Harvest Moon

"Free? Who says? I may want something in exchange for all this entertainment I'm providing. All I'm getting paid for by the gin is moving bales off this belt. Entertaining cute girls ain't in my job description. Maybe I should have a cover charge."

"OK. You take plastic? All out of cash," she said with a smirk as she sipped her coffee.

"Nope, but maybe we could settle the debt using the barter method, you know ... a tradeoff we both agree on. Like maybe one night I get to take you out to dinner or something," he said. Then that panty-dropping smile ... again. "And you pay, of course."

She looked at him as though in deep thought.

"Depends. We talking the Sonic drive-in over in Horn Lake or the Four Flames in Memphis?"

Carnell slung another bale off the belt and leveraged it into place for the forklift.

"Don't matter to me ... long as you're there," he said.

She smiled. Her heart fluttered. She could feel her nipples tingle.

"Aw. That's really sweet, Carnell," she said. "Deal."

She got up, walked across the floor to where Carnell awaited the next bale. She extended her right hand to formalize the agreement. He removed his work glove and took her small, smooth hand in his powerful, leathery right paw. They both felt what seemed like a mild electrical current pass between them. What she wanted to do was pull him to her, cover his mouth with hers, peel the clothes off him and ride him like a bronco right there on the baling floor. But a handshake would have to do for now.

She tossed her empty coffee cup in the trash bin, gathered up her Surface and was off on another round of inspecting the towering gin machines that helped turn the raw cotton into the thread that made up her shirt, her khakis, her socks and her moistening panties.

On the shipping deck, Carnell almost missed the next bale he had to wrestle as he watched Sari's pert ass twitch as she walked away. He tried to refocus his attention to his work to deny his libido the fantasies that would stiffen his cock if he let them proceed unabated. In his line of work, that could be very uncomfortable; sometimes dangerous.

Dew and dust had already settled on the cars outside the Grey Knight Gin by the time the last bale emerged from the press at 11:27 p.m. and the facility fell unnervingly silent, as it would remain for the next 61/2 hours. The fact that Sari's car had barely made it to the lot almost 17 hours earlier on gasoline fumes and prayers had been out of mind for her until she perched behind the wheel, hit the ignition, the starter whined but nothing ignited. Panic set in. Hitching a ride was pretty much out of the question since she was the only employee who commuted from as far east as Marshall County. And hers was one of only two vehicles left in the lot.

That's when she saw Carnell walking toward his pickup truck. He saw the interior light on in her car, heard the engine failing to crank and walked over, unaware of who was inside.

"Sounds like you're either out of gas or the fuel pump's shot," Carnell said. She popped out the driver's side door.

"Sari?" Carnell said, surprised. He could see her embarrassment even in the semi-dark parking lot.

"It's out of gas. I barely made it here this morning on fumes," she said. "Now I don't know what to do."

"Well if that's it, we can fix that easy enough. I got an empty gas can in the back of my truck and we can fill that up at the BP down in Walls. That ought to be enough to get you to a gas station. Lock your car up and hop in my truck," he said.

She double-clicked the key fob, the car horn yelped to signal that it had locked, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She climbed into the cab of his 10-year-old Chevy Silverado and noticed snapshots of his little boy, Jason, encased in round, Lucite frames dangling from his rear-view mirror. She held them tenderly and looked at them when the cab light came on as Carnell opened the driver's side door and climbed inside.

"Carnell, he's beautiful," she said. "Look at those blue eyes and that curly hair and his little cowboy boots. He's just ... precious."

Carnell nodded. "Yep. My little man is my whole world. Me and Cindy didn't plan him but I can't imagine life without him."

Sari couldn't take her eyes off the pictures on the short ride to the BP station not quite a mile from the gin. When they stopped, she fed her credit card into the slot on the gas pump and Carnell filled the can with unleaded regular. When they returned to the gin parking lot, Carnell stuck the funnel end into the gas tank opening of Sari's car and drained its contents into the vehicle.

"OK, try it now, Sari," Carnell said.

She hit the ignition button. Still nothing.

"Keep trying, darlin', it takes a while if the fuel tank's bone dry to draw gas back through the fuel line," he said.

She tried again. And again as despair crept up her spine. On the third try, the engine came to life and she squealed in delight. She emerged from the car and ran to Carnell and flung her arms around him.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you, Carnell. You're my lifesaver," she said as she hugged him around his waist. "Now I suppose I owe you two dinners?"

He had reflexively accepted Sari into his arms as she ran into his arms. He was chuckling until he pulled back enough to look into her eyes as she looked upward at him and the gaze of each locked onto the other's.

Neither spoke. The world around them was silent. Their faces inched closer together. And there, in the midnight chill of the Grey Knight Gin parking lot, their lips met.

It was a chaste kiss, lips that brushed each other. It broke momentarily and they gazed into each other's eyes again, this time finding a mutual longing, and their lips met again, their mouths open and tongues searching. Sari stood on her tiptoes and Carnell pulled her more tightly into him. He gathered her trim waist into his arms and held her as though he wished never to let her go as their kiss lingered for minutes.

"Uh ... wow," she said when the kiss at last broke, their foreheads pressed together. "That was ... that was ... uh ... nice. Really nice."

He said nothing but kissed her gently on her lips over and over. She held her embrace and pulled him to her each time. She could feel her body loosening, conforming itself to his. She felt as though her nipples could bore holes through her bra, and she could feel Miss Kitty dampen. She felt him stiffening beneath his Levi's. But this was neither the time nor the place to drop trousers for a quick bang in their boss's parking lot.

"To be continued?" Carnell whispered, evidently having reached the same conclusion.

They kissed again, this one deep and searching, her hands playing along his muscular back downward to his ass.

"Definitely to be continued," she said, her voice husky with lust. She slapped his ass as they relinquished their embrace. "I'll see you in a few hours."

"Yeah you will, sweet cheeks."

Some Time Alone

Work had been torment for Carnell and for Sari. The closest they could get to acting on their mutual attraction was her visits to the shipping deck to sip coffee on her four breaks per day. The Grey Knight had no tolerance for romantic dalliances on company time, especially during the height of ginning season. Things moved too fast for such distractions from the complicated operation of these massive machines. One amorous couple was summarily fired two years earlier just for kissing in a corner of the gin.

After-hours meetups offered only limited relief. One late night, they drove to a darkened county road where they kissed, fondled and dry-humped each other almost to orgasm before a pair of headlights half a mile in the distance turned off U.S. 61 and headed in their direction. They scrambled to their respective vehicles and diverged into the Mississippi Delta darkness and, ultimately, to their homes - his in Hernando and hers in Byhalia. Once home, they opened a Facetime audio chat and talked and exhorted each other to an orgasm. Neither had sufficient internet bandwidth video live-stream themselves during the process. That was fine. Each wanted to retain some aura of mystery and neither cared to have their video intercepted and served up to a world of pathetic voyeurs via some criminal Russian porn site.

There were also doubts each had about how Carnell's little boy might complicate a relationship, should one develop. On that level and based on the respective arc of their career aspirations, it was a dubious long-term fit. He had no immediate college aspirations, though he was not content with life as a laborer. Sari was determined to follow her mother's professional path and become a classroom teacher.

By living at home and working, Sari had almost restored her college fund to the point where it had been before the pandemic. She could wait another year or two and, barring any leaps in tuition costs, fully finance her final two years toward a teaching degree at Ole Miss. Or she could go starting the semester just after the holiday break in January and need to take on about $10,000 in student loan debt.

In the moment, each was hot for the other and mindful for the first mutually free date where they could have each other unreservedly to themselves. The gin would run every day until at least Thanksgiving, still about a month away. Days off were rare and grudgingly given every 10 days only to comply with federal labor laws. The trick was timing the days off together for Carnell and Sari.

The solution came in the form of a letter from the office of the dean of the School of Education at the University of Mississippi. Given Sari's academic record in high school (she finished third in her senior class of 89 students), and at Northwest, where she made the honor roll all four semesters. Ole Miss had accepted Sari for enrollment as a junior in the spring semester and she seemed to qualify for a partial scholarship program for which she had applied under the Teach Mississippi Initiative. It provides need-based aid to top in-state students studying to teach grades kindergarten through high school who agree to spend the first five years after they graduate in one of Mississippi's underserved and under-resourced school districts, mostly inner-city or rural schools.

Dean Rhetta Pearlman listed several dates for incoming student orientation ranging from the end of October until mid-December. Sari could apply online before her orientation date and have her evaluation for the scholarship before a panel of experienced teachers and Education School faculty during her orientation visit.

It seemed the golden ticket. Sari's parents urged her to take the first available orientation date. She chose Nov. 4 and asked her gin supervisor if she could switch her scheduled day off, Oct. 30, to five days later. He was more than happy to oblige because it gets the gin past what's usually the busiest week of the year. By Halloween, cotton harvest had pretty much peaked and the backlogs of unginned modules would begin dwindling to just a handful a day by the end of the second or third week of November.

It also worked for Carnell, but for a different reason: he was in the Mississippi Army National Guard and he had to report two days after that at Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg. Employers were obliged by law to give employees time off to fulfill their military commitment to the Guard and Reserve. Part of that included two days to prepare and arrive at the drill site, meaning he had until 5 a.m. on Nov. 6 to stow his gear and be in formation for drills at Camp Shelby.

Carnell would meet Sari in Oxford on the afternoon of the 4th, a Friday, after her interviews with the scholarship panel and orientation. Since the 5th was a football game weekend - Texas A&M at Ole Miss - and hotels within a 50 mile radius of the small college town of Oxford would be booked solid, they would drive a little more than an hour west on Highway 6 to Clarksdale and stay in a collection of shotgun sharecropper houses on the site of an old gin that had been renovated into luxury cabins in keeping with the region's Delta blues music motif. They would spend their first night together in one of the repurposed cabins in the shadow of the corrugated steel shell of what, into the early 1970s, was a cotton gin on a plantation. A group of entrepreneurs opened the venture backed investors who wanted to promote blues tourism. It was repurposed into the most unusual of boutique hotels with a bluesy-chic bar and restaurant where a pour of Jack Daniel's whiskey would set you back $10.

The interview seemed to go well. Sari's superb scholastic record spoke for itself. But she noticed the panelists leaned in the most when she talked about how she had moved in with her parents at the start of the pandemic when she finished at Northwest and worked the past two years at the Gray Knight Gin in the fall and waited tables at Applebee's in Olive Branch the rest of the year to restore funds the pandemic layoffs and lockdowns had bled from her family's savings. Rhetta Pearlman nodded understandingly and looked around the table at other panelists.

"Would you have any trouble, Miss Fogarty, if after you received your degree, you were given a list of challenged schools in Mississippi and asked to interview with them. It could be, for instance, Mound Bayou or Tchula, or maybe inner-city Jackson or Biloxi. You'd be asked to commit to five years. It wouldn't necessarily have to be in the same school or district all five years, but it would have to be a school designated as challenged based on per-pupil funding and pupil achievement scores," one panelist, an active teacher, asked Sari.

"No, ma'am, I wouldn't have any trouble with that at all. That's where my heart is. My first few years were in a poor school in western Marshall County where my mama taught. It's near Byhalia," she said. "They closed it six years ago. About broke my heart."

Heads nodded. Notes were scribbled. Her 30 minutes was up.

"Well, Miss Fogarty, we have several more interviews to today. We should have a decision for you in the next couple of days. We will email you from the contact information you provided. Meanwhile I believe we've got a tour of the school, some conversations with some of our professors and lunch set up for you," the dean said.

Sari shook hands with everyone around the table, took her portfolio and left the room to join her group for the orientation tour.

She had arranged to meet Carnell at 2 o'clock in the parking lot of a fried chicken restaurant in a strip mall on the west side of Oxford to avoid the ballgame crowd flooding toward the campus and Oxford's Courthouse Square. But Carnell got caught up in the pregame inflow as he attempted to enter the city from the north on Highway 7, not anticipating the crush of Aggie and Rebel fans who would fly into Memphis and clog the long stretch of two-lane road to spend a day in the university's famed Grove and its football stadium the next evening.

It was almost 3 p.m. when he reached Sari, who was on the edge of despair. She had begun to second-guess how her interview went and whether Carnell would really show up. Had he found it impossible not to spend time with his son, Jason? Was there still something between himself and Cindy, his ex, even though she was engaged to a firefighter in Southaven? She would text Carnell only to receive an autoreply that he was driving and could not receive messages. At least he was in his truck and on the move ... somewhere.

When he arrived, he found Sari trembling and her eyes brimming with tears. He held her and kissed all over her face repeatedly, apologizing for his tardy arrival before he framed her freckled face in his rough hands and kissed her lips intently. Slowly, Sari felt the stress of the huge day, her apprehension and her self-doubt melt away in the reassuring comfort and strength of Carnell's embrace.

"I know it's hard to have confidence sometimes and that the not knowing is the toughest thing, but you're a smart, hard-working, beautiful girl and I am sure that and the goodness of your character will win over those folks," Carnell said as a chilly breeze swept around them and sent her brown ringlets flying wildly around her face.

"Thank you, Carnell. It's easier when you're near me," she said.

"Let's head to Clarksdale. This ballgame crowd's only going to get worse the longer we wait. Just follow me," he said.

They had been on Highway 6 for about 45 minutes when they drove through Batesville and the road swooped down from a kudzu-covered bluff where the rolling, red-clay hills and piney woods to the east fell away dramatically into the fertile, griddle-flat black loam of the Delta that stretched westward beyond the horizon to the Mississippi River. In the peak of harvest season, it was a patchwork of stubble from recently harvested crops of cotton, soybeans, corn, rice and milo. Another 45 minutes on the arrow-straight two-lane road and they were approaching the intersection of Highway 6 and U.S. 49, reputed (falsely, by tourism flacks) to be the crossroads where musician Robert Johnson bartered his soul to Satan in exchange for his mastery of the blues guitar.

They turned south on 49 and within a few minutes arrived at the Shack Up Inn. Carnell registered them under his name and paid cash for the lodging, handing them his Visa card to cover incidentals. He was handed a key to Unit 12.

From the outside, the weathered-wood exterior of the shotgun shacks looked bleak. Sari feared that she was about to spend this supposed night of romance in a hovel without running water, an outhouse for a toilet, and rotted floorboards from which possums could emerge at any moment. But once the door was opened, the surroundings were appropriately kitschy but first-rate. A rusted RC Cola sign hung directly over a stocked wine fridge. The large showers had polished brass fixtures and walls and floors of brightly colored epoxied concrete with bright paintings of the region's rich blues origins. On another wall was a personal steam sauna. A Persian rug covered the middle of polished hardwood floors. The four-poster queen-size bed was covered with 500 thread-count Egyptian cotton linens. On the pillows were two passes good for admission for that night at the Ground Zero blues club in downtown Clarksdale, owned by the Oscar-winning actor and Mississippi native, Morgan Freeman.

The hosts had stocked a bowl of ice with long-neck bottles of Budweiser and Miller High Life instead of champagne, more befitting the inn's "beer-and-breakfast" branding. That didn't mean that there weren't travel-size bottles of fine bourbon purchase in the room's mini-bar - the incidentals Carnell's credit card would cover. To the rear, there was a poured-concrete patio with a ceiling fan hanging from a sun awning overhead. Handmade, oak rocking chairs overlooked a recently harvested cotton field and the setting sun beyond.

"How'd you hear about this place," Sari asked. "I was about to get back in my car and haul ass back to Byhalia til you opened the door."

"A National Guard buddy from just down the road in Sumner spent his wedding night here rather than drive all the way to the Memphis airport for their honeymoon trip to Vegas. He's big into the blues. Said I had to see it myself but it's better with somebody special," he said. "And you are the most special woman in the world to me."

●●●

With those words, Sari melted into Carnell. She hooked her arms around his neck and pulled his mouth onto hers as they stood on the veranda where they had watched the sun peek thought the last of the high, gray clouds in the clearing western sky. Carnell wrapped his arms around her waist then stood straight, pulling her off the ground as their tongues dueled. Sari wrapped her legs around his slim waist and Carnell placed his hands under the dress she had worn to her interview and beneath her buttocks to support her.