The Ruddy Rose
By Dee Wolfe

“…And then they tied a true lovers’ knot,
The red rose ‘round the briar.”

Nephi Gass wished to be a farmer. The summer of his eighteenth year saw sunrise after sunrise through silver clouds in patches looming above the willow damp of Shepherd’s Canyon, glories coming through them like Jove’s own fingers touching the face of His beloved Earth. It would have been a nearly perfect summer had his father’s death not left Nephi with the orchards to care for, and the vines, the chickens to feed, the animal corn to harvest in the north field to feed the chickens through the winter. Nephi and his mother and his sisters, yes and his helpful cousins carried on without old Gus to guide them. He had died of lung cancer after Halloween before Nephi’s fifteenth birthday; and it had been a hollow Christmas for the family, all of them hearkening to the past and Nephi’s mother in tears remembering her own beloved.

Still, the cherries and peaches had to be pruned and, with the harvest, picked and carted off to market in bushel baskets or crates. There was corn to be planted no matter what else, and chickens to be fed every day, and eggs to be gathered every day. Three years went by as Nephi grew enthusiastic for farming and thought, by Spring’s end, having little regard for schooling, reading a favorite book while he navigated the old family tractor, he could be a farmer for the rest of his life, and saw himself in coveralls mucking boots and straw hat, chewing a shaft of wheat.

He was slight in those days, not much to see, brown hair bleached as white-yellow as corn silk as he went out into the yard to work one of twenty acres. High school lay behind him forever in the squalid dust of Davis High halls and Nephi had only the ripening of fruit to worry about, and not one thing else. He had found in the tool shed his dad’s old pipe and a pouch of fragrant tobacco. He lit up as he had seen Gus do in the past and liked to smoke in the east orchard on the hillside near the property line where his mother couldn’t see him.

“Mom,” he had told her, “I can handle the farm well enough. We can truck the lot of this to market and move the rest to the bishop’s storehouse. It isn’t anything I can’t handle.”

Myrna replied “I can’t bear to see you carrying this load by yourself. You’re still a young man and I won’t tie you to this farm if I can help it.” As she spoke she fingered the long tail tied behind her graying hair, looking off to a mythical place where Gus still stood holding her world on his shoulders.

She invited all the greater Gass family, spread from Weber through Davis and on into the farthest reaches of Salt Lake County to come pick fruit and help sell it, and for this she would pay them in harvest. As well she invited her own side of the family, the Roses, though they were somewhat fewer in number. As a result her brother and his family of ingrates and ne’er-do-wells arrived in a station wagon, and Nephi saw his cousin, Ray again. The pretty blonde and ruddy boy stepped from the backseat with his curls on his shoulders and a killer’s grin on his face. They were the same age though Ray was a little bigger, and a bully and liked to bully littler boys. Nephi could only imagine his fate had his mother not intervened in a fight were Ray had held him pile-driven into the front lawn, his neck twisted out of sorts and his head to one side gasping red. A few years had passed, and now Ray had learned new games like how to steal cigarettes and ‘fan a fag’ so authorities didn’t notice, and how to get out of doing any work at all.

Nephi wished for his cousin to see him in his element, the master of the property, a wizened farmer used to toil and rough hands, and a farmer’s intuitive sense of seasons and the play of light on leaves of trees. He wished for Ray to see that he, Nephi had conquered the world’s expectations of his place and skills, stalwart standing in his straw hat taking the measure of a peach. He wanted Ray to see him smoking a pipe.

After Ray had climbed out of the wagon and laughed a little at Nephi he reached an arm back in and brought forth a dark haired slender girl all legs as brazen as sunlight. No mere daintiness here but grace, a dancer’s easy grace, a ballerina’s lightest movements. She got out and smiled at Ray and fanned the back of her shorts as if brushing something away. She wore a white blouse that opened in front and followed her cleavage and tied together with a string at the breasts. The sleeves were long and billowy and cuffed. She looked wonderful that way. Her feet were bare but Ray crawled into the car to retrieve her thongs.

Nephi knew her at once, remembered from summers ago, Renee Walker, whose parents were pure trash but friends to the Roses. Ray walked her past Nephi, neither saying a word, holding her arm and saluting him with a terse fling and went on into the house. Nephi turned and watched them, the girl’s round rear rolling like an ocean calm on a sunny day. He followed them in and stood in a corner of the kitchen leaning on a counter as Myrna peeled potatoes and the coffee pot percolated merrily. He heard Ray answer her query: “You remember Renee Walker. She’d like to take home a bushel of peaches for her folks and says she’ll work for them.”

“I remember you, Renee. Sounds fine,” Myrna smiled broadly, not considering in the least where Renee should sleep. Nephi smelled trouble and the same anxieties that nibbled at him in the weeks before his father died, when school was too difficult a thing to bother with, when there were only the paperbacks to hide in, moodily immersed as he was in UFO lore, ghosts, and prophecies of end times. But the one end time affecting his heart to a sinking terror, he could not face at all until it came upon him. Convinced by that event that he had seen it all and could face anything, Nephi moved unprepared for this day. It took no time at all to realize that he had suddenly fallen in love with Renee, and hated his cousin for her all the more, and did so in the time it took to peel potatoes.

Nephi poured himself a cup of coffee and stomped outside to fire up the tractor, something he convinced himself his cousin could not do. He turned the crank around and around although it would not start. He saw her floating before his inner vision like a gust of pollen through orchard leaves, her smooth, oval face and brown eyes large and soulful, gazing at him not quite blankly but expectantly. Ray kept stepping to her to laugh and take her away and, when Nephi looked up, there they were standing before him, her thighs so close and scented with the primordial fragrance of nakedness, standing close together, her shorts so short he could see a wedge of light through her closed thighs.

“Won’t it start?” asked the grinning Ray as he turned to flip the switch below the tachometer. “Now try it.”

Nephi swore under his breath and tried the crank again. This time the tractor roared to rumbling and Ray said “you have to turn it on first.” He made a face at Renee who could not help a little giggle. They turned as one away from the tractor and left Nephi to fume alone as he climbed in the seat, and no one to see him as an angry clown without makeup.

For the past several years since his father had died, Nephi had left the management of the orchards to Uncle Denny Rose. He it was first brought the Walkers in to help pick the fruit, and they had brought along young Renee, a skinny twerp of thirteen forever at the mercy of her tormentor, Ray. They came in the month of March to see to the pruning and in April and May to irrigate the trees. Finally they showed up on golden warm mornings in June to pick the bundled fruit of the cherries, and the kids made a go of it, the three of them into mischief whenever they could get away and run under the trees or wade in the wide ditch on the firebreak along Shepherd’s Canyon. Ray had never liked Nephi, and bullied the slighter boy until Denny took the strap to him, making him yelp for mercy in front of Renee. Nephi pitied his cousin for the yowling and howling and made a secret pact one day when Denny came into the tool shed carrying his strap, and nearly caught Nephi smoking his late father’s pipe. At that moment Nephi realized that Ray had been hiding behind the bench and crouched against the wall. Denny stepped out to stand at the mouth of the shed surveying likely hiding places. Just then Ray popped his head up surprising Nephi, and put a finger to his lips—“please…” Nephi nodded and held up the pipe. They were conspirators now, and waited in silence while old Denny moved away from the tool shed. Something was up, the old cuss knew it but couldn’t sniff it out.

Suddenly he came back into the shed. “Sure you ain’t seen my boy?”
Nephi dropped the pipe as Ray ducked down, and picked up a hammer pretending to tap something before him, nothing there, of course, but held it up a little above the bench.

“No, Uncle,” he said.

“If you do,” Denny sneered, “give him something to do,” and hung the strap on the nail of the outside wall of the shed. He sauntered off, something terrible on his mind.

“Coast is clear,” Nephi said, and his cousin popped up.

“When’d you take up smoking?” Ray asked.

“When’d YOU?” Nephi asked as his cousin lit a cigarette.
Ray drew a deep pull and let out smoke as lazily as it would drift. “Thanks for that, man,” he said.

Nephi thought of those years behind him now as he drove the tractor to the tool shed and hooked a two-wheeled trailer to it. While the tractor grumbled loudly, he filled the trailer with cherry crates and little green baskets to fill a lug of cherries. Making a fair stack and laying two long wooden ladders across the trailer he climbed back in the tractor and started for the orchard where the big black-red cherries dangled like small hearts engorged with blood. Up in the midst of deep shade of cherries he parked and stopped the engine. Here were galvanized buckets with hooks on the handles hanging from the crotches of trees. Nephi took one and chose a likely tree and began to pick. All the cherries gone from the bottom limb he climbed into the tree and picked more, filling the bucket as he did so until it swayed heavily from a branch beside him, and then he lost himself in dreaming and ate several cherries near him. He could not say how long he sat musing.

He thought of Ray and Renee and himself running in the orchards far into the night, playing hide and seek and telling ghost stories to the trickle of water where the ditch widened into a small pond. One night Ray took his clothes off in front of her and she stared brazenly at him with a twist of her lip. “Come on. Let’s go skinny dipping,” and finally coaxed her down to her panties as she got into the water and complained how cold it was. After a moment Nephi got in too, and they sat staring at one another from a distance until Nephi heard his mother calling and scrambled out to fight his way into his grubby clothes. He ran to meet his mother and made up some story that would suit her.

Mostly Ray and Renee were happy to throw pebbles at each other and chase each other wildly through the starlit avenues between the trees, hiding behind the trunks and popping out with a boo; and Nephi wished she would throw a pebble at him. Then they played a kissing game in the tall wild wheat and Nephi felt her cool wet lips on his cheek, her tongue licking the iron taste of his skin as he closed his eyes and enjoyed a little thrill in his groin. Ray laughed and said “you’re full it, baby!”

In the near absolute darkness of the orchard they walked together just ahead of Nephi as he slowed down lost in his own reverie. He could see their silhouettes holding hands to the far end, her legs pressed to Ray’s, their heads coming together for a long kiss. His heart leapt to see it. She wore the tiniest cut-off jeans in those days, and Ray’s bold hand massaged the mound of her maiden-hood while she leaned into him kissing him hard.

Her bare brown thighs kept coming to Nephi’s mind just now, lying back in a high branch of the cherries and he felt the swollen member standing against his coveralls and wished for her, wished to part her legs and find the joy between, her face smiling and urging him in. To his surprise he ejaculated in a spasm of twisting and crimson embarrassment. He panted. He found his composure and checked for telltale signs, and then lay back and fell briefly asleep.

He awoke to voices arising from below and opened his eyes to see a robin not two feet away tilting its little head in scrutiny as if a party to his weakness and there to mock him with a merry song. He blinked and started to and the robin flew off in a flurry and Nephi turned to the west toward Antelope Island to see them coming up, his mother and sister, his mother’s brother and sister, and Ray with his Renee bringing up the rear. “Where are the buckets?” he heard Ray yell out and then “here they are.”

“Where’s Nephi?” his uncle asked.

“Check your book of Mormon, Pop,” said Ray and chortled derisively. The old man stopped in the dust and turned to give him a cold look. It was enough to shut Ray up for a moment but Nephi answered from his tree “I’m up here.”

“With the seagulls,” said Ray.

“Try robins,” said Nephi. “They like the cherries.”

“So do I,” said Ray who brazenly winked at Renee. She rolled her eyes at him and made a look of unconvincing disgust. Nephi saw it all from his secret spot in the shady tree, and felt a tinge of hope that she might drop his cousin and fall for him. He dared not think that she had eyes for Ray alone.

Buckets were handed out and Nephi descended his tree, laden with the heavy bucket, the spent juices of desire squishing in his briefs. He hauled the bucket to the trailer and poured out the cherries, all attached to their stems, filling a lug a third of the way. He turned to announce that he needed to go back to the house for a moment.

“Everything okay, Son?” His mother asked, never entirely sure that her baby boy wasn’t dying from some disease and wasn’t telling her.

“Bathroom,” he lied and fumbled back down the sloping orchard toward the back door. Once inside he drew the drapes on his bedroom window and got out of his coveralls, went to the bathroom to wet a rag and brought it back to his room, removing his shorts from where he sat on the edge of the bed as a line of semen slimed slowly down his leg. He wiped it up, the little coagulated nubs like bits of curd piled up around his predicament and all smelling of wet paper. He felt the tiredness in his legs and pulled on a pair of fresh underwear. He lay back on his bed and dozed in an overwhelming sense of defeat and guilt. Renee, he thought to himself, I don’t care, and indeed he didn’t as sleep took him and a half an hour passed away.

A lifetime had passed, a hundred thousand years perhaps and Nephi awoke into a quiet afternoon of blowing wind in the rafters of the old farmhouse, a ghostly sound that filled his dreams with wind-bent structures and faces slanting away in agendas alien to him. Voices were stopped and garbled in such a swound and Nephi always awoke a little mystified by ambiguities, as he did now seeing his father’s face of desperate reassurance as the old man called to him.

Nephi dressed himself once more in musty-smelling coveralls and pulled on his mucking boots. Straw hat upon his head he went out the back door and back up the slope to his mother who asked “good grief, where’ve you been?”

“How long’s it been?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Fall asleep in there, Neeph?” his cousin asked.

Wearily, Nephi took his bucket up again and climbed halfway the height of a long wooden ladder, the type like a three legged stool supported by a single post set in the ground. It was wobbly at best and Nephi feared precarious heights, and hated the cursed thing and the far places it took him into the highest branches of a fruit tree, gingerly balanced on the next to last step, swaying back to see above him while holding to a mere twig for balance, knees hugging wood as he reached past the last bundle of leaves for the last cheery handful of cherries.

So, the afternoon curved on into sunset, and Nephi and his uncle Denny called it a day and Nephi hauled the day’s harvest down to the highway in his dad’s old pickup truck, its dusty upholstery smell that soothed him back to better days he knew when the Little Dippers played ‘Forever’ on the old truck radio and rain swept the windshield in rhythm, and the world grogged on asleep and content. The Philco still played a thousand rock stations, and Nephi heard a recent not-so-oldy, oddly appropriate as he punched the dial: ‘just walk away, Renee, you won’t see me follow you back home…’

Oh, yeah, thanks for the memories. They wandered hapless hand in hand to nursing homes to be tube fed unto demolition, verily.

Later, coming back in the truck with its bed emptied, Nephi saw the two Rs sitting at the edge of the property gazing cross-legged upon the highway. He pulled onto the dusty drive and stopped and rolled down the window. “What are you up to?”
Ray said “Cherry Red mustang.”

“What? Where?” He grimaced through dust cloud.

“Right here on the highway, movin’ slow, not a care in the world, the most beautiful little car you ever saw in your life, and it’ll never be prettier than it was passing by me. I saw it and I drank it up, and you missed the boat, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t see it, said Nephi and put the truck in the lowest gear, grinding slowly along up the bumpy driveway. But just then he heard Renee whine “don’t—“ as she came up in a huff and yanked the other door open and slid in beside him.

“What’s going on?”

“Just drive,” she said, glowering through the windshield, her arms crossed before her like a put out Nefertiti all out of patience. Ray came running up and dove into the bed and came up behind the back window, slapping at the glass and making faces at Renee, all of which she ignored. She ignored Nephi, too, ignored everyone and all of herself, her slender graceful self with the perfect hair about her shoulders. How he wanted her.

He droved as slowly as he dared to, glancing side-wise at her trying to peruse the closed blank book beside him, studying the nipples rising against her blouse so desirably he wanted to reach across and pinch the little things but lost courage and held desperately to the wheel. He felt he had a chance, somehow, that he could play the gentleman and let her see a how a polite, kind man treats a lady and then she would know the difference. He would take her right out from under Ray and he would love her and she would be grateful, all this, while Ray slapped at the windshield and called her name out as if it were an obscenity, and Nephi knew it was so he could make a face at her, a puerile gesture that surely she would reject. A woman needed a man not a boy.

Suddenly she brightened and turned a wide smile toward Nephi to his surprise, and he was about to smile back at her but the smile was not for him as she continued on and turned her head behind her with a great grin, and pounded on the glass and, to Ray’s out loud laugh, gave him the finger. He returned it and she giggled as if nothing on this Earth were funnier.

Dinner sat ready at the house. Myrna had baked two chickens and opened a jar of her canned string beans. The chickens were stuffed and an open can of cranberry sauce had been spooned onto a plate. The potatoes were boiled and mashed and gravy from the chickens served in a white porcelain tureen in a flowery motif. Nephi would not notice until later they were roses. A bottle of Coca Cola sat beside each plate as went the Gass family custom. All took their chairs and commenced to dig in.

“Stop!” Myrna held up a hand in protest. “Nobody eats under my roof until the food’s blessed.”

Ray, sitting next to Renee as if he owned her set the spoon back in the tureen and folded his arms in a sarcastic way, leaning back in his chair to show them to Renee, who did likewise. Denny stood and bowed his head and delivered a jack-Mormon’s typically clumsy and fumbling benediction: “…and we say these things in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ…” after which ‘amen’ expelled like a rumbling fart, they attached the table.

“I don’t how you do it, Myrna,” Ray’s mother gushed through a gob of masticated chicken flesh. “Mine always turn out so dry.”

Nephi studied across the table Ray and Renee as together as doves in bas relief on a plate of sentimental china, complementary and complete in symmetrical affection, and yet a serpent slept in the dense foliage of their nest. “Don’t,” she said, squirming away from his pokes and pinches while he grinned wide and toothy to torment her. A little leg of chicken in her dainty fingers it was all she could do to get a nibble out of it. “Stop it,” she whined, leaning away and glancing back sidelong at him while she sucked the grease from her fingers. At this point Ray caught her hand and put a finger in his mouth and mocked her with a leer that Nephi found repellant.

She’d had enough and got from the table, bluntly asking to be excused and slammed out the kitchen door into the eastern night of lunar pillars of light arraying behind the mountains. Nephi had stared at her, watched every slender muscle of her movement, the black river of hair cascading down her small shoulders, the innocent soft face of her, the long legs under her little round butt that moved like music out of the hollows of his spent desire. He wanted her but watched her leave and knew that now was the time, or else never, and she would never be as beautiful as she was just now. He could feel the primeval readiness of her in his groin, but had spent the seed of himself for her into his clothes, and so sat like a straw man.

Passed a quantum pause and Ray got up rubbing the greasy nubs of his fingers on his pants with a “scuse me,” and followed her into the melodic mystery of crickets and cycles and the Earth’s abiding whims, the breezes of night, the rising lunar disk, the very hills glowing at the rim.

“What’s that all about?” asked Myrna.

“Who knows?” asked Denny, nosing the last of the mashed potatoes. “She’s an odd one, that Renee.”

Nephi pretended not to be curious and so took his time pushing his plate back. After awhile he made a show of parting and patted his belly, mumbling about going to fetch something or other and putting it in the tool shed for the night. He went out the door but pulled the screen close behind him very quietly until it clicked, and stepped from the small cement square into short grass, and the scene before him dim into the shadowy lines of sheds and trees, and meandering toward the tool shed to find his father’s pipe and pouch. He felt in his coveralls for matches and rolled the book around in his nervous fingers, thinking of her, thinking of them together hand in hand in the quiet, lovers exclusive, three a crowd, one lost in pipe smoke behind them awishin’.

A secret sentence came upon the leaves in breezy night, and Nephi wondered at its grammar. Arrived and paused and re-arrived and taken elsewhere to another congregation of hearers, strangely spoken gospel telling the history of all the winds that ever blew on summer nights when lovers met in moon glow.

And as if on cue the fat moon arose amidst her musty light of yellow ethers flying on her scattering of moon spores pungent and vibrating, emitting her nocturnal phosphors filled with purpose and portent, like a dandelion gone to stars in feathery spin.

Nephi never found his pipe, gone antsy with anticipation, yearning for her as he moved into the eastside orchard where the cherries had lately clung. He followed moon-cast footsteps up the way and stopped to hear the breeze, wherein he heard a soft moan, a whine perhaps not as animal as human coming from the south where the tall grass waved and shimmered. He crept toward on tiptoe until he saw them in a circular flat of grass wriggling, writhing like pale maggots nearly at his feet, primeval forms conjoined in pulsing rhythm, Ray atop Renee, the full moon catching the joy in her lidded eyes, her lips to his lips, her hands clasping her toes as she brought her legs way up to splay about Ray’s own body, the moon upon his own halved moon, while he held her head in his long right arm and kissed her face and thrust himself into the sweating, coiled hairs of her groin, the inverted patch of her forest temple, moving forth and back in abandonment to the simple directive to merge in love, the Rose and his briar piercing the flesh that held him.

Nephi gulped and backed away. The little war between them was won and Ray had won it, and the defeated must retreat in darkness to a sad lay, a song of loss. He wandered east to where the orchard ended and moonlight illuminated rolling hills of sage and numinous wheat like squares of oriental language, hieratic codes formed in lines of constant change as if a poem were pouring forth to him in the oldest and most mystifying syllables. The whisper of breeze and call of robins, creak of branches, celebrating coupling angered him, the weakness in him, the spent sperm to nowhere, seed across a barren plain. How he envied lovers, and wished to be loved. He wished, yes he did, but no longer wished to be a farmer.