“When you go back up to see him,” Maggie said, “try to find out what his plans are for informing his family.” A.J. was silent. “Whoops,” she said, looking at him. “I’m sorry. I was assuming you were going back. Are you?”
“I suppose I am,” A.J. said with reluctance. “I don’t want to, but I said I’d do it. To be honest, I don’t want anything to do with this. I don’t want to see him dying, and I don’t want to see him dead. I must be a coward.” He had developed a bad headache, his lifelong habit when dealing with cosmic no-win situations. He rubbed his temples in the darkness.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “I’d really be worried about you if you were looking forward to it. And you’re not a coward. You’re just a little more honest than most men.” She reached over and patted his chest. “Which isn’t saying that much, really.”
As he was about to respond, they were interrupted by a commotion coming from the house. The screen door slammed and Harper Lee’s voice came to them across the gloaming.
“Mama! Emily says I’m adopted.” Emily Charlotte was the Longstreet’s oldest child at eleven years. In a break with a tradition that had been handed down from mother to daughter for generations in Maggie’s family, Emily Charlotte was named after not one but two of her mother’s favorite authors, the Bronte sisters. A.J. was unaware of this unusual family tradition when he married Maggie but probably would have taken her to love, honor, and obey anyway, had he known. The other two children, Harper Lee and J.J. (short for James Joyce, much to A.J.’s dismay), had to resign themselves to being living tributes to only one of Maggie’s cherished writers. Emily took every opportunity to point out this literary shortcoming to her siblings, because it was her job to torment her younger brother and sister. It was a duty she took seriously.
Maggie, born Margaret Mitchell, had been named by her mother, Jane Austen Callahan, after the celebrated author of Gone with the Wind, a self-help manual that dealt with the subject of how best to cope with Yankees when they venture south.
“Mama? Daddy? Am I adopted?” Harper’s voice had a small quaver in it.
“Absolutely not,” A.J. replied. “We got you the regular way. Mama and I went down to the hospital and picked you out. Emily, on the other hand, we bought from a roving band of Gypsies. We gave nineteen dollars for her, back when that was a lot of money. We wouldn’t have paid so much, but we really wanted a son. Emily was the only boy they had, so they charged extra.”
“But Emily is a girl’” Harper protested.
“Well, sure, now she’s a girl. But she was a boy when we bought her. She changed when she caught the chicken pox right after we brought her home. I looked all over for those Gypsies to get my money back, but they were long gone.”
“Really, Daddy?”
“Absolutely. I have a receipt around here somewhere.” Harper was very quiet. Then Maggie and A.J. heard the screen slam as she ran inside to discuss genealogy with her older sister. A.J. got up from the ground and dusted off. Then he offered his hand to his partner in child procurement.
“I wish you wouldn’t tell her things like that,” Maggie said as she stood beside him. “She believes every word you say.” They walked toward the house.
“I guess we had better feed them before they turn mean on us,” A.J. said. They stopped on the porch.
“Are you feeling better about Eugene?” she asked.
“A little better,” he replied. “Not great, but better. I will do what I can. It wouldn’t be decent to leave him hanging. Thank you for straightening me out.”
“I’ve been straightening you out since the night we met,” she observed. “I view it as my life’s work. I just wish it paid a little better.”
Maggie and A.J. first met fresh out of high school while working the third shift at a cotton mill famous for its denim products and its abuse of the hired help. A.J. could recall these days as clearly as if he were watching a Movietone Newsreel of his own life, complete with humorous clips, mugs for the camera, and narration by Lowell Thomas. The clarity of his memories was no doubt influenced by the altered states of awareness he achieved throughout most of the period. Unlike Eugene, he did not favor drugs; his main weakness was alcohol, and between the ages of sixteen and nineteen he had been attempting to drink himself to death before his invitation arrived to visit exciting tropical climes and get shot. Luckily for A.J. and Eugene, Richard Nixon was, at this point in history, coming to the belated conclusion that it was not possible to subdue Asiatic peoples through warfare by attrition.
A.J. was sober the night he met his future wife. He had seen Maggie around the mill previous to their first meeting and had admired from afar her obvious grace, intelligence, and poise, all of which he had inferred from the way she filled her blue jeans. He had been hoping that the chance to introduce himself would arise, and when that opportunity presented itself, he was quick to realize his time had come.
A.J. was operating his forklift on that fateful evening when he noticed Maggie engaged in a discussion with the shift supervisor, Clyde Cordele. She seemed to be agitated, but Clyde was smiling and nodding and did not seem perturbed in the least. Then Clyde reached over and touched her shoulder. A.J. walked toward the pair. As he neared their vicinity, Maggie knocked Clyde’s arm out of the way, and he again reached over and touched her shoulder. Maggie again knocked the offending arm away, then balled her fist and drew it back. It was this defiant gesture that caused A.J. to fall in love with her, or at least that’s what he always said. She cut a fine and formidable figure. A.J. was close enough by then to hear her next words, and they were eloquent.
“If you touch me again, Pillsbury,” she said, “I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.” There was cold steel in her voice and fire in her eye. All of Clyde’s employees called him Pillsbury due to his uncanny resemblance to the famous doughboy of the same name. It was a tribute to Clyde’s intellect that he never realized the insult and believed instead the name was a term of endearment.
There was never much doubt in anyone’s mind, excluding upper management, about the shortage of anything vaguely resembling common sense in Clyde Cordele. Any shred of confusion lingering on the subject was cleared up on the night A.J. first met Maggie. Clyde stood facing her, smiling and mulling his alternatives. He had been warned and should have retired from the field. But it is one of Nature’s immutable laws that a snake does not know how to be anything but a snake, and Clyde could not overcome his own DNA. So he reached over for one more try. He was one surprised doughboy, however, when he realized it was a different shoulder he was holding. A.J. had slipped between Maggie and Clyde at the opportune moment and was now looking into the latter’s confused eyes.
“You had better let go of my shoulder,” A.J. said. “You know how people around here talk.”
“Longstreet, you goddamn hippie,” Clyde hollered with color in his cheeks, “get your ass back on your job, and get it over there now! This ain’t none of your affair!” A.J. had been suspecting his budding career in textiles wasn’t truly important to him, so it was with no great distress that he decided to plow into Clyde like a Massey-Ferguson tractor into a new row.
“She isn’t interested,” A.J. said. “She probably has religious convictions against consorting with farm animals.” That one really got to Clyde. His face turned blood red, and his mouth began to make random movements. At that moment, he resembled the Pillsbury dough fish. Behind A.J., Maggie cleared her throat. Then she lightly tapped her uninvited hero’s shoulder.
“Uh, look, whoever you are,” she said, her soft drawl a melody of syllables to A.J.’s ears, “I appreciate that you are trying to help me, but I can take care of this. Really.” A.J.’s shoulder tingled as if burned.