M*A*S*H: Marigold Wine 9/? H/T [M/R]
Title: "Marigold Wine" part 9/?
Author: aura218
Pairing: Hawkeye/Trapper, Hawkeye/others
Genre: Drama, romance, longfic, postseries, 60s
Summary: In the 60s, Trapper visits his old army buddy at a hippie commune, where Hawkeye has retreated to find peace.
Rating: R/M
Part 9
Part 9
Honestly, these men. She didn't know where Siva or the boys got up to tonight and didn't care. Halfway down the hill, Lena handed the baby to Jeremiah so she could put her shirt back on. Wouldn't Grandma Pearl have words for her if she strutted half naked past the lettuce patch with a baby on her hip. She'd think Lena was the second coming of the goddess Oester.
Jeremiah was quiet as he walked beside her. Lena didn't know if quiet was good or troublesome. Lena wasn't raised with demonstrative emotion, but these Americans -- Hawkeye especially -- seemed to let their every thought dribble from their lips like water. She'd learned a lot about trust and friendship with Hawkeye, and especially at the commune, and most particularly when she invited Siva into their family.
It had been a simple, decision, really, but not easy. Over a year ago, when she and Hawkeye had been living at the commune for only a month, still figuring out what it meant to share bicycles and meals, Siva had become besotted with her husband. He was flagrant, possessive of Hawkeye's time and his mind, claimed he was writing a book of poems about veterans and wanted to hear Hawkeye's thoughts. When Lena came home to find the two of them in bed together, she realized she had a decision: she was pregnant, she loved Hawkeye, Siva was her best friend and she loved Jeremiah already. This didn't need to be complicated. So she uncomplicated it.
It wasn't complicated . . . until it was. Hawkeye was so broken, Siva so angry about the American "race thing," and her boys needed parents. The bickering started within months. Hawkeye embraced free love in theory, but in practice, he was woefully old fashioned and not as near as free minded as he thought he was. And Siva was having hang-ups about homosexual sex that no of them had predicted, especially when his parents started sending letters asking him what he was doing with his life -- telling him to find a Black mother to make his family complete again. Hawkeye flatly refused to discuss the race matter, his answer to the problem being that it didn't exist to him, and Lena believed that it really didn't; but it did to Siva, and for that reason he really should have listened with his ears instead of his mouth. Siva didn't like being told how to feel about his own race discomfort. That was around the time Siva decided he didn't like sex with white men anymore.
Lena's hopes for a big family fell down among problems that were so far from the protective umbrella of love, togetherness, and one nation that Sitsips was based upon.
Jeremiah, clutching his fish to his chest, slung his slightly damp hand in hers. She gave it a squeeze. Sunny pulled at her shirt, reciting his new favorite word: "Mok?" All her years of covering up her décolleté, and now she had a short, fat, bald fellow strapped to her chest begging to suck on her nipples in public.
"Is Hawkeye mad?" Jeremiah said.
Lena had asked her foster mother a question like this once. She was scolded, not so much for eavesdropping on grownup business, as being preternaturally grownup enough to be attuned to adult emotions.
"Yes, dear heart," Lena said. "But not at you. Hawkeye and Siva are having a disagreement."
Jeremiah stopped walking. Lena, tethered to him, stopped as well. Sun beat down through the gaps in the trees. He peered up at her with his piercing green eyed gaze.
"I like Hawkeye," he pronounced.
When Lena was a child, she wasn't permitted to like or dislike any adult. They were simply there, like a bulky piece of antique furniture.
"I'm very glad of that. He loves you very much," Lena said. She had lived with Hawkeye for thirteen months before she could say the L-word half as often as he babbled strings of love metaphors and puns and allegories at her.
"Sometimes I don't like him or my dad," Jeremiah said.
Lena led him down the hill. Doctor Spock said, "You're allowed your feelings."
"Why do they fight?" Jeremiah said.
Lena squeezed his hand. "I don't know, my little love. Sometimes it just doesn't work out between -- friends. But they love you very much."
Jeremiah smiled shyly.
Gaining confidence, Lena tried for advanced parenting: "Do you think if they both apologize for ruining your day, you can forgive them?"
Jeremiah heaved a dramatic, grownup sigh. "I guess I can let it go this once."
"Oh, my love, how you make me laugh!" she said.
Lena reached to hug him, but he twirled like a ballerina, holding her fingers for balance.
"Can we eat my fish now?" Jeremiah said. "He's getting stinky."
Lena turned him so he was walking properly downhill. She pointed over the treetops to the commune center and kitchen. "What do you see there?"
"Smoke?"
Lena followed his gaze. No, not smoke, steam. The kitchen ovens in the compound were stoked to a high blaze. By the sun, it was only three or so; their shadows were stumpy and trollish.
"Are we respecting someone's beliefs again?" Jeremiah said.
Lena led him to the path that circled around the back of the cistern, so she could have a clear view down the open field behind the metal longhouse that served as both her classroom and the compound cafeteria. Through the vented window, she could see a half-dozen men, unfamiliar to her, dressed in animal skins, milling about in the longhouse. They seemed to be talking to the Sitsips college students who hung out there in the afternoons around mealtime. Lena hadn't spoken to many of those kids who came up from the universities this year, but they usually were semi-appreciable workers, good sorts from good suburban homes, if a bit whiny about the lack of television. The newcomers were giving Lena a bad vibe. They were sharing ideas, in the open minded counter culture sense; rapping, jiving. Be it women's instinct, or wisdom of age and veteran status, but Lena could tell by the aura given off from the new people that she wouldn't like what they had to say.
Lena turned back down the hill. "I . . . I think the kitchen is spoken for tonight. Let's just roast it on a campfire, we'll see if Grandma Pearl will show you how to make a mud pack oven."
Jeremiah trudged behind her. "Lena, that sounds like a yucky thing to do to Frank."
"Frank?" Lena's bare foot caught on a root. The weight of Sunny overbalanced her. She stumbled and caught herself on a sapling, nearly snapping it in two.
"Hawkeye says all dead fish are called Frank." Jeremiah chattered on, unaware.
"Please don't argue with me, dear heart." Sunny began to fuss as they crossed into the woods path. Lena covered his head with her free hand. If only she could stop to nurse. . . . Why did she feel like she was being pursued? This was like a bad dream.
Jeremiah tried for a different tact. "I thought you said we're s'posed to share all our food." Strangers of any stripe were more interesting than the same old hundred people he saw every day.
They had reached the fork in the woods path. Lena stopped abruptly. Jeremiah stared up at her expectantly. For a horrified moment of suspended panic, her mind hung in indecision. This neighborhood of the woods, which she'd walked every day of the past year, looked as unfamiliar as a street in a city she'd never visited.
"I believe the boy is correct," called a rumbling voice. "I was told the Sitsips Commune is communal."
Lena turned. The man was huge. No, merely tall. His presence was huge. His beard was a separate, parasitic entity that hung to his sternum. His hair tickled his elbows and was growing in thick clumps. Jeremiah drew closer to Lena.
"Excuse me?" Lena said.
"Can I? Do I have that authority over your existence?" The man loped closer to her.
He was coming from the T-intersection that wound to the other part of the lake, Lena realized. Walking away would lead her to the women's cabin. Irrationally, she wanted to disguise her planned route from him.
"I'm called Bear by my people," the man said.
"That's very nice." Lena had nowhere to go but the path to the women's barn.
Bear was rickety but fast. In a flurry of disturbed vegetation and a cloud of odor, he was blocking her path again. He grinned at her, showing his bicuspids. Bicuspid. One was missing.
"And you are?"
Lena straightened her spine. "I'm the schoolteacher."
Bear came closer, one foot before the other, hands jangling at his sides. "What a coincidence. I am a student of life." He reached out. Lena, revolted, was too scared to smack it away, though she could envision herself doing just that, despite the appalling manners of doing so. His red-brown fingertip with its dirt-rimed nails tucked into the palm of Sunny's clean, pink hand.
"I welcome this spaceship to our world," the strange man said to her son.
Sunny stared. His upper lip reared up. He pealed out one long, high shriek.
"Lena?" Jeremiah said.
Lena took three swift strides around the horrible creature -- into the bushes, through the weeds, onto the path. She dragged Jeremiah behind so hard she could have pulled his arm out of the socket. Without looking back, holding onto Jeremiah's arm so tightly he had to run to keep up with her, she marched down the path to the women's cabin.
She pretended she didn't hear Bear shout "We would like to watch your baby!" or feel her nipples tighten. His gravely voice felt like callused fingers stroking her skin.
*
"I gave her mother that necklace when we were dating," Trapper said.
He was pacing Hawkeye's cabin like a caged animal. Bathing suits had been shucked and abandoned on the posts of ladder-back chairs. Trousers had been procured. Hawkeye perched on the edge of the sofa, watched him warily.
"Trap, colleges give out thousands of those a year."
"No, not like this. It's got a shamrock on it, white enamel with emerald inlays. That was Louise's good luck charm, she wore it to all my games. I saw the glint in the sunlight." Trapper slapped his fist into his palm, unaware of himself.
Hawkeye, bare to the waist, sat back, pensive. "On the one hand, I hate to point out that there's more than one Irish doctor in America."
Trapper, standing in his cutoffs in front of the fireplace, gestured vaguely, giving him that.
"On the other," Hawkeye said, "you said Becky was lost and alone. Sometimes these groups offer all the answers to kids like that."
"That's ridiculous," Trapper said.
"Why?"
"She's not that kind of girl."
"Trap --" Hawkeye stood.
"I don't believe this!" Trapper stared at Hawkeye, eyes pleading. Hawkeye reached for him, but Trapper turned away. "I had all the answers she needed! Come live with us, we'll pay for school! Get a job, we'll help you find an apartment! Find a goddamn husband or even a fucking roommate and stop living like a damned -- a -- a damned -- !"
Trapper punched the wall. Not hard. He needed to hit something and it was there. He couldn't wreck his hands -- he was still a surgeon. He stood there, breathing hard at it, because if he turned around Hawkeye would be watching him and then he'd laugh, because he was so angry that he was going to either laugh or cry and he just wanted to be angry.
"Was she on drugs?" Hawkeye asked quietly.
Trapper pressed his forehead against the cool wall. "Why couldn't she just be . . . normal."
"What's normal?" Hawkeye's voice sounded very far off from the action, like the narrator in The Twilight Zone. The guy with all the answers who can explain the weirdness you just watched for half an hour.
I wish I was normal, Trapper thought. "I wish she had it easier," he said instead.
Trapper felt Hawkeye behind him, his warmth and his presence. He was scaring his lover. Hawkeye's hands were light as bird's wings uncertainly attempting to stroke his shoulders. Trapper sighed and leaned back into the touch. Hawkeye's arms circled around his waist and he leaned his head back onto Hawkeye's shoulder. Chest to back, hands on his belly, he covered them with his own. Hawkeye kissed his earlobe.
"And I thought diapers were the most difficult part," Hawkeye said.
Trapper barked a laugh. "Take it from a veteran, don't teach 'em to talk. It's not worth it."
Hawkeye kissed his smile. "That's for fortitude."
"Why?"
"Because we need to talk to my wife."
*
Lena desperately wanted to dig a burrow under the corn crib and hide there with her boys and never come out. But what would that solve? If no one questioned men like Bear, why would they leave? She didn't think of this as bravery so much as survival. Most communes lasted a season or two before egos, failed crops, or sex brought down their ideals. Sitsips was in its fifth year. If she and Hawkeye couldn't live here, where could they? If she, Hawkeye, Sunny, Jeremiah, and Siva were fishes and birds falling in love, Sitsips was the place where they could make their home.
She left the boys with Grandma Pearl in the women's barn and set out on the path. Away from shelter. Into the woods.
It was merely logic that led her to the center of the commune, the compound with the pretty potted flowers and artwork, the largest structure on forty acres of land. Where else would a guy like Bear lead his revolution? Lena told herself she wasn't going back in time as she saw the clutch of women and old people outside the long metal schoolhouse, because she had been far too little to remember the S.S. roundups or the train to the ghettos. This wasn't history repeating itself. It certainly wasn't going to be once she got down there and assessed things.
Approaching the disorganized group of co-eds, artists, and old people, Lena could hear Mrs. Robinson's voice above them. Mr. Robinson was passing around papers and shouting at people. Mrs. Robinson appeared to be running the show.
Bethany -- a girl with hair so long she often sat on it -- passed a yellowing newspaper clipping pasted to a dismembered scrapbook page to Lena. The rest of the college-age women and moms like her were reading similar material.
"They are only as dangerous as we make them!" Mrs. Robinson was saying to one frightened woman -- Sable, Lena remembered, who had two boys older than Jeremiah. They had played records together at the dance.
"They're a menace!" Mr. Robinson said.
"My God, look at this," Lena read her clipping aloud. "'The group is lead by Robert Thomas, "Bear," 42, who claims to receive spiritual guidance from a Hindu Guru.' I just met him!"
"Is that like their God?" Bethany said.
"Are you in college? It's like a teacher," said Alera, Bethany's sometimes friend, who wore her hair in a Natural.
Lena read on. "'The cult --' the reporter actually wrote that word -- 'which calls itself "Exincunabula or "out of the swaddling clothes" has twice been accused of kidnapping, illegal possession of drugs --"
"What better kind?" Bethany said. Several people laughed. In a place where eight-year-olds sipped from their parents' cups of marigold wine at midsummer dances, Lena could hardly see the harm in a little pot.
"-- and have harassed local communities with their decentralized and nomadic lifestyles.' This is last year, the Boulder City News," Lena said.
"That's very poor Latin," Mr. Robinson said.
Bethany flipped her long hair. "Well, what's wrong with that? So they move around a lot. Of course the press doesn't understand our lifestyle, especially if we get a little too much notice from Mr. and Mrs. Middle America."
Mr. Robinson shook his finger at her. Bethany stepped back, surprised. "No, no, silly young woman."
"They're no good," Mrs. Robinson said. "Look how we've arranged ourselves as a society since they've arrived. In just one hour, are we all equals? Don't you see who is outside, and who is inside?"
The group outside the longhouse took itself in. They were women. The very old and the very young. Only young men had been invited to the Exincunabula club meeting. Lena remembered how that Bear fellow had given her a very proprietary look.
"What about the kidnapping charge?" Lena asked the Robinsons. "Did some teenagers run away from home and join them?"
Mr. Robinson said, "Teenagers deserve what they get."
"Hey!" Bethany said. "I'm nineteen!"
Mr. Robinson waved her off with a flap of his hand. Bethany looked positively disgusted.
Mrs. Robinson handed Lena another scrapbook. "A couple whose daughter joined this Exincunabula group went to the police. The parents did, not the daughter. They said their granddaughter just disappeared, and their daughter seems to have no memory of her."
There was a flutter from the other women assembled. Lena felt her mouth going dry.
"What . . . I don't understand," Lena said.
"What happened to the baby?" Bethany asked.
"If they knew, the paper wouldn't say Missing Persons," Alera said.
Bethany frowned. "They looked so groovy with their handmade leathers."
"I thought you were a vegetarian," Alera said.
"It's vegetarian if you use the whole animal."
Lena hardly heard the chatter as she read another article, this one from New Mexico. Another case of the grandparents saying their grandchild had gone missing and their own child seeming not to care. The missing child's mother refused to leave the Exincunabula commune-or-cult. Where were the fathers? How could this happen in America?
"This is unbelievable. A child just disappeared? How could this happen?" Lena said.
"They have homes all over the country and some in South America," Mrs. Robinson said. "This reporter --" she handed out another sheaf of papers -- "says Bear has them practicing a form of paganism that honors the earth mother Gaia as parent to all, and parent to none. He's been quoted saying 'the tyranny of birth shall be shown as mere accident, not fate.'"
"I kind of like that," Bethany said.
"The hell?" Alera said.
"No, think about it. Is it really fair that you get stuck with the parents you do?" she said. "I mean, my parents didn't support my artistic ability. I have so much catching up to do, if only they'd enrolled me in more art classes as a child!"
"You don't have the artistry God gave a mule's butt," Alera said. "Your parents are your parents, period."
"Regardless," Mrs. Robinson said, "his movement is growing."
Lena handed the papers back to Mr. Robinson. "I can imagine why. Just look at that group."
They looked. Inside the longhouse, Bear might have been telling a particularly thrilling hunting legend to a group of cross-legged, awed Boy Scouts. There was discussion among them, joking, a lot of exposing their deepest thoughts.
"They're bonding," Alera said.
A crazy plan is full of crazy people, Lena thought. How dumb could a bunch of twenty-year-old boys be? An individual was fairly intelligent. A group of humans, wrapped up in a charismatic leader, and drugged to the rafters with mind-opening drugs that made Bugs Bunny seem like a classical philosopher? She'd seen this before. She'd seen the weak try to stand in the way of this kind of bull-headed might, and seen what had happened to those who made a fuss.
"I get it," Bethany said.
"We know you do," Alera said.
"Listen," Bethany said, "what do people like Osiris and, you know, the younger guys? The philosophy students, the kids who came here to expand their mind? What do smart, creative people really like more than anything else?"
"Magic mushrooms?" Alera said.
"She means," Lena said, "a philosophical ideal."
There was chatter in response to that from the other women in the crowd. Who could deny that Sitsips was a place to try on as many varied, colored, multidesigned hats as one could find, dream up, or discover in the stars while high? Lena wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold in the late afternoon sunlight.
Mrs. Robinson waved her arms wide, papers shuffling in the air like feathers. She corralled the group into a lump.
"Come now, ladies. Back to the henhouse, I'll show you all how to have a Quaker women's meeting and get things taken care of. Mr. Robinson, you shall keep watch here?"
They bid Mr. Robinson and the longhouse a grateful goodbye and started up the hill. Lena cast a glance over her shoulder in the longhouse. Stuck between two boys dressed like Indians, smoking a peace pipe, was Siva. He appeared to be listening intently, his expression was unreadable to her. Far off, thunder grumbled, threatening its approach.
Prestorm wind kicked up, flipping the leaves in the trees to show their white underbellies. A shiver went down Lena's spine.
*
After they dressed, Hawkeye and Trapper headed straight for the women's cabin. Standing hesitantly at the entryway, without Lena as their Virgil's guide into the deep, the two war veterans verily trembled in the face of the cabin's oppressive femininity.
There were cut flowers on every available surface. Six cats had taken over the sofa, yet it wasn't covered in hair. In the front room, which was sunny and colorfully decorated for children and also monitored at all times per schedule sheet hung on the wall, a little boy was putting a dress on a rubber doll and a little girl was building a tower out of blocks.
Someone had duct taped a box of maxipads to the wall and cut an opening to dispense one at a time.
"Well," Hawkeye said, noticing it a second after Trapper did. "That's certainly convenient."
"This is like opposite town," Trapper said, holding on to Hawkeye's shoulder lest an attack of the vapors strike. "We better not stay in here too long or we'll start wearing their bras and snapping our jockey shorts."
The two guys picked carefully through a stand of A-frames holding drying paintings. The themes on the canvases seeming to be lesbianism, murder, and high heels. At the end of the grove of sawhorses, the artist, a girl of about sixteen, gave them a cheery smile.
"Ah, honey --" Trapper addressed her.
The sunshine smile disappeared. The girl's dark eyebrow arched to a point over her pinpoint blue eyes.
"Miss," Trapper corrected. Her expression held. Her lips were the perfect apple red of a fairy tale princess's stepmother. "Ma'am?"
"Pandora, have you seen Lena?" Hawkeye said.
The girl was all smiles again. "Sure, Hawkeye, she's upstairs in the drawing room."
"Thank you."
As they moved away, Trapper hissed, "How come she's Miss Congeniality for you?"
Hawkeye covered his mouth and muttered, "Use no terms of endearment in here without express written permission, unless you want your testicles to end up in the soup."
Trapper had to admit, this was by far the most civilized building he had seen on the compound. The walls were made of regular building material, there was a floor, it was decorated half to death, and everyone seemed busy. Rooms were labeled for their use, the labels had explanations beneath them, and beneath the explanations were amendments and iterations to the explanations. Trapper remembered many occasions when army nurses simply amazed him as forces of female capability. He didn't know how women did it -- how did the sofas stay clean, how did the rules get made, how did all that happen with all the gabbing they always did? Louise's church group couldn't decide on a lunch date without everyone taking ten minutes to discuss their family and medical problems. The one time Trapper had stepped in to speed things along, he'd been . . . summarily rejected, to say the least.
"So, how did the girls get the big house and the men all live in little hovels?" Trapper asked.
"They said if we let them fix it up, they'd give it back when they were done," Hawkeye said.
"So why haven't they?"
"They're not done yet."
Trapper snorted. They were moving down a long hallway marked with arches to rooms branching off, possibly in search of a staircase. So much stuff was packed in here, and so many bodies, he could hardly see a foot in front of himself. Someone's pet python regarded him languidly from a chickenwire cage build into a closet. He stepped around it, carefully. A purple poesy sign over the cage read, "Please don't pet Fluffy, she's still adjusting to humanity."
Hawkeye shrugged. "It was a dump. The roof was falling in, we didn't know how to fix that. They brought in some, y'know, some of those sorts of girls."
Trapper laughed. "You mean women with power tools?"
"Yeah."
"Hawkeye." Trapper grabbed him by the back of the shirt and tugged, crashing them together. He kissed him, thoroughly. Some girls in an adjacent room whooped.
Trapper said, "You are 'one of those sorts' of people."
Hawkeye nudged Trapper off, playfully. "Anyway. The girls got organized. Lena says it's scientifically proven that women should live in groups like cats and men live in little hovels like poisonous snakes."
"So?"
"How could we say no? They're cute and have claws. We gave them the barn and slunk off into the woods like the cold blooded reptiles we are."
"That doesn't sound very communal."
Hawkeye shrugged. "The eternal struggle: biological imperative versus intellectualism."
"Crunchy versus creamy."
They mounted a ladder. The second floor opened up to a loft of shotgun-style rooms. This area was less finished and seemed more of a work area than living. Cordoned off areas were designated by artful names painted on the rafters over the center of the rooms. The "drawing room" where they found Lena was packed with a bookcase, lumpy bean bag chairs, typewriters on a rolltop desk, a long bay of plywood work desks, even a few music stands. A corner of the room was segregated by a pink boundary painted on the floor. A sign read "Paint Corner - please spray away from others." The walls on that side were utterly covered in paint, glitter, string, leaves -- was that rabbit fur?
Lena was with the kids, she on the floor, feet tucked under her, doing calligraphy across the tops of thick, homey looking paper. Rolls of leather and heavy metal tools were also out. She seemed to be piecing diaries with epigrams on various pages.
Hawkeye bent beside Lena and kissed Sunny while he played with two dry paintbrushes. To Trapper's surprise, Jeremiah, in one of the beanbag chairs doing a page of subtraction, got up and hugged and kissed both of them.
"I'm sorry I ruined your fishing trip, pal," Hawkeye whispered.
"I forgive you," Jeremiah said.
"Thank you."
Jeremiah shrugged, aw shucks, no big deal. He went back to his math. Curious, Trapper tried the beanbag chair beside the boy. He'd seen these in stores but never wanted to appear this undignified in public. He sunk in more than he expected. It felt good on the two vertebrae that gave him trouble at work but wrenched his bad knee. He tried to wiggle himself up, but slumped back down again. Whatever.
Jeremiah was watching him over his notebook.
"Do your math, kid," Trapper said.
Jeremiah giggled.
Hawkeye knelt beside Lena. "We saw them arrive."
"They're meeting with the college boys and the others in the longhouse. Just men." Lena didn't look up.
"I see."
Lena looked up briefly, didn't meet his eyes. "Have you talked to the Robinsons?"
Hawkeye nodded. "We saw them on the path. They filled us in."
"One lawsuit doesn't prove anything," Trapper said, caution in his voice. It didn't not prove anything, either.
"Well." Lena selected an awl, a hammer, and drove the metal spike into the fleshy material. "Until the men decide something, I'll be working."
She looked down at her work, subtly dismissing them. Hawkeye glanced at Trapper, as uncertain as Trapper felt. He wasn't familiar with this side of Lena. Was this anger? He'd gone with a few girls who got like this right before they blew. Lena didn't seem the passive-aggressive type.
"Why?" Hawkeye touched her arm.
"Because." Her voice was clipped, her hands professional and spare as she put a sheaf of papers into a binding clamp. "There's not much I can do about them, is there? And in the meantime, the folk fair is in August and I have thirty self actualizing journals to calligraphy, bind, and back in leather. Add to that, four hundred bars of soap to make and label, and berries to can --"
"Hon --"
"The income pays for your child's food," she said.
"I'll help you. I did last year, didn't I?" Hawkeye said.
"When you weren't typing away," she said.
Hawkeye looked lost.
"I'll help," Trapper put in.
"Me too," Jeremiah said.
Lena gave them the sort of tolerant smile your friend's mom gives you when you got her kid in minor trouble but she can't punish you.
"Lena, sweetheart, listen, we need your help --" Hawkeye said.
"Don't sweetheart me!" she snapped. "I'm very busy right now, Hawkeye."
Hawkeye leaned back on his haunches, shocked. "Lena, these Excu-Excula-whatever people -- this isn't the end of the world."
Lena pointed the business end of her awl at him. "Don't you tell me, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, how I should be feeling about outsiders walking into my town and changing everything. They -- telling us how we should do things? And those little idiots may just go along with it, won't they?"
Trapper could feel his heart beating in his throat. He wanted to reach out to her, but he didn't know what the rules were on touching, hugging, comforting. He still didn't get this free love thing, or if there were rules. If they were supposed to make it up as they went along, he wasn't sure if this was a good time to improvise.
"Do you think that's a possibility?" Trapper said.
"It is if the idiots who run this place drop the acid and think the trip is groovy," Lena said. "Don't you know how intoxicating pretty ideals are?"
Trapper watched Hawkeye, who sat down cross-legged on the floor beside Lena. She let him move close. Trapper desperately wished he had words for this situation. He was a veteran, but not of a whole war-ridden childhood.
"Everything could change," Lena said to her leatherwork. "Don't you understand how that scares me? I've had enough changes. I like my life. I have my children, my -- my you, and Jeremiah has his fathers. Do you understand that they took those women's children away?" Lena's voice rose to a peak.
Hawkeye wrapped his arms around Lena, pulling her into the circle of his body, and held her as she shook. Trapper slid out of the stupid beanbag chair and moved beside her. He took the plunge and patted her back in a manner he hoped was reassuring. He wanted her to know she wasn't alone, it wasn't even just her and Hawkeye.
"Lena?" Jeremiah looked up from his homework.
Hawkeye knee-walked over to the kid and pulled him into a hug. Jeremiah put his head on Hawkeye's shoulder and hung onto his neck, feet coming around Hawkeye's waist like a littler kid than he was. Lena put her head on Trapper's shoulder, so he pulled her closer and said nice things in her ear.
"It's okay, kiddo," Hawkeye said. "Your mom is worried about someone else. Do you want to go show Grandma Pearl your homework?"
Jeremiah nodded. "I saw her in the sewing room."
"She is, it's right next door," Hawkeye called after him even as he took off.
"I know!"
Trapper kissed Lena's temple. She was putting up a strong front, but clearly terrified. He grasped that this was more than over some new group coming to town, but couldn't begin to fathom the well of fear someone like Lena must draw from. Hawkeye gently took the awl from her and set it down.
"There are laws in this country," Trapper said. "I know people, lawyers, even a congressman. You are not, I repeat. Not. Going to lose your children."
"I'm sorry," Lena said. She wiped hastily at her eyes.
Hawkeye took her hand, holding it in both of his. "Listen. We'll go away from here if it comes to that. But Trapper needs our help. His daughter Becky is with those wackos."
Lena's hand went to her mouth. "Oh! -- oh my goodness. How? Your little girl?"
"She's not so little," Trapper said.
"She got into trouble," Hawkeye euphemized and summarized. "We guess she just fell in with them."
"I saw her at the lake when they all just rolled in," Trapper said.
"Like a storm cloud," Hawkeye added. "Trap, there's a subject I hate to bring up. . . ."
Trapper sighed. Well, Lena deserved to know. "Becky claimed to be pregnant about eighteen months ago, but we don't know what happened after that. There's no baby. I haven't seen her in over a year, and then she shows up here. I'd sure like an explanation."
Lena looked at him, horrified. "Oh, Trapper, you don't think she could --"
"She wouldn't," Hawkeye said.
"We don't even know if she was really pregnant," Trapper said. "Or maybe she, you know, she lost it, didn't have it. Who knows when she took up with these yahoos."
"But you're sure you saw her?" Lena said.
"I didn't imagine it. She looked up and saw me, I'm sure of it," Trapper said. "But it was like she looked right through me."
Lena shoved her calligraphy papers into boxes. "Maybe the women won't talk to men. The article from the Robinsons said the men controlled the women completely."
"These people are starting to become my least favorite cult," Trapper said.
"We'll make it better," Hawkeye said. "We always do."
"Of course we will." Lena stopped. "How?"
Hawkeye, sitting between them, took Lena and Trapper's hands in his. Trapper's gaze flicked nervously at Lena, then back at Hawkeye, who was giving them a battle-weary smile. Trapper almost felt like a shoe was waiting to drop, like this couldn't be for keeps. Adultery he knew; he was so good at it. But Lena was giving them both watery smiles. She leaned over and kissed Hawkeye. Trapper watched helplessly, hating how right they looked together. But then Hawkeye turned his head, and before Trapper could process the moment in his mind, Hawkeye was kissing him.
Lena climbed over Hawkeye and, with a glance of permission, landed delicately in Trapper's lap. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her forehead to his chest. He held her in a great bear hug and kissed the same spot on her hairline that Hawk had kissed this morning. She seemed smaller than the first time he saw her. Pocket-sized. Something dear he'd like to protect, almost like a little sister but moreso that distant cousin you have a low grade attraction to. He'd learned so much about the world in just two days.
"I'm so glad you came," Lena said. "All things considered."
Trapper laughed. Hawkeye grinned at him over her blonde head.
"I'm glad you think so highly of me, sweetheart," Trapper said.
Lena stretched her legs out into Hawkeye's lap. He leaned back against the wall and rested his hands on her bare legs.
"I'm afraid for my kids," Lena said.
Trapper rocked her ever so slightly. "You shouldn't. We're white hats. We get the bad guys and have the happy ending."
"Look," Hawkeye said in his action-voice, "what are we doing sitting here going on just the word of a few reporters when we've got living witnesses? I don’t know if you're aware of this, but reporters sometimes write things not just to tell a story, but to sell it."
"That Bear guy was a pretty big creep," Lena said.
"The brass at the top are always creeps," Hawkeye said.
"Comes with the territory," Trapper said. "Get some people under you, you get to liking the feeling of your boots squashing the guys you stepped on to get there."
"You two didn't meet him . . ."
Hawkeye tapped her arm to pontificate. "Well, what about the women? Has anyone even talked to them?"
"I don't know," Lena said.
Hawk was having an Idea. Trapper could see the little bulb lighting up his eyes. "Look, there's no point in trying to convince the boys tripping balls down in the longhouse. Why don't you take the girls and go stage a feminist intervention?"
"And drag my Becky out of there by her hair, if necessary," Trapper put in.
Lena nudged him. "If your daughter is over eighteen, she's free to make her own mistakes."
"She's nineteen."
"Horrid age." Lena stood, leaning on their shoulders for support. "All right, gentlemen. I'll gather the troops."
Hawkeye popped up and mock-saluted. "That's my girl."
Lena led them to the ladder. "Meanwhile, ah, do you boys have plans?"
"No, why?" Hawkeye said. Trapper eyed them both suspiciously. He'd never felt so handled as when he'd fallen in with these two.
"Well, dear heart, have you shown Trapper our new shower and water heater?"
Hawkeye wrapped an arm around her waist. "Miss Klein, I believe you are trying to have me seduced."
Lena and Trapper waited while Hawkeye went down the ladder. "No, I'm hinting that you both smell like fish."
"Ah," Hawkeye said from the floor level.
"There's running water in this thatchpatch?" Trapper said.
What he meant was, is it a private trickle for two?
~*~