O'Connor & Smitty are in a Fix

"Get me up. Help me up," Smitty gasped, and O'Connor, out of breath himself, scrambled to help him.

"What the hell was that?"

"Was what?"

"Trapping my hands like that."

"I don't know," he said, and glanced down in embarrassment. "I don't know what that was. Did I hurt you?"

"No, you just-- Jesus, I can't get this thing out of me soon enough. I feel like a boiler about to blow."

O'Connor climbed between Smitty and the bedframe and pulled Smitty into his embrace, Smitty's back against his chest, so he could reach around and lay the palms of his big hands on Smitty's belly, pressing in a little to feel the watermelon as it stirred to slow life.

"I think we woke it up."

Smitty snorted a reluctant laugh. After a moment, his hands joined O'Connor's as his belly shifted, twisted, seemingly of its own unknowable will.

"Is it so bad, really?" O'Connor asked. His hand reached down to feel the heavy lower curve of his lover's stomach.

"Is it so bad really?" Smitty echoed incredulously. "So bad really? So bad really! I'll tell you this--if you do this to me again, ever again, I'm going to slit your throat for you, and then I'll slit my own."

"I won't," he said quickly. "If it's as bad as all that, I won't. I'll wear a French thing. Every time. Every time." In his head he saw Colleen, her round, tidy stomach poking up under her white sheet in the cold morgue. "Sweetheart. Don't talk like that."

"I can't do this again. I can't. I can't. I won't."

"All right," O'Connor said. "All right. We won't do this again."

"We!"

"Well, you."

"Hmph."

"What does it feel like?"

"Do you really want me to tell you?"

"I do, love. I'd--you know I'd carry it for you, if I could."

"No you wouldn't. You wouldn't like it any more than I do. It ... at first ... you're pukey and tired all the time, like you're coming down with an ague or the grippe. Later, your belly swells up big. At first it's not so bad. Except you know what it is and you can't make it stop growing or get it out of you." Smitty's voice was laced with horror. "Then it gets bigger. Then it gets--" he gestured down at himself. "I can't see my damn--you know, my damn privates. I can barely see my feet. I can't always tie my boots, you know that, you've been tying them for me half the time. It's heavy. It's so heavy. Sometimes you can't breathe from how heavy it feels. It pulls on your back. It kicks you from inside. It squashes your guts. And you have to hide it. All the time. From the other boys in camp. Because if they knew--"

O'Connor stroked Smitty's tight, swollen flanks. "Do the women like it? They must, or--"

Smitty shrugged uncomfortably. "Some of them do. Others--it's how you get a baby, and they want that, or their husbands do, or--or they don't, not at all, but you can't always help it." He chuckled quietly, and O'Connor could hear the grin in his voice. "Once? I was listening at the keyhole, me and one of my sisters, while the married women were talking about things they didn't want us to hear? And one of them said, she said she hated being that way because her husband wouldn't touch her, wouldn't hardly look at her, she said she thought he was afraid it would bite him if he--you know. If he put it in."

O'Connor giggled.

"Another said she liked it, rather, because it made her husband so happy. He liked to keep her full of his kids and she liked being full of them too. Too full to move. Too full to wear her corset. Too full to go out. She said he'd keep her like that all the time, if he could." There was a thoughtful silence. "I think he was sort of like you. Pushing on her tummy every time they were alone so he could admire what he'd done to her."

O'Connor felt a chill of shame. "How many did she have?" he asked, with a not quite steady voice.

"Twelve," said Smitty. O'Connor's cock twitched at the thought of it. Twelve times! To be so swollen, so heavy and full with--

"But with the thirteenth one she died."

O'Connor's heart gave a great whack in his chest.

"She had pains for days. Mama was over there and sent word back not to wait up. There was a doctor in the town, but he'd had an apoplexy, or something like that, so the women handled it. You could hear her screaming from all the way down at the end of the road, but then she stopped screaming, and that was worse. They said it was too big for her, it was stuck inside her, I suppose. She couldn't get it out of her. And she died. And it died too."

O'Connor wrapped both his arms around Smitty's shoulders and squeezed him tight. "I don't want you to die," he said. Smitty patted his arm.

"I don't want to die either, at least not like this. I'd rather be shot by the rebs than die with this thing stuck in me."

"Will it come out from--?" O'Connor slipped a hand back into Smitty's loins, into his damp, private heat. "It will, won't it."

Smitty nodded. "That's what they say."

"But it's so--it's so tight. It's so small. And your belly's so--"

Smitty nodded. "It stretches, I reckon. It must. But I don't hardly understand it myself. I'm pretty scared, I reckon. Mm. Keep doing that."

O'Connor stroked and pressed. Stroked and pressed. Stroked and pressed.

"Mmph. That's so nice. Could you go again? Before we--"

"Again! Are you sure?"

"Mm hm. I can't stand being this way. With this big heavy belly and my--my tits all. Mmph. But it's--it's made me about as randy as I've ever been, in all my born days. Let's do that thing again, one more time. Can you?"

Then Smitty twisted in O'Connor's arms, pushing him onto his back--hard--and pinning him there for a moment. He swung a leg across O'Connor's body, awkwardly, because of the watermelon, and straddled him, then lowered his body down. O'Connor grasped himself, guided Smitty with a hand on his hip, and sank home.

"Oh god! Don't move, if you want me to keep going."

They held very still, and then it was Smitty's turn to pin O'Connor's hands, for O'Connor to wriggle beneath the weight of his lover, their stomachs pressed tight together.

"This is what you like, ain't it? Ain't this what you like?"

They moved together tentatively, and then with greater force after O'Connor freed his hands and used them to steady Smitty's weight, to stroke his belly, to tickle him between the legs.

They came. Smitty first, his cunny spasming around O'Connor's shaft, and O'Connor a second or two later.

They found that they couldn't quite look at each other, as they lay together in a tangle of limbs, Smitty's belly pressed between them. Then Smitty kissed his sweaty forehead, and he kissed Smitty's beardless cheek, and then their mouths found each other once more. When the housemaid came to knock on the door and ask--please young Massas, would they like for her to bring a bath, it would be an extra charge--they shouted for her to go away, and they slept.

**

Nature didn't come for Smitty on the parade ground, mercifully, but on the picket line. He'd been doing his duty all this time. Light duty, because they were in winter camp, but duty nonetheless. O'Connor had noticed one or two of the men watching him more carefully than usual. Soldiers weren't often observant of other men, but it was obvious something was wrong. He felt nervous, prickly, ready for a fight, almost eager for one. There'd been some trouble early in O'Connor's enlistment, when the two of them started tenting together. Whispers of Catamite. Sodomite. Unnatural love. One of the other men had put a stop to it. McMaster wasn't a young lad like most of them, but older, in his forties, maybe his fifties, with a grown son in another regiment and a daughter married to some reb down south. They listened to him, and when he shrugged his big shoulders and said simply, "All right for David and Jonathan," it stopped. Mostly. O'Connor's hard right cross had done its part too.

It was McMaster who took him aside now.

"How's your pard? Smitty, I mean."

"He's all right."

"Are you sure about that?"

Reluctantly, O'Connor looked into McMaster's calm gray eyes and understood that he knew. Maybe not everything. But enough.

"He's been feeling a little sick lately. Just bloated, I think."

"You know that's not what it is. You need to take him to the surgeon, son."

"I know. I've--I've tried. He won't go."

"Then force him, son... If you love him."

**

They were deep into a four-hour watch when Smitty grunted and bent forward, grabbing his knees. "Shit. Shit."

"What is it? Are you hurt?" His first thought was rebel gunfire, but he hadn't heard the crack--

"It's my--stomach. It's gone as hard as a rock. Here. Feel." Smitty grabbed O'Connor's hand and shoved it inside his greatcoat, pressed it to his belly. It was hard. Impossibly hard. O'Connor pressed it here and there, holding his other hand to Smitty's lower back, and feeling the muscles thrum beneath his hands. Disgracefully, he began to stir below the belt. He shouldn't have, given how afraid he was, for Smitty, for the watermelon, for them all, but he did.

"Ugh. Shit. Help me, Sean."

"What can I do?"

"Just--I don't know. Just-- It's easing up now."

Smitty straightened, and leaned back against their tree. He looked at O'Connor and grinned ruefully. "Guess I should have deserted after all. Shit."

O'Connor hugged him, briefly and hard, and when the pains came again a few minutes later he made a decision. "I'm going to get the sergeant, and then I'm taking you to the surgeon."

"No, Sean, wait, I can--"

But by then he was gone, sprinting blindly through the trees, expecting at any moment to trip and fall headlong or whap his head against a branch and knock his stupid self unconscious. But he did not. When he got back with the sergeant, Smitty was curled up on the ground holding himself.

"All right, all right," said the sergeant. "What's this all about? A bad bellyache, is that it?" He took a knee and dropped a hand to the bulging front of Smitty's greatcoat to feel for himself what was wrong. When Smitty grunted and twisted away and he saw in the lantern light the sheen of sweat on Smitty's drawn face, he nodded once, then looked at O'Connor. "He don't look good at all. Take him in. I'll cover your post."

In the hospital tent, one of the nurses came whisking out. "What is it?" It was the hatchet-faced one, not the other one, the plump sweet one that most of the men were at least a little bit in love with.

"He's sick," said O'Connor, not knowing what else to say. "It's his belly."

"Help him over there, get him lying down, get him out of that greatcoat. I'll bring the surgeon to have a look at him."

"Sean. No. Get me out of here," Smitty hissed at him. But O'Connor did as he was told, dragging Smitty to the examination table and hoisting him up onto it.

Another spasm seized Smitty, but when it released him he lay back gasping, tight, full belly thrusting into the air. Beneath the greatcoat, he wore a fatigue blouse buttoned only at the neck, the way some men wore them in warmer weather, and under that, one of O'Connor's old shirts from before. He'd been a heavier man before the army, not exactly fat but very well-fed, and the army had thinned him out considerably. It was stretched tight across Smitty's stomach. Across the watermelon. Smitty's trousers were still held together--barely--with the string.

Suddenly there was a strong smell of whiskey and onion breath in the tent with them. The surgeon had come.

"That is a grossly distended abdomen, Private. What were you thinking, why did you wait so long to bring him in?"

Smitty tried to rise. "Please, Sean. Get me--"

The surgeon pushed him back down. "Lay still, boy, and let me have a look at you. You're full to the brim, aren't you? How long has this business been going on? How bad is the pain?"

"It's pretty bad but it comes and goes, sir," O'Connor answered for him.

He heard a gasp, and the nurse's eyes flicked upward to meet his, and he knew that she knew. Then the surgeon's hands were on Smitty, all over Smitty, prodding and pressing the mass of his belly through O'Connor's shirt and unfastening the string that kept his trousers on. But that's mine, he thought, briefly outraged. Don't touch that, it's mine.

"There's no dropsy," the surgeon said. "Very odd--perhaps his bowels. Perhaps a cancer."

"Please sir, if I might speak to you," said the nurse. "In private, sir." She couldn't look at O'Connor.

"Not now, woman," snapped the surgeon.

Smitty made a sound--Hng.--and tried to roll onto his side as his belly seized again. The surgeon felt the muscles contract beneath his hands, then looked sharply into Smitty's beardless face and began to probe more purposefully. As his body relaxed once more, Smitty raised his hands to cover his face and, astonishingly, horribly, began to cry.

"Help me get his trousers off," the surgeon told the nurse. "Step lively. Don't cry, son, it's not worth all that. You're having a baby, is all. You." He glared at O'Connor. "You--you can get out. I think you've caused enough trouble here already."

**

Because he didn't know what else to do, O'Connor sat down on the ground outside the hospital tent to wait. He hunkered down inside his greatcoat and tried to steady his shaking hands. In the east, the sky showed no signs of ever growing lighter. He listened to the sounds from inside the tent. When his mother had been having her youngest, she had hollered the house down, until O'Connor and Colleen took the younger ones out of earshot. Colleen's face had been terribly pale, and he wondered now if she had known already about the tiny creature growing beneath her own skirts. He heard no hollering from inside the tent, just effortful noises out of Smitty, like a man struggling to shift a heavy weight, which, he supposed, wasn't far off the mark. Once a shout: "Get off me, you bastard. Unhand me, right now." A grunt out of the surgeon that made O'Connor think the man had caught a fist or a foot. It made him grin.

After a while, the nurse came out. "You," she said. "You're still here. I thought you might be. Your little wife. She's very tough."

At first he didn't understand what she meant. "Smitty," he said. "Has he--is it--?"

"Is the baby here, you mean? It won't be long now. A few more hours at most. I am a spinster." She blushed. "But between them, my sisters have had nine. The first one often seems as if it will take forever to arrive. It can be very ... distressing, to the husband. Well. Doctor has gone to refresh himself." She made a sour face, and O'Connor realized that he liked her in spite of it all.

"I will bring you a cup of coffee." She squeezed his arm companionably. "I have always thought that some of our young women might serve their country on the battlefield as bravely and competently as any young man."

"Can I--I mean, can I--?"

"Can you see her? No. It is not a suitable place for men." She made another face. "Other than Doctor ... I suppose."

The noises resumed. He imagined Smitty squirming, straining, struggling against the tremendous weight in his belly, and he thought of that woman, dying of exhaustion with her unlucky thirteenth still trapped inside her. He decided that if Smitty died, he would shoot himself. There would be no point in living on. Someone else could take the baby, if it lived. A woman in town, even though she'd probably raise it to be a reb. Or that nurse could give it to one of her sisters, or keep it as a foundling if she wanted to.

**

After a while, O'Connor dozed in the early winter sunshine. The sergeant came to prod him awake with the toe of his boot.

"It's reveille, ain't you heard? Get on your feet."

O'Connor looked up at him blearily. "You'll have to court martial me. I ain't leaving."

The sergeant looked like he was prepared to throw a right old conniption, then lost heart. "I got roaring drunk when Molly was having my first. Spent the night face down in the garden. You ain't doing so bad. I'll tell the captain you're on the sick list too."

**

It was nearly time for lunch and O'Connor was dozing again when the nurse came out. "Private O'Connor. Private O'Connor."

"What? Is he--?" He scrambled to his feet.

"Private O'Connor. You have a son. And--" She gripped his arm, and this time there was nothing friendly in her at all. "You are going to marry that maiden, you are going to marry her immediately, and once you have done so we will say nothing further about the--this extremely unusual order of operations."

By the time O'Connor returned to his tent at last, to a shouting, jubilant reception from the lads, who called him Papa, who called him Daddy, who pounded his back and shoulders and mussed his hair and shoved a whiskey bottle into his hands, he had held and kissed the baby, which he found charmingly ugly, a tiny scrapper with Colleen's russet hair, and kissed Smitty, and married him, although there had been some trouble about the names. The chaplain wanted Smitty's name, and O'Connor had told him. John Smith. Private John Smith. And it had taken a moment for him to understand their pitying looks. They couldn't put that on the papers, they explained to him. Smitty had a woman's name, he must have one, and O'Connor should have known what it was. Eventually they had coaxed it out of Smitty himself, who was too exhausted to fight them for long. And the chaplain had read the words, and O'Connor and Smitty--both of them so turned around they scarcely knew where they were--had repeated them, and then they were married.

And then O'Connor, desperate for sleep and a good cry, was called before the corps commander. His sergeant was there, and his captain, and the colonel of the regiment, and all of them were shouting at him. He let the shouts wash over him.

Absolutely unheard of.

Shameful behavior from a soldier.

Flagrant defiance of all known military regulations.

PREGNANT!

"Which one is it again?" he heard the colonel say.

"Captured the reb guidon at Pittsburg Landing," the captain told him. "Sir."

"Oh that one. Brave little fellow. A girl all along? I dare say."

"And she's your wife?" said the general in O'Connor's direction. "Answer me, Private."

"No--I mean, yes sir. My wife, sir." The words felt so strange in his mouth. Smitty. A wife. How odd.

"And when were you married, Private? Before the war, was it?"

"About--it was about an hour ago, sir."

"About an hour. About an hour." The general's mustache twitched as if he might be fighting laughter. "Have the discharge papers written out," he told the colonel. "I don't care what you put on them for causes. Something honorable, I think. Not for you," he said at O'Connor. "You signed up to serve for three years or the war, and serve you shall."