Unknown
Pony girl
CHAPTER ONE
The stars were just beginning to appear in the evening sky. They came out one by one, like shy virgins, and then twinkled magnificently in the clear deep dark blue of the early evening.
Lena hurried from the farmhouse with her milk pails in her hands. Her face was thrust into the dark heavy collar of her coat, and it scratched her soft cheek. The harsh words of her parents, screaming at each other, still rang in her ears, and it wasn't until she was halfway across the yard that she looked up and saw the bright stars in the sky. Then she stopped and gazed at them, and wished on the first one she had seen for a better life.
She didn't know any other kind of life except that which took place within the small confines of the little Iowa farm where she lived with her parents. Life had been better when her brother, Ret, had still lived with them. But he had grown up and gone away run away from the life of brutal words and harsh treatment that their father meted out to everyone on his land.
"You screaming bitch, you're no better than a whore! You deserve to be treated like a whore!"
Lena turned and saw her father's raised arm strike her mother to the floor through the lighted kitchen window. With a sob she turned again and hurried to the barn. She opened the big door and then closed it and went down the row of cows to Tess, her favorite cow.
Tess' udders were heavy tonight and Tess mooed in great pain and pleasure as she saw Lena approaching with her milking pails. Lena had barely positioned the pail under Tess and placed her hands on the cow's heavy tits when the milk began to come. Lena deftly directly the steaming hot stream into one pail, which quickly filled. Another pail was filled from the same udder, and then two more pails from the second udder.
She talked to the cow as she milked: "That's it Tessie, girl. Feel better now? Didn't you know I would come out here to milk you? You know I wouldn't forget all about my Tessie." She stroked the cow's hot sweaty flanks and the cow turned to look at her with her big, wordless cow eyes. Lena imagined that the animal understood Lena's own pain and sorrow. Every time she witnessed her father striking her mother she felt a sickness for which she knew no cure. She had been witnessing such scenes ever since she could remember. But now, as she approached puberty, the cruelty of her father toward her mother seemed to affect Lena's sensitive spirit even more.
She was twelve years old and a very pretty girl, wholesome and healthy looking with a good clean, farm girl's complexion: fair with a rosy blush on her cheeks from working outside, summer, winter, spring and fall.
She was well developed for a twelve-year-old, as so many farm girls are. Perhaps it was the environment in which she grew up, witnessing the farm animals in all the stages of their existence: from birth, infancy, mating, adulthood, and death. They kept pigs and chickens as well as cows on their farm, and there were four horses: two old plow horses which they had from the days when they had a horse drawn plow, and two beautiful stallions which her father kept for his own riding pleasure.
As she went down the line of milkcows, the barn filled with the warm soothing smell of fresh hot milk. Together with the smell of the hay in the loft, and the twinkling of the stars through the loft window, the barn seemed a world apart from the farmhouse across the yard. The barn was a place where Lena felt she could be alone, and dream.