Them That Helps Themselves

Clem's words kept going over and over in Jeb's mind as he worked his way down the stream to where a pool was formed at the base of a fall. Here's where fish tended to get stuck trying to get upstream and where Jeb planned on landing the family's dinner. The phrase revolving in his head was, "God helps them that helps themselves." It seemed to be Clem's answer to everything out here on the southwestern edge of the new state of Missouri—made a state before there hardly was anyone to be in the state, certainly not where the Ritcheys had settled, deep in the southwest corner of the territory.

Helping themselves. That's what Clem Ritchey, Jeb's father, had told Jeb when Jeb pointed out that they were still the only family homesteading here in this section of Newton County after five years. Jeb had seen his twentieth birthday go by. His sister, Ruth, was past her nineteenth. It was time for them both to be married and settled down on their own homesteads. But Clem had kept them close and worked them hard, with little time left to them to think about being anywhere else. Whenever Jeb said he thought he'd do some traveling of the area, Clem thought up something else that he had to be on the farm for.

It would have been unthinkable for Ruth even to entertain the idea of going beyond the bounds of the homestead. Only Clem went anywhere for supplies, and they got precious little of those from the outside. Clem believed in self-sufficiency. And, as he was always prone to say, he believed that God would provide—through the family's own efforts.

It was as if Clem didn't want Jeb or Ruth to set out on a life of their own. He always talked about the farm as the family's world down through the ages, not just his.

When Jeb had been bold enough to admit that he wanted to go in search for other families in the area because it was time that he was thinking of taking a wife, Clem resorted to saying that, when either Jeb or Ruth were meant to bring anyone else into the family, God would send them here. As in all else, we are to provide for ourselves, Clem had said, and we are settled right here.

Jeb didn't understand what his father meant by that until this day, as he was approaching the fishing hole below the falls.

He heard them before he saw them. Clem was doing a lot of grunting, and though Ruth was moaning a good bit, she was keeping it quiet. She certainly wasn't resisting her father, so Jeb didn't bust in on them. Instead, he crept up to where he could see them and still be hidden in the foliage of the dense forest.

Ruth was lying, face down, her voluptuous, but small-boned, body easily being supported on a large lower branch of a giant fir tree. The skirt of her cotton dress was gathered up around her waist, and the top of the dress, which buttoned down the back, had been unbuttoned and was pushed off her breasts as well. She was below average in height and body, favoring their mother, Sarah. Her flowing hair was a mixture of Sarah's strawberry blonde and Clem's golden blond, with the red being mostly a highlight.

As Jeb well knew from taking every advantage of spying her at her toilet, there being little privacy at the isolated homestead, she was ripe for attention, with plump breasts and buttocks, and wide hips. He had dreamed many a night while masturbating of the thick lips he'd seen of her slit, and he'd had many a fantasy of exploring within her folds. It didn't seem to give him pause that she was his flesh and blood.

Jeb's solidly built father, Clem, was indulging in that ripeness. His breeches were off and on the ground and his flannel shirt was open to expose his muscular chest, with the matting of blond, curly hair swirling around his pecs and trailing down into this bush. His cock was thick and was buried in Ruth's cunt, moving in and out, as Ruth moaned and slowly writhed under him. He was crouched over her back, his teeth latched onto the back of her neck, and his rough hands clutching and squeezing her breasts, working them in the rhythm of the thrusts of his cock.

There was an all-business aspect to the father's fucking, like the pleasure of the act was secondary to the purpose he was giving priority to.

Was this what Clem meant about helping themselves? Jeb wondered. How would his father feel if he, Jeb, helped himself to Ruth as well? Although he almost had to laugh at finding that his father was fucking his sister considering what he himself was doing to meet his need. Even as he watched, he perceived that there was a difference between his need in engaging in sex and what seemed to be Clem's motivation.

He stayed, watching, until Clem gave a little shudder and Ruth was jerking and emitting little cries. When Clem pulled his cock out, it was evident from the residue of cum Jeb could see on the bulb that his father had seeded his sister. The two remained in position, though, with Clem almost absentmindedly kissing Ruth's shoulders and cheeks until the daughter turned her face—seemingly willingly—to her father and they kissed on the lips a bit more passionately. Most of the passion was the daughter's, though, and she was so sensual that the father would have to be made of stone not to have responded.

Clem was hardening again. He thrust inside his daughter's cunt again and resumed pumping her.

Jeb silently pulled away and walked back toward the house. He moved quietly, making as little noise as possible, with his knife held at the ready in his hand. There had to be some form of meat on the table this evening, and it apparently wasn't going to be fish from the pond at the base of the falls.

"Rabbits? I thought you was going fishing," his mother, Sarah, asked as he entered the cabin.

"I managed to catch these before reaching the fishing hole. We can have fish tomorrow," Jeb answered.

"They was down there, wasn't they?" Sarah asked, her lips in a thin line of resigned disapproval. "Ruth and your father. He was breeding her—or trying to, wasn't he?"

He was doing a pretty job of it from what Jeb could see, but what he answered was something else.

"You knew?" Jeb was taken aback by his mother's use of the word "breeding," but now that he'd heard the sex act put into that context, it seemed exactly what his father had been doing. His taking of his daughter seemed to lack the pleasure of moving his cock inside a woman. It seemed more like just another farm chore.

"Yes, I knew. Your father can't hide nothing from me. I badgered him about finding someone for Ruth. She's nineteen. It's past time for her to have a husband of her own. But your father said he couldn't give her up—that we needed to provide for ourselves here, and she was needed for that."

"Provide for ourselves?"

"You know your father. Helping yourself. We need a larger family if we are to prosper here on the frontier. He needs more sons. You probably don't realize it, but he's scared stiff that you'll leave us and thus cut down on the work we can get done on the farm. I must say that I share his fear, but for more reasons than he has." She was giving her son a hungry look.

"So, he is laying with Ruth—"

"To breed her, yes."

"And you are right with this?"

"It's true the farm needs more workers if we are to expand it. But your Pa would hold with bringing in a man from outside the family. But I have interests of my own, as you well know." She was unbuttoning the front of her dress, exposing her pendulous breasts, and moving close to her son. Her hand went down to unbutton the fly of his breeches.

"Am I to be part of this breeding plan too, Mother?"

"If it is to happen, you will have to be, yes. But I would like to think there be more than that 'tween you and me. And I know that if we are to breed more Ritcheys, you are more important to the family than Clem is."

"I don't understand."

"We had no more after Ruth," she said. "Your father is not able to have more."

"My father? Not you?"

"Yes, it is your father who is empty," she answered. "Not that he knows it or would accept it if he was faced with the truth. He can do the pokin' but nothin' comes of it."

She wouldn't go into it further with Jeb, but she well knew it was Clem, not her who was sterile. Neither Jeb nor Ruth were from the loins of Clem, and earlier in the year, when the army had gone through, driving the Cherokee tribes from the Carolinas and Georgia further west, one of the Cherokee braves had escaped and trapped her in the cabin. She had not fought him hard, because, in his roughness, he pulled more pleasure and passion from her than Clem had done since the earlier years of their marriage and before.

Sarah thus knew she still could bear a child, although she had had to prevent development of such a child from the Cherokee, who surely would not have presented as a Ritchey.

She had taken Jeb's hands and put them on her breasts. He didn't take them away, so she knew she would have her way with her son again. They had lain together for some months. Jeb had always pulled out in time, but if Clem was trying to breed Ruth, Sarah thought, there was no reason she couldn't provide him what he wanted herself. She was not opposed to Clem's "doing for ourselves" belief, but it would mean something different from what Clem had in mind.

"So, you want me to—?"

"Your father is, in many a way, a stubborn and ignorant man. He wouldn't accept that there's anything dead in him. You are a Ritchey, so it is our duty to help your father with his plan."

Jeb indeed was a Ritchey. Clem Ritchey wasn't his father, but Clem's brother, Samuel, left behind in Virginia when the family had moved west, was. But there was no way that Sarah was going to tell either Clem or Jeb this.

She was already on her knees in front of her son, pulling his hard cock out of his breeches and moving her mouth over the bulb.

He fucked her on the table where the family ate, Sarah on her back and Jeb between her legs, holding them spread and moving his cock in and out of her cunt. He knowingly fucked her in a more mutually pleasurable way than he had observed Clem taking Ruth. He rubbed the bulb of his cock between Sarah's labia, as puffy as her daughter's were, and over and over on her clit until the woman was panting for him to sink deep inside. And when he did enter her, at first he fucked her slowly and shallowly until she begged for more. The eventual plunge and vigorous pumping pulled a passion of high ecstasy from both of them.

When he was about to ejaculate and moved to pull out of her, as he'd always done before, spouting his cum on her stomach, Sarah rose up, snaked her arms around his torso, and palmed and squeezed his buttocks, holding him close to her so that his seed was released deep inside her—again and again.

"Remember," she murmured, "God helps them that help themselves."

Whether or not Jeb accepted Clem's beliefs that the sex act, even within the family, was a necessity to preserve the future, Jeb would always take pleasure from it—and would give pleasure as well.

Ruth returned to the cabin first, all aglow and chatty. It was obvious to Jeb that she harbored no feeling of being violated or even of remorse for laying with her father. He could hardly blame her. If Clem wasn't going to let her meet any other men, this was preferable to his sister to drying up as an old maid who never had been plowed.

He only wished that he was brave enough to . . .

When Clem arrived from plowing not as much of the back field as he would have if he wasn't busy with other plowing, the two women were happily moving about the kitchen area at one end of the cabin's main room, while Jeb was sitting at the table, skinning the rabbits for dinner.

"Rabbit?" Clem remarked. "I thought this would be a fish night."

"For fish, I would have had to go the fishing hole below the falls, Pa," Jeb said, without looking up.

Clem had the decency to blush a bit, but he said nothing—and Jeb well knew that he could say nothing more either.

* * * *

One overcast day three months later Sarah had barely climbed off the table, cinched up her bodice, and smoothed the hem of her cotton dress down to her ankles and Jeb had just buttoned up his breeches and moved to where the family's hunting rifle was hanging above the fireplace, prepared to hunt out the dinner meat, when Ruth burst into the cabin. She was frantic, wailing and weeping and staggering about.

"It's Pappy," she cried out. "He's . . . he's . . ."

"He's what?" Sarah asked sharply. She gave a pained look and clutched at her belly. The baby was already moving inside her.

"He's under the plow. He ain't movin' and there's blood all over. I found him in the back field, near the rocks by the stream. The plow turned over on him."

The three of them rushed back to the field farthest from the cabin, but there wasn't anything they could do for Clem. The plow had tipped over by the rocks and come back at him, the blade cruelly slicing into his midsection.

Sarah collapsed on a nearby rock and clutched at her stomach, in shock and looking completely disoriented, her whole world collapsing. The importance of a strong male worker in a family unit on the frontier couldn't be underestimated. Strong and industrious women were necessary in their own realm, but it would be nearly a year now before Sarah herself would be strong enough again to handle a plow.

She looked up dully at her son—now a full-grown man himself and the father of the child in her womb—no longer looking to him as a son of the family, but now as the master of the clan—wondering if the young man was up to the responsibility. Jeb, looking stunned himself but the realization of his new role dawning on him, was standing by his father's body, holding a near-hysterical Ruth close in his embrace.

Despite the shock and tragedy of the situation, Jeb felt his loins stirring. He had not embraced his sister like this since they were small children. For the past few years, he hadn't trusted himself and Clem had been careful to keep them separated too. Now, if he was going to replace his father at the head of the family, he was free to touch her in any way he wished. He felt himself trembling from both awe and anticipation while still being fully aware of the seriousness and tragedy the family had been thrown into.

"I best go get the shovel," he muttered, as Sarah stood to receive her daughter into her arms. She also moved to the horse patiently standing in the traces of the plow, no doubt enjoying the break in pulling the plow in the field and with little understanding of the momentous change in the order of the family's life unfolding before it.

"I believe the cottonwood grove down near the pond at the base of the falls would be the best place to put Pa," Sarah said as Jeb turned to fetch the shovel. "Mind that you not put him too close to the big oak there. That's where we buried the Cherokee Indian Pa found lurkin' around the cabin last year. Pa would not be comfortable buried near a primitive native, specially one he shot himself. I will go to the cabin and write a letter to your Uncle Samuel. He had talked of coming out to join us. Now he will have to. In the morning you'll need to ride over to Springfield to send it, Jeb."

Jeb paused in his stride toward the tool shed. In the last few moments, he had been flexing his strength into what he saw as his new role in the family at the head the decision tree. He wasn't at all sure he wanted Uncle Samuel coming in over him. But he would face that with Uncle Samuel when he arrived, which could not be for nearly a year yet even if Samuel was prepared to start out as soon as he received Ma's letter in Virginia.

That evening, it was Jeb who took up his father's favorite phrase, "God helps them that helps themselves," in explaining to Ruth what the new order was about in family survival on Missouri's frontier in the 1830s. It was more than symbolism that led him to lay his sister down on her back on top of their father's newly mounded grave, push her cotton skirting up to her waist, unbutton his breeches, and do with her what he'd been doing with his mother for nearly a year.

Ruth shuddered and moaned under him more deeply than Jeb had heard her respond to her father. She trembled and sighed, begging him not to make her wait, as he rubbed the bulb of his cock between her puffy folds and repeatedly across her clit before pushing inside her and moving in and out just a few inches inside her. He laughed a husky laugh when she clutched his buttocks, thrust her pelvis into his crotch, and pulled him deep inside her, after which they were both lost in his fast, deep, thrusts, bringing them to a shared climax.

Docile and accepting young woman that Ruth was, she willingly accepted the transition from having her father's cock working inside her to having that of a younger, more virile and handsome brother plowing her. She had never separated the pleasure aspect from that of the necessity to breed. She was ripe for having a strong man between her legs and deep inside her. It mattered nothing at all to her whether it was her father or her brother. They were the only men she'd seen in the last three years, and her time for being bred was now.

She did allow as she got more pleasure out of it with Jeb, though.

She fully accepted Jeb's reasoning that the Ritchey's must help themselves in the battle to survive and progress and multiply and that it was fitting for Jeb to assert his new position on the grave of their father so that the spirit of Clem would be content in knowing that Jeb was taking over the "helping themselves" responsibility.

All that she cared about was the feeling that, at last, she could feel herself quickening inside and creating a baby that every woman of her age wanted to have as the thrusting of Jeb's manly cock brought her into greater explosions inside than Clem had ever managed and that, clutching Jeb's firm buttocks into her, he seeded her again and again and again deep inside with strong, virile spurts of his seed.

As fate would have it, Jeb did not have to reach any understanding with Uncle Samuel when the wagon rolled up to the cabin some eight months later. He increasingly was wary of the showdown to come between him and Samuel as he grew into his role as head of the household. He managed to take over all of the farm chores his father had been doing and Sarah and Ruth, both content in having a man take care of them as Clem had never fully been able to do, willingly took on more chores themselves and increasingly acceded to any decision Jeb made.

When Jeb and Sarah, swaddling an infant in her arms, and Ruth, her belly big and round, went to the cabin door at the sound of an approaching snorting horse and wheeled vehicle, there was no Uncle Samuel in the wagon—just a weary Aunt Rachel and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Annie.

"Samuel took fever crossing from Tennessee into Missouri and died a week later," Aunt Rachel said in a flat voice. "We had sold everything in Virginia and were already half way here, so we just continued on."

"No matter, you are welcome," Jeb said, his eyes locked on the lovely and ripe young Annie, who, though casting her eyes down, was keeping the strapping young, muscular, and handsome Jeb in her peripheral vision and already sighing and dreaming of what might be.

Sarah was visibly of mixed emotions at the failure of Samuel to appear. She too had begun to worry about a coming struggle for ascendance between Samuel and Jeb. She initially had wanted Samuel to come, because he was the natural father of both of her children, and Sarah had always preferred his cocking to Clem's. But in the past months she had seen her son grow into manhood and capably take over the responsibilities of family patriarch. And, she had to admit, his cock inflamed her as neither Samuel's or Clem's ever had been able to do.

Jeb didn't fuck just to put a baby in a woman's womb. He fucked to provide mutual pleasure for short periods of time in an otherwise hardscrabble life.