The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [175]
The men on the store porch speculated endlessly about alternative outcomes to Boden’s experience, and had a lot of fun.
A year or so went by, both Mont and Boden got married to other girls, and Jelena and Doris were getting to the far end of marriageable age, and then the war came and took away nearly all the young bachelors of Stay More. When news came of the first of several deaths of Stay Morons in the war, the people threw a pie supper at the canning factory for the purpose of raising funds for some kind of War Memorial. Ostensibly a pie supper is for the purpose of raising funds, but it is also a means of promoting conviviality and courtship between males and females. All the women and girls bake a pie, and these are wrapped and sealed and auctioned off one by one to the highest bidders among the men and boys. The males aren’t supposed to know who baked which pie, and are thus obliged to sit with, and eat with, and talk with, the female who baked the pie that they bid on. The organizers of the pie supper paid a visit to Mrs. Dinsmore and said she ought to make sure that both Doris and Jelena each baked a separate pie, no foolishness of both doing the same pie, and Mrs. Dinsmore said she would see to it that each girl did her separate pie, and sure enough, Jelena and Doris showed up at the pie supper with two different pies.
To the men on the store porch who had missed the pie supper, it was afterward Uncle Tearle Ingledew who told the tale, told it on his own nephew, William Robert Ingledew. “Billy Bob,” as we have seen, was Hank’s youngest brother, and was not drafted into the service because all three of his brothers were already serving. Although just as tall and strong and handsome as his oldest brother, he was, if anything, even shyer toward females, the shyest of his generation of shy Ingledews, but he somehow persuaded himself that there was no connection between bidding on a pie, of which he was uncommonly fond, and courting a girl. “So he made him a good bid,” related Uncle Tearle to the men on the store porch, “and he got this here pie that Jelena had fixed, and he took the wrappers off, and saw it was sweet pertater, which he don’t keer fer too mighty well, so he figgered he’d take him another chance, and bid on the next pie that come up, and damn if he didn’t git the one Doris fixed! It was coconut cream. The folks thar got pervoked and says you wasn’t supposed to bid on but one pie, but ole Billy Bob, he says by God he likes coconut cream and for that matter he aint too unpartial to sweet pertater neither, and he reckons he’ll jist eat ’em both. And he did. Jelena and Doris set on each side of him while he et their pies, but he never minded. They never bothered him much, and he give ’em a slice or two of their pies. After they done eatin, he was right well full and satisfied, and didn’t even mind when both them gals set in to talkin his ear off.” Strangely, the men on the store porch did not make any jokes over this news. They nodded their heads gravely, spat their tobacco juice, whittled their sticks, stretched in their chairs. At length one of them remarked, “Wal, if they is a-gorn to be jist one, then maybe ole Billy Bob is the one, atter all.”
He was. The next summer, Billy Bob, who was a carpenter by trade, more or less, built himself a modest frame house on the south bench of Ingledew Mountain. It too resembled the plain, modest dwelling