monochrome like a death mask; lips painted a red so dark it looks black, or perhaps the hue of dried blood; eyebrows plucked away and painted back on in a bold ballerina stroke; eyes hooded beneath the black widow’s vale that shrouds the top half of her face.

“Pretty,” the voice remarks as the light fades again and the air is filled with the pungent scent of tobacco smoke. “And she’s a milker? It’s sweet?”

“Like an old dairy cow,” Em agrees, scenting money.

“Bring her forward, let me taste,” the voice says, business like, and Lizzie is pushed against the side of the big black car. It has driven far to get here, and, despite the evening chill, its flank is still hot from the dusty road.

“Unfasten your blouse, girl,” the woman says matter-of-factly as her hand cups Lizzie’s big swollen tit, and though Lizzie tries to protest her aunt pushes her against the vehicle as the woman inside slips the girl’s fat breast out and squeezes the nipple softly, immediately feeling moisture and licking her fingers. “Good,” she pronounces, a hint of surprise in her tone.

“Told you,” the aunt agrees. “Told you this was a good ‘un.”

The woman in the car considers. “I’ll give you fifty for her,” she eventually offers, “and the same again for the child. He’s a fair looker.”

Lizzie starts to protest but her aunt silences her, and, peering into the darkness, starts to haggle. But the woman within makes an impatient gesture and there’s a click of a pocket-book being opened and the scent of mint-fresh currency.

“Final offer, Em,” she says with weary patience. “Take or leave. Your choice.”

Em Ljunggren makes an impatient noise and Lizzie thinks with relief that the deal’s off, but then her aunt reaches into the car and snatches the bank notes. “They’re all yours, both of them. Lizzie, get into the car and do as the lady tells you. It seems harsh now, but you’ll thank me for this someday...”

And before the startled girl can make any reply her aunt is in the truck, starting the engine and driving off into the silently whispering ocean of corn without a backward glance.