Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [72]
In the sharp silence, following so closely on the sound of the echoing song, I pictured Mary Elizabeth in my mind, still in the same position where I had left her at The Place. She sat quietly, feet below the surface of the pool, and with dancing dappled sunlight reflecting on her pale nude body. Her blue-green eyes looked at me reproachfully, and her ordinarily full lips were set in a tight grim line.
To make her disappear I shook my head.
This was a recurrent vision of Mary Elizabeth. Whenever I happened to think of the woman, a guilty, sinking feeling accompanied the thought. She was always nude, always at The Place. I never thought of her as fully clothed—that was a Mary Elizabeth I didn't want to think about—the spinsterish, school-teacherish, Methodist kind, with a reproving expression on her face. As a rule, when I hadn't seen Mary Elizabeth for several months, her features became indistinct, except for her hurt blue? green? eyes. But her body was always as clear in my mind as a Kodachrome color print. I remembered every anatomical detail, the way her right shoulder dipped a quarter of an inch lower than her left, the round, three-eyed shape of her button navel, and every golden pubic hair.
I loved her and I had always loved her and I always would love her, and the dark guilty shadows erased her pink-and-white body from my mind. No man had ever treated a woman any shabbier than I had Mary Elizabeth!
Suppose, I thought blackly, she just says the hell with you, Frank Mansfield, and marries a nice stay-at-home Georgia boy... a bloated bastard like Ducky Winters, for instance, the manager of the Purina Feed Store? Why not? He's single and over thirty. What if his bald head does look like a freshly washed peach and the roll of fat around his waistline resembles a rubber inner tube half filled with water? He's got a good job, and he's a member of the Board of Stewards of the Methodist church... well, isn't he? His mother can't live forever, and he did pinch Mary Elizabeth on the ass at the box social that time... remember? You wanted to take him outside, but Mary Elizabeth wouldn't let you.
How many good prospects does she have? Ducky Winters, no matter what you may think, is one of the better prospects. Suppose she marries one of those red-necked woolhat cronies of her brother's? Wright doesn't want her to get married, but he would approve of some farmer who would keep her close to home, just so he would be assured of seeing her every day. What if she married Virgil Dietch, whose farm is only three miles down the road? Virgil's only forty, a widower with two half-grown boys, and he'd be damned happy to marry a woman like Mary Elizabeth. With his growling German accent—despite three generations in Georgia—and his lower lip packed chock-full of Copenhagen snuff, she wouldn't be able to understand half of what he said, but Wright liked Virgil and ran around with him. And Wright wouldn't object to a marriage between them.
For more than an hour I tortured myself, mulling over the list of eligible suitors in the county Mary Elizabeth could marry if she wanted to spite me. There weren't many left. Most of the men in rural Georgia get married young, and divorces are rare. The remaining eligibles were a sorry lot, especially when I considered the widowers who had worked their wives into an early grave.
It was exquisite torture to consider these ignorant woolhatters who shaved only on Saturday, who wore a single suit of long johns from October 15th to May 15th, and who didn't take a bath until the Fourth of July. And yet, as far as husbands were concerned, every one of these men would make a better husband than I would. As a woman, she was entitled to a home and children and a husband who stayed with her at all times.
I had provided Mary Elizabeth with eight years of nothing. A quickly scrawled line on the back of a picture postcard, and on one of my rare, unscheduled