My mother named me after the Virgin Mary. She still thinks I´m a virgin.
I wonder sometimes if she had sex more than once. It doesn´t seem to bother dad, which seems strange to me. They love each other and sleep in separate beds. It´s clear there are all sorts of people in this world.
I was born in Denver. Dad worked for a big insurance company and mom was with one of the big accounting firms. We lived there until I was about ready for school. Mom and dad didn´t want me in Denver schools, so we moved to Fairplay, where mom´s sister Bessie has a ranch.
Dad opened an insurance office, and mom went to work for the Co-op that sells all the farm supplies there. I went to school, and after school I took the bus to Aunt Bessie´s and stayed there until mom or dad picked me up. I almost always slept at home, and we were usually at home together on the weekends, at least until I got really busy with work on the ranch.
At home, mom cooked and kept house when she wasn´t working. They both worked long hours and sometimes I didn´t get picked up from Aunt Bessie´s until after dinner. But we had a pretty close relationship, except when mom would lecture me about covering my body, and keeping my virginity, and staying away from boys, and, and, and.… I learned to tune it out.
Mom and dad really love me, want the best for me. They just have a different view of life than I do. They are proud of me, too, which helps.
The reason I could tune out mom´s lectures was that her sister, Bessie, had a different point of view, and I spent a lot of my time with Aunt Bessie, with Beth, my cousin, and Dan, Beth´s brother. I´d get to the ranch after school, and Aunt Bessie would have chores for me. I´d work pretty hard most of the time, but with plenty of breaks for cookies and hugs and talk about why things are the way they are, and why my folks are so strange.
Bessie says my mom and dad are just the way they are, and I should take the good and the not-so-good together. I know they love me, and Aunt Bessie gives me the space to be myself and find my own way in life. Aunt Bessie loves me, too, so I´ve got two moms, not just one. And one of them I can talk to.
At the ranch, as I said, I did chores, but I had to do homework, too. Beth and Dan and I all had schoolwork as the first priority. And it was mixed with ranch work – looking after horses and cattle, cleaning up around the main house and barns, and working on the range with the hands. I learned to drive a tractor when I was seven, and I can handle a bale of hay without getting stressed. I grew up with horses.
Bessie has three hands who´ve been with her for a long time. Jesse is the foreman, he bosses the hands and Bessie bosses him. The hands live in the bunkhouse and Jesse has a place built on to one end of the main house. Most of the time, we all eat together – Aunt Bessie does the cooking and runs the chuck-wagon during round-ups.
When we first moved to Fairplay, mom, dad and I spent Christmas at Aunt Bessie´s. I had a great time, and I got to sleep with Beth in her bed. I was kind of surprised when Beth came to bed in nothing but skin, but she didn´t seem surprised at my pajamas, so we snuggled up together and slept like spoons all night. Her bare skin felt good. I was a little surprised again in the morning, when Dan slipped into bed with us. He was naked like Beth, and he and Beth cuddled as though it was natural for them. Seeing Beth and Dan was the first time I had seen people naked. I never said anything about it to mom or dad, but, for some reason, they never stayed there overnight again.
It got to be a routine, school, homework and chores at the ranch with Beth and Dan, home again at night. Sometimes homework at home, too. Weekends, I usually went out to the ranch during the day, home again for supper with mom and dad at night.
In the summer there was a lot more work to do. After school was out, the chores on the ranch seemed to multiply. I learned to ride when I first got there, and could saddle and groom a horse by myself before Christmas. That first summer, I really learned to ride; I was in the saddle most of the daylight hours, and now and then the three of us would take sleeping bags and spend the night under the stars. Beth and Dan usually zipped their sleeping bags together and I´d have to watch them making love while I tried to sleep. I kept most of my clothes on in the sack.
That first summer, though, I also learned to swim. There is a creek that runs through the property, and about a mile behind the main house there´s a draw with cottonwoods and sycamores. Aunt Bessie had a corral there and a line shack for towels, mattresses and barbecue stuff, and there was a stretch of fence around it all to keep the cattle from fouling the water. They had dammed the creek so there was a good swimming hole there, and we all learned to swim like fish.
The first time was a little strange for me, because, when Aunt Bessie took me and Beth and Dan out there, she´d just said, “Come see our swimming hole.” When we got there, we put the horses in the corral and went down to the water. Beth and Dan stripped and jumped in. I didn´t know what to do, and I said to Aunt Bessie, “I don´t have a bathing suit. What´ll I do?”
“Just take your clothes off, dear. Nobody minds here, and nobody will say anything to your mom and dad. We all swim naked. Join us.” And she took off her own clothes, too.
Well, I said to myself, ‘might as well´, and soon Bessie was leading me into the water. Of course, it was cold enough that I started looking for ice cubes, but it was fun, and we all played and swam until I was blue. Then, Bessie made me get out and dry off and lie in the sun to get warm. Dan came over and lay down next to me, and we talked. I liked it.
Before long, my cousins had taught me to swim, and we would spend our spare time in warm weather at the swimming hole. On weekends, or when there was time during the week, Bessie would join us, and sometimes the hands would come in for a swim, too. I found out that the regular hands all swam naked as we did, and now and then, when I was out on the range with one of them on a hot day, we would get to a stock tank and strip and take a swim.
During round-up, when there were extra hands around, we either didn´t go swimming or wore bathing suits. “We do things our own way, here,” Bessie told me, “and we don´t advertise them when there are strangers around.”
But all the nakedness got me pretty confused, and I asked Aunt Bessie about it. The next day, after schoolwork and before chores, Bessie and I took off our clothes, and Bessie gave me the grand tour of our respective vaginas. She told me how each of the different parts worked and how they would grow as I grew up.
“I guess I don´t need to tell you not to tell your mom about this.”
“I won´t. I don´t think she´d understand this is something fun and important. But I can talk to Beth about it, can´t I? And Dan?”
“Of course you can. They´ve been wanting me to tell you all this for weeks. You have all the fun you want to, and when you have any questions or anything else, you let me know.”
From then on, the three of us cousins felt perfectly happy whenever we went swimming and just went naked whenever we felt like it. Usually, we tried to be private about it, like at the swimming hole or in the hayloft, or in one of their bedrooms in the winter. Beth taught me how to eat pussy and how to enjoy it. Dan taught me how to do a good blowjob, and when I got big enough, I got to share his cock with Beth. Of course, Beth was already fucking the hands, so I wasn´t on short rations with Dan.
Don´t get me wrong. Life at the ranch was not all bare-ass bathing and fucking. Aunt Bessie expected you to do what you were told, to do what you said you would, and to think carefully about what you say and do.
“Not even animals do things without thought,” she´d say. “There is no worse excuse than to say ‘I didn´t think´.” And, when we´d say something off the wall that wasn´t clearly a joke, she would challenge us: “Tell me what you really mean by that.” And we would really catch it if we weren´t totally honest and reasonable in our answers.
Ask a question, you got a full answer, with directions on where to find out more. Later, she would ask you what else you had found out.
And she wanted our opinions, too. We had to be ready to say what we thought about nearly anything that was going on at the ranch, in the town, the country and the world. She would listen to our opinions, then tell us what she thought or decided and why. “This isn´t a democracy, here,” she´d say, “but I value your opinions.”
Aunt Bessie taught me how to cook, too. She and Beth and I did all the cooking for the ranch – herself, Beth and Dan, the three hands and Jesse and a lot of the time, me. We all helped. So, a lot of the work I did was helping her get meals, especially during roundup, when there were another four or five mouths to feed. I can cook as well over a campfire as I can in a kitchen.
One day, mom said to me, “Mary, being around Elisabeth (she meant Bessie) is doing you a lot of good. You talk like a human being, and you´ve got the habit of thinking about what you say. Elisabeth was always the smart one of us; I always wondered why she became a rancher.”
Out of habit, I thought about that and said, “I think it´s because as a rancher, she´s her own boss: no one tells her what to do. She takes her own chances, her own risks and pays for her mistakes. That´s a pretty good way to live.” Mom just looked at me and said nothing more on the subject.
Of course, it was really nice to lie around with Beth and Dan and play with them when we had the time.
Early on, Beth taught me how to masturbate. It always makes me laugh when I come. Don´t know why.
Then, soon after I showed up, Dan began shooting stuff out of his cock when he rubbed it. Bessie explained what that was all about, too. About the same time, Beth began screwing the hands. And so, when Beth started getting her period, Bessie started her on the pill.
When I got my period, Bessie got me the pill. I learned about condoms, too.
By the time I was eleven, I could ride like any hand, and I was getting good with a rope. I never got interested in the rodeo stuff – barrel racing and calf-roping – but I did a lot of the same things for real.
By that time, of course, Beth was fifteen and she was taking on all three hands. It only took a year or so until I could too. On Sundays, a bunch of us would lie around the pond and make love all afternoon.
Aunt Bessie didn´t join us those times; only when the hands weren´t there. I was never sure why until later. I guessed she didn´t feel like she should make love with them and still boss them around.
Once things were sort of out in the open, it made everything easier. If I was off riding fence with Johnny or Manuel or Paul, we could stop for lunch or take a dip in a stock tank and then make love. Once in a while, I would ride around afterward without my shirt on, just to get whoever I was with interested in doing it again.
Now and then, on slow days in the winter, I´d go out to the bunk house, sometimes with Beth, sometimes on my own, and spend the afternoon with the hands.
Beth started to date guys from school, and she would tell me about what they did on their dates. I learned early that back seats and truck beds aren´t the best places for love-making. Beds are. Beth told me she mostly brought her fellows home for the evening. Aunt Bessie said she´d rather have Beth in bed upstairs with her boyfriends than trying to have fun in a truck.
Guys started asking me out, too. Mom said no until finally, when I was fifteen, I convinced her it was making me look silly in school. She´d let me go on dates with guys, but I had to be home real early. What with working on the ranch afternoons and weekends, I didn´t get much chance with the guys from school until I was old enough to go out with guys who drove. Then, with an early curfew, if I wanted to get laid, it was off to the woods and into the back seat. But I found I needed to spend a lot of time getting to know them before I was ready for that. After all, I certainly got plenty of sex at the ranch, and the guys at school were mostly going to live on the family ranch for the rest of their lives, anyway. None of them interested me that much.
And of course, I always got my homework done.
When Beth got through high school – top of her class – she went off to college at Colorado State in Fort Collins. She was planning to run the ranch with Dan, so she wanted to really know her stuff. That left me to look after the hands for the next two years, at least while she was away. It really was fun. Bessie always made sure I was only doing what I wanted to do. “Don´t ever let a man screw you unless you want it,” she said. I got into a couple of scrapes with guys from school who just wanted me to spread my legs without getting anything in return – no love, not even much respect. But I´m strong and I know how to make sure guys know what I will do and what I won´t.
When Dan went away to college, we all thought he would go the Ag route, too. But he got interested in engineering and ended up studying electrical engineering at UC Boulder. That sort of meant, as Bessie put it, “he´s gone for good, and it´s up to Beth to run this place if she wants to.”
When I graduated from high school, Beth graduated from college and we spent the last summer working and talking and being close like before, but with a difference. I knew I was leaving, pretty much for good. Dan was as good as gone, and Beth was looking down a long road with just herself and her mother to run the ranch. We talked a lot about it.
“I´ve got the hands, of course, to help with the work, and they keep me warm in bed, too. But I´ve been thinking about what I want to do about kids and maybe getting married,” she said one day. The four of us were sitting around the swimming hole.
Bessie said, “Honey, you need to give this all a little thought. And there´s something else you need to think about, too.”
She went and got her cell-phone and made a call. We kept on kicking it around until Jesse showed up. He´d never been at the swimming hole with us before, but in no time at all, he was naked and sitting with us. He´d brought steaks and stuff for dinner, too.
Bessie said, “You know I´ve never come out here when the hands are here and you guys are getting it on. Well, the reason is, I have my own thing with Jesse, here. We sleep together every night, and he has been my real love ever since your father died. We´ve kept it pretty quiet because that´s the way he wanted it, but now I think it´s time for a new look at things. I warned him this was coming, so it´s no surprise to him. He´s agreed.
“Beth, here´s the way I see it. I´d really like to keep the place in the family. The three of us and the hands can run the ranch like we always have. Maybe we´ll need another hand when Mary and Dan are gone. If you find someone you like enough to marry, go ahead, and bring him here. Just make sure you´re willing to give up screwing four or five different guys, ´cause that´s probably what your husband will want you to do.
“On the other hand, if you want to have kids, you can have all you want – there´s plenty of men around who´d be glad to knock you up any time you let them. You don´t need to be married any more. And we´ve got all it takes to give your kids anything they need.
“Now, that´s a lot to think about, so why don´t we start some food?”
We talked a lot that evening, and ended up feeling all warm and cozy together. As the summer went on, I tried to get Jesse to screw me; so did Beth. He said ‘No thanks´ very sweetly.
When I left for college, Beth said to me, “I´m just going to play it by ear. I love things just as they are; three or four lovers is just my speed. I don´t want to go off looking for trouble; most of the girls at school who got involved with local guys don´t have the kind of life I want. If lightning strikes, I´ll deal with it then.”
Before I left for college, we had a long, wet, and loving party at the swimming hole.