Warning: some readers may not find this tale tasteful.
Stories of
Love,
Lust, and
Other Violence
Young Jersey Warren's parents had been very strict with her older sisters, but those four older sisters and her four older brothers had tired them out so much that she had little interference in her activities, even the sexual experimenting she did with boys her age. Still, she found life too restricting for a very intelligent female with a sense of adventure and had a plan to remedy her life's limitations.
She had always been interested in diseases, injuries, and treatments for them, and she read the little she could find about medicine and the medical practice and hung around the local doctors, lending a hand whenever they would let her. Although her nursing help was appreciated by most of the physicians, she wanted to be a doctor herself, not a nurse, in part at least because she knew that women were often treated as second-class patients by most physicians, even in the modern year of 1875 and in the cosmopolitan city of Philadelphia. Since getting a license to practice medicine depended on approval by an already-licensed doctor, she made a deal with a man, Dr. David Clark, who had a stellar reputation as a physician but a bad reputation as a womanizer; he could have access to her for his pleasure with her enthusiastic participation any time he wanted if he would teach her everything he knew about medicine and certify her as a competent physician when she had become one. He had thought she would soon drop out, but she saw it through, and he had to admit that she was the best of all the physicians he had trained --- and certainly the best and most-enthusiastic sex-partner he ever had even though he was many years her senior. For her part, she had to admit that not only had he taught her what she needed to know about medicine but that he hadn't been the only one to benefit from their other activities.
When she began her practice as a physician, she was surprised to find that almost none of the women in the community and no man anywhere would come to her with medical problems, even when Dr Clark, who didn't mind cutting back on his practice, tried to help by telling some of his patients that they should visit her because she was totally competent in all aspects of medical practice. That lack of patients was the reason she ended up at the age of twenty-three, hanging her shingle way out west in the small mining community of Torres in the Territory of New Mexico, where she struggled along for over six months, setting bones broken in accidents, caring for a few brawl-inflicted cuts that couldn't be patched up without stitches, and treating two miners who came to gunshots over Annie, the local whore. Business wasn't booming, but she scraped by.
The only females within fifty miles, except perhaps for some Indian women who wandered through, were she, Annie, and the wife of one of the miners. The wife didn't associate with the whore or the doctor, whether her choice or her man's choice, Jersey didn't know; however, she and Annie struck up a friendship of sorts, and she tried to advise Annie on not getting pregnant and on avoiding diseases, even to the extent of supplying her new friend with vulcanized condoms that she was never certain were put to use. Annie was addicted to opium and, Jersey was surprised to learn, only twenty, although she looked at least a full decade older.
Although Jersey had several miners ask her to marry, she wasn't ready to settle down and begin bringing babies into the world in such a place as Torres and certainly didn't intend to spend her life in Torres; however, several men who wanted an upgrade from their activities with Annie or just wanted more opportunity made offers of money for a commodity Jersey could provide without benefit or restrictions of marriage, and, finally, she decided that she would do a bit of whoring, perhaps for some small part to add to her income but mostly to relieve her boredom. She set her prices high enough not to compete with Annie, and anyone who didn't meet her price didn't get her special services, and she also made each and every one of her customers use appropriate protection. Although she had hoped that at least one of the clients would routinely provide her orgasmic pleasure, any pleasure she got was purely happenstance because not one of the men who paid her price was at all interested in her enjoyment.
After less than a year of two professions, Jersey had enough money to buy land near the railroad about a mile from the camp town and to have a house built there, the first of several that would be built in this location as even the miners wanted something more permanent than the thrown-together camp that was never meant to last. She had a share in two mines and owned one of the more-productive but whimsically-named ones outright. Its owner had been ordered back east to take charge of his father's business and to marry the daughter of the father's business partner, and he had signed over the entire rights to Jersey's Honey Pit to her in return for a full week of mining the original for which his mine had been named. She became very wealthy because of that mine, but no one ever reported that the man regretted the deal.
Since no one was giving her the pleasure she wanted and had come to expect from her activity with Dr. Clark, Jersey had surveyed the group of miners early on and had picked Jerry Henderson, one of the younger ones, whose cleanliness appeared a bit better than the norm, to be her lover and to enjoy as much of her as he could take in exchange for giving her pleasure, and, although she had to teach him, he was soon adequately addressing her needs. She was earning less than a fortune as a doctor but was getting rich from her mining interests and other activity, even though a few of the miners had found wives by that time.
Things changed dramatically on all fronts when a new miner brought smallpox to Torres. The first night in town he drank with several other miners, probably sharing the water with which they washed down the whiskey and coughing when he swallowed the raw hooch, and, even worse from the perspective of many, he visited Annie for a quick bout that night. Although he already had the rash when he came to town, it was not until a couple of days later that Jersey recognized his condition when she was called to look at him, and she isolated him immediately. Over the next four months, she had all the work she could handle as a doctor, and, although she didn't manage to save the original patient who died after a couple of weeks, she was thankful that her twenty-hour days over most of that span resulted in the survival of every one of the eleven local people, including Annie and Jerry, who came down with the disease, and, except for a few scars, not disfiguring to any of the survivors, no one seemed much worse off, health-wise, than at the beginning.
When it was over, a tired but triumphant Jersey made permanent her temporary retirement from prostitution, determined to spend the rest of her days laboring only as a doctor. She had to bid goodbye to Jerry, her lover, when his slightly older brother William came from the east to take him back home for convalescence; however, after putting Jerry on a train headed back east, William stuck around to stake his claim to both his brother's mine and Jersey's charms. After insisting on and getting proof that he could perform adequately to meet her needs, she welcomed him to take his brother's place and, for several months, didn't really notice any great difference in the two. She suspected he wouldn't want her forever, and she didn't plan to keep him forever because her goal was to leave this town behind before too long and to move on to another life, perhaps as a respectable wealthy physician or with an invented identity as a rich heiress.
William had agreed to his father's request to come west and rescue Jerry to a great extent because he had lost his wife to another man even though he had given her all his love and treated her better than any man he knew treated a wife. After she left him, he decided he wanted nothing to do with women except for an occasional --- well maybe frequent --- romp in the hay, and taking over his brother's woman to whom he felt he owed nothing except orgasmic pleasure now and then suited him perfectly. He had no plans ever to marry again, but he was content to remain with Jersey and enjoy their relationship as long as she wanted him.
For months after recovering from smallpox, Annie was too weak to continue her earlier profession, and, since Jersey had quit, the single miners were left without anyone to relieve their yearnings. This situation created opportunities for an occasional wife to trade an abusive or worthless husband for a less-abusive or more-worthy one, and a few also began earning more than their unsuccessful miner husbands; however, eventually the destitute single miners banded together to send for two young women from St Louis. One of the young women with more wisdom than the other negotiated excellent prices for the sexual favors of both; however, only the negotiator amassed a fortune for the rental of her body because the other woman spent most of her money on alcohol, laudanum, gambling, and other diversions. The savvy one ended up as a pillar of society, such as it was on the frontier, after rescuing and marrying one of her former clients when he lost all his money in a fraudulent scheme not of his making, but the other ended up like most frontier-town whores, dying young from opium addiction and alcoholism. Annie, who had no income after her inability to continue her work, accepted a one-tenth share of Jersey's Honey Pit, and began working for Jersey as a nurse, and she enjoyed being able to pay some young miner down on his luck to give her what she desired in bed.
Both Jersey and William were surprised when they were still together after two years and were sharing much more than they had intended to share, and they were even more surprised when they were still together after five years and doing all the things a married couple might do except having children and saying 'I love you' to each other. Her medical practice thrived after what everyone in town saw as her dedication in saving all the local citizens from smallpox, and, although they would normally have been reluctant to reveal certain male parts to a female doctor, many had already shown their all to her in her former profession and had nothing to hide. William had been elected mayor of the town and was under some pressure to take a wife; however, there was no woman he wanted to marry, and, anyhow, he suspected any woman he married would likely insist on his giving up the woman with whom he shared so much and felt so comfortable. The mining claim he had taken over from his brother didn't yield much ore, but Jersey's Honey Pit kept on having one of the richest yields of all the mines in the area, and she had never minded sharing with her lover.
After Jersey and William had been together for seven years, when she was nearing thirty-four and he was a bit over thirty-five, she quit insisting on protection during her fertile time and was soon pregnant. When he informed her that he still didn't want to get married to her, she told him that they didn't need to marry but that she certainly wanted a child and could easily support it without his help. She --- probably even he --- was surprised that he didn't seek another woman when she became huge during the late stages of pregnancy, not even during the short time that she had to give up having intercourse before giving birth or the longer time afterward, but he had found that she was the only woman who held interest for him. After the baby's birth, Annie, who had already lost out as the town whore because she was pushed out by the newer women even though she had managed to kick her addiction to laudanum, turned from helping Jersey as a nurse to helping her as a nursemaid to her son. A second child, a daughter, was born a bit over two years after the first, and a final child, another son, was born when Jersey was forty. As one of the area's prominent male citizens, with gender designation being an unnecessary addition, William had several opportunities for marriage with more-proper, younger women, some of whom would have looked the other way and let him continue with Jersey, but he had no wish for another woman in his life. He could always tell himself that he had no commitment to Jersey or responsibilities to the children and could leave whenever he wished, even though he knew he spent and enjoyed more time with his sons and his daughter than most of the fathers in the area did with their children.
Jersey had enough income from mining and land deals to hire two full-time maids to help Annie with child care and to do house work, and, by this time, she didn't care that her bills for medical service were not paid by many of the town-folk, and, in particular, she gave lots of time to providing medical services for women of the area. Although it did not always please everyone in and around town, she gave classes on prevention of undesired pregnancy, and, when it was necessary, she bullied men into bringing their wives in for medical care. She was thankful that her classes to train mid-wives were well-received and was happy that the survival rates in and around Torres among infants and women giving birth were among the highest not only on the frontier but across the entire nation. Her life may not have been as glamorous as she had anticipated at seventeen, but she was doing exactly what she had wanted to do and was enjoying it.
When his and Jersey's oldest son was ten, William, who was in the territorial legislature by this time, told her that he thought they should get married to provide legitimacy for their children, but she replied that was not a sufficiently good reason, to which he responded that, if she cared for him, it damned well was a good-enough reason, given that she had held his heart for several years. She then admitted that providing legitimacy probably was an adequate reason since he felt the same for her that she felt for him, and they married some eighteen years after they began their temporary affair.
It would be wonderful to report that they lived happily ever after, but, while they apparently loved each other the remainder of their lives, they didn't live forever and died in their late seventies, leaving a large fortune, including the still-productive Jersey's Honey Pit, to their three offspring. Somehow the name of the mine was altered to Jersey's Glory Hole, a still-smutty name but one with mining significance, on all the records made afterward, and the story of Jersey and William began to evolve slowly also. She was still the bold female doctor who saved everyone when the mining town was ravaged by smallpox; however, William became the loving husband who stood by her side and helped her during the ordeal, while his brother Jerry totally disappeared in the altered tale, and she had received the very productive Glory Hole as thanks for saving a wealthy miner instead of getting the Honey Pit as payment for a week of royal naked-boogying. In the new history, Annie was the town whore with a heart of gold --- a true characterization, it must be admitted --- who helped nurse smallpox patients instead of being one of the earliest patients, and the wedding ceremony ten years after the birth of their oldest child became a renewal of Jersey's and William's earlier marital vows for which the record has mysteriously been lost.
Descendants of William and Jersey, most of whom enjoy financial advantages from Jersey's fortune even today, have regular reunions of the Warren-Henderson family to honor their illustrious ancestors, and, although few of them ever question the accepted family history, one young male descendant who had done a bit of genealogical research began finding records that differed from the sanitized version that family members liked. Only one cousin --- a female third cousin once removed they conclude, of a different generation although about the same age as he --- gave credence to his findings and was interested in joining with him to learn more, and they have been fascinated by the real Jersey and real William they have found by digging through forgotten records. Most of their cousins try to kick them out of the clan or, at best, ignore them, but their apostasy has brought them closer together. When her cousin and lover tells the young female that he thinks Jersey's genes have weakened in the other descendants and that she is the only present-day re-embodiment of their ancestress even though she admits she's never been a doctor or a prostitute, she laughs and tells him that she must not be as good as their several-times-great grandmother because no one has ever offered her anything as valuable as Jersey's Honey Pit for a bit of rolling in the hay.