Free The Reservoir by John Milliken Thompson

uncertain.
    “She’s my cousin too,” Tommie said.
    Lillie stopped. “That’s enough dancing for me,” she said, and she took herself back to the parlor.
    Willie bent to unlace his mud-caked boots. “That should be enough wood for the week.”
    “Been out chopping?” Tommie asked. Willie grunted, and Tommie stood there watching his bare head. “Go on and hit me if you want to.”
    “Why would I want to do that?” Willie said, standing, chest out. In his stockings he was taller than Tommie. He forced a good-natured laugh, then rapped Tommie on the chest with a fist. “I’d sooner hit myself.”
    The next fall he was off to the College of Richmond, having kissed Nola twice—once on the cheek and once lingeringly on the lips behind an Oriental screen. She seemed to favor him over all other boys. She admitted that she had kissed boys at camp meetings, but “just for practice” and only “because they were sweet,” not boys she would take seriously as suitors, such as himself. He sensed that her logic was somehow flawed, but she sounded so convincing that he never tried to do anything except hold her hand unless she suggested he might do more.
    As for Lillian, she and Willie had become such close friends that Jane had quit worrying about them. “I don’t know exactly what they’re doing when they’re gone together all afternoon,” she told Tommie, “but I think Willie is very mature and he’ll do the right thing by her. He’s not too young to marry at eighteen, nor she at fifteen.”
    A few days before he left for Richmond, Tommie asked his brother what it was like to lie with a girl.
    “Why do you ask me?” Willie said. They were standing out under a tremendous multitrunked pine in the front yard, a pre-storm wind shivering the needles. Willie’s shirt was soaked with sweat from lifting hay bales; Tommie had just bathed, though he had worked as hard as Willie earlier in the day, then gone in and studied for two hours—a habit he had kept up all summer.
    “I’m going off to college and I wanted some pointers,” he said.
    Willie made a puffing noise. “I don’t know anything about girls, especially Richmond girls. Though I expect they’re about the same as girls around here.” He grabbed a branch and leaned his waist into the trunk in a casual way that Tommie admired. His brother had always been a better athlete, a more outgoing and uncomplicated person than himself. But though they were best friends and he knew Willie better than anyone in the world, there were things Willie kept to himself. Tommie suspected that Lillian had become his new best friend and confidante. His brother had all but quit asking him to go out on fishing and hunting jaunts, not that he missed them so much, though he did miss being with Willie and having him desire his company.
    “But you’ve been with a lot of girls,” Tommie said.
    “Not so many. And only ones that I care about.”
    “You used to ask me what I thought about her.”
    Willie nodded. “So you want to know if I’ve lain with her?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Then I won’t tell you.”
    “Well, have you?”
    Willie looked out across the oatfield. “Maybe. What about you and Nola?”
    Tommie puffed and shook his head. “Nola’s not that kind of girl.”
    “And you think Lillie is?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “I know some terrible things nobody else does,” Willie said. “About her father. Her father’s an evil man.”
    “I know he beat her.”
    “Worse than that,” Willie said. He flexed the muscles in his jaws. With Tommie waiting for him to go on, he opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “He made her feel dirty … he came into her room when she was getting dressed.”
    “You know she tells lies.”
    “So she fibs sometimes about where she’s been, or what she’s been doing. That’s the kind of fib you’d learn to tell if you didn’t want your father to hit you for living.”
    And that was all that Tommie was able