The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [168]
When Sonora returned to Stay More the following June to spend the summer with her aunt/mother, she and Hank were such old friends that they didn’t even bother with the preliminaries of movie-going and hand-holding and kissing. As soon as it got dark on the first night Sonora was back in Stay More, they met in a thicket alongside Swains Creek, embraced, and made a love that eclipsed anything in the U.S. mails. Hank was amazed at how superior reality is to words. To experience such a thing, he realized, was proof that he existed, even if his parents had never done it. And he knew that now that he had done it, he had created a son to wear Eli Willard’s chronometer.
But he was mistaken. He did not realize that every act of love does not result in offspring; he did not know that there are many days in each month when a girl is infertile. He offered to marry Sonora, and was confused when she laughed and said she was too young, although she would be happy to marry him after she finished high school in another year. The high school that Hank had finished at Jasper had not permitted pregnant girls to attend, but possibly, he realized, the big-city high school at Little Rock was more broadminded. He was further confused when, the very following night, she wanted to do it again. He wondered if that would produce twins, but he did it. By the end of the week, he was worrying about supporting quintuplets, but he thoroughly enjoyed doing it and went on doing it, until Sonora said they had to stop for a while because it was the “wrong” time. He didn’t know what was wrong with it, but he obligingly stopped. “We can pet, though,” she told him. He didn’t know that word, but she showed him what it meant.
It was a great summer. I was there. Even though I was only a child I knew what Hank and Sonora were up to. Several times I spied on them and envied their pleasure. But the only other person who knew, rather than simply guessed, what they were up to, was the Beautiful Girl, to whom Sonora confessed. As postmistress of Stay More, the Beautiful Girl knew that her daughter, whom everybody else thought was her niece, had been carrying on a lengthy correspondence with Hank Ingledew, and she was glad for Sonora, because Hank was one of the best in a long line of fine Ingledews. He was tall, and strong, and good-looking. So the Beautiful Girl, who once upon a time had been courted and bedded by Hank’s Uncle Raymond, was not at all surprised when Sonora confessed that she had lost her virginity to Hank and that they indulged themselves in their bodies almost daily. Sonora assured her that they were “careful.” The Beautiful Girl thought that was a beautiful thing, and she lived vicariously through Sonora, enjoying Sonora’s descriptions of the myriad ways that she and Hank took advantage of the fact that they had miraculously been created female and male.
It was also miraculous that Sonora did not get pregnant that summer. Hank was puzzled. He knew that certain women are sterile. He asked Sonora if she had ever had a bad case of the mumps, but she hadn’t. Then he began to wonder if he himself might be sterile. Perhaps, after all, he was only imagining that he existed. Or maybe, he speculated, he only existed in Sonora’s imagination; she had created him for the purpose of giving her pleasure. He did not much like the thought, but there it was.
Thought can be a shattering experience.