Read Online If I Told You Once: A Novel by Judy Budnitz - Free Book Online Page A

momentarily ashamed. But he kept pulling and tugging and did not notice, hardly seemed to see me at all, I was a service, less to him than his horse or the subordinate who had taken it away.
    It was all happening too fast; I was not having the expected effect on him but it was too late, he snapped a cord and the last of my clothing fell and pooled at my feet. I felt as if he had gone too far, as if he had gone beyond my clothes and stripped off a layer of skin, my body felt raw and sensitive all over like a fresh cut, a hangnail.
    This was the moment when he was supposed to grovel at my feet, look up at me with worshipful eyes like the men in Anya’s room. Instead he muttered something about chicken bones and boosted me onto the bed.
    He threw himself upon me, and I undid my hair and let it fall all around so at least he would not see my face as he did what he did. He puffed and groaned and breathed his sour breath into me, and dug out the deep places in my body and scraped and chafed against them so long I thought I would develop calluses before he was done, and as he did this I looked up at the ceiling at a crack in the plaster that seemed to be branching and spreading even as I watched it, like the crack in an egg as the chick begins to peck its way out into a harsh new world.
    When he was finished he lost no time in getting back into his trousers. He put on his tunic, polished his boots with a cloth and then put them on, gazing down at them fondly. He was brisk, efficient, on his way to a fine dinner, no doubt.
    I asked him when I would see my brother.
    He laughed into the mirror. He was smoothing his mustache with oil.
    You’ll never see your brother again, he said.
    You promised, I said.
    If you want a promise kept you should get it in writing, he said.
    Your brother’s no better than a horse, he added, if they can’t train him they’ll take him out back and shoot him.
    I leaped from the bed, landed on his back, sank my teeth into his neck. I could not inflict much, his flesh was leathery tough meat, my teeth could not pierce it.
    He smashed the handle of his pistol down on my fingers and I fell from him. He raised his foot to kick, but the polished perfection of the boot made him reconsider. He did not want to soil it, after all.
    He stepped around me, put on his coat, paused at the door. I expect you to leave here before nightfall, he said. And he added: Rinse the sheets before you leave. There’s water in the basin.
    He opened the door, paused, and said in a fatherly tone: You should be careful in the forest at night. There are timber wolves, they are unpredictable.
    Then he was gone.
    I stood a long time before the mirror; it was black speckled, rip pled with age, looking into it was like looking into a deep pool that sucked up most light and only gave a little back as reflection. But I could see enough. I saw how my bones stuck out like scaffolding, and the skin was sallow and rough. The officer had left bruises shaped like fingerprints all over my shoulders. There was nothing in my face that could tempt or intrigue; my hair was long but it looked only like hair, not like precious metals or sunsets or fires. Worthless merchandise.
    How foolish of me to bargain with this.
    How foolish to think I could move mountains just by being a woman.
    I stood looking at the girl in the mirror who held her breasts in her hands and cried. Stupid girl, I thought.
    I had never seen my mother cry.
    Outside the sky was crowded with clouds dark as smoke, or smoke thick as clouds.
    I washed and dressed and went to the stables and stole a horse because although I may have been ignorant of men, I understood animals and knew how to win their complicity. I ached between my legs and each step the horse took sent a jolt of pain a little farther up, a little deeper in.
    My brother was nowhere to be seen.
    So I rode away from that ugly place.
    *   *   *
    Those three old women who used to plague my village told me a story once.
    I