Grandma's Pornography is Grandpa's Coat

Grandma's Pornography is Grandpa's Coat
lost Love
fiction
edward w Pritchard

A dry cold wind rattled the walls of the hut and the young bride awoke with a start. Her husband had slipped out of bed over an hour ago and would be busy around the ranch to leave up and across the San Bernardino Mountains at dawn for four months of high paying work in Death Valley on a borax mining crew.

The girl washed quickly in the cold water and put a liberal dose of French perfume about her neck and slipped into the immodest red dress, cut low in the front and very tight through the hips. She usually wasn't this type but her husband would see and attract the attentions of many women in the Saturday night desert towns over the next four months and she wanted him to remember her smell and the curve of her hips on those lonely Saturday nights. For further insurance of that she had bought some very expensive British tobacco that she planned to give him just as she kissed him good-bye, so every time he smoked her tobacco, which would be only occasionally because of the expense of the British tobacco, he would think of her.

His long leather coat would be open and would surround her body as she pressed against him when she gave him the tobacco, and he would have to bend down low to kiss her and the brim of his hat would have to be tipped for their faces to touch and the kiss would be short because both knew it was imperative that he got high in the Mountains before the heat of the day began, so their last embrace would be tantalizingly short.

She would remember that moment for many many times through-out her long life because he would not return to her. There would be no word of what had happened to the fifteen man borax mining team he was a part of, they would just disappear into the desert in Southern California in the year of 1885. The dark eyed bride would wait at the ranch at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains the rest of her long life. She would often review the departure over and over in her mind, and at other times felt it deep in her body and it wasn't until she was nearly seventy that she completely lost his smell and the feel of his hands on her hips, before he climbed into the wagon and left for four months of work as a borax miner in the early fall of 1885.

Later, when me or my twin brother Tell would ask Grandma about Grandpa or where we came from, she would tell us part of that story, but under no circumstances would she speculate to us on what had happened to the 15 man borax mining crew.