So this is movie oriented. Mostly cause I've never had the stomach for a ten year old in love with a seventeen (hundred and four) year old.
Mae Tuck knew her sons weren't innocent. She knew both of them had traveled the world and the human way of life. They may look young but both were older then they ought to be. And both she knew, would keep on moving and loving.
Whether they loved women or dogs didn't matter. Once in one of his lives, Miles had trained dogs and Jesse had been a horse rider. Both had loved many women, all physically, never absolutely never mentally.
Mae didn't worry about that. It wasn't her business, unless they got a girl pregnant but even then Tuck would take of it. She had the utmost trust in Tuck to take care of everything and if he didn't she could. She knew her boys needed things that only a woman could give. Love, attention even sex when the time called for it. It was a natural thing and however unnatural they may be, boys would always always be boys.
Do not make the mistake that her boys were heathens. No. She has raised them properly. They knew how to treat a lady. She'd sat with them and talked to them and whatever she couldn't teach them, Tuck saw to it they learned, somehow.
She didn't try to tell herself not to worry. She would whether she wanted to or not. She worried about Miles. He was so loving, though he hid it, and that blasted woman had taken his heart when she left. And he wouldn't be the same. But he knew the consequences of loving another woman, even as he tried to drown his sorrows in them.
It was Jesse she worried over the most. He had no idea of what loving a woman could really feel like. He had experienced sex. That was all. He'd never felt like Miles had felt and he wouldn't know the difference if he'd made love or just had sex. And Mae worried love would creep up on him and steal his sense and then he would spill their secret. Only to have himself heartbroken and like his brother.
And then Winnie Foster had arrived, crying and terrified on her old horse, with Miles looking so angry. She looked so small, so timid, in her pretty white things and her large blue eyes looking up at Mae. She crouched down flinching away from Mae and Miles. Mae felt every instinct of being a mother to protect her to be there for the girl her son, her family had stolen away. So she sent Miles away to find Tuck, because Tuck would know what to do and Miles was scaring Winnie.
It got late, and Mae knew that the girl would be hungry. She was serving Winnie dinner then Tuck arrived. And so did Jesse and Miles. And suddenly they were arguing, what to do what to do. But Winnie interrupted.
"Know what?" Her voice was loud and clear and confused. And once again Mae was left with no clue as to what to do.
So she solved it as she solved every problem in her life. She fed it. There were pancakes and bread and foods she hadn't cooked in a long time because this was a feast and her boys were home and she had a problem. The evening ended but not as she thought it would. Miles was angry, Winnie was still frightened and Tuck hadn't thought of what to do.
But she found the presence of another woman comforting. Because she'd been alone here for so long. Tuck was a man, and Jesse was a boy, and Miles was her broken son. None of them could truly ever understand the mind of a woman. Mae needed another of her own kind to speak to, to laugh with over her silly woman jokes. And even knowing there was another in the house was making Mae long to share the secret.
She heard when Jesse went to speak with Winnie, heard the words they exchanged. And that day she had a new subject to worry over.
Jesse played rough. He tumbled and broke things and cut himself. He had no regard as to safety, never had. Why else would he be so high up in a tree? He was still young, still seventeen for all the one hundred and four years he'd lived. He wouldn't think that no one wouldn't play as he did. She worried that Winnie would come back with bruises, would come back and want to leave. Worst she'd want to tell the secret.
And so when she did come back, Mae watched them very very closely. If Winnie was in any way hurt, she would hit that boy raw.
Instead she watched as her son, her young wild Jesse son, touched Winnie as if she would break. He was aware of everything she did. He took knives from her hands, cleared away any twig or rock with his bare foot so that she with hers wouldn't hurt. He looked at her with protection and diligence. He heeded her every word to him, a feat Mae had still to do, and he did as she told him, even though it wasn't what he'd wanted.
He was no longer the carefree boy he had been when they'd left this morning. He was wiser, stronger, more willing then ever to defend and attack as needed to protect his family, all that he loved. He had fallen in love and had learned that though it would make you lighter then a feather it was something that made you grow up, something that changed inside you. He would feel, as Mae knew, that he'd become older then the lake and the wood and the spring because love wasn't always the good in life. Sometimes it was forced to be the bad guy, make people cry or do desperate things, and eventually fall into place with another person and become so incredibly, blissfully, unthinkably, stupidly, flimsy in love.
Hope you enjoyed it. I posted my last paragraph of facebook, mostly cause I thought it might have a little more meaning in it. Ah well.