Free Love is a Wounded Soldier by Blaine Reimer

challenged, looking me in the eye.
    “I love her, sir,” I said, with no hesitation.
    “Ah, of course,” he smiled, his tone
ridiculing my statement ever so slightly. I didn’t know what to say. He allowed
a minute of silence to linger. The only sounds were the gelding munching and
the pounding of blood in my ears.
    “Do you know when I began loving my wife,
Robert?” he asked me, serious now. I shook my head. By now Joseph had caught on
that we were having something of a personal discussion and had made himself
scarce.
    “During our third year of marriage, when
Ellie and Joseph were just babies,” he began, looking down as he pinched his
chin between his thumb and forefinger, “Caroline got a case of smallpox, and
she had it so bad, you could almost smell the Grim Reaper’s breath, he was that
close. And I nursed her, and I cared for our babies, and I fell on my knees and
begged God and cried for hours that he’d spare her life. And he did. Now I’ve
never been quite sure whether I cared for her and about her because I loved
her, or if I really began to truly love her because of the unending, unbearable
weeks of sacrifice I made for her, but after that, I felt such an unbelievably
strong love for her that I couldn’t have begun to fathom before then.” He
stopped, wiping a tear off the end of his nose, his cold lips forming a stiff,
thin smile. After hearing his story, I felt a little silly for using the word
love so carelessly.
    “Do you still think you love her?” he
probed, curious, not challenging now. I deliberated a little in my mind and
finally pieced together a fitting answer.
    “No, sir,” I shook my head, “but I like her
plenty, and she’s a fine girl. And the way I see it, I could learn to love her
easier than any other girl I can think of.”
    He dispelled the tension with a low laugh
that I imagined gurgled up his esophagus like a burp. I laughed too, relieved
that the mood had lightened. I still expected a rigorous cross-examination, but
I suppose he must have been adequately convinced of my integrity, because he
said, “Well, now I guess it’s just up to you to persuade Ellie,” and smiled at
me the way I’d always wished my father had.
    High on clearing the first hurdle, I
cockily responded, “Oh, that shouldn’t be so hard!” My bravado was
substantially outpacing my bravery, however, and I immediately began steeling
my heart for asking Ellen. It would be one thing if her father rejected me, but
quite another to have the object of my desire outright refuse me.
    “Well, go along,” he nodded toward the
house.
    I turned to go, trying to swallow a
grapefruit of angst as I walked back toward the house with fear and trembling.
At that moment I began to understand what a woman is.
    A woman is a terrifying thing. A woman is a
velvet hammer that softly pounds your will from around your heart, leaving it
bare, vulnerable, defenseless. When a woman gives you her heart, she gives with
it the feeling that you are the sole monarch of an infinitely precious domain.
A woman is drink, a tonic to one, poison to another. A two-edged sword that can
mince the strongest heart, or surgically repair the fainting one. A woman can
inflate the value of your life to unfathomable worth, or make you wish you’d
given up the habit of living long before you met her. A woman is a driving rain
that drowns your spirit, or a refreshing sprinkler of sustenance to your soul.
A woman is the sun; the power of life and death are in her hands.
    A feeling of absolute helplessness pummeled
my guts as I took off my coat and boots. My destiny was in her hands, and it
seemed my mind, soul, and body rebelled at the thought of having so little
say-so in how this was all going to end.
    Mrs. Moore and Ellen had started with
supper. I walked into the kitchen and stood in the middle of the floor, feeling
awkward, conspicuous, and unsure.
    “Hungry?” Mrs. Moore smiled at me as she
transferred a steaming pot of cooked potatoes