58 - The Lips

"I know a story about a curse," Asenath said, as she found a candle. There were visibly fewer of them now, and they were more spread out. "It was set after the Civil War, before Dagon's Hollow was a town, just a collection of farms. Former slaves and their families came north to sharecrop. I call this story...

THE LIPS

Slavery was over. Mrs. Jute was aware. She did not care. The Black people who worked for her knew it. This was her land, and those who worked it and lived on it did so at her forbearance. Those who crossed her were whipped, and those who hadn't crossed her obeyed out of fear. For there was no law but her law. Traders came only monthly in those days, before the railroad came through, and they came to her house and dealt with her. She bought all the food and clothes and the hundred other things that she and the sharecroppers needed to survive.

So they worked the land. They kept to themselves. And every now and again, Mrs. Jute chose one of their daughters to be a maid in her house.

There were three or four maids in the house at any time. Young, strong Black women, plainly dressed, to do the washing, cleaning, and cooking. When one needed discipline, as Mrs. Jute called it, the others would hold their unfortunate down and lift her skirts. Mrs. Jute's cruel lips would sneer at the sight of the exposed buttocks, the bare mons. Her whip had a handle fifteen inches long, and seven cords of leather, each one drawn from the strip of skin along the back of a Black man, as thick as a razor strop, and studded with iron at the tip.

No one knew what had driven Mrs. Jute from Texas to this isolated spot. Or when she had been married, or what happened to her husband. What she had experienced in her life that made the sight of blood trickling down brown thighs so alluring. That pushed her sadism to such limits.

Yet it was the aftermath that was whispered about.

The young woman couldn't walk, when Mrs. Jute was done, her arm aching, the victim sagging in the arms of the other maids. Mrs. Jute would have her stripped and taken to her own bed. Water was boiled, bandages were made ready, and Mrs. Jute would care for the afflicted young woman herself. From beyond the locked bedroom door, the other women would hear the screams. The soft words. The moans. The young victim would remain naked in that room until Mrs. Jute thought she was healed.

There was a small grave in the yard, marked with a stone. Beneath it lay the body of a young woman who had sought to flee one night. Mrs. Jute's pistol had blown her brains out as the wounded maid climbed out the window. A potent warning, for those who would reject her.

Then one day, a new woman came to the house. She called herself Mary Freeman. Her mother had been a **** in Texas, and been taken in a raid by the Comanche. The Comanche held slaves too, and it was not clear if Mary was emancipated or had escaped. Nor did Mrs. Jute care. Mary Freeman was a beauty, tall and strong, clean of limb, with deep brown eyes and features that spoke of a Native American father, but skin darker than any of the free Blacks hereabouts. Mrs. Jute accepted her service. Bided her time.

Mary Freedman was not well-suited to housework. She had not grown up washing sheets and making beds. The other maids hissed warnings. Yet the problem came when Miss Jute caught the young woman drinking her brandy.

It took all of the other maids to drag the strong young woman into the bedroom. They tied her wrists to the posts at the foot of the bed, and stripped her skirts to bare those dark buttocks. One of the maids, who whispered the story to her children, spoke of the devilish fire in the eyes of Mrs. Jute. Her arm bent back and...

Mary Freeman never made a sound. It was as though she became a statue. Her dark limbs hard and fast as black iron as the whip tore at her labia and buttocks. A whip like that, in the hands of a strong woman, can cut the skin like a cat's talons. The lack of reaction seemed to drive Mrs. Jute into a frenzy. She struck with all of her might, until the pink flesh of those muscular buttocks showed, and blood ran freely. Still, Freeman made no sound.

At last, quivering with rage and some other emotion, Mrs. Jute fell down onto her knees and sank her white teeth into the bound Black woman's flank. And at that, finally, Mary Freeman screamed. She screamed in a language that none of the women knew, and her voice rose into a long, horrible ululation, and continued on until Mrs. Jute, driven to madness, fetched her pistol and blew her brains out onto the bedsheets.

The body was buried the next day, beyond the other. The maids were up all night, scrubbing blood from the floor, and all the next day washing the sheets.

Mrs. Jute did not sleep. Not until every drop of blood was cleaned up. Then, and only then, did she lie in that bed.

Thereafter began the horror. It started when Mrs. Jute began to suffer from a case of boils. Slow-swelling buboes on different parts of her body. As they spread, she did her best to cover them, so the maids only rarely caught sight of the raised skin, brown and swollen bubbles of flesh, and the sharecroppers in the fields not at all.

A trader came and went. The boils got no better. Something about them seemed to work on Mrs. Jute's mind, for the maids began to hear her whisper. Always in the quiet moments, when no one else was talking. And the moment she was aware of the whispering, Mrs. Jute would leave where she was and lock herself in her bedroom. Yet the whispering, the talking to herself, got worse. For while no one could ever say they saw her lips move, the voices grew louder. Sometimes it sounded like an argument, other times, simply a babble.

The toll on Mrs. Jutes' health was terrible. She drank more, ate little, and slept not at all. The maids walked on tiptoe, still fearful of the woman's whip, for though her health failed little by little, so her blue eyes were full of fanatic fury...tempered only by a growing fear.

The finale came in the days before the trader was to come again. A high, ululating cry came from Mrs. Jute's room, and then a scream of pain and rage. Both voices sounded at once. None of the maids would **** the door, but the youngest ran around the outside of the house to the window, to peek inside.

Mrs. Jute stood naked before the bed. Her whip was in hand, and with shrieks of pain she tore at her own flesh.

The brown boils had burst. All over the white woman's body were black, swollen lips, showing small, clean white teeth and purple tongues. And with one voice, all those lips were giving out that brain-searing scream, that constant high-pitched sound that only one throat had given voice to.

With each stroke of the whip, white flesh shredded. Mrs. Jute attacked herself with a terrible mindless fury, driven by fear and madness. Her own labia hung in bloody tatters. Her thighs were gory ruins, through which muscle shown. Her breasts, her belly, her ass. It mattered not how many lips she smashed, there were always more, out of reach.

Perhaps the maid should have said something when the whip fell from nerveless hands. When Mrs. Jute reached for her own pistol, and with tears streaming down her face pressed it against her temple.

Yet the maid had seen too much in that house to save Mrs. Jute from self-destruction.

Asenath smiled. Her eyes met those of everyone around, as if waiting to answer their questions. When none came, she blew out the candle.