The Truest Pleasure (12 page)

Of course Florrie was always a flirt when she talked to men. She was a backslapper and nudger. Her husband David was even then getting sickly. He wanted to be a Baptist preacher and spent a lot of time indoors reading the Bible, and leaving most of the work to her. Tom was the opposite in every way.

I'd say every woman and every man are attracted to each other. It is the natural thing, and marriage is just a selection and guiding of that attraction. But Tom and Joe's Lily disliked each other from the beginning, or almost from the beginning. It was like they recognized each other from the first as somebody they couldn't hardly stand. And I never really understood it. I know it had something to do with religion, since Lily was always talking about a service her and Joe had been to, or some meeting out at Fletcher they was going to. Lily loved to talk about preachers they had heard and how they preached and how many people had been healed or led to the baptism of fire. Once she started she would talk nonstop. She would ask Joe to agree with her and then before he could answer she would go on.

It wasn't too long after Tom and me was married that Joe and Lily come down for Sunday dinner. Lily had a new lavender dress and a lavender hat. She liked clothes more than any woman I've ever knowed. She spent everything she could on new cloth or a new dress or a shawl. You would have thought
she was rich to see the way she dressed, except her clothes was too colorful. She was always wearing yellows and pinks and lavenders, and I don't know if the rich would have dressed that way. She liked dresses with great flouncy sleeves. And sometimes she even carried an umbrella to match when she went to church or to a revival service. She said she liked to dress up out of respect to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. “It's a way of showing my faith,” she said.

Lily knowed how to butter up Pa. She would hug him and kiss him on the cheek and bring him pieces of cake or pie. And he liked all the attention. What man don't? And by then he was old enough to be a little childish. She once begged him for a piece of land up on the road. She said, “Pa, I don't have a thing of my very own. If you give me a piece of ground I would have something that was just mine.” And Pa went to town and had a deed drawed up and give her five acres there along the river road.

But strangely, Lily didn't bother me much. I'm not sure why, because she got on most people's nerves one way or another. I guess I just thought she was silly, and didn't pay much attention to her. Or maybe it was I only saw her Sundays, because she rarely come over to work with me, the way Florrie did.

That Sunday they come for dinner I fixed chicken and rice and a coconut cake. I had had to hurry to get things ready before church and never had a chance to put on a good blouse. What I wore was plain cotton, perfectly acceptable, but not fancy.

As we set down at the table Lily twisted herself in her lavender dress and patted her hat and said, “Oh Ginny, you always look so good in your clothes.”

Now I was used to Lily and knowed she just wanted somebody to compliment her new outfit. I guess no one had thought to since she almost always wore a new dress on Sundays if she could.

“Thank you, Lily,” I said. “And your dress just takes my breath away. Ain't it pretty, Tom?”

But she had made Tom mad. He had not made allowances for Lily, and her manner got to him more than I would have dreamed. His face turned red and he looked down at his plate. I guess he had not growed up with people like Lily around him.

“Well I had to have something to wear, if we're going to town to hear Preacher Carver,” Lily said. “I told Joe I didn't have a rag to wear unless I could finish this dress in time.”

“You look like a society lady,” I said, pouring coffee for Pa.

“I think we should dress with respect for the Lord's work,” Lily said. “Don't you agree, Pa? We should dress at least as nice as the devil's people.”

“We should look the best we can,” Pa said.

“Preacher Carver healed a goiter on a woman from Greenville,” Lily said. “Before a thousand people he reached under her chin and jerked the goiter away.”

“I hear he reached for their money to jerk away,” Tom said.

Lily ignored him. Tom's face was flushed like he was sunburned, and he wouldn't take his eyes off his plate.

“Preacher Carver has healed hundreds of people all over South Carolina,” Lily said. “At his meetings the lame has walked and the blind has been able to see. He is a great man of God. Everywhere he goes the number of saved increases.”

“I've heard everywhere he goes the population increases about nine months later,” Tom said.

“Tom!” I said. But I had to laugh a little behind my hand too. I had never heard Tom talk so.

“Preacher Carver has blessings for them that will receive them,” Lily said. She wiped her mouth with her handkerchief.

As soon as he finished eating Tom got up and went outside. He never liked to set around talking with my folks after dinner, especially if Lily was there.

She didn't like him any better than he liked her. She liked men that flirted and complimented her on her new dresses. And she hated men that argued with her. That's why Joe kept silent when she talked in her trembly voice. She had been raised an orphan after her papa died in the Confederate War, and she tried to act stylish and cultured I think to cover up how poor they had been.

Once before Jewel was born we went to pick huckleberries at the head of the river, the summer after Tom and me was married. Tom hitched up the wagon and put in three seats. We took buckets and a picnic basket, and left at daylight because it was ten miles. We stopped on the river road for Joe and Lily. David was sick and Florrie couldn't go. It was just us four with Pa.

Lily come out wearing a big white hat with a white veil. “I must protect my face from both sun and flies,” she said. “I'll not come back with my skin all bit and blistered.”

It was a fine summer morning and we got almost to the head of the river before the sun come over the mountains. I
always loved that upper end of the valley where the river gets small as a branch and the ridges plunge to the water. The pines are straight and black and the cliffs jut like statues far above.

“Did you see the article in the paper about wrinkles?” Lily said, as the wagon rattled on rocks.

“I don't think I did,” I said. I was watching the dapples of early light through the trees. The woods was spotted with coins and streaks of sunlight.

“It said the two ways to prevent wrinkles are to stay out of sun and wind, and to never wash your face with harsh soap.”

Tom was guiding the horse around rocks and slowing the wagon over washed-out places. We started climbing, winding out of the river valley. We come into the bright sun.

“Did you read the article, Tom?” Lily said.

Tom did not answer. He kept looking at his shadow throwed over the horse in front of him.

“Oh I forgot,” Lily said. “Tom don't read the paper.”

“We need to get water,” Pa said. “There's a spring ahead.”

“There won't be any water on the ridge,” I said. Anybody that went up to Long Rock to have a picnic or pick huckleberries had to take their own water.

Tom stopped the wagon a little further on and took the water bucket out of the wagon. I could tell how mad he was at Lily by how he banged the bucket on the wagon as he lifted it. Tom was usually too careful to bang anything. The spring was above the road in the laurel bushes. Tom disappeared into the thicket.

Pa took his glasses out of his pocket and saw a screw had fell out of a temple hinge. He searched in his pocket for the loose screw. “I can't pick berries without my glasses,” he said.

But the screw was not in his pocket. He turned it inside out and found nothing but lint. “I have an extra screw in my purse,” he said. He reached into his pocket and looked startled. “It ain't here,” he said.

Pa patted his pockets, and then patted them again. He kept his pension money in his little leather purse, as well as a house key. “I had it this morning,” Pa said.

“Maybe the man that can't read took it,” Lily said. I looked at her and she turned away. I felt the blood rush to my face.

“I didn't mean that,” she said behind her veil. “I didn't mean a thing.”

Tom returned with the bucket of water and set it gently in the wagon. Cold water run down the sides of the pail onto the hay.

“Pa lost his purse,” I said to him.

“Where?” Tom said.

“I don't know,” Pa said. “I had it this morning.”

“Where was the l-l-l-last place you saw it?” Joe said.

“When I left the house I put the key in the purse,” Pa said.

Tom walked around the wagon and looked under the seats. “Here it is,” he said, and picked the purse up from the straw.

“Glory be,” I said.

When we reached the top we could look down on the river valley stretching blue and white in the summer haze. It was so wonderful to be out of the kitchen, away from the hot fields, up on the ridge where the breeze whitened the huckleberry bushes. To the north you could see the Pisgah Mountains climbing one on top of the other to the edge of the sky. “What a glorious day,” I said.

It was that same summer before Jewel was born that Tom went fishing with Joe and David. Joe never invited anybody to go on his trapline, but more than once he had asked Tom if he wanted to go turkey hunting or deer hunting up in the Flat Woods. And every time Tom said he had work to do, had to split rails or clear brush, had to fix a fence. “And I don't have a gun,” Tom said.

“You can borrow mine,” Pa said. Pa had a muzzle loader, as well as a shotgun, but Tom claimed he didn't want to use them.

I don't think Pa and Joe believed Tom had never hunted or trapped. They thought he was just being modest or maybe trying to get some advantage. Maybe by working harder he was trying to show them up. Maybe by always working he was trying to show how he was in charge of the homeplace.

But late spring come and we had the awfullest rains. They must have lasted two weeks at least. Every day it rained again. And even though it might stop and the sun shine a few minutes and fog start rising on Cicero Mountain, the next thing you knowed it was raining again. When it finally stopped water stood in the plowed fields and the ground was too soggy in the garden to touch. The sun come out midmorning, and we could see the river high in its banks. The falls was roaring over at the mill.

Joe and David come by with their fishing poles and Joe carried a can of worms. David was too frail even then to do much hunting, or heavy work, but he liked to fish. Sometimes he set by a pool all day watching his line and studying some tract or magazine.

“Tom, g-g-get your pole,” Joe called from the yard.

Tom was sewing up a hole in his overalls. He was the only man I ever saw who would sew. I guess he learned how when he was living on his own at the Lewis place. “I ain't hardly got time,” Tom said when he come out on the porch.

“S-s-sure you've got time,” Joe said. “Everyth-th-thing is wet and near about drowned except the trout.”

“Come on,” David said and coughed.

“I ain't even got a pole,” Tom said.

“Pa's got plenty of poles under the eave of the smokehouse,” I said. “One of them is mine. You take my pole.”

“C-c-come on,” Joe said, “while the fish are biting.” Joe was like a little youngun he was so thrilled to be going fishing.

I saw that if Tom didn't go it would embarrass Joe and David. They had gone out of their way to be friendly to their brother-in-law. They might not ask him again.

“Let's go,” I said to Tom. “I'll go too and we can get a mess of fish for supper.”

I think that's what persuaded Tom, that there might be something useful to be gained. All our hog meat was gone and some fresh fish would be welcome.

“G-g-ginny used to love to fish,” Joe said, “wh-wh-when she could take her nose out of a book.”

I got the poles from the nails on the wall of the smokehouse and we followed Joe down the trail along the edge of the field.

When I was a girl, fishing was something we did in the spring and early summer. Pa would take us after a rain when the river was muddy and it was too wet to plant or hoe corn. Going down to the swollen river was so exciting my stomach
would churn. Florrie and me learned to put worms on our hooks same as Pa and Joe did. Pa showed us how to throw the line into deep water and hold the pole with both hands, waiting to feel a trout jerk the line. He showed us how to fish the pools in the bends, and in the dark places behind rocks and under a log or overhanging bank. We got to know the Lemmons Hole and the Bee Gum Hole.

We followed Joe to the Bee Gum Hole where the creek joins the river at the bend. The river was a foot higher than usual. Muddy water lapped the sand where fishermen built their campfires.

“Th-th-throw your line over there into the deep water,” Joe said, and pointed to the deepest part near the eddy. The fast current on the far side spun water backwards into the deep part.

Tom didn't say anything as he baited his hook.

“There's a grandpa trout in there so big and smart he'll never be caught,” David said. “It eats the little trout. It must have been here since the Indians fished the river.” He begun to cough.

“If you h-h-h-hooked it, it might pull you in,” Joe said. “That f-f-f-fish is strong as a horse.”

“We call him Plow Wing,” David said. “Old Plow Wing.”

Joe and David talked like little boys. I guess nothing makes men feel young again like fishing. Before Tom got his line in the water David had already caught a trout about eight inches long. The fish flashed its mirror sides as he pulled it to the bank.

“Now that's a m-m-monster,” Joe said. David slipped the hook out of its mouth and throwed the fish back in. “We don't need minners,” he said.