Sleepless Nights in the Hills by Ausin Mitchell - HTML preview

Chapter One

Leta Dodd was driving her small Suzuki Swift motor car when she

saw a man standing near a Suzuki Vitara jeep. She recognized him instantly. He was Mark Reid. She remembered what had happened to her more than ten years ago. It was a Saturday morning and she was going to the market in Linstead. Her three children were in the car with her. She waved to him and he waved back.

“Mummy, who’s that man?” her eldest and Mark’s daughter, Debra asked.

“He’s a friend of your father and mine,” she told her.

“He’s the man, who’s building that big house up the road,” Debra stated.
Her three children were Debra at ten years, Trecia at seven and

Paul at five years. He had gone to the United States on the eve of their wedding. It was not only that, but she was pregnant with Debra. Now he was back home, a commercial farmer and divorced. He was living in Keswick and building a house after tearing down his late parents’ old one. She understood that he had already built two rooms. Girls in the village were lining up to live with him. In the meantime, a woman, Hazel, came to live with him.

“Mark is my man and I’ll fight any girl for him,” she told a group of village girls one day.

She was a copper-colored woman. She was about five feet seven inches tall, with big, but firm breasts, a tiny waist and wide hips. Most times she was dressed either in shorts or jeans. She was in her middle twenties and the mother of two children, two girls. She was a teacher at the local primary school. Leta’s husband, David ran the local hardware. She knew that Mark would like to reclaim Debra. At thirty years old, he claimed that he was still a virile man.

“I want to start all over with you, Leta,” he told her when they met a year ago.

She knew that David was ten years his senior.

“It was David who rescued me. Debra calls him daddy. I don’t want anything to change.”

“It was a business marriage I did to get my papers. My aunt, Wendy, arranged everything. I didn’t want to tell you because you would have taken it badly.”

“I took it badly when I heard. I have to thank David again. As I said before, he rescued me.”

“When Aunt Wendy was returning home, I gave her a letter to give you. My mother told me about you and David.”

“I never received any letter from Miss Wendy.”

“I stayed the stipulated time in the marriage, then got my divorce, but by that time you had married David. I just got married to another woman. We have two children but are divorced.”

“What about Hazel?”

“She’s my live-in lover. If we get back together, I’ll tell her to leave.”

“Just like that, I wouldn’t like any man to do me that. I heard that you have other women besides her. I heard about a woman called Rhea. Are you as wild as in your younger days?”

“Obviously not, I would have fathered a lot of children if I was still like that. She’s a friend of mine. Hazel believes I’m sleeping with her, but that’s not so. You don’t go to parties or dances again?”

“I don’t want to leave the children at home alone.”

***

Hazel and Rhea were quarrelling over Mark. Hazel was from Keswick while Rhea lived in Norris. Mark stayed alone at the house. Rhea has one son and a daughter. She was twenty-four years old while Hazel was two years older. Rhea was a nursing assistant at the local health center. The two women were quarrelling in the Keswick village square.

“Hazel, you’re going on as if you own him.”

“I don’t know where you came from, Rhea. He has been out here for more than a year now and it’s me he’s been dealing with the whole time.”

“You’re not the only woman, he’s been sleeping with. I know what he does with me, and he always leaves my house satisfied. So much so, that he keeps coming back for more.”

“He keeps coming back to me for more. We’ll see who he moves into that house when it’s finished.”

“I have one foot in the door already.”

Hazel laughed and said.

“I know my position with him. So, you can go on talking,” she said as the latter woman got into a route taxi going to Norris.

***

Mark decided to go into farming on forty acres of land in St. Mary. He farmed mostly cash crops, but some tree crops and tubers. He

had also found another woman, Tena Davis. She was living in St. Mary. She was a pharmacy assistant over there. She was a tall girl with small breasts, a narrow waist and hips. She was in her early twenties. Sometimes he told Rhea and Hazel that he was staying with relatives while he was in fact with her.

***

As Leta prepared for bed that night, she remembered the argument she had with David.

“So, Mark is back home, are you returning to him? I suppose you’ll want to take Debra with you?”

“Are you crazy? He hasn’t done anything for me except give me a heart ache. He has children with his wife in the States. If he wants more children he can go to Rhea and Hazel.”

“Are you going to tell Debra?”

“No, she will have to find that out for herself. What he did was a

selfish act. I can never forgive him. Somebody whispered to me that he has another woman in St. Mary. Before he went away Nadene, Madge and I used to fight over him. I don’t even know where those two girls are now. I must ask him about Nadene. She claimed to have been pregnant just before he went away.”