The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [140]
There was only one girl in Stay More who, without any reservation, met that standard, and I cannot utter her name here, because the utterance of her name fills me with longing and sadness, but I have uttered it elsewhere. The town fathers of Jasper erected a high school, and this Beautiful Girl, although from a very humble family, was the first graduate of Stay More grade school to qualify for admission to the high school, and just to be near her Raymond Ingledew volunteered to serve as school bus driver, or rather school wagon driver, hitching a one-horse chaise five mornings a week and driving her into Jasper, where, since he had nothing better to do while waiting to drive her home, he enrolled at the high school himself, a twenty-one-year-old freshman among fifteen-year-old freshmen. Raymond, commendably, made no attempt to seduce the Beautiful Girl when she was a fifteen-year-old freshman. He waited until she was a sixteen-year-old sophomore.
But she repulsed him, claiming she already had a boyfriend. She did; his name was…but I have a habit of uttering his name only as a magic incantation to ward off mindlessness; I can use here only his initials, which were E.D. E.D. had been the Beautiful Girl’s boyfriend since she was eleven years old, but this stood as an extra challenge to Raymond, who knew that he was much more handsome than E.D. and was certainly from a much better family. He continued, during their junior and senior years, trying to seduce her, and, because her own mother continually reminded her that Raymond was a banker’s son while E.D. was only a wagonmaker’s son who couldn’t go to high school, Raymond at last, with a promise of marriage, seduced her, discovering that her ardor in the act was a match for her beauty. But the conquest did not satisfy him. Although they were officially engaged, he continued to dissipate his oats among all his previous conquests, and he could not for long keep this a secret from the Beautiful Girl, who, when she found out that he had been keeping company with Wanda Dinsmore, gave herself again to E.D. and later boasted of it to Raymond, whose strict double standard tore at his heart and compelled him to the rash act of picking a fight with E.D., whose fists drubbed him senseless.
When Raymond recovered, he committed the rasher act of running off to Jasper and enlisting in the army. Raymond’s older brothers, all five of them, ganged up on E.D. and threatened to kill him unless he went and joined the army too. So those were the only two men of Stay More to fight in France, where they wound up in the same platoon, and even became friends, or at least friendly rivals, or at least comrades-in-arms. E.D. was promoted to sergeant, and won the Croix de Guerre; Raymond was promoted to corporal, and was captured by the Germans in the Argonne forest, tied to a tree and left there as a decoy to lure other Yanks into the line of machine gun fire, but the squadron’s lieutenant sensed the trap and forbade his men to rescue Raymond. E.D. disobeyed the command; the lieutenant tried to stop him; he knocked the lieutenant cold, and crawled on his belly fifty feet to the tree where Raymond was tied and began untying him; Raymond urged him to get away because it was a trap, but E.D. continued untying him, until the machine guns opened fire: both of E.D.’s legs were hit and he crumpled to the ground and would have perished had not his men opened massive fire on the machine gun nest and managed to drag E.D. out of there. Raymond wasn’t hit, but he must have died in a German prison camp, or else, when liberated, he must have met some voluptuous French girl and married her and stayed over there, because he never came back to Stay More. E.D. was court-martialed for disobeying orders