Evie didn’t argue with him. None of it seemed real anyway. Time was speeding up and slowing down in fits, like her pulse. The argument between David and Violet moved as rapidly as a silent film, jumping so suddenly into anger that Evie felt she must have missed a whole section of it. “Where is your tact?” Violet was asking. “We are here to get my girl friend married, it’s the happiest day of her life, and you sit talking about hearse wagons. Well, stop right here. Let us out. We’ll walk to the wedding.”
“Tact, nothing,” said David. “It’s a free country, ain’t it? I got a right to voice an opinion just like anybody else.”
“Voice it by yourself, then. We three are walking.”
“Go ahead,” David said. “But let me tell you one thing, fat girl. I didn’t like you the moment I set eyes on you. Organize, organize, I know you like a book. Why don’t you get something of your own to organize?” He stopped the car with a jolt and reached across Drum to open the door. “Get out, all that wants to. You won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”
“Fine,” Violet said. “Pick us up at the nearest J.P., in an hour.”
“Minister,” Evie told her. “And anyway—”
“Minister, then. I don’t care. You just go have yourself a beer, David Elliott.”
“What?” said Drum. He had been watching pedestrians all this time, not appearing to listen, but now he turned halfway in his seat and raised his dark glasses. “Minister, what’s that for? What’s wrong with J.P.?”
“Well, nothing,” said Evie. “Only I was always hoping, well, I was counting on a minister. Also a church.”
Violet nodded.
“What next,” David said.
“Things are getting out of hand here,” said Drum. “I had never looked for all this.”
“Well, now’s the time to back out,” David told him.
Violet said, “Will you just hush? Evie, climb out. We’re walking.”
“No, wait,” Evie said.
“Do you want him to ruin your wedding?”
“It’ll be ruined for sure if you walk,” said Drum. “Because I ain’t coming.”
“Wait,” Evie said.
Time slowed to its regular pace. Everyone hushed and stared at her.
“Nobody walks,” she told them. “I plan to have a normal, ordinary wedding, with witnesses who aren’t called in off the street. No fighting. No disapproving. We are going to do this one thing the way it ought to be done, and afterwards we will have a bottle of wine to celebrate. Now, is that too much to ask?”
“Well—” said Violet.
“All right. Shut the door,” Drum said. “Looks like we got to find us a minister.”
“Methodist,” Evie said.
The minister had a face she forgot an hour later. He perched, childlike, on the edge of his seat when they drove him to his church, and he stayed that way forever in Evie’s mind. All she remembered of the wedding itself was the smell of musty swing cushions when Drum stood beside her at the altar. For souvenirs she had a wire-thin ring and a marriage certificate in old English lettering, two engraved doves cuddling at its head and David and Violet’s ball-point signatures on the witness lines.
11
For twenty-four dollars a month they rented a tar-paper shack on the outskirts of Pulqua. A series of tenant farmers had once lived there. Tobacco fields stretched away from it on all sides, and the gravel road in front was traveled by barefoot children and mule wagons. Evie thought it was a wonderful place to start out in. The tenant farmers had been too poor to leave even a strip of carpeting or a one-eared sugar bowl; the house was blank, waiting for Evie to make her mark. Nothing she could do would hurt it.
She plastered the papery walls with posters advertising the Unicorn. She spent eighteen dollars at the dimestore, entering the amount carefully in a budget book, and lugged home tea towels and cutlery and a set of dishes the bluish color of skim milk. Their furniture came from Evie’s father’s house. They had moved it in a U-Haul-It the afternoon of the wedding, because they couldn’t afford a night in a motel.
First her father said, “Married?” Then he sat down on the porch steps and said, “Married. I don’t believe it.” He was slumped and hollow-faced, exposed before Drum and David and Violet, whom Evie had brought, without thinking, up the front walk with her. They stood in a semicircle around him and frowned at the ground. “Have you ever met Drum?” Evie asked finally.
“No, I don’t believe I have,” her father said. He rose and held his hand out, not quite looking into Drum’s eyes. He could have threatened annulment, but he didn’t. He didn’t seem to have the energy to think it up.
“And this is David Elliott,” Evie told him. “Violet you know.”
But her father wasn’t paying attention.
“Are you the rock singer?” he asked Drum.
“Yes, sir.”
“Casey.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I don’t understand. I was going to take her to a plastic surgeon; none of this was necessary.”
“Sir?”
“Oh, it’s all beyond me,” Evie’s father said.
“Mr. Decker,” said Drum, “Evie and I will need furniture. Do you reckon we could borrow what you have extra?”
“Well,” said her father. He turned and went into the house. Would he lock the door behind him, say he never wanted to set eyes upon them again? But when he was inside he said, “Take what you want, then. Evie will show you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Drum said.
His mother was different. She clutched at Drum’s shoulders and said, “You what? You fool. What would make you go and do a thing like that?” And Evie stood in the doorway, wondering where to put her hands. She hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. “You said you were never going back,” she had told Drum. “Why now? Why drag me with you?”
“Because I want to show her I’m settled and done with her,” Drum said.
He stood motionless in his mother’s grip, although she was trying to shake him. “It was you always telling me I didn’t appreciate her,” he said.
“Well, I didn’t mean marry her.”
“It’s done now. Do we have to get in a swivet over it?”
“In a swivet, you say. My life is broke in pieces and you tell me not to get in a swivet. You, Evie Decker. Don’t you look at me so smug. I’ll get every lawyer in town after you. I’ll annul it, I’ll have your marriage license tore up by the highest judge there is. Oh, where is your father when I need him the most?”
She grabbed the hand of one of Drum’s little tow-headed brothers, who shifted his feet and grinned.
Drum said, “Mom, can I have the record player from my room?”
Who would have thought that Drum Casey would be so homey? He wanted cushions for all the chairs and curtains for the windows, a checkered skirt for the stilt-legged kitchen sink and a frilly bibbed apron for Evie. During the first three days they were married he spent his time installing can openers, toothbrush holders, and towel rods. He directed their settling in as if he had had in mind, for years, a blueprint for a home of his own complete to the last detail. “That easy chair goes in the bedroom, for when I’m making up songs. No more lying around on a bed to play my guitar. The other chair goes in the corner of the living room. We want our furniture in corners. We want to sit snug in corners when we’re home of an evening. Do you know how to make biscuits yet?”
Evie paid a call on Clotelia, choosing nighttime so that she could go to Clotelia’s own house instead of her father’s. “Well, look who’s here,” said Clotelia, kicking open the screen door. “The girl with the peabrain, I declare.”