This is a work of fiction. It contains explicit descriptions of sexual acts. It is not intended for minors.


Ironcleft Genesis part 7
By Boondocker (Boondocker42@gmail.com)


Time passed. As is often the case, the days sometimes seemed long while the seasons flew by. Jennifer cared for her son and continued working to make Ironcleft the perfect home. Perfect by her crude standards at any rate.

Several times a year she would make visits to the lowlands to "get seeded" as she began to describe it. She failed to get pregnant for a number of years and she was becoming worried. Her menstrual cycle would often be disrupted after one of these visits but after a month or two it would return.

In the spring and summer after Stanley turned two Jenny experimented in the fields around her cabin, learning through trial and error how best to prepare the soil and plant seeds. There was a lot of error in the trial.

Jenny found a number of plows and dozens of spades and hoes among the abandoned homesteads. As they were, the plows were of little use to her. They were designed to be pulled through the ground by horses or oxen. Jenny could certainly out-pull an ox but without a person at the rear to steer the plow it just flipped and twisted whenever she tried pulling it.

That was frustrating but it was nothing compared to her troubles with the shovels and such she tried to use. They were of course made to be used by ordinary people. Even your average workman would from time to time snap a shovel handle while trying to break up tightly packed soil. For Jennifer Stram, the thick handles of ash, hickory and oak snapped under even her most casual efforts. She could try to be careful with the spindly things but that only worked so long before she grew careless and heard the tell-tale snap of tortured wood.

Besides, being that careful and working with such small tools was SLOW. Mamma Stram had no patience for it.

Jenny knew she wasn't the brightest wick but she applied herself to designing a tool better suited to her needs. She gave up on the shovels as hopeless. She was no blacksmith to fashion new, larger spade heads and she had no way to attach stronger handles to the ones she had.

Perhaps she could figure out a way to guide the plows. She tried pushing from behind but quickly ran into the same problem she had with the shovels... the tiller-like handles of the plows where never intended to force the wedges of metal through the earth. They simply snapped off in her hand before she managed more than a couple feet.

She even tried lashing a pair of plows to her feet but that turned out to be an absolute joke. She had pictured herself kick-stomping her way across the fields like an angry toddler but no amount of lashing and strapping came even close to keeping the things under her feet... she never even made it to the point of testing them in the field.

She thought about the problem for weeks. Inspiration came when she passed an old wheelbarrow rotting near one of the abandoned barns. Jenny had no use for the things since she could carry loads far more easily herself. But seeing the single-wheel design brought home to her what the root problem was with the plows. They were unstable.

A wheelbarrow is also unstable. But a wagon with its four wheels was far more steady.

She had seen a number of small three-wheel carts growing up in the weak lands so she decided to settle for that. Fortunately, she had half a dozen plow heads she'd found throughout the valley so she had plenty to work with... she wouldn't even have to steal from the weak lands.

Jennifer was not any kind of craftswoman but her experience with her carrying rigs and the bits of crude carpentry she had done allowed her to put together a sturdy frame of roughly squared logs. It was a simple T arrangement. Jenny figured that if she let a pair of plows trail behind a third, the two would act as a drag and keep the contraption pointed in the right direction.

Jenny was rather proud of herself for finally reasoning the problem through and finding a solution. And the damn thing worked... more or less.

One problem was the issue of footing. Walking in front of the triple-plow like an ox meant trudging over fresh and unstable ground. As she had often discovered before, Jenny's strength was easily thwarted by bad footing or poor leverage.

Eventually she decided that rather than pull the thing like a beast of burden, she would stand fifty or a hundred feet away and haul the plow in like landing a big fish. This allowed her to settle into one chunk of earth, stamp out some good footing and properly put her power to work.

In later years she would eventually line all the fields she worked with mostly buried logs to press her feet against to always have the ideal footing.

The three-plow system was good at keeping the plows pointed in the right direction. But, even though a plow is designed to keep its nose plunging down into the earth, it would occasionally pop to the surface like a porpoise. Once that happened, it would happily skate across the surface, accomplishing nothing.

Jenny's solution to this problem was simple. The tool needed more weight. The plows and thick beams only weighed about five-hundred pounds. This made it easy for Jenny to chivvy around but it was proving to be too light to do the job to her satisfaction.

She built a wooden cage on top of the T frame and loaded it with rocks until she was satisfied with its earth-hugging performance. She actually had quite a bit of fun figuring out how much weight to use. As the hauling got more difficult, Jenny reveled in the feel of her muscles working hard for a change.

Constantly breaking ropes forced her to back off on the weight. She did one time manage to haul the contraption through a fresh, undisturbed field with four thousand pounds of rock in the bin. She knew it was overkill but she loved the way it made her muscles burn to challenge herself.

By that point she was bundling four heavy ropes together to take the load... she had more difficulty maintaining a good grip on the enormous wad of fiber than she did actually dealing with the weight.

And then that big hawser snapped on her next pass across the field.

She eventually backed off to just a half-ton of added weight. She packed the stones in a series of rope-nets. These she could sling over her shoulders much like her old carry rig when she had to transport the plow.

Jenny approached most tasks in much the same way. Her great strength and resilience set her apart from other people. It had led to her isolated childhood and driven her into the hills. In a better world, perhaps Jenny could have found a place in society and been a better-rounded human being but that is not the way things had turned out.

Jenny was defined by her power and she let it guide every aspect of her life.

If she needed to drive a fence post into the ground, the anvil from the abandoned smithy made a good hammer. Except when she got carried away and shattered the wooden post.

When she eventually became bored with rabbit and pheasant and squirrel she decided that once in a while, a little weak-land beef would be nice to have. So she ran out of the valley, found a farm one night that seemed to have stock to spare and stole a cow. When she almost immediately grew impatient with leading the balky creature, she slugged it across the head, driving shards of shattered skull into its brain and killing it instantly.

She slung the eight-hundred pound animal over her shoulders. By the time her easy, loping run brought her back to her home, the carcass's spine and ribcage had disintegrated into countless shards of bone. Butchering the big animal was the bloodiest, messiest thing imaginable and Jenny ended up wasting more meat than she ate.

But she did get a few tasty steaks out of the whole rigmarole and Jenny considered the venture a success.

She hauled water in waist-high barrels, two at a time. Due to the wear and tear and breaking handles her axes suffered, she took to slamming logs down onto pointed rocks to break them down for fire-wood. She still needed the axe to fell the trees though and she became careful with the tools... she was growing tired of stealing replacements.

Through all this, Stanley was usually planted on a nearby patch of earth, watching his mother's labors and listening to her running commentary. Any passer-by who was not simply stunned into mindless shock at the sight of the naked woman engaged in impossible feats of strength would have thought her mad to be babbling so.

They might not have actually been wrong. One would be hard pressed to actually declare Jennifer Stram sane. "Not well adjusted" would be about the best that could be said. But regardless of the state of her sanity, her constant babble was the result of her pledge to talk to her son so that he may learn to speak.

Stanley's development seemed more or less normal. Jenny really had nothing to compare his growth too... she couldn't remember her own early childhood very well and she had been enough of an outcast in the weak lands that she knew little about children in general.

A number of falls and other accidents he had survived without injury implied to Mamma Stram that her son had indeed inherited some measure of her strength but beyond that she could not yet gauge how unusual he was.

He was dark of skin like his mother and grew rambunctious in the way most young children do. He learned to walk at a typical age though predictably, he was slow learning to speak. Even the usual baby-babble was slow in coming.

By the time he was four, Stanley was a spindly, spider-like bundle of energy. He seemed to be all arms and legs.

Needless to say, Jenny no longer carried him in a papoose. Sometimes, he would run along behind her. He was almost tireless; his little legs pumping frantically to keep up with his mother. But his scamper was far outpaced by his mother's loping strides. Still having no patience for anything that might hinder her, Jenny would usually pick him up and run with him in her arms. As the seasons passed she grew more confident with his resilience and would let herself use the pounding, ground-devouring run that she most favored.

Later, once his arms and legs were long enough and his grip strong enough, Stanley would cling to his mother's back while she ran. Had Jenny had a better reference to work from, she would have recognized his ability to hold on as a clear indication of his unusual strength.

There were two things in Jenny's life that bothered her. The first was her inability to get pregnant again. The second she wasn't even aware of. She didn't know why she grew sad while laying in bed at night or why her son's happy squeals sometimes made her want to cry. In fact, Jenny never had understood emotions very well and sometimes didn't recognize the odd feelings she would experience.

She also didn't really know why she would still sometimes think about Thomas, the man from her town in the weak lands that had perhaps been her only friend. She had left all the limitations and complications of that life behind her. She was far better off on her own.

Of course, that was the root of her mysterious malaise. Jenny Stram was lonely.



Boondocker
