The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [176]
The next time the revivalist who had revived the Dinsmore sisters happened to be passing through Stay More again, he learned of the situation and paid a call on the sisters and pointed out to them that their “man” wasn’t even a member of the church; in fact, like all Ingledews, he was an atheist; but even if he was a member of the church they would still be living in sin and they had better agree to one of them getting legally married to Billy Bob. When this had no effect, the minister went to their mother and reasoned with her, but Selena told him, “Why, Reverend, them gals is happier than I ever seed ’em in their whole life, and I aint aimin to git in the way of their happiness.” The preacher gave up. But the men on the store porch did not. Whenever Billy Bob came to the store, which was seldom, they would pester him with questions which made him blush all the redder and at last manage to stammer out, “Aw, you fellers is all wet.”
But were they? To their sharp eyes it began to appear increasingly plain that Billy Bob, who had never been noted for great energy, was becoming almost indolent. He moved with slow, unstudied aimlessness, not exactly abstracted but with the corners of his mouth ever so slightly uptilted in what was not a grin nor a smirk so much as an expression of felicity. If the store-porchers’ conjectures were true, they could not help but feel, to a man, a profound envy which they never dared express to one another. Yet the only question which Billy Bob ever deigned answer was a question that one of the men on the store porch posed in the most general terms and as a kind of observation, twelve months after the sisters had gone to live with him: “Hit’s been all of a year now, Billy Bob. How you like it?”
And Billy Bob scratched under his hat reflectingly and, with that expression on the corners of his mouth, allowed, “Wal, they tend to kind of talk a little more than I keer to listen.”
Not long after, Tilbert Dinsmore circulated the report that not one but both of his sisters, he had observed on a recent visit to Billy Bob’s place, seemed to be swelling out around the middle. Now he didn’t know what others thought, he said, but as for himself he didn’t take kindly to the idea of having a damn pair of woodscolts for nephews or nieces or one of each. The next time the preacher happened to be passing through Stay More, Billy Bob’s many uncles, led by Tearle, ganged up on him and “persuaded” him to join William Robert Ingledew in holy matrimony with Jelena Cloris Dinsmore and Helena Doris Dinsmore. They were no longer referred to as “the Siamese twins” but rather as “the Mizzes Ingledew.”
Several months later, strangest of all to relate, only one child was born. According to whoever heard it from Billy Bob, who himself did not understand it, Jelena and Doris with their bellies approaching term had gone down to the creek to bathe, and when they returned, Jelena was carrying the baby swathed in a towel.
What happened to the other baby? Or had there been another one? Had it been stillborn and they had buried it? Or had it drowned in the creek? But how could two sisters, even if they had conceived within minutes of one another, have managed to give birth at the same instant?
No, the people thought, only one of the girls had been pregnant, and the other girl had a sympathetic false pregnancy or else just stuffed a pillow of ever-increasing size inside her dress. But Billy Bob himself didn’t know which sister it was, and within a short time, in the last year