Heat

Chapter 36

They went to a Christmas morning service at the church and watched a children’s nativity pageant in which Carey took part. Coldwater’s sermon was mercifully brief and free of his usual cant. When the service ended, Jesse and Jenny approached the pastor.

“Good morning, Jesse, Jenny,” Coldwater boomed. “Merry Christmas to you.”

“And to you, Pastor,” Jesse said.

“I thought Carey looked very pretty as the Virgin Mary,” Coldwater said.

“Thank you, Pastor,” Jenny replied.

“Pastor,” Jesse said, “Jenny and I have decided to be married, and we would be honored if you would perform the ceremony.”

“Well, congratulations to you both,” Coldwater said, beaming at them. “When would you like to hold the service?”

“We thought Sunday, just after the regular service. We’d like to keep it as small and quiet as possible,” Jenny replied.

“I’ll put it on my calendar. Will you have a honeymoon?”

“We hadn’t gotten that far,” Jesse said. “I’ll have to talk to Herman Muller about getting some time off when he can spare me.”

“Good, good. I’ll see you on Sunday.” Coldwater wheeled and walked out of the auditorium.

Jenny was unusually quiet on the way home and during Christmas dinner. It was not until Carey had gone out to show her friends her presents that Jesse spoke up.

“Jenny, what’s the matter? And what were you talking about last night, about keeping things from me?”

She beckoned for him to follow her, then led him out of the house. He found an old broom and brushed the snow off a picnic table, then they sat down. It was cold and clear, and they wouldn’t be comfortable for long.

“First of all,” she began, “I want you to know that I wanted to get pregnant; I did it deliberately. Does that make you feel trapped?”

“No, it doesn’t. I think that if you’d asked me I’d have wanted to wait for a while, but that doesn’t matter now. I learned last night that you haven’t been taking the birth-control pills, and I thought about it a lot, and I decided it was all right with me. I’m curious, though; why did you do it that way?”

“Because that’s what Jack Gene wanted.”

Jesse stopped breathing for a moment. “How’s that again?”

“Pat Casey came to see me and said that Jack Gene wanted me to get pregnant. You’re new in the community, and I think they wanted to test you, see how you’d react.”

“And you were willing to do that for them?”

“No, not exactly; I love you, and I wanted a child; but I wasn’t in a position to say no to them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you went to the courthouse to get Carey’s birth certificate, did you look at it?”

“Yes.”

“So you saw that there was no father listed?”

“Yes, but it didn’t matter to me.”

“I sent you to get the certificate so you’d see that and ask me about it. I was surprised when you didn’t.”

“Like I said, it doesn’t matter.”

“Do you understand why there’s no father listed?”

“I assume you weren’t married.”

“I was married, in a way.”

“Then why wasn’t the father’s name on the certificate?”

“Because I can’t be certain who the father was.”

“I’m sorry, but this is very confusing. Why don’t you just tell me the whole story?”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you from the beginning. I was a little girl when Jack Gene Coldwater came to St. Clair, along with Pat Casey and Kurt Ruger. My parents became his followers, and they lived by his every word. When I was fifteen our house caught on fire. My bedroom was downstairs, and I managed to get out, but they didn’t.”

“I’m sorry, I never knew.”

“I was alone in the world, and Jack Gene took me in.” She paused and a tear ran down her cheek. “He married me.”

Jesse gulped. “At fifteen?”

“Yes. It wasn’t a real marriage in the usual sense. He performed a kind of ceremony, and I became one of them.”

“One of who?”

“One of his wives.”

“How many did he have?”

“I was one of five at the time. There’ve been more at times and less at others.”

“And Jack Gene fathered Carey?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure.”

Jesse was becoming very uncomfortable with this conversation, but if she was willing to talk about this, he was willing to listen. “Tell me why you’re not sure.”

“I didn’t get pregnant at first. I tried not to. And after a while, Jack Gene began to get impatient. He wanted children, a lot of them, and he hadn’t much use for those of us who couldn’t give them to him. We were separated from the other women, those of us who couldn’t get pregnant, or who had girls. Jack Gene wanted boys, you see.”

Jesse was at a loss for words.

“So he put us aside — there were three other women — and sometimes, if he got bored with the wives who were living in his house, he would come to visit us. And he would bring Pat Casey and Kurt Ruger.”

In spite of the cold Jesse began to sweat inside his coat.

“And it was during one of these... visits... that I got pregnant.”

“All three of them?” Jesse asked quietly.

“All three,” she said, and the tears flooded down her face.

He reached for her, but she pushed him away.

“I want to finish this,” she said. “When Carey turned out to be a girl, they put me out of the inner circle, which was all right with me. I was nineteen; they put me in this house and gave me an allowance. I wanted to leave town, but Jack Gene wouldn’t allow it. They made me send Carey to that awful school, and if I had tried to teach her different from what they did, she was trained to tell them. They would have taken her from me and... I don’t know what would have happened to me. Sometimes people just disappear from this town. I had no money, no education, no skills. There were no relatives I could go to, nobody at all. The only place I existed was here, and it was at the whim of Jack Gene. He seemed to forget about me for a long time, but when you came to town I heard from Pat Casey.”

“He told you to take me in?”

“Yes.”

“He told you to get into my bed?”

“Yes.”

Jesse laughed ruefully. “And I thought it was because I was so irresistible.”

“I’m sorry; it’s so difficult to tell you all this, but I felt I had to.”

“Why?”

“Because I fell in love with you that first night, and I don’t want us to go any farther on false pretenses. If, having heard all this, you want to forget about marriage, I’ll understand.”

He took her shoulders and turned her toward him. “I’m glad you told me all this,” he said. “None of it matters, but I’m glad you had the courage to tell me.”

“You don’t mind about... my background?”

“I’d change it if I could, but I want you the way you are, no matter how you got to be you.”

She snuggled her face into the hollow of his neck. “Oh, I love you so much, Jesse. Even more, now, I think.” Then she jerked away from him. “We can’t stay here after what I’ve told you,” she said.

“I don’t want to stay here, but I have to for a while. Can you stand it a little longer?”

“How much longer?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I have to get Carey away from that school and these people. She’s Jack Gene’s child, I’m as sure of that as I can be, and he’ll want to keep an eye on her. He’ll use her as he used me; marry her off to one of his cronies, or just put her into a house of women, as he did with me. I’ll kill him before I’ll let that happen.”

“I understand, and I want to take you away from here, but I can’t just yet.”

“Why not? What is there to keep us here?”

“Did Pat Casey ask you to pass on information about me?”

“Yes, he calls once or twice a week. I brought you out in the yard, because I thought he might have some way of listening to us in the house.”

“What have you told him?”

“Whatever he wanted to know. I don’t know anything about you that he would think derogatory. If I had, I wouldn’t have told him.”

“I’ll take you away from here, Jenny, you and Carey, I promise; but I have to stay on for a while, and I can’t tell you why. I don’t want to put you in the position of knowing about me and having to lie to Casey.”

“What I don’t know, I can’t tell him, is that it?”

“It’s for your protection. I’d trust you with my life, but you and Carey are safer knowing only what you know now, that I love you, and I’ll take care of you both.”

“I guess that’s good enough for me,” she said.

“Good. You have to go on living your life as usual, for a while. You can’t say anything at all to Carey. We have to let Coldwater do this ceremony; I’ll give you a better one later. And one of these days I’ll say to you, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and—”

“And I’ll go with you the second you say it,” she said, and put her arms around him.

Jesse’s mind was elsewhere. He was having fantasies of castrating Jack Gene Coldwater.