The Travel Nurse

It was after dark by time she went out to him. By then the barn itself had receded into the black sky— no moon— but she knew he was still in there by the two large squares of yellow lamplight coming through the windows. Sure enough, he was sitting on a stool with his back to her, leaning forward, shoulders curving in. He was milking one of his cows.

"Mr. Cameron?" she said, and if he was at all surprised by her presence he didn't react— directing the streaming milk three times more against the edge of his pail before he responded.

"Yes, nurse?" He didn't turn around.

"The coroner has come and gone," she said.

Milk zinged into the bucket. "Hazel?" he asked.

"Hazel has gone with the— she has gone with him and your wife's body."

His head drooped forward slightly, just enough to show the gap between his creased, slightly yellowed shirt collar and the back of his neck. It was clear he had been responsible for the care and laundering of his own clothing for some time before she showed up, his sister-in-law being utterly devoted to his wife, her sister Lora Lee, but unwilling to extend any acts of service to him. The two of them had a strained relationship, Mr. Cameron and Hazel, her treating him with thinly-veiled contempt and he, as with most everyone, very spare towards her in return.

There was something smoldering between them that she, a travel nurse who had been in their home all of six weeks, was not immediately made privy to. Something ongoing and insidious that had nonetheless been smoothed over in anticipation of the nurse's arrival, the final days of Lora Lee.

They lived together the same house, all three of them. Hazel had her rooms downstairs.

She walked over to him, drawn by the sudden, tender vulnerability of his exposed neck, his unpressed shirt. "Perhaps you could leave your chores for the morning," she said, clutching the folds of her skirt in one hand to keep from reaching out and touching him there.

"Cows have to be milked before bed," he said, still without looking at her. "Doesn't matter what the day is, or— what the day's events."

The day's events. His wife dead after a long and protracted illness. By accounts she had fallen sick the year after they were married, a very young woman then, and still young when she passed. He was a good ten years older, his dark hair shot through on the sides with silver. They had no children— that being the cause of her sickness, of her ultimate decline.

Finally he turned to look up at her. "Do you know how to milk a cow?"

"No," she said, and he sighed, elbows resting on his knees. "You can't put grief off or work it away, Mr. Cameron," she said after a moment, her voice coming out unexpectedly tentative to her own ears. Still, she pushed on: "Perhaps I could make you a cup of tea inside, where it's warm—"

"It was Lora Lee who wanted to have children," he said, going back to his cow and yanking her udder firmly. "She said she saw no point in living life if not as a mother." He was, she surmised, attempting to explain why he had continued to impregnate her, even as her health failed further with each subsequent loss, even as she became bedridden. He spoke with the flat kind of slowness people often did in the immediate aftermath of a death. "My sister-in-law tried to have her moved into the hospital, but she refused to go."

She had heard about that too, first from Hazel herself. She had called it a care home. "Her illness could still be managed," she'd said, "granted that she did not conceive another child. And I saw no other way to keep him off of her—" she had pinched her mouth shut then, clearly horrified at having said so much. They were hanging the laundry out to dry in the side yard at that time, bed linens and towels, and the two of them strung up the rest together in silence.

She had stared into the bleached-thin weave of Lora Lee's sickbed sheets, backlit by the cold November sun, and imagined the marital relations that had once occurred on it: he was much bigger than her, even before her illness he would have been, powerful, with wide shoulders and capable hands. She imagined Lora Lee's body shrivelling smaller beneath him each time— had she cajoled him into it? Begged him, pleaded and cried? Or had he been willing, even eager, to participate in her singular drive towards motherhood? To speak to him, to listen to him— even now— there was no way of telling.

He finished with the cow, moving the three-quarters full bucket to the side and turning to her again, knees apart and palms rubbing over the thighs and knees of his work pants. "She and I had not been intimate as a husband and wife for many years."

So there it was. And yet— as a woman of twenty-three, well brought up, unmarried, confirmed at St. Thomas's Anglican Church in downtown Toronto— she should have fled the barn immediately, singing out her hurried excuses along the way. As a nurse however, one who had sponged the man's wife's hemorrhages away daily, made milk puddings on the stove and then spooned them into her, wiped her vomit, massaged her stomach which felt like a water bladder ready to burst— she heard herself asking: "What do you mean?"

Lora Lee had miscarried in the fall, her final attempt, precipitating the nurse's arrival. By accounts she had done so every year for the past decade. It made no sense then what he was saying, if he was using intimacy as a euphemism for sexual intercourse— the way people often did.

He looked startled, his hands stilling on his legs immediately, as though he'd forgotten where he was and who he was speaking to. "I gave her what she wanted even after it became clear she would never carry a child," he said, blinking. "It wasn't out of desire for— She believed in the possibility of a miracle. She wasn't in her right mind."

That was true. However she may have been before, by the time the nurse arrived she had regressed to a near child-like state, in turns clinging, whining, contrary and often, unkind.

"Don't let that girl touch Benny's things!" she'd screamed at her sister on the first day, when the nurse came in the sick room to collect a basket of soiled laundry piled near the door. Hazel reminded her gently that the nurse had come to provide care for her, Lora Lee. "She'll wash and dry your laundry only," she said, pacifying her sister with several pats on the head.

Her nightmares woke the house, with the crying and carrying on until someone came in to flip on the lights. It was the nurse's job to go to her at that time and she did, but it was almost always for naught— Lora Lee, petulant as ever, demanded her sister, and no matter what the nurse tried she found herself knocking at the basement door. Two, three in the morning: "I'm sorry, Miss Hazel, I'm so sorry—"

She would come promptly in a bathrobe and curlers, slippers slapping through the kitchen and into the sickroom. There, she cooed over her sister with a lifetime's worth of practice and efficiency, soothing her back to sleep.

Mr. Cameron never made an appearance during the nightly commotions, nor was he called for. Whether or not he slept, he remained behind his closed bedroom door.

"I didn't love her," he said then, turning back to the cow and making soft noises with his tongue, standing up to lead her into the stall.

She should have been horrified by him— by the kind of man who would say that so plainly after having only an hour earlier been marched through his kitchen to view the lifeless body of his wife, his own face gone nearly as slack as hers. Who had, instead of waiting inside to speak to the minister and the coroner, gone out to the barn to milk his cows. Who hadn't a word of comfort to offer his collapsed and wailing sister-in-law. Who, by all accounts, had not shed a single tear.

They'd wrapped her body in the sickbed sheet and taken her out like that, a tiny mummy, the coroner lifting her as though she were nothing more than a dry bundle of twigs.

She gazed at his neck again when he walked away, the sharp line of his hair, the straightness of his shoulders and narrowness of his waist. She imagined him climbing on top of that tiny woman five— six?— months ago, doing it out of duty, or desperation, or both.

Miss Hazel could probably hear it happening from her room below too, a realization that sent a strange but pleasurable shock through her. She understood why Miss Hazel disliked her brother-in-law so, but in that moment also wondered, irrationally: had she ever wanted him?

"You look flushed, nurse," he said, coming back and slinging an empty pail down beside his stool where he intended to bring the second cow out. He was looking at her hard, making no pains to disguise his stare as anything but. "Perhaps you should go inside and lie down."

"No..." she said, finding it impossible to look away from him. She blinked, several times. "I don't want to lie down."

Hazel had told her before how he and Lora Lee met. Lora Lee was eighteen and already done with school for three years when they were married. And because she was so delicate looking, blonde hair with blue eyes and a baby doll sort of face, she'd always had one boy or another chasing after her. Mr. Cameron came to Muskoka from nearby Lutterworth, where he'd worked as a farm hand and labourer, and the two met at a dance one Saturday night.

"He was taken with her, of course," she said, sniffing. "But what none of us could ever figure out was why she allowed herself to be taken by him." He wasn't entirely unsuitable though, even Hazel had to admit: after the wedding he took over the bulk of the farm responsibilities, which allowed her to let go of her hired man, saving the cost of his salary. At the time there was still the promise of children, too, ones who might eventually grow up to help run things.

As to why Hazel never married, she didn't say nor even give hint of during any of the times they spent together. She was older than Lora Lee— "eleven years on the day she was born—" and though she hadn't herself inherited the cherub-doll gene she was attractive nonetheless, with thick auburn hair and a beautiful, arresting symmetry to her features. You could assume from looking at her that there was at least one broken engagement in her past, at the very least a sweetheart who had died overseas.

"What do you want?" he asked then, sitting down on the stool. When she didn't answer, he said: "Do you want me?"

She looked at him, his narrow waist, dark hair showing at the base of his neck where he left his shirt collar unbuttoned. His work pants, stained with dirt at the knees, the bulge forming below his belt.

"Have you ever been with a man before, nurse?"

She nodded from where she stood, frozen, unable to think of what to possibly say to him besides: "Yes."

"Yes?"

She went to him, nodding again, putting both hands over his shoulders and chest, rubbing around his shirt collar and then his neck like she was somehow appraising him. He tipped his head back to face her, eyes closing when she touched him. The lamplight both smoothed and highlighted his features, catching the soft line of skin under each eyebrow and the curve of his cheek so he reminded her, suddenly and painfully, of a boy.

"Tell me about it," he said, his voice low— that of a man's— his large hands on her waist pulling her down onto his lap. She said she'd had a steady boyfriend back home, and the summer after graduation they had driven as far as they could out into the sand piles and there, lay down picnic blankets or quilts or a sheet—whatever he had stashed in the trunk of his car.

"You're not a virgin?" he asked, caressing her waist and up along her side.

"No," she said.

"You let him penetrate you?"

She nodded, her face going hot when responded with a low sound that she could only interpret as approval— she came to understand later that he didn't want a virgin, or an inexperienced girl. He didn't want anything to remind him of his late wife.

He began to touch her, his fingers finding the spot over her nipple. "Tell me what else you did," he said. He spoke so low, in a tone she had never heard from him, or from any man for that matter, and when he touched her breast she felt a shock travel to directly between her legs.

"He did the same things you're doing now," she said. "Touching me, and—"

"And?"

"Kissing," she said. Moaning softly, he bent his head and attached himself to her other breast, the damp heat of his mouth coming through the fabric of her dress. The shocks continued and she started to squirm, pushing her hips back against him and feeling him grow hard in response.

His desire for her was palpable but he remained solicitous, rubbing and kissing until she reached around behind her and unhooked her dress, letting it fall down in front. She removed her brassiere and he took up kissing and rubbing again, fingers rough against her bare skin on one side while his mouth was soft on the other, and as he did he rocked his hips towards her in a way that made her rock hers, too. She arched her back and he pulled her skirt up so that she was straddling his leg with only the thin fabric of her underpants between them. As she rubbed herself over his firm thigh, the rough texture of his jeans, she felt a delicious feeling collect down low in her stomach.

"Did he make you come?" Mr. Cameron asked, breaking the seal of his lips on her at last.

"What?" her voice came out so breathy she almost didn't recognize it as hers.

"The feeling you have right here," he said, indicating where his other hand rested in the folds of her skirt at the top of her legs. "Did he do that for you?"

"Oh, no," she said, arching her back even more as the feeling suddenly shot out from her centre where all of those shocks had gathered, only to shoot out through her entire body like a wave of pleasure— a mist— as far as the tips of her fingers and toes.

"Good girl," he said, hand up her skirt now and rubbing her over her underwear, his other hand still anchored to her breast, his erection jabbing into her from behind. She couldn't help crying out, over and over, and the waves kept coming, each more pleasurable than the last. Finally they subsided, and she stood up to undress. He took his pants off and sat back down on the stool, asking if she would kneel in front of him.

She knew what he wanted from her. She wondered, tiny little shivers of pleasure still shooting through her body, if his wife had ever done it for him. Virginal, doll-faced, a prim little country dimwit and grade-ten dropout— she guessed not.

She took the tip of his penis in her mouth and he groaned so loudly that one of the cows kicked her stall wall, startling the other into making a sudden, bleating noise. He took no notice, gasping for air and then groaning again. She continued to lick him, rubbing his shaft with both hands while taking as much of him into her mouth as she could.

"Nurse," he cried, grabbing her shoulders in both hands, her upper arms, pushing his hips forward so she would take more of him in. "Oh, nurse— nurse—" He pulled himself out of her with a startling quickness, pushing her back onto her heels where she stared at him in front of her, enormous and pulsating. He thrashed wildly, closing his eyes and turning his head from one side to the other as he tried not to ejaculate.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, oh, oh—" He unbuttoned his shirt and threw it off, pulling his undershirt over his head, and with that seemed to gain an edge of control. He got down on to his knees in front of her and lay her on the floor, taking himself in one hand and rubbing it over her gently without going inside.

"Doesn't that feel good?" he asked, and she moaned— oh, yes. She almost couldn't believe that she was doing this— she, herself— lying spread open on a barn floor while her dead patient's husband trailed his erect penis over her body. She wanted it though, more than anything she wanted this, and more, too. "Do you want me to put it inside of you?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, nodding her head quickly.

"Ask me."

"Oh?"

“Ask me to put it inside of you."

"Please, Mr. Cameron," she said. He moaned loudly. "Please, put it in me."

He pressed the tip against her. "I have thought about this since the moment you walked into my yard—" he pushed himself in, but only by millimeters. "Ask me again, nurse," he said.

She did what he asked, her voice taking on the slightest edge of desperation— like a young teacher finally fed up, or a slightly frazzled babysitter. "Mr. Cameron, please, put it inside of me." His response was swift, pushing his entire length into her and barely pausing before drawing back and doing it again. She gasped, the floor boards caressing her back roughly as he did it again, and again, all the gentleness gone out of him. He had dreamed of doing it this way to a woman— hard, with abandon, and passion, sweat, and pleasure— and since the nurse had first showed up in his home he could think of almost nothing else.

He thought of the suffocating nights spent with his wife, and how she conceived each one of his children without issue but could not keep them. And with each one she lost, her body deteriorated further— her health failing for the better part of their decade-long marriage.

Hazel had called him every name in the book for the way his and her sister's marriage had unfolded, for the manner in which Lora fell ill and stayed ill and ultimately died. Early on he'd lost his temper at her, yelling that his marital bed was none of her damn business, saying he'd be damned if he let some old maid tell him when he should or shouldn't be having relations with his own wife. He said Hazel was deranged to even think she could talk to him that way, that she must be half-crazy from lust, and jealousy, that she was probably just itching for a man of her own. That was when she'd slapped him good and hard.

He had to admit he'd deserved it. Poor little Lora Lee had heard everything from the bed where she was recovering (then they were still calling it recovery, still seeing a chance) and cried through the night she was so distraught. She never could handle any sort of conflict.

It was the only time he'd ever engaged in that conversation with Hazel, though she did try heartily to bait him over the years: comments made to him, both under her breath and straight on; to Lora, to the doctors, the minister. He'd even overheard her going at the little nurse when she first arrived.

Right before the nurse came Lora Lee had gotten so bad that Hazel made a pallet on the sickroom floor, keeping an eye and ear on her sister through the night. His bedroom was opposite, through the kitchen, and he slept with the door open as he always had. Hazel, however, picked up a curious habit after just a few nights of walking to the bathroom without first putting on her robe. She wore only a nightgown, ankle-length silk, sleeveless, her pendulous breasts loose beneath the lace décolletage. She passed through the kitchen, by his open door, never turning to look in even though she knew he was lying right there.

As the nights passed she seemed to walk closer and closer to his door, even though the direct route from sickroom to kitchen to bathroom took her along the opposite wall, past the sink. Her breasts bounced with every step she took, the dim porch light shining through the window to highlight perfectly the texture of her nipples beneath the sheer fabric. Even before she took sick Lora Lee was always a fragile sort, delicate ribs and small little breasts— but Hazel was well built, broad chested with ample hips to match.

One night he was sure— reaching up in the dark and rubbing his eyes to make sure— that she walked by him naked. He saw it all— the breasts, hips, smooth white thighs and patch of hair in between. After that he shut his door to sleep. There, in the heavy, warm stale air he thought of Lora Lee, lying nude in the grass at Muskoka, imagined Hazel climbing on top of him, fondling her breasts in both hands before dropping them down into his mouth. He'd stroked himself furiously, silently, erupting into the dark.

The nurse was so young, and so eager, climaxing just from rubbing herself over his thigh while he'd shoved himself against her from behind. She had got on her knees and sucked him like she knew exactly what she was doing, lay down and instructed him to put it in her. He did, hard, over and over, and when he drew back and took her leg in both hands, pushing it back so her knee was pressed into her chest, she shook all over and came for a second time. He maintained his pace while feeling her squeeze and contract around him, all the while crying out without seemingly a single inhibition. He thought of Hazel and Lora Lee— years of teasing, goading, pleading, tears, the endless whispers in the dark— looking down at the girl below him. The grip of her body relaxed slightly and he let go of her leg, sliding his hand under her back and turning her over. He entered her from behind, a way he'd only observed done but never done himself.

He was unprepared for the sensation of his outer angle meeting this new inner one. He heard a strangling sound— realizing seconds later it came from him— and as he watched himself disappearing inside of her he had a second realization: he had not learned her name.

"Mr. Cameron," she said with considerable effort, her breath coming so fast. He grabbed her bottom hard, almost a slap, digging his fingers in.

"Nurse," he moaned, releasing her only to grab her again in the same spot but harder, pushing himself in deeper. "My precious little nurse."

"I've never done it this way before—"

"Me neither—"

"It feels so good—"

He was kissing her ear, her cheek, her neck, moaning and groaning and flailing on top of her faster than ever. She could sense the spasm gripping him before he said anything, pulling his elbows to her sides and straightening his back, lifting his head up.

"I want to come on your ass," he said, crying out as he pulled himself back at the very last second. She looked back over her shoulder and saw him kneeled over, gripping himself in one hand while erupting uncontrollably over her back. When he was done he fell silent, except for heavy breathing, and dropped back over her. His chest rose and fell against her.

"Nurse," he murmured, putting his arms under her, around her waist, his damp cheek pressing on her shoulder, his next words soft and unintelligible.