Chapter 2

It was very quiet on the cool October day in Barnes Crossing, Missouri. It was particularly quiet on the campus of Ferguson Barnes Christian College. Only one sound interrupted the silence of FBCC; it was the sound of singing, and of a piano accompanying the voice of a young girl.

The girl, a freshman, was practicing hymns in the lounge of the women's dormitory. She was the only student present on campus; the others had gone home for the weekend. There were not many free weekends at FBCC. It was a college run by strict discipline, and there were many rules; one of the rules was that only three weekends out of each semester could be spent off campus, not including the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday breaks. Two of the weekends could be scheduled according to the desires of the student (or of his parents, since written permission from the student's father or mother had to be secured prior to any overnight absence from the FBCC grounds). The third weekend was one which all students took simultaneously. It was in mid-October, when the faculty attended a Christian Colleges Association convention and retreat in Nashville. But because Wiffie Candace Gilford's parents were on a church speaking tour-her father was a minister-she had to stay on campus.

Oh, she wasn't entirely alone; though none of the other girls were there, Mrs. Ardsley, the aging housemother of the dormitory, was very much in evidence. Her fifty-eight years and two hundred-odd pounds now occupied a small suite in which she sat darning the girls' socks (they were not permitted to wear nylon stockings) and humming country hymns to herself while rocking back and forth in her Lincoln rocker in front of the fireplace.

Perhaps Wiffie should have felt honored to be there with the woman. After all, she had the privilege of helping Mrs. Ardsley prepare a bland dinner (Mrs. Ardsley was, alas, on a very restricted diet), and the honor of joining Mrs. Ardsley in carrying on the tradition of dormitory devotions. The two of them would spend a half-hour together before their ten o'clock bedtime, singing hymns and reading from the Bible. (Not that Mrs. Ardsley actually read from the Good Book; she was able to recite from memory, having absorbed large portions of it, including the inspiring begats and more begats from I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles, all of which were quite sexy in a way, if you stopped to think of all the begetting, which Mrs. Ardsley did not. She did enjoy these chapters in another respect; her ancestors had come over shortly after the Pilgrims, and she was inordinately fond of genaeologies.)

Wiffie and Mrs. Ardsley would also spend a little time sitting together in silence, mentally thanking God for the bountiful blessings which had been showered upon the students and faculty of Ferguson Barnes Christian College, and then the young girl and the woman would pray together aloud, reciting familiar words about the beauty of the blood of the lamb, until at last Mrs. Ardsley accompanied Wiffie to her room, where she would tuck the girl into bed, turn off the light, and go back to her suite, after having made certain that all the dormitory exits were firmly locked not only from the inside, but-except for the private exterior door to her own suite-from the outside of the building as well.

Was Wiffie Gilford happy? It was hard to say. She was not the kind of girl who often revealed her happinesses, nor was she the sort who often revealed her bursts of sadness, when she was struck by feelings not in keeping with the Spirit of Joy with which every Christian is Blessed. Oh, she was moody at times, and at times she also laughed and smiled and looked almost radiant. But the moments of frowning were invariably limited in frequency and duration, and so were the times during which she smiled. Whatever her expression, whatever her mood, it would cease to be public after a short time, and would be replaced by a noncommittal expression which betrayed little or no emotion. This state of facial musculature would persist until her next brief show of feeling, which would take place hours-occasionally even days-later.

On this particular chilly autumn afternoon, Wiffie sat in the lounge of the girls' dormitory playing scales on the piano as she sang to herself softly. After she had played up the scale and down the scale, and up and down the scale, and down and up the scale, and a number of other variations on the keys ranging from middle C to high C, she began to sing hymns such as "Trust and Obey."

"How Great Thou Art."

"Blessed Assurance," and other songs, some slow in tempo, others practically rollicking in tempo, but all of which she rendered in the same calm, controlled voice.

"Sing, Wiffie, sing!" Mrs. Ardsley, who fancied herself a faded Southern beauty of sorts, had waddled into the room and now plopped herself down on a nearby divan. Wiffie stopped momentarily, then resumed singing in the same expressionless voice, and Mrs. Ardsley joined in:

Mighty Jesus, Savior Jesus, Stand guard o'er all our land; Drive out the pagan guardsmen, Send in our warrior bands!

For we are on your side, O Lord, And we know you're on ours; Help us emerge victorious In weeks or days or hours.

It was a touching, patriotic, Christian sort of song, and Mrs. Ardsley rendered it in a suitably dramatic and affirmative manner. The third verse, which discussed Christ's ability to crush a Communist uprising in the manner of an exterminator squashing a mosquito, was a verse of which Mrs. Ardsley was particularly fond, and she rendered it with gusto.

When the song was over, Mrs. Ardsley stood, and she was beaming with pleasure. She strolled over to Wiffie and placed a hand on the girl's shoulder. "We have much to be thankful for," she whispered softly as she put her face next to Wiffie's cheek.

Wiffie dutifully murmured her thanks to the Lord for the various blessings involved, and tried to move away from Mrs. Ardsley.

Presently, the two of them went to Mrs. Ardsley's small suite to prepare dinner, and after some three hours of knitting and small talk, it was time for devotions, and then for bed.

While Mrs. Ardsley puttered about her sitting room, Wiffie went into the communal bathroom at the end of the dormitory corridor to wash up. She decided to have a shower. It was nice washing when there were no other girls around; she didn't have to wait till she was in the shower stall to remove her bathrobe, but could take it off in the main part of the room and examine her ever-maturing young body in the mirror. She left her bra and panties on as she washed her face, but when she was ready for the shower, she removed the undergarments and admired her figure in the glass above the sink. Almost unconsciously, her hands wandered to her breasts and cupped the generous hillocks of tissue, her fingers touching the nipples until those soft pink buds turned red and hard.

She felt a little odd as she stood there, watching herself hold her breasts and noting the unfamiliar sensations that tingled through her body. She was so innocent; there was so much that she needed to know.

A moment later, Wiffie stepped into a shower stall, where she let the warm water spray onto her shoulders and run down over her breasts to her belly, and below to where it glistened like dew as it accumulated in her bronze pubic hair. She soaped herself, doing a leisurely job of it and enjoying the freedom of not having to rush through the shower to let the next girl take the stall.

Suddenly, Wiffie heard a noise behind her. Whirling around, she saw Mrs. Ardsley standing there, the shower curtain pushed to one side.

"I thought you might like a clean towel, dear," the woman said. Her voice was softer than usual, and had a strange quality to it. It filled Wiffie with an unfamiliar fear. Wiffie's hands rushed to cover her breasts and bush as best they could, and she bent over slightly in an effort to render her body less visible to the staring woman.

"Please, Mrs. Ardsley!" she exclaimed in embarrassment. Her voice was almost a squeak.

"Would you like me to dry your back?"

"No, thank you. You can just leave the towel on the floor outside, if it's all right."

"Very well, dear." The woman smiled, still staring at Wiffie's nude body, and then she bent to place the towel on the floor next to the entrance to the stall. She turned to leave, and then, halfway out of the bathroom, she stopped and looked around. "Oh, Wiffie...."

"Yes?"

"I just wanted to say that you're a very pretty girl. You should thank God for being so good to you."

"I will, Mrs. Ardsley."

Still frightened, Wiffie pushed the shower curtain closed and rinsed off as quickly as she could. When she was dry, she put on her bathrobe and slippers, then snapped off the bathroom light and walked back down the corridor to her room, where Mrs. Ardsley waited as she changed from her robe to pajamas. Then the old woman insisted on kissing Wiffie good night before tucking the covers around her.

Monday was better. Her fellow students were back on campus, and once again Wiffie could take part in the routine activities which, while they deprived her of some essential privacy, blessed her with an anonymity which came quite naturally to her in a crowd. And it was good not to have to worry about Mrs. Ardsley.

Wiffie began the day with an hour-long session in Old Testament class; this was followed by Freshman Civics, an essentially right-wing course which explained the relationship of the Bible to everyday American life. Civics was followed by Choir three days a week, and on those Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays Wiffie really enjoyed being a student at Ferguson Barnes Christian College. For an hour and a half, she and her fellow choristers would sing songs of faith and joy and salvation; the songs would range from old Negro gospel numbers to Bach chorales and Handel's Messiah, and as she sang, Wiffie could truly let go and make all the noise she wanted to, without losing the anonymity that came of being but one soprano in a section of twenty.

On this particular Monday, the director was in bed with a virus, and the choir was being led by Hampton Budd, a young man more commonly known as Hamp. He was a clean-cut sort of fellow; or so he appeared; fairly tall, unusually outgoing, and with a self-confident air about him which reminded many of Christ's disciple Peter. Indeed, his bearing occasionally reminded some of Christ himself, or-when his voice boomed out arias from Handel's Messiah-the prophet Isaiah, or perhaps Moses, carrying the stone tablets down the mountainside after a summit meeting with God. Hamp was a big man on campus; he represented the FBCC ideal of an enthusiastic joiner who spread the Good News with an air of good fellowship and genuine joy.

Wiffie had never really paid much attention to him; she hadn't, up till now, had much time for or interest in boys. She had her music, and she had her daydreams, and she had her mother and father and her childhood teddy bear (not that she really used it any more) back home to occupy her thoughts. It wasn't so much that she was a good girl, nor was it any inherent lack of interest in the male gender. It was simply that she had always felt more or less self-sufficient as far as emotions were concerned. Perhaps time and hormones would change her attitudes; she hadn't thought about it to any great degree.

But now, to her slight surprise, she found herself paying unusually close attention to Hampton Budd. As he raised his left palm to indicate a crescendo, her voice swelled in volume and a thrill coursed through her body; when he put his palm up and made hushing gestures with his mouth, she joined her fellow singers in the pianissimo passage, and felt her cheeks grow happily warm as she did so.

It was a nice rehearsal, all in all, and Wiffie was sorry when it was over.

It had been an extraordinarily boring day, Hampton Budd told himself. Classes, Choir, poor meals, a few laps around the track in Sophomore Phys Ed, prayers, a session of study in the library, a songfest in the dormitory before devotions ... A typical day, true enough, and a good one; and yet for some reason it had nonetheless seemed like a boring day-an extremely tiresome, unbelievably boring day; quite unexciting, in any case. It was dreadful, having to be bored like this. Living with other Christians might be good for the soul, he mused, but it certainly wasn't very stimulating. What Hamp needed was excitement.

Hampton Budd had done very little sinning, except for an occasional fit of masturbation, which he did for health reasons anyway; it kept the testicles from bursting due to excess seminal pressure.

He had come close to scoring a few sin points during his brief postadolescent years. There had been the time when the other second-string backs on the football team had discovered that he was a virgin and done the appropriate thing: They had taken him to the whorehouse in the next town, in accordance with local custom. But alas, the girls had priced themselves too high for Hamp-ten dollars for a quickie behind the curtain separating the two beds in the large back room-so he'd had to pass up the opportunity. Had he paid the ten dollars, he would have been unable to meet his tithe on the following Sunday. Then too, he had found himself emotionally unprepared to go through with it in any case. Perhaps it had been fear of failure; the girls weren't much older than he was, but they were obviously blessed with considerable sexual experience. When one of them had put her arms around him, he shrank back. And worse still, he found that when the young woman attempted to entice him into the other room by letting her dressing gown fall open a little way, he lost what had been only a partial erection in the first place. The journey had ended in fiasco; the other fellows had good-naturedly taunted him when they emerged from the building to find him waiting on the front steps, and his ears had burned throughout the twenty-minute journey from the whorehouse back to the boys' own town.

And there had been Margaret, the girl from the Baptist Church, whom he had taken for a drive after the church-sponsored high school graduation party for the Christian youth of the town. Hamp and Margaret had parked on a private road, despite her misgivings. Hidden from prying eyes on the back forty of the Budd family farm, they had sat and talked over their plans for the future. It was understood that she would go to nursing school and he to college, and after he'd graduated from college and had spent some more time in a theological seminary, he would be ordained as a minister, whereupon the two of them would marry and become missionaries in Afghanistan. As it turned out, she had become engaged to a medical student eight months after she and Hamp went their separate ways the following September. Nevertheless, they had crammed a little sin into those two hours they spent together in the car. They had held hands, and kissed a little, and he had held her in his arms, and as she became enthusiastic in her responses to his soul kisses (which she had permitted only with considerable reluctance in the first place), he had shoved his trembling hand up under her skirt and between her thighs.

She had jerked back, gasping, and opened her eyes in an expression of shock that bordered on terror, but he had ripped her panties far enough down to get his hand into them. With his middle finger inserted in her private region, he had told her that he was doing it because he didn't want her to forget how close they'd been during their senior year of high school. "It's a symbol, Margaret," he told her.

She had called him an animal then, and in surprise he had removed his hand from her crotch, wiped it on his trouser leg, and begged her forgiveness. She loved him, as it happened, and so she had forgiven him on the condition that he would watch his conduct in future. Since he was going away to college in the next few months and could no doubt keep his desires under control via prayer or self-abuse in the meantime, he promised that he would be more careful.

They had dated regularly for the remainder of the summer, and when they kissed now and then-being sure to keep their tongues in their respective mouths-she had been as tense as she had at first on that evening in the car, and on no occasion did her tension give way to sexual response.

But it would be different next time. And there would be a next time; indeed, Hampton was confident that it would come soon. Before long, his arms would welcome a new girl-a girl who would appreciate his special virtues and who would let him educate her-for that matter, educate both of them in the physical, sinful aspects of love.

Perhaps Wiffie Gilford was such a girl. (He hadn't known her name when he first saw her, but she had impressed him as no other girl ever had so he had inquired.) What a creature she was! She was beautiful, with a body that any prophetess or angel would envy. She was perhaps five and a half feet tall, with a bone structure gently outlined by layer upon layer of soft, utterly delectable flesh. Her skin was pure and unflawed, the color of un-thinned cream. Her breasts were twin mounds of seductive softness which nestled in the bosom of her cotton Empire dress, and the curve of her hips was matched by those of her ungirdled buttocks and her sweet, cloth-draped thighs.

As for her head, it was crowned with straw-blonde hair which reached to her shoulders in a single broad, rope-like braid; her face was innocence personified, with its lightly freckled nose and puppy-like blue eyes.

And yet, beneath all the innocence there was a hint of something else-something hard to define, but something unquestionably there. It was a look of uncertainty, of questioning, of sensual curiosity stirring beneath the shroud-like chastity blanket of Christian faith. It was a look of warmth not often seen in a girl of Wiffie's background; it was an air of physical awareness waiting to be freed.

Would she be Hampton's Chosen One? Would she be the first girl to enjoy an orgasm at his hands; would she be the one to surrender her virginity to him as she ended his own by taking his penis into her warm vaginal sheath?

He could envision it now. He could see the two of them joined as though in some gentle erotic ballet, their naked bodies, half-hidden in a morning fog, dancing on dew-wet grass before falling to the ground in slow motion, their hands reaching out for one another's body and their legs becoming entwined as their torsos rolled together on the grass. He could imagine kissing her lips, then her shoulders, then the tips of her breasts; he could imagine his prick growing hard and strong and reaching out toward her while she watched, with a happy titter coming from her throat and a sensual flush appearing on her face.

And he could imagine going into her. It would be so simple, so easy, so beautiful; he would roll her onto her back, then kneel between her upraised knees, and at last let his organ slip past the love-lips and into her wet vestibule, where it would throb against the slick tissues until at last his hand would move down and guide it into her vagina in one slow, ever-so-loving stroke. She would raise her hips to receive him; his arms would tighten about his neck as she felt his member deep inside her, and soon they would be rocking to the rhythm of some heavenly chorus. When at last he came, he would fill her with semen by the cupful, and she would welcome his ejaculation with a burst of her own fluids, so that their essences-his semen and her liquid perfume-would anoint their organs in the great baptism of mutual satisfaction.

Afterward they would lie in each other's arms. They would listen to the birds and feel the dew on their skin, and kiss each other tenderly until their bodies cried out to make love again.

As Hamp emerged from his thoughts and guiltily noticed the stickiness in his pajama pants, he realized that Wiffie had seemed this real to him despite the fact that they had never really met. Was it a sign of some sort, this feeling that Wiffie Gilford, despite being a virtual stranger, was already his conception of the one and only girl? Perhaps. It seemed that way, in any case, and he hoped that his wishful thinking would be replaced by something more real as time went by.

At the beginning of November it was decided by the administration of Ferguson Barnes Christian College that the United States was in a grave state of spiritual deterioration, moral decline and political decay. The citizenry suffered from poor bowel habits-or so one could assume from watching the innumerable television commercials on the subject-and it was a well-known fact that the majority of American men had long since abandoned the hygienic habit of washing their generative organs in cold water on a regular twice-daily basis. And what with Negro riots, pacifists, beatniks, creeping socialism, and everything else that had become everyday in America, it was obvious that the country was in trouble. Secularism had seeped into every corner (indeed, every nook and cranny) of what had once been an American way of life.

Perhaps nothing could be done about the situation, but the trustees, president and faculty of Ferguson Barnes Christian College were not the kind of men and women who would give up their country without a fight. And so it was that the powers-that-were at FBCC voted unanimously to institute the Ferguson Barnes Memorial Anti-Communism Put God First Drive.

It was also unanimously decided that the young person most capable of handling the undergraduate end of the drive (with the assistance and guidance of a trusted faculty advisor) was none other than Hampton Budd.

The drive was launched with a rally. A Campus-

Wide Kick-Off Rec Night was held in the Thelma Barnes Memorial Gymnasium and Auditorium. Hampton Budd was there, and after the school officials had made their speeches, he took the rostrum to lead the call for student volunteers. He began by leading a cheer for Miss Agatha Bells Barnes, the late Ferguson Barnes' senile but much-loved sister, and then he exhorted his fellow students to join the drive and help bring publicity to God and FBCC. When the pep talk was over, the students went forth to.. .well, to drink Hawaiian Punch and eat chocolate chip cookies. But when the food was in their bellies, most of them did what was expected of them; they signed the volunteer sheets, committing themselves to performing the various chores that were involved in a drive of this kind.

Wiffie, not being much of a joiner, stood off by herself while the other students pushed and shoved to be high on the lists for jobs such as Bible Reader, Tract Distributor, Convert Counselor, Tactical Organizer, Smelling Salts Administrator and so on. Wiffie was, after all, a reticent sort of girl; she wasn't cut out for approaching strangers and slapping them on the back and looking them in the eye and asking why in the name of John 3:16 they weren't members of God's team.

"Why aren't you over there putting your name down?"

Wiffie turned abruptly when she heard the voice, and was startled to find herself facing Hampton Budd.

"I was waiting for the other people to get out of the way," she told him, unconvincingly.

"And what are you planning to sign up for?" he asked. "How about Button Pinner? You're the kind of pretty girl that people would like to have come up and stick a pin in their lapels, you know."

"Oh, I wouldn't have the nerve to do something like that!" she said.

"Well, what are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet."

"You're going to do something, I hope. You're expected to. Everyone else is going to be doing something, after all."

"Oh, I'll do something," she hastened to assure him. "But ... Well, I just don't know what it is that I should volunteer for. I'm not much good at anything, I'm afraid."

"I've seen you in Choir." He smiled. "You can sing, can't you? Why don't you sign up as a Street Corner Song Witness? It would be right up your alley. Or on your corner, rather." He chuckled. She did not.

"Well," he asked after a pause, "can you do anything else?"

"I can take shorthand. Not too well, though."

"That's all."

"Well, I can type."

"Great! I'll tell you what: I'm going to be busy in this job, since this is probably the biggest thing to hit FBCC in fifty years, and I'm going to need someone to help me out with press releases, handouts, programs, and everything else that goes into running a drive like this one. How would you like to be my secretary? I don't know any other girls who can take shorthand, and you have to volunteer for something, after all."

"I'd love to," she said softly, suddenly feeling happier than she'd been in months. "I'm not very good, really, but I'll do my best."

"That's all I ask." He put a hand on her shoulder.

At that moment his name was called by Miss Agatha Befle Barnes, and he started to move away. "I'll see you," he said with a wave.

For Wiffie, the evening was over.