Project Purple

18 - The Goatwench

The name of the program was Project Purple.

Many female viewers of the streaming webcast took great interest in everything the women did in their waking hours, no matter how innocuous: The bucket toting, the goat milking, the cooking, the washing, the sewing, the mending and the knitting comprised just a few of their endless tasks.

They followed the progress of the Pickleherring as she squatted on her little bed, hunched over her evening quilting. Or they wondered if the Herbalist was able to adequately repair the new rip in her dress. Or they debated in their chat texts on the ingredients the Matron employed in her gingerbread, or on how the Sayer kept her fiery mass of red hair so smart (rumors circulated that she had smuggled in some shampoo contraband, but the scrutinizing surveillance never confirmed such a transgression.)

As in most episodic programming, viewers listed toward the characters of controversy, and no one exacted viewer interest more than the Goatwench. She had something special-an animated, curious charm, which often landed her, unwillingly, and for reasons she couldn't fathom, at the center of almost every calamity that had engulfed the colony.

But the inescapable fact was that no other colonist was as inclined to the hullabaloo of trouble as she: refusing to attend the Sabbaths; refusing to put on the proper headwear for women; soliciting her master for sexual favors, destroying a camera lens; surely, those involved with Project Purple watched Henrietta Dobie with anticipation.

What would this unruly-remarkable American do next?

***

She walked good and long-the lone colonial sojourner. The summer had burst in vivid colors all around her, and she figured that she could, just maybe, keep walking and, just maybe, survive on the many berries and whatnots nature was providing.

Slowly, her spirits returned as she surged northward, marveling at the antics of a single marsh hawk above, conspicuous with its slender body and white rump, skimming low over the trees, tirelessly quartering back and forth, waiting for its prey.

She had given the small glass eye of the camera exactly six vigorous bashes with the milk bucket; Henri wasn't going to stand idly by as her fellow servant suffered on the kitchen floor for his heinous sin of embracing another man.

The destruction of property ... Well, they'd probably make that a more serious charge.

Occasionally, the marsh hawk appeared to halt in mid-air, and even do some back somersaults, hovering over the teeming bog. It would then beat its wings rapidly and pounce on its luckless prey below.

It had seemed fairly clear to Henri that the Badger was gay. The problem was that his veneer of heterosexuality was getting thinner by the day, the longer he stayed out there in the exacting environment; he was now swinging his hips as he walked, and covering his mouth with a dainty hand when he laughed. It seemed that as he grew comfortable with the other colonists, his initial determination to conceal his feminine ways was lapsing. And in these denuding, transparent surroundings, she had figured soberly that no good would come of any such revelations (they called them unbossomings).

"You're growing a new garden in your heart," the doctor had told her. He had said it often, and she had been fond of hearing it. "All those dirty old weeds are dead and beautiful, red roses now bloom there."

His soothing reassurances were always welcome, and when Henri looked back on her old life, it seemed to her like one toxic cockfight. All those old rivalries, all the one-upmanship that had possessed her so; those days were mercifully gone - though it required over two years of therapy with a caring doctor.

"You think I'm a bitch now, you should have seen me before," she confided with a rueful smile to the Badger in May, "But I'm going to enjoy this adventure."

"Or die trying," Badger said, "That's the spirit!"

She looked up again at that marsh hawk, which was calling with a plaintive "Pee, Pee, Pee!" to its mate, who rose to meet it, and grabbed the prey in midair when the hawk above dropped it.

What an amazing example of teamwork from the animal world! What was it they had just transferred in their beaks? A lizard? Maybe a mouse? A frog? And she stood and watched the hawks, sensing with a dark chill, for the first time in her life, what it was like to be prey, what it meant to be devoured by untold superiority.

She didn't know where she was going, merely that it was, again, north-the only direction that made navigational sense to her. And she knew, somehow, that this was the direction the horrid ones (as she now called their mysterious organizers) didn't want the colonists to explore.

'Can I sleep with you, Bob?' - So now she was a slut for trying to get off the cold floor back in late May. She figured the Governor would be in a fine pickle with that one; if she spent more time in the pillory, he'd have to do the same to the woman he was fucking, too, wouldn't he?

She tore off a sturdy branch, and had her walking stick, but this didn't diminish an encroaching feeling of uneasiness; she could feel something out there in the woods to her left. Something was stalking her, and it wasn't human.

'Would it make a good episode if I got mauled by a wolverine?'

But then she looked up sharply because the whine she now heard was not of living things - It was an engine that droned officiously, a small airplane taking off somewhere on the other side of the marsh.

She crouched there by the edge of the still water and waited, and was soon rewarded, as the plane emerged from the tree line, a small piston-powered aircraft, which then flew east.

She considered working her way around the east side of the marsh and snooping out their neighbors, but the watery inlets grew haphazardly outwards from the main body of the swamp, and a morass of little lagoons, or impenetrable clumps of foliage, bemired any reliable progress.

Also, the shadows were getting long, and so she halted there in uncertainty.

It had been an eventful outing. And if information truly did rule the day, the Goatwench was now sitting on a very compelling throne of priceless knowledge...

The lone seventeenth-century colonists, in their isolated valley, had some quite contemporary neighbors.