“When they beat Duke for the national championship, you probably danced down Main Street wearing nothing but a Hog hat.”
“If I thought it would have helped them win, I might have,” she says, sipping a Killian’s.
“Honestly, if I’d had a dream when I was sixteen years old that I would marry a farmer and live in rural Arkansas until I was almost fifty, I would have woken up screaming I’d had the worst nightmare in history.
It shows humans can get used to anything, I guess. Until Dwight died, a few people, obviously traitors, had almost begun to think of me as a native.”
I smile, knowing how Southerners are about people who move in from north of the Mason-Dixon line. From our perspective, it takes a couple of generations for them to fit in.
“You should consider moving toward the center of the state,” I say, serious but still hoping to keep the conversation light.
“We’re more civilized over there.”
Angela places the bottle carefully on the mat in front of her.
“It looks as if I’ll be moving somewhere,” she says, her voice suddenly harsh.
“I decided to go on and sell to Cecil and Nancy. We had the papers drawn up this week and got them signed.”
Her eyes look so sad I reach across and touch her hand. This is what has been bothering her.
“Is that going to work? What will you do?” I ask, remembering her comment last week that Cecil wouldn’t be able to make the payments.
“It doesn’t matter,” Angela says brusquely, and pushes back from the table.
“You’ve never seen the farm, have you?”
“No,” I admit, not at all eager to see it now. I was hoping we could stay in Memphis, go out to eat and who knows what? There are plenty of motels between here and Bear Creek.
“I’d like to show it to you,” she says, standing up.
“You might never see it.”
“Sure,” I say, reaching for my wallet. The expression on her face is so determined there is no point in arguing with her. There are obviously some things she needs to work out before she gets around to me. I need to take my time. But, damn, she is an attractive woman.
She has combed her hair forward, making her look younger. Her breasts swell nicely under her black sweater. I wish we were staying right here. The way I feel now I wouldn’t care if she were seventy.
On the jukebox is some song about a man whose woman has betrayed him with “Backdoor Jack” after he left for work at a hospital in the early morning hours. I can relate to that. What better time than the freshest part of the day?
On the drive back, she waxes nostalgic about her father who had brought her south with him at the last moment.
“I was going to stay with my older sister in Buffalo. Gwen was married, but Dad was afraid her husband would seduce me, or one of his brothers would. They were Irish, and every one of them was extremely good-looking.
Dad didn’t trust them.”
Oddly, despite all the confidences we shared, Angela never told me this story. Muddy, barren fields skip by in a blur as I gun the Blazer up to seventy-five. When I was a child there was only one crop. The soil yielded year after year the “white gold.” Cotton was still king and admitted no rivals.
Now, after a love affair with soybeans, it has come back.
“Why did he think he could trust me?”
“He knew your mother had shipped you off to Subiaco, and I told him how religious you were. I think he figured you were too eaten up with guilt to seduce me.”
“I almost was,” I admit. Yet did I seduce her-or was it the other way around? We drive in companionable silence as I think back on that first summer I knew Angela. Mr. Butler, a stern agnostic, did seem to approve, as I recall, of my own religious fervor. I ask, “Do you think your father ever knew what was going on?”
Angela shakes her head at the psyche’s longterm capacity for denial.
“He would have had to have been in a coma not to. You radiated guilt like an atomic bomb. Typically, I convinced him that you were merely having impure thoughts. Poor Daddy. To be such a smart man, he could be such an idiot.”
Typically? Was I not the first?
“What about the blood?” I ask, forlornly, more than thirty years later.
“I thought you were a virgin!”
Angela reaches over and pats my hand, which is on the steering wheel.
“Menstrual,” she confesses “I was just starting my period that night. It came in handy for a change.”
“Damn!” I say, speeding up. My speed has dropped to forty miles an hour.
“All these years I played this tape in my head that it was the first time for both of us. How many had there been before me?” “Eight,” she says, solemnly.
“Really?” I ask, horrified.
“Men,” Angela says benignly.
“You were the second, for God’s sake! I had dated the same boy for two whole years.”
I keep my eyes on the road, knowing anything I say will sound foolish.
What difference does it make whether I was the first or the second or even the eighth so long as she did not give me a disease? Ego. The male ego. On TV the other night I saw a news clip showing how some very religious teenagers were being given gold rings by their parents for agreeing to stay virgins until they married. Guilt used to be enough, but now it takes heavy metal.
Soon Angela points to a dirt road bisecting a muddy field to my right.
“Our land, mine and the boys’, starts here on the east side of the highway.
When Dwight’s father died, his will divided the property in half.
Dwight was given the land nearest Bear Creek, except the house, which was left to him and Cecil jointly. When Dwight built the house in town, he sold his interest in the one out here to Cecil. Despite the division,
they continued to farm as if it were still all one piece of land.
I wish now Dwight could have bought Cecil out.
He’s not cut out to be a farmer. He’s okay with machines and a hard worker, but you have to be a business-person today to farm, and Cecil’s not.
Dwight got a degree in agriculture at Mississippi State, and Cecil barely got out of high school.”
A blast of wind hits the Blazer as a semi passes us from the opposite direction. A college degree apparently didn’t keep the farm out of trouble.
As she looks out over the bare fields, Angela falls silent. Land.
Since I’ve never owned anything but a single lot, I’ve never understood the attachment.
Maybe Angela is thinking of Dwight and all the work he put into it. The truth is, I don’t know why she brought me out here or what she is thinking. All I see is mud.
“Slow down and turn in to the left by that mailbox,” Angela commands, pointing almost a hundred yards up the highway.
I do as I’m told, and the road becomes gravel instead of goo, as I feared. Soon a one-story faded brick-red house behind a grove of trees comes into view. It can’t be more than twelve hundred square feet and is
almost boxlike in design. Are we visiting Cecil or what?
“Ugly, isn’t it?” Angela says, a brittle tone to her voice, which is a comment that needs no corroboration.
“I can’t imagine why anyone would want it.”
By a butane tank behind a nearby barn I spot a GM truck, whose rusty bed makes me think of those ads on TV showing the number of trucks still on the road with two hundred thousand miles on them, but there is no sign of life around the house.
“This is the old homestead, right?” I ask, assuming that Angela will tell me the purpose of this visit.
“Cecil and Nancy are in Birmingham with their children at a funeral for a couple of days,” she says, her voice betraying a hint of what sounds like contemptuousness.
“You want to go in for a while?” The expression on her face is brutally frank. We won’t be going in just to use the bathroom.