Chapter 4 – Chapter 4

"I told you we needed to get a field plowed to vegetables and fruit," Mary told Jess over final preparations in the kitchen for dinner. "I grew weary of telling you and the man showed up looking for work. And he obviously can do the work. He has most of the field plowed already. That's more than you've gotten done for us out there in the last three years."

"Careful woman," Jess said, "You forget yourself on who makes decisions around here. The man looks like trouble. I will not—"

"Shhh, he will hear you, Jess. And the man has a name. He is Damon. Damon Smith, he told me."

"How so will he hear me, Wife?"

"He is in the dining room with the children. He has come for dinner."

"Come for dinner? Eating with the family?"

"Yes, and I have given him our old homestead cabin to live in. He's a farmer, not a cowboy, Jess. He will not mix well with the other men. And just you wait, what he produces for us will be far more useful and valuable for the family than any one of your other hired men."

Jess bit his tongue from saying that there was only danger to the family unit from this man's presence here, but he said nothing. To say anything would be to say too much. And she had a point about the man. Putting him in the bunkhouse with the cowboys would be like putting a rooster in the hen coup. And beyond that, in the back of his mind, he was thinking that having him bunking alone in the old homestead cabin had possibilities. But then he shook his head. He couldn't possibly be thinking that. The man had to go.

Dinner was covered with a veneer of comfort and conviviality, but under that was a deep layer of tension—at least for Jess, although he fancied he could feel it in others as well, except, perhaps in the man, Damon, himself and the younger son, John, who obviously saw nothing wrong in another man than his father putting his feet under the family table. James seemed drawn to the man and asked him all sorts of questions about farming. It didn't help the level of tension in the room that James' interest in farming rather than cattle ranching had a history of battle lines drawn in the family—not just between father and son but also between husband and wife, as Mary supported James in his interest.

Perhaps, Jess thought, this was the source of the tension underneath the surface of the conversation at the dinner table. Perhaps, though, it was because he had told Mary that this would be the last dinner the man took in the family dining room.

He brought the subject up near the end of the meal, saying, "We asked you to dinner as a welcome, Damon. But henceforth you will be eating in your cabin—unless you wish to eat with the other men in the bunkhouse dining room. Your meals will be brought to you unless you have said you wanted to fix a meal for yourself."

Damon took the command well—in fact he was taking the subservient roll of a field hand well at the dining room table. This didn't lessen the tension inside Jess, though, and he only hoped that when he spoke he didn't reveal how nervous—and aroused he was.

Late that evening Jess closed the Bible on his lap and spoke up. "I forgot to put out the feed for the cattle in the north pasture, Mary. I will go do that now. I may be late in getting it done. You need not sit up for me."

She looked up from the stitching she was doing, looked over her glasses at her husband, and smiled. She said nothing—not even about the tremble Jess seemed to have acquired in his hands on the just-completed cattle drive.

The path to the north pasture passed by the old homestead cabin, which was beyond the line of sight from either the ranch house or the bunk house.

A light was glowing in the cabin, and Damon was standing in the doorway, naked to the waist, An arm flung up the frame of the doorway, and his opposite hip thrust out at a provocative angle. A smile was fixed on his face as he watched Jess approach on his way to the field. He had a stalk of wheat in his mouth that he was chewing on, all casual like.

It wasn't long at all before Jess was standing at the side of the bunk beds in the cabin's second room, grasping the side slat of the upper bunk, his buttocks rearing out into the room behind him, and his feet planted firmly on the worn wood floor. Damon stood behind him, an arm wrapped around Jess' waist with a broad hand palming Jess' naked belly and the other hand around Jess' throat, arching the older man's chest back, as Damon's cock pounded hard and deep up into Jess' channel.

Jess was whimpering and moaning. Damon was laughing. He was still chewing on the stalk of wheat.