I helped Rose down, giving her a smack on the bottom by way of habit. Then, I bent down behind the splashboard to unhitch the singletree, and the horse was fidgeting and switching his tail and I was saying, “Sooo, boy, soo, now.” And then I thought of an idea.

I gave the horse a goose and made him jump. I drove my shoulder against the splashboard, making a heck of a racket like the horse had kicked it. Then I jumped out in the clear again, groaning and clutching myself.

Rose came running up, clinging to me by one arm as I staggered around doubled over. “Oh, honey! Darling! Did that goddam nag kick you?”

“Right in the you-know-what,” I groaned. “I never had nothin’ hurt so bad in my life.”

“Goddam him to hell, anyway! I’ll get a pitchfork and gut the brindle bastard!”

“Naw, don’t do nothin’ like that,” I said. “The horse didn’t go to do it. Just help me get him hitched up again, so’s I can get home.”

“Home? You’re not going anywhere in your condition,” she said. “I’m taking you in the house, and don’t you argue about it.”

I said, but, looky, now, it wasn’t necessary to go to all that trouble. “I’ll just go home and lay down with some cold towels on it, and—”

“You’ll lie down here, and we’ll see about the towels after I see what the damage is. It might be you need something else.”

“But, looky, looky here, now, honey,” I said. “It’s kind of private, a thing like that. It ain’t hardly something a woman should deal with.”

“Since when?” Rose said. “Now, come on and stop arguing with me. Just lean on me and we’ll go real slow.”

I did what she said. There just wasn’t anything else I could do.

We got to the house. She helped me back into the bedroom, made me lay down on the bed and started taking off my clothes. I told her she didn’t need to take them all off, because the pain was just in the part that my pants covered. She said it wasn’t any trouble at all, and I could relax better if I was all undressed instead of partways, and to stop butting into her business.

I said that it was my business that got hurt, and she said, well, my business was her business, and right now she was running the store.

She leaned down over the place where I was hurt, or supposed to be hurt, turning the lamp this way and that so that she could make a proper inspection.

“Hmmm,” she said. “I don’t see any bruises, honey. No breaks in the skin.”

I said, well, it sure hurt, that’s all I knew. “Of course a fella don’t have to get hit very hard in that area to make him hurt to beat heck.”

She said, “Let’s see, now, you tell me here it hurts. Does it hurt ‘there’, or ‘here’, or ‘here’—”