The Truest Pleasure (3 page)

People always liked to have Florrie around, because she was fun and told jokes. But the truth is she was a little silly, always
talky and boy crazy. I hate to say it, but a lot of women and girls appeared to me just plain shallow. They didn't have a thing on their minds but gossip. And Florrie always was a little lustful. She married early and liked to say that I was becoming an old maid. I never tried to discuss with her about men, but, like I say, she let me know several times she had gone with David before they got married. I couldn't help but wonder where they had done it, for both our house and the Latham house was always full of people. I guess I was really a little jealous of her.

From age fourteen on I had gone to picnics with young folks from school and walked home from time to time with a boy after church. That's the way we did things back then. A boy was interested, he walked you home after meeting. But I had only one beau before I met Tom. He was the schoolteacher for a term, named Simcox. He was from Asheville, and like all teachers back then he boarded around the community. That was part of his pay. When he boarded with us him and me got to talking. We talked way into the night after I washed the dishes. He had read more books than anybody I ever met, and he knowed all about Egypt. Everybody else had gone to bed, and we set there talking while the fire died down. The talking got slower and it was getting cold in the room.

Finally he stood up like he was going to bed. I stood too, and he looked at me. He pulled me to him and kissed me, not a deep kiss but just a meeting of lips. I didn't know what to think, but it felt good. I didn't want him to stop, but he pulled away like he had done something wrong. And he wasn't looking when he stepped back right into the churn. I had set the milk by the fire to clabber. He tried to catch his balance but the churn tripped
him. Down he went and the churn tipped over and sour milk poured over the hearth and over him. Some even splashed in the fireplace and hissed and smelled like scorched sour milk will.

Pa and Locke come to the door to see what was the matter.

“The churn tipped over,” I said to Pa. I wanted to laugh, but I didn't. Pa and Locke went on back to bed.

I looked at Mr. Simcox like I was about to bust out giggling. But he wasn't laughing at all. His face was all red and looked sweaty. I think him and me could have made a go of it if he had been able to laugh then, when he was getting up and wiping off the sour milk. I liked him a lot. But he took it too serious, and we never did get closer after that. Oh, we walked up to the spring at twilight and back several times. And we set by the fire talking about every kind of thing you could think of. But we never did relight the spark. He had got too embarrassed. Some men don't ever forgive you if you see them in a pickle. Locke teased me something terrible for months, saying, “When is Mrs. Simcox going to have supper ready?” and “Is the learned Mr. Simcox going to join us?” When the school term was over Mr. Simcox went back to Asheville and I never saw him again.

I thought I was too tall for the boys to like me. I put up my long black hair as was the fashion then, and wore my white blouses. I reckon I read too much.

Pa was always an easy mark for peddlers. They would come through in those days with packs on their backs, or in buggies. Most was recent comers to America that spoke with accents. Pa loved to talk, and welcomed them for dinner, sometimes for the night. And he nearly always bought something.
He said I was too suspicious of strangers, especially ones selling something.

One of them was Ahmed, from Palestine, who had arrived in Greenville only a year or two before. On his first trip through the mountains he carried everything in his pack, a few pieces of cloth, needles, thread, thimbles, small vases of brass and pewter. His English was barely understandable, but his patience and cheer was endless. I was breaking beans on the porch the first time Ahmed arrived.

He walked into the yard sweating and out of breath, but he took off his pack and begun showing his wares. He brought out one piece of silk or linen after another, and holding them to the light would say, “Is a nice, madam, no?” He kept repeating the words and showing the scarves and strings of lace, while I went on breaking beans. Finally he reached into the bottom of the pack and brought out an afghan with apricot and gold and green workings on it. “And now for the woman of taste,” he said.

He asked ten dollars for it. I offered five.

“Madam, I have wife and many chindren in the old country who must come to 'is country.” He spread the afghan over a chair. “For such work it would be a sin to take less than nine dollars,” he said. I offered him five again and kept snapping beans.

“Is impossible,” he said. “You want me to starve, and all my little chindren?” He folded the afghan and placed it on the pack.

When Pa returned from the field at dinnertime Ahmed and I was still talking on the porch. He had dropped his price to seven dollars, but I refused to give any. I think it was the work
of stringing beans that made me so firm, for I did want the afghan.

Pa introduced hisself and invited Mr. Ahmed to stay for dinner. They set on the porch and talked while I fixed bread and taters and roastnears to go with the beans. The peddler brought out his wallet and showed Pa a picture of his wife and children, brothers and sisters. When he made enough money, he said, he was going to have his own store in Greenville and “sell nothing but the best.” In fact, even now he sold “nothing but the best.”

Before he eat, Mr. Ahmed brought out a little book and read from it, after Pa said grace. Pa asked if that was the Bible.

“Yes, yes, the words of the prophet.”

“Do you believe in Jesus in your religion?” I said. I knew it wasn't exactly the thing to say, but I wanted to know.

“Yes, yes, he also was a great prophet.”

“Then you do believe in the Lord?”

“Yes, yes, in the great lord, Allah.” Mr. Ahmed went for the cornbread and new beans and taters. But he would not touch the buttermilk, asking instead for water. The roastnears he eat with special relish. Afterwards he spread the afghan on the cedar chest in the living room. “And for you, kind lady, only six dollars and a half,” he said.

I shook my head.

“But is worth ten. How can I live?” he said.

“Ginny can be stubborn,” Pa said. “Here, I'll give you six and a half.”

“No, you won't,” I said. “Five dollars is all it's worth.”

But Pa got the money from the leather purse he kept in his
closet and paid Mr. Ahmed in silver dollars and one half-dollar. “Ginny's a good girl, but stubborn,” he said to the peddler.

The first time I met Tom Powell it must have been at church. Most people like to claim they fell in love when they first saw each other. I reckon that's the way they remember it, because that's the way they think it should have been. But I have to be honest. The first time I saw Tom I was just curious.

What I recall seeing first was the big blond mustache Tom had. It was at the church picnic, and in sunlight his mustache shined like crystal. I thought, That man is built awful strong, and his mustache makes him seem even bigger. He wasn't much taller than me, but he looked stout, like he was used to lifting logs and splitting rails, which I found out was true.

They had put watermelons in the spring to cool, and then after dinner, and after they had sung hymns in the hot church for hours, Pa and Joe and other deacons sliced the melons. It was late August and the watermelons was so ripe they split with a crack when you touched a knife into them. I offered a piece to Tom, and thought, How is he going to eat through that big drooping mustache? I handed him a fine slice, and I was curious.

“Thank you,” he said and took the dripping melon. It was the nineties and he had on a flat straw boater hat and one of those suits with narrow lapels and a shirt collar tall enough to choke a body. He even had a cane which he hung over his left arm.

I was busy passing slices to everybody, old folks and younguns, but I wanted to keep my eye on the new feller to see if he
got his mustache wet. I handed a special piece with no seeds to the song leader, and I cut another slice for Preacher Jolly.

When I turned back around I didn't see Tom at first. He had got under the shade of one of the big oak trees. And he had took out his pocketknife and was calmly cutting little pieces and putting them in his mouth. He wasn't getting a drop of juice on his suit or mustache. That was my first lesson in how careful he was. Didn't anything hurry him. And he had found the best spot in the shade while most folks was busy talking and sweating in the sun and little kids spit black seeds on each other.

“Howdy,” I said.

“How do,” he said. “I'm Tom Powell.”

“Where you from?” I said.

“I work over at the Lewis place,” he said. You could tell he wasn't used to wearing fine clothes. His face was sunburned and his hands was rough. In the collar and cuffs he looked stiff as a man in the pillory. I felt sorry for him, knowing he was ill at ease. I had never felt sorry before for a man like that.

“You ain't been to church before,” I said.

“I go down to Crossroads,” he said. Under his Sunday clothes he looked powerful the way a horse looks powerful. His shoulders was so broad it seemed he could lift the corner of a house.

“You should come back to visit us,” I said. I couldn't believe I heard myself saying it.

He looked at a stain of melon juice on his pants. Careful as he'd been, the piece had dripped. “What a shame,” I said.

“Ain't nothing,” he said.

“Come down to the spring and you can sponge it off,” I said, “quick, before it dries.”

“Where is the spring?” Tom said.

“It's just a ways down this road,” I said.

We started walking toward the spring. That's what courting couples did after church in those days. The road by the spring was maybe half a mile, but in several places it went under trees, and there was side trails off into the pines on the pasture hill. The excuse was always that they was walking to the spring for a drink. Older folks smiled when they saw young people go that way, and kids giggled and sometimes hid in the thicket and throwed rocks at couples kissing under the white pines. Many a marriage got started on that walk to the spring.

Tom and me ambled down the road in the August heat. It was cooler in the shade, but deerflies and gnats was out. I had on this big hat with flowers on top. It was the kind of floppy hat women wore back then. I brushed flies and gnats away. It didn't seem dignified to slap at them. But in the shade above the spring the air was whining with bugs. A breeze come up. After a hot day in August it will oftentimes blow in a storm.

We had been so busy talking, or I had been so busy talking, I hadn't noticed any clouds over the mountain to the south. I raised my hand to brush a gnat away and hit the rim of my hat. The breeze snatched it and lifted it above the road and into the trees below the road. Tom reached after the hat and missed.

Wind knocked the hat right down through the trees toward the spring branch. It looked like a big white and pink bird flopping through the woods, bouncing off limbs and saplings.

“Oh no,” I said. Tom was after it like a hound after a rabbit. He run down through the brush and hemlocks, trying to catch the hat on his cane.

“Let it go,” I hollered. “Come back.”

But he had started out after my hat and he was determined to get it. He disappeared in the hemlocks going toward the pasture. I was embarrassed all this trouble had happened over my silly hat. I picked my way around the hill toward the fence, trying not to catch my Sunday skirt on briars or holly bushes. It was a good ways to the edge of the pasture.

Pa had been one of the first to put in barbed wire. He said it was easier than splitting rails, and would last longer too. He put the barbed wire around the pasture where he kept the bull.

By the time I got to the fence Tom was already in the pasture. Wind jerked my hat in little hops over the grass, and he kept trying to pin it down with his cane. Every time it looked like he had caught it the breeze jerked the hat further along.

“Don't matter,” I hollered.

Just then the bull come around the rise. He started running right at Tom, straight ahead in a beeline. Then Tom saw the bull. He jumped up and started for the fence.

“Hurry hurry hurry,” I hollered. I stood at the fence and pushed the top wire down so he could jump over it easy.

The bull stopped for half a second, then charged as if shot from a cannon. Tom was maybe a hundred feet from the fence, and it appeared he was stretching to reach the strands while his feet was way behind pushing on the grass. I never saw a man reach so far, with the hat in one hand and the cane in the other.

I pushed the top wire further down and he kind of turned sideways and hopped across the fence still holding the hat and cane. He made it except the pants on his left leg caught on a barb and ripped a tear maybe a foot long in the cloth. The bull run right into the fence and stuck his head through, snorting.

“Get away, Bill-Joe,” I said. “You get away.”

My hat had pieces of grass and little bits of trash stuck to it. Tom handed it to me like something I might not even want.

“You shouldn't have gone to such trouble,” I said.

His face was red from the heat and from the running. And I guess he was embarrassed too. His straw hat had been lost by the branch, and his blond hair was all messed up. The tear in his pants was so big I could see white skin through it.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “This old hat wasn't worth it.” I had ordered the hat from the catalogue from Chicago for exactly $2.98. And now it was dirty and probably couldn't be wore again.

“I better look for my hat,” he said. While he was poking around in the brush down by the branch I glanced up at the sky. A cloud passed over the sun and it got dark all of a sudden, like you had put a light out. Something snapped in the air straight above, and there was thunder at the very top of the sky. Then there was a flash over the mountains, and booms faraway.