Marrying Stone (17 page)

As they talked, the women set up the meal on the plain pine planks laid between the sawbucks on the near-level place at the far side of the school, until the planks were groaning from the weight of the supper fare. The menfolk were called to eat first. Roe followed Onery and made his way along the impressive spread of food as the ladies smiled at him and served him their cooking.

After his bad experience with Meggie's piccalilli, Roe
was a little hesitant to try anything that he didn't recognize, but the ladies eagerly piled his plate high with local delicacies. Discretion being the better part of valor, Roe moved away from the general crowd with the hope that he would be able to throw away some of the less promising items on his plate without insulting any of the local cooks.

He found a seat near the foot of a hickory tree. Almost immediately he was joined by a lighthearted and grinning Jesse.

"Where did you run off to?" Roe asked as his friend took a seat beside him. His plate was even fuller than Roe's and a huge chunk of light bread covered the whole of it.

"I don't like standing 'round talking with the menfolks," Jesse admitted. "I walked around smelling the gals while I had a chance."

Roe grinned. "You mean you won't have a chance later?"

Jesse pinched off a big piece of bread and scooped up a large bite of one of the offerings upon his plate. He held it up to Roe for him to look at. "These is fried ramps and new potatoes," he said. "Nearly the best eating on the mountain and I suspect the gals'll be eating it same as us."

"So?"

"So they ain't no other smell as pungent as ramps. By the end of supper, me and you and every other soul on this mountain gonna smell like wild onion."

Meggie was uneasy yet she couldn't put her finger on why. It certainly wasn't because Paisley Winsloe had decided to marry up. But she worried that if she seemed unhappy or concerned, everyone would think so. She was genuinely happy for Althea, although it was difficult to imagine the soft-spoken, quiet young girl with a blundering, loud bragger like Paisley Winsloe.

She suspected that the cause of her uneasiness more likely might be Roe
Farley. She had hoped that her girlfriends would have the good sense to ignore
the handsome stranger. Unfortunately, her hopes were not to be realized.

"Ain't he just the slickest-looking feller you ever seen?" Mavis Phillips asked, pretending to swoon. Her dramatic gesture was ruined by the pile of red corkscrew curls that fell into her eyes.

Polly Trace giggled. "I cain't believe he's been staying out at your place, Meggie, and you didn't have the decency to warn your friends to wear our good dresses."

"Oh, go on, Polly," Alba Pease chuckled. "These
are
our good dresses and you know it as well as the rest of us."

Polly laughed along with her and the two young women hugged each other companionably.

"Well, I would have let you know," Meggie told them. "But the way I heard it, Polly, if a fellow isn't Newt Weston he just isn't interesting at all."

Polly blushed a fiery red. The diminutive, flaxen-haired blonde had been wearing her heart on her sleeve for the younger Weston boy for over a year.

"Mercy sakes alive!" Mavis Phillips exclaimed. "That fine-looking Mr. Farley could make every man on the mountain look about as appealing as old Pigg Broody."

Alba feigned a gasp of shock. "And all this time we thought you were saving yourself with the hope of becoming Pigg's missus," she teased.

The girls laughed uproariously as Mavis raised her hand in a pretense of threatened violence.

"Well, you girls just get your minds right off that new fellow," Eda Piggott declared. "He's just not meant for the likes of you."

"Eda's right," Meggie agreed. "He's not just city-bred and scholarly, he's rich, too. He's got a boodle bag of money big enough to choke a horse."

"How do you know that?" Polly asked.

"He offered to pay me cash money for his meals."

"Someone was willing to
pay
to eat your cooking?" Alba's tone was facetious in disbelief. "He must have been nearly starved to death!"

Meggie took the jibe good-naturedly. "I guess it's just more evidence of how ill-suited he'd be as a mountain husband."

"Meggie's absolutely right," Eda said. "If any of you are thinking sweet about him, you'd best just stop it right here and now."

Meggie nodded.

"Because the truth is," Eda continued, "I'm the only one among us who could even have a chance with the fellow and I intend to have him."

"Oh!" the young gaggle of girls cried in unison.

Meggie's mouth dropped open in shock and she stared at Eda in disbelief.

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about staking my claim," Eda answered calmly. "I just want it understood here and now that I've got my eye on that Farley fellow and I don't want a one of you intruding on my quarry."

"That's the most foolish thing you've ever said in your life, Eda Piggott," Meggie declared.

Eda deliberately raised her chin and looked down her nose at Meggie. Her heart-shaped face and perfect complexion were only exceeded by her vanity. "I don't know why. You never get nothing in this world if you don't go after what you want. And I've decided that I want this fellow. I don't know why you're taking such a tone about it. I've spoke first," she said. "Unless you think you got a prior claim, Meggie."

A strange feeling welled up inside Meggie. It was almost as if the hairs on her back had raised like a mad cat and her fingernails had magically turned to claws. Involuntarily she recalled those first magic moments when she thought Roe to be the long-awaited prince from her fairy-tale book. She felt again the sweet warmth of his mouth on her own. And suffered once more the thrill, shock, and shame of embarrassment of Roe catching her at bath in her all togethers. J. Monroe Farley might not be her prince, but he wasn't going to be Eda's either!

"You don't need my permission to make a fool of yourself, Eda Piggott," she said tartly. "Mr. Farley is a city man, a real honest-to-God city man. He's just here to study us and study our music. He's looking us Ozarkers over like we was some strange breed of critter he's never seen before. He's not nearly about to settle down and marry here."

Meggie shrugged. "If you want to set your cap for him, you'd best be prepared to be taken for a fool. The whole mountain will be laughing at you when he leaves here before the first snow."

Eda's face turned red but she was not about to be cowed so easily. Her bright brown eyes were sparkling with anger and she was primed and ready to give Meggie more than a little piece of her mind.

Her response was interrupted by the ringing of the call to order bell. With their attention distracted, Mavis, Polly, and Alba quickly stepped in between the two angry young women and hurried them up to the area in front of the schoolhouse where the evening's entertainment was about to begin. Deliberately, Meggie forced her thoughts away from Eda Piggott's foolishness. She was not about to let her silly friend ruin the Friday Literary for her.

Buell Phillips, attired in his snowy dress shirt and a pair of fancy-tooled leather suspenders, took his place at the top of the schoolhouse steps. He continued to toll the bell up and down until the group was appropriately hushed and closely assembled on the slope. He set the bell back in its box next to the door and looked across the crowd with paternal approval for one long moment before he spoke.

"It's time, my dear friends and neighbors, for the Marrying Stone Mountain Literary Evening Debate," Phillips announced to the crowd. "Tonight our topic is the following."

Holding a piece of brown paper some distance from his face, he squinted almost painfully as he read, loud and carefully, the words written there.

"Resolved: Fire is a better friend to the farmer than water."

He looked up from the paper and waited with dramatic silence for the crowd to absorb the importance of the subject in question.

Then, as he felt sufficient reverence for the argument had been established, he introduced the speakers.

"The advocate for the resolution tonight is a young farmer that we all know." Phillips's tone lightened slightly as he cleared his throat. "I've always thought him a right smart fellow, but I hear that he's just declared his intent to become a married man, so he cain't be a whole lot smarter than the rest of us."

The crowd chuckled good-naturedly. "Despite that, would you all please indicate your welcome and appreciation for our advocate speaker, the eldest son of Orv and Beulah, Mr. Paisley Winsloe."

A small smattering of applause ensued as Paisley took his place on the first step of the schoolhouse porch and bowed politely to the crowd. He was cleanly shaved and had his hair slicked down. His Sunday-go-to-meeting coat was a little worn and short in the sleeves, but the red polka-dot choke rag done with such care at his throat was store-bought and as fancy as any on the mountain. Meggie's one-time gentleman caller had never looked better.

"Speaking in opposition to the resolution tonight," Buell Phillips continued, "is a farmer that has enlightened and impressed us with his discourse on many occasions from this forum." Again Phillips grinned slightly in preparation for his small attempt at humor. "I asked him once about the development of his ideas and his philosophy and he told me that a man can do a heap of serious thinking when he spends nearly every day of his life staring at the back end of a mule."

The crowd again laughed with admiration at Phillips's wit. Staring at the back end of a mule was what most of the men in the crowd did all day and not a one of them could fail to see the humor in it.

"Allow me to present our opposition speaker for the evening," Phillips said. "The husband of Grace and father of Labin, Tuck, Polly, and Shem. A man who raises the skinniest pigs and the fattest rocks on this mountain, Mr. Labin Trace."

As the crowd chuckled, Trace stepped up to the school-house steps and gave a formal nod to the crowd that was acknowledged with polite applause. The upland farmer was not as prosperous as the Winsloes and Phillipses and others who plowed fields in the hollow, but his shabby overalls were very clean, pressed with neat, hot iron creases.

Meggie glanced over at Polly, who was grinning proudly. She raised her crossed fingers in a gesture of luck.

"As the advocate," Phillips said loudly, hushing the crowd once more with his words, "Mr. Winsloe will go first."

Buell Phillips stepped down from the steps and left the two men alone on the platform to speak.

As Paisley began to make his presentation on the positive qualities of fire for warmth, cooking, and the making of tools, Meggie's attention wandered.

Her glance strayed across the crowd to where Roe Farley stood with her brother. Clearly, Jesse was delighted with his new friend. And Meggie was grateful that Farley's kindness to her brother extended to willingness to still talk and joke with him in public. A lot of the men on the mountain were leery of being seen conversing with Jesse, as if his simple-mindedness were catching. It was one of the things she had disliked about Paisley Winsloe. At the cabin Paisley had conversed with Jesse when he had to, but at church gatherings and Literaries, he had acted as if Jesse were a stranger.

Roe Farley apparently had the confidence of a man who didn't have to prove his mental abilities.

Meggie smiled approvingly as once more she allowed her gaze to stray to the two men in her thoughts.

Jesse was listening to the debate with the awed expression of admiration and confusion that was so familiar. Her brother was very aware of his own limitations. She knew that he hated not being as smart as everybody else. But he was warmhearted and generous enough to feel admiration rather than jealousy for those more gifted.

Jesse was clearly entranced by the big words and noble phrasing that emerged from the gap-toothed, tobacco-stained lips of Paisley Winsloe and Labin Trace.

Roe Farley, on the other hand, appeared to be more than a little bit amused at the seriousness with which the speakers and the crowd took the debate on whether the benefits of warmth and water outweighed the disasters of fire and flood.

Meggie's curiosity was sparked. What did a much learned city fellow think of the Ozarkers' attempts to educate themselves and bring culture and civilization to their lives? He might well have found the speakers and her friends and even herself quite comical. Perhaps he did. Somehow the thought didn't bother Meggie. She never had been, nor ever would be, ashamed of who she was and the way she lived. It might not be the way other people lived lives in other places, but it was the way life was lived in the Ozarks and she wouldn't have it any other way. She supposed that in some ways the mountain folk were rather comical. Unaccountably, the memory of the up-and-down plowed cornfield came to her mind and she chuckled out loud.

Apparently it was not only Ozarkers who could provide a laugh with their foolishness. J. Monroe Farley, a Bay State scholar, was a lot smarter than most of the folks on this mountain. And he might well have cause to chuckle a time or two at their backwoods ways. But he had provided a laugh or two himself.