Head West, Young Starlet Chapter One

Head West, Young Starlet

Chapter One

New Star, Same Sore Ass

Georgina Ruston had only once, in her life, been more than fifty miles from the barn she was born in. The barn, even more than her antebellum estate, or the fields she worked, stood as the manifestation of her life.

Early in the morning, early in summer, and only days after Rachel Ruston’s 18^th birthday, the barn(indeed, all of Gray Estate), reverberated from the common noise of thick leather meeting tender flesh.

Punishments, on a farm, are rarely kept secret.

The field hands and house workers, just stirring from coffee, began another day of labor. They marched to the rhythmic, jarring strokes like a war drum they hardly heard anymore. Rachel was the baby of the estate, beloved by all, and sweet and shy and tender despite regular lashings from her mother. People can get used to almost anything.

The merits of the hidings were debated. While all agreed all teenagers need a firm hand, and while all agreed Miss Georgina always had a reason to take Rachel in hand, Rachel’s quiet nature and the clockwork regularity of her trips to the barn forced many denizens of Gray Estate to conclude that, dog gone it, Miss Georgina just didn’t like Rachel, her youngest.

‘Hell of a way to wake up.’ Old Ned said, delivering the second and third bucket of milk; these for butter.

Tamara, the fat cook, took the buckets. ‘Girl gets whipped so often, I don’t think she’d know what to do with a white ass.’ Tamara, whose own ample bottom was pitch black, often broke down demographics among color of ass: white, black, sunburned, yellow). She didn’t mean anything by it; it was just convenient.

Old Ned fiddled with a cigarette. He’d quit, after the war, but everyone knew Old Ned didn’t like to pry, so he would nervously fiddle with the last pack of smokes the army give him instead of prying or walking off.

Beatrice, the oldest and likely heir, walked by Old Ned on her way to the mill, which was her interim fiefdom, like Wales for the English. She saw the smokes and decided it would be prudent to fix a cup of Joe to go.

‘Today, Rachel got caught w/ rap music.’

‘Rap music?’ Old Ned asked, turning the phrase around in his head, certain he’d heard it sometime ago. ‘On her… dingus?’

‘MP3.’

‘We should throw that third MP away.’ Old Ned was too old to work like he wanted, so he tried to be wise to earn his keep. ‘Save the farm thousands on leather oil and work hours.’

‘She don’t want a licking,’ Beatrice pontificated. ‘She’d act right.’

Tamara, ever in the background, cooking or cleaning, said to herself in large enough voice to hear, ‘Rachel’s just a sweetheart.’

‘Then she ought to act right more often then, she’s such a sweetheart.’ Beatrice snapped. ‘I tell her! A few of those teeth shaking cracks exited the barn before Beatrice put down her coffee. ‘Hell with it.’ And she left for the mill, her fiefdom.

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The Gray Estate barn was, perhaps, the cleanest wooden barn in Texas. No stray hay on the ground, tools in order, and the family strap, a monster from the cruel old days, always freshly oiled.

By the side door, which was now open, jutted a shelf five feet from the ground, with a hook at the side. Rachel knew this shelf better than any other object on the planet. Better than her bed, better even than her hands.

Warn, dark blue jeans puddle at her feet, body bent obliquely(not tall enough to bend all the way over though the shelf was set low), she put her weight on her elbows on the shelf, her hands together in a fist. She bit her thumb for a spanking. Always the same thumb, and always on the same spot resulting in a permanent mark.

Every four seconds, as clockwork, thick leather struck her tender bottom. She shook, bit her thumb, but otherwise kept her place, only tensing her serious and downcast face for the length of the impact before falling back into flat affect. Her eyes were closed, her veiled eyeballs looking down and evincing self-pity.

Georgina often boasted that her youngest’s backside was made for the family strap, just like her own was when she had been a willful girl back in the day. Rachel’s backside was small in width and length, so that the strap could and did touch every inch of the target; yet her cheeks jutted out, like the spanking shelf she leaned on, jutted out to the delight of any man seeing Rachel in jeans, but sadly for Rachel that just meant plenty of meat to tenderize.

And, perhaps more importantly, Rachel was a fast healer. Like her mother. Beatrice and Emily and Regina would take a week at least to fully heal from a whipping, when the rare occasion saw fit for one of Rachel’s sisters to be whipped. Rachel’s sitter would be smooth and soft white in only three days after the most agonizing punishments. She was teased unmerciful after the X-Men movie came out, every youngerd calling her “Wolverine.”

“Brats,” she called them, but smiled and slashed at them with make-believe claws.

This superior healing factor was a mixed blessing, like most blessings, as ever since the end of Christmas last, and the beginning of her last semester of high school, Rachel had been whipped every three days—but always for a good reason.

This despite Georgina’s thinking that each spanking should be an event to be remembered for life. Georgina didn’t believe in counting the strokes, but thought, rather, that a mother’s intuition knew when a hide had finished tanning. Old Ned, who was the kind that counted everything without trying, knew that Rachel rarely bent for less than sixty licks. One-hundred licks was unusual. On this day, Old Ned counted to one-hundred and thirty when one of Tamara’s little ones ran careless and bumped his war knee, so even his unconscious had to stop counting to help him keep from scalding the little monster with his coffee. He managed to catch the spilt coffee with his withered old hand, then lost himself in the memory of bullets and confusion, and his lost friend, too inside his own mind to measure the outside world.

But even Rachel’s whippings can’t last forever. There’s always too much work on a farm that ought be got to, especially in the morning light.

When six seconds went by without that terrible shock and burn, that lash Rachel could never inure to, no matter how many exposures, when that six seconds went by she knew one more whipping was over without making more than a few whimpers, here and there. She’d won again. Hurray.

She stood up, too exhausted to shake, and pulled her jeans up, itself a punishment. She had access to looser jeans, but she had her vanity, even if subtle . She turned to her mother, her head down and eyes on her feet, and murmured ‘Thank you, mamma’ in her quite little voice. Her face, hidden by her long, thick hair like her mother’s when she was 18, was the picture of self-pity.

‘You want to sing about something, sing about God or Love or something good and country like that. Or your mother that loves you, not shooting police or streetwalkers, understand?’

Georgina menaced her daughter with the strap that had known four generations of Ruston ass; a sign that Georgina would be happy for an excuse.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Rachel answered, though the rap music she had been caught with wasn’t about either cop-killing or prostitution. She knew where such an argument would lead her buns.

‘Good. Now. We both have chores to do.’

The Gray Estate barn was, perhaps, the cleanest wooden barn in Texas. Rachel, alone now, instead of rubbing her jeans, oiled her mother’s spanking strap, swept the floor, cleaned and ordered the tools like the top hand liked them, checked for cobwebs and wasp nests, then sprayed Lysol on everything.

She felt stiff and weak right after a lashing, and preferred private shelter for a spell before facing the wide plain. She squeezed her jeans and made all the motions of a deep, anguished moan without the noise. She scrunched her eyes and bit her lip, and kept rubbing until the pain became manageable. Her joints continued to burn. Ten minutes of clenching every muscle in her body, not to mention tensing those already stretched muscles upon impact every few seconds, would take the spry out of anybody. It made her body hard and lovely, fit for a magazine cover, but she never did get used to the exercise regime.

Old Ned, looking over the porch, saw Rachel exit the barn by the side door, rubbing her jeans and feeling sorry for herself. In his experience, girls tried to hide their rubbing after a spanking, for the pride you see, but Rachel’s spankings were so frequent, and so noisy, she must consider such vanity ludicrous.

Rachel, the picture of self-pity, got on her horse, stretching her neck around in another silent moan, and got about her chores. She had a way with horses. All animals, really, but especially horses.

Georgina, having given a dozen orders to a dozen people, entered the kitchen.

‘Well! You can…’ Georgina rarely was at a loss of words. Old Ned and Tamara looked at each other on the sly. ‘Just forget about any help from the brat this summer. She’s… she has decided to go to Los Angeles to be in the pictures.’

‘Ah.’ Old Ned muttered, not wanting to give Georgiana a punching bag by commenting one way or another.

‘She’s been talking about it a while, and I've been wising her, but she told me for sure, with schedules, last night. The ungrateful fool. I told her, “no you are not, because I’m not giving you the money, and without money, in this world thats so damn modern, you can’t go anywhere. So you just get set for state college in the Fall and decide on a study you like.” Then she tells me she’s saved all her money from her weekends working at the Ceniplex for three years, and I said “This world is cruel and eats a cotton-headed little fool of a girl like you alive every five minutes,” and she said “I hope not,” and I said, “It’s going to and…" I’m going to balance the books.’

In her room, at her desk, looking over closed books, Georgina burst into tears and wept like she may die.