THE BIG WORLD OUT THERE
By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM
Uncle Joe stopped with a forkfull of mashed potatoes halfway to his mouth when he heard me. "Jeb, you are out of your mind!" he declared with finality.
"It wouldn't work, son." Pa said kindly. "Didn't work for me and didn't work for your uncle, neither, when we tried it."
"But I'm going with John and he and I...."
"Won't work." Uncle Joe declared again with finality.
"Why the tarnation not?" my younger brother Michael put in. He was almost eighteen, he probably was thinking soon enough, he'd be trying what I was about to.
"The trouble with leaving the farm and heading to the city to make a living is you got to make a living." Uncle Joe declaimed. He was the family self-appointed expert on everything, and was right about things just often enough that you'd pay attention to him when he talked.
"I'm willing to make a living." I said firmly. "And it ain't like I'm needed here on the farm none."
"This will always be your home." Pa said.
"Yeah, but you got Luke and Mark already here." I said of my two older brothers. "Farm isn't big enough to support more'n it's already got. If either of them are getting married, you need the rest of us to clear on out of here."
Pa didn't deny it; Luke had been courting Emma Sue for the last year and hadn't asked her to marry him for just that reason, Luke didn't have any better prospects than slowly taking over the farm, but right now it had Pa and Ma and us eight boys all with our legs under the table, needing land to work and a place to sleep and food to eat. Farm barely took care of us as it was, if Uncle Joe stayed more'n a couple more weeks, we wouldn't even have that.
"A man your age wouldn't get a job that paid better'n ten dollars a week." Uncle Joe went on. "You'd pay six of that for a room to sleep in. Have to probably ride a train to work and home each day, too, one of them little city trains, and that's another buck fifty. Buy your food out of that and what have you got left? Nothing. Soon you're stealing clothes to wear and food to eat and you'd find yourself hitching back here. Your Pa did it, so did I. A fellow can't make it in the city less'n he's powerful lucky or his family is already rich. You figure on being lucky?"
"Don't figure on anything more than giving it a good try." I admitted. "What else can I do?"
"It won't work, Son." Pa said to me gently. "Stay here and we'll ask around the other farms, see if anyone wants to hire you on as an extra hand. Old Widow Jenkins needs help all the time, you know."
Old Widow Jenkins was a mean, stingy old maid that had a few acres and wanted you to sweat all day for a dime and a nickel in payment. I set my jaw stubbornly.
"Why don't you wait another year at least." Pa said, seeing my expression. "Maybe then you can take more'n a couple dollars with you when you go, at least. It'd make all the difference to you. I darned near starved when I tried it, those first few weeks. Then I never did catch up again."
I looked at Ma, who had the grace to look ashamed. I had saved my money the last year, working like a mule on anything that came to hand. Had saved up fourteen dollars and some. Then Ma had come down with a fever and needed some medicine. And Paw hadn't a dime to spare. I paid the doctor and the druggist, ten dollars to the doctor and two dollars to the drugstore, leaving me just under three dollars in my pocket right now.
"Think about it, at least, Son." Ma said. "You know you can stay here long as you need to. And it's an awful big world out there, you can get lost in it powerful easy." I knew she was thinking of her own childhood, and her parents that moved her from town to town every couple of years while she was growing up. Until Ma married Pa, she hadn't ever really had a home.
"I'll think about it." I agreed reluctantly.
"I hear that Matt Chambers is going to bail hay tomorrow." Pa said. "Maybe he'd hire you for the day to help him out."
So I got up before dawn and walked that four miles to the Chambers' farm. But he had six men there already, I'd made the trip for nothing. Going to be past noon before I got back home, with a cold biscuit for my breakfast and probably the same for lunch when I got home.
Instead of heading west, I headed northwest. Since I was wasting a day here, I decided to go see John and see what he made of what Uncle Joe had told me.
John Daniels was a little luckier than me, only him and his older brother and sister with his parents, but they had a much smaller farm. He was in my shoes, only hope for his family was if he cleared out best he could.
Mrs. Daniels was home and smiled to see me. It was a bit after their own mealtime but, without my even asking, she obligingly stirred me up some milk gravy and heated up the two biscuits left from the family's lunch and fed it to me as an impromptu lunch. "John's out in the east pasture, seeding it with some new grass seed," she explained as she stirred the gravy. "You eat this and then you can go out and see him."
I did and soon enough found John with a bag looped over his neck, reaching in and pulling out handfuls of near-microscopic seeds and cast them over the freshly turned earth. After he was done, he would turn the earth again, stirring most of the seeds underground, from where they would sprout and proliferate.
John's back was to me and for a time I just stood there and watched him at work, the large, strong arms moving in the gentle arcs that spread a swath of seeds with each move. The dirty blond hair cut short into almost a saucer-shape on top of his head. This made his ears stand out more, but they were finely shaped and lay close to his head rather than being "jug-ears" like Oscar Morrison and his family had.
John turned and then he saw me, turned around further to face me. "Jeb! Howdy!"
"Howdy!" I returned.
John saw my downcast face then. "What's the matter?"
"I talked with Uncle Joe about moving to a city and finding work there. He thinks it's a bad idea." And I told him about the conversation we'd had.
John frowned at the end of it. "So what does that mean? What do you want to do?"
"I don't know." I said. "I don't want to stay at the farm, or move about like Uncle Joe does, sponging off relatives until everyone's sick of seeing me. But there's not any real work to be had around here, either. But they don't pay enough in the city to let a person live there, neither, according to Uncle Joe."
John stood a while and said, "If you'll help me spread the rest of this seed, then we'll have some time to talk."
With my help, the seeds were spread in less than an hour, and the sun wasn't half down the sky. I expected us to go back to the house, but John led me to a large oak tree surrounded by bushes. The shade inside there was great, and the grass, stunted by the limited sunlight, was short and easy to lie down on, which was what we did, side by side in the hollowed place between two rows of prominent roots.
"You plan to stay here?" John asked.
"I don't know." I said. "Doesn't make sense, no matter what I do, seems to me."
"Then you might as well leave."
"Maybe I should. But I'm not going to get far on two dollars and sixty-five cents. All my worldly possessions."
"You can come with me." John offered. "If you want to."
"Go with you where?"
John shrugged. "I don't know. Wherever we end up, I reckon."
"But I only got two dollars and...."
"I got another forty-two dollars." John cut in. "I sold a couple of cows Pa let me raise as my own. That ought to be enough for a good start in a new town for both of us."
It would be. "But...but that's your money."
"It'll be our money. If you come with me."
"But...but why?"
"You think I want to go to some strange city all by myself?" John said. "I'd feel lost in no time. Besides, you get a job, you can pay half the rent on a room. Pay your share of groceries, we buy pots and pans and other household stuff together and before you know it, we got ourselves set up with some proper housekeeping."
"You and me." I was trying it on. Why not? "You don't mind kicking in more'n your share at first, until we get going?"
"Sure, I don't mind!" A short pause. "Of course, we'd have to share ever'thing, you know."
"Well, sure."
"Only one bed, I mean. At first, that is. Cheaper that way."
"Yeah, it would be." I thought about it and smirked. "Be almost like it was when we were growing up, wouldn't it?"
"I was thinking about that, myself." John and I had spent one whole summer visiting each other's homes, when we were maybe six or seven. Too young to work on the farms, we were let to run wild in summertime, most days, and our nights we'd sleep over and our hands would find each other. Afternoons, too, when swimming and such.
"Why'd we ever stop doing it?" I asked him. "I mean, you and me. It was such fun and...."
"And?"
"Nothing." I blushed. And I'd love to do it again; that was my unspoken sentence.
John smiled easily, the smile only a good friend can give you. "It was that preacher man come by and talked about sin and damnation, remember? All the sins of the flesh and how they'd take you right to hell."
"Oh. Yeah." I nodded. "And we believed him, too, didn't we?"
"For a while, anyway. I got my hand back to work a month or two later." John laughed, again, that easy laugh only a good friend laughs with you, and I laughed, too. "Got real busy, in fact."
"Me, too." I said.
John burst into a new laugh. "And first time I shot my spooge, I thought I'd injured myself! Made Ma take me to the doctor and wouldn't even tell her why I needed one!"
I damned near burst a gut, haw-hawing. "I thought the same durned thing! Cepting I was too blasted ashamed. Only way I found out what happened was when I caught Mark in bed doing the same thing and he told me what it was."
"Wish Sam had told me what it was." John spoke of his older brother. "Would have saved my Pa the doctor bill."
We laughed a bit more and I looked over at John. He was up on one side, head resting on one hand with the elbow on the ground. Such a strong face, honest and kind and....
I reached out and touched it without really thinking about it. His face sort of softened as my hand cupped his cheek.
"I think you and me sharing a bed again would be great." I said softly. "If you want to, that is."
John's head began to move up and down, stroking his face against my palm. "I want to." he sighed. "I want to."
"Yeah." I turned onto my side toward him, scooted up and pressed our bodies together. Neither John nor I had any experience with sex other than the childhood explorations, though we had traded all sorts of stories and half-truths and myths with other boys growing up. I had wondered how it would be when I actually got in bed with someone (my partner in those thoughts had been a nebulous being of indeterminate sex, indistinct and important only in the way they made me feel), but I found my hands and mouth knew their duty, my hands holding John, touching him, feeling him the way he was feeling me, and our mouths locked onto each other like two pieces of a restored whole. Holding John, I felt complete in a way I hadn't since our younger days, when our games together, in bed and out, had been my entire world.
John's fingers turned to undoing my overalls, then my shirt underneath. When he had the shirt half undone, his hand reached in and the feel of his fingertips as they brushed over my breast was the most ecstatic feeling I'd had in my life! I moaned and my cock stabbed up, hard as stone, and I jabbed at John's body with it, the glans hitting him in his lower stomach like the prodding stick you use to knock pigs out of the way of the feeding trough so you can pour the slops in or let one of the weaker pigs in to eat.
And John was the pig that dove into to nibble at my chest and he rolled me onto my back with the force of his grab of me, and then he was on top of me, my erection nuzzling his chest and his own rubbing back and forth aggressively upon my left leg.
My clothes were worried off him while he fed upon my flesh with a hunger that raged through him and poured out of him into me, our desires inflaming each other. Soon my shoulders were naked, then I was naked to the waist, then further down still and my body, my mostly nude body was his for the taking.
I expected him to do as we had when we were children, to use his hand to pleasure me in that old, friendly, familiar way, I was astounded when I felt his lips upon my cock, his tongue touching it, and then the mouth that covered me up and swallowed me down until my entire dong was one gigantic wet-coated well of delight that sparked joy all through its length and fountained pleasure with very motion of his mouth as he rose up and down upon my cock in long, sensuous strokes.
"Oh, God, John!" I moaned. "Oh, God, that feels so good! Oh, God, oh!"
I lay there as he serviced me for nearly five minutes, and after the first flush of joy had turned into that heaven on earth that goes on and on, I found myself able to think. Such great pleasures being visited upon me, it wasn't right that I should only lay here and let him do it, I should repay his kindnesses somehow.
"Turn around, let me help you." I murmured to him, my breath short due to my passion. "Let me do you, too, John."
Without a word, he turned around and squirmed my way as I squirmed his. We met at the midpoint, cross-wise to our original positions, my feet chock-a-block up against one of the row of roots from the oak tree. I had to unfasten his pants and fish inside for his organ, but with the bulge there to guide me, I didn't have to search for anything but the path of entrance, I brought it out and gasped.
This wasn't the tiny pud I had worked in our youth. This was a majestic male organ, one a bull would be proud to sport when he mounted the cow. Almost ovoid in its length, fattest in the center and narrowed up to the glans, and narrowed again to where it joined his body. I wanted to take him down, but wasn't all-fired sure it would fit!
Nevertheless, I took him in hand and guided it to my lips. The glans was easy enough to get inside, arrow-shaped as it was with only the slightest flare at where it joined to his shaft, and from there, I began to try to work the shaft within me. John's moistness told me to lube it lavishly and I did, my spit coating the column with moistly slick saliva, and then I worked on taking John the way he took me.
Slowly, my mouth accommodated the thick dong, until I had more than half of it buried within me. Settling for that, I began to work back and forth the way that John was working mine.
The feeling of his cock in my mouth somehow intensified the feeling of his lips on my own, I was soon matching his motions stroke-for-stroke, trying to imitate his every touch, every gripping of his lips as he rose, every flick of his tongue on the top of my cock by flicking his, and the result was that our groans of pleasure rose together and sped up together and crescendoed together, and when John's moan of ecstasy burst into release and his salty spunk inundated my tongue and tonsils, I matched him with my own climax that assailed my senses and jetted my life's essence deep into John's waiting, clutching maw.
Again, my instincts knew just what to do, I gulped at this elixir of maleness and swallowed his jizz as fast as he generated it, while he sucked my own tube of virility so hard it felt like he was drawing it from me instead of me shooting it out. I sucked his own cock harder and soon we were both left with only limp strands of exhausted male flesh in our mouths, ridiculously weak, empty tubes that fell away rather than being release by our lips.
John rolled onto his back as did I, and we panted and heaved for breath once again, and then I moved until I was on top of him, face to face, and I reached for his lips and took from there the promise that love can demand and receive, a kiss that bonds two lives together until they can never, ever be severed, for the lover has become a part of you, and you have given in return a bit of yourself.
"So." John said when I let his lips go at last. "When do you want to leave, and where do you want to go?"
"That's easy." I said. "I want us to leave as soon as we can, and wherever you are, that's where I want to be."
"That's good." John said. "I was worried most about being lost, but with you with me, I can't get lost."
"And wherever we go in that big world out there, that'll be our home." I agreed, and kissed him again.
THE END
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WWW.TOMMYHAWKSFANTASYWORLD.COM