He blushed and asked, “You think I’m good-looking?”
“Oh, yes indeed,” she affirmed but cautioned herself to take it easy and let him do the courting.
He blushed even deeper, and coughed, and hemmed and hawed and said, “Well, let me tell you something, honey, and I don’t keer if you believe it or not, but you are the most scrumdidliumptuous lookin creature I ever seen in all my born days.”
That made her laugh at length before she said, “Nobody ever called me that before.”
He joined in her laughter and said, “Well, they just aint any words. You’re cute as a bug’s ear.”
She liked him. She liked the simple kinship of the situation: he and she happening to be alone together, fishing at this spot on this morning when all God-fearing people were getting ready to go to church. He was so easy. If he had snapped his fingers and commanded her to disrobe, she would have shed her clothes right then and there. It seemed like a different lifetime in which she had last experienced the bodily thrill that was Sonora’s practically every night. Through her head paraded all the men she’d had any contact with for the past ten years, and not a one of them was as becoming and worthy as this fellow named Dolph. But she had to remind herself that it was like fishing: she had to let him play her before taking the bait.
He seemed to have lost his interest in fishing for fish and was more interested in fishing for her. “I declare,” he remarked, with a wink in his voice if not in his eye, “aint you a little bit skeered to be way out here in the woods all by yoreself?”
“No more scared than you,” she rejoined.
“Some old goat might could come along and try to lead you astray.”
“I expect he’d find me hard to lead.”
“Never kin tell when there might be one of these here sex fiends a-runnin around loose.”
“Life is full of dangers.”
“Why, for all you might know, I might even be one of them myself.”
“You sure don’t much look like one.”
“Caint never tell. Them that don’t look it is probably the most likely.”
“Do you feel like a sex fiend?”
“Well, by nature I gen’rally feel pretty harmless, but any man would get to feelin kinda roosterish after lookin at you long enough.”
“Now that’s too bad, because roosters can’t last more than a poke or two.”
He blushed but said, “Haw! I happen to know one particular rooster who kin shore last a lot longer than that.”
“Braggart,” she could have teased.
“I’d be right glad to prove it to you.”
Her wit could not come up with a good retort to that.
“How about it?” he asked, no longer joking, and she had to say something to that.
“Fast, aren’t you?” she managed to say.
“Thank you. Folks up home is always saying that Dolph Rivett is slow as molasses in January.”
In view of her decision to do it, she wondered why she was being so coy. What did it matter? Perhaps now that he had sunk the hook into her, she had to put up a little resistance. But her memory of Sonora’s most recent description of making love with Hank Ingledew made her begin to breathe deeply.
“All right,” she said, after the deepest of breaths.
Dolph Rivett looked at her strangely, not understanding, uncertain. “All right what?”
“All right prove it.”
“You honestly mean it?”
She nodded, smiling her best smile.
“You mean…” he was suddenly uncomfortable, not expecting her to give in so readily. “You mean me and you…I hope you understand what I’m talkin about…now do you honestly mean that it’s all right with you if I…if you would…if me and you were to…to sleep…?”
“Not sleep.”
“Naw, I mean…you know…”
“I know.”
He stared at her for another moment, and then asked, “You’re not a…you aint…you’ve done it before, have you?”
She nodded.
“I—” his voice was apologetic. “I aint got no…none of them…them things, you know, them safes…you know, them rubber—”
“It’s all right,” she assured him.
“Are you sure?” he persisted. “If you wanted me to I could…I could…stop beforehand…before…the seed…”
“I just finished my monthlies,” she prevaricated.
“Well now, that’s just jim dandy,” he said, beaming, and began to look around him, as if looking for a nice spot to do it on. He did not notice that a fish had taken his bait and was pulling it down into a hole in the bottom of Ole Bottomless.
“You’ve got a bite,” she said. She couldn’t help pointing it out to him.
“Huh?” he said, a little panicky, perhaps thinking she’d made some accusation which precluded the anticipated tumble.
“There,” she said, pointing out the line being unreeled and disappearing into the water.
“Shoot fire!” he exclaimed, and grabbed up his rod and began reeling it in. After a minute’s work, a large fish appeared, a gollywhopper, the biggest catfish you’d ever seen, thrashing around and trying to pop the hook loose from its lip. Dolph Rivett was as a man torn. He would love to land that prize cat, but feared that during the several long minutes it took him to play the fish out Latha might change her mind, and thus he’d lose the larger fish.
“Aw dad hackle it!” he said and jerked the line hard to remove the hook from the fish’s mouth. “What’s a ole fish at a time like this?” He reeled in his line and put down the rod and asked her, “What about that willow thicket over there?”
She shook her head. “The chiggers’d chew us alive.” Then she pointed up at a ledge on the side of the mountain. “There’s a little cave up there.” Immediately, she regretted saying this. If she supposedly came from Demijohn, how would she know about the cave?
“Just lead me to it!” he said, rubbing his hands together.
The two of them climbed up to the ridge, a hundred feet above the creek, and walked along beneath an overhanging ledge until they came to what was not actually a cave so much as a nook, a recession in the rock where ancient Bluff Dwellers had had a shelter. The dirt floor of this cavern was still littered with the fragmented relics of this strange non-Indian tribe that had owned the Ozarks in the time of Christ. With his foot Dolph swept an area clean of bones and shards.
His black and tan mongrel had followed them. “Go tree a bird!” Dolph commanded it, but it sat firmly on its haunches with its head cocked to one side, curiously watching these two crazy people. She didn’t mind, but Dolph did, and eventually he threw a piece of two thousand-year-old pottery at it, and hit it, and it yelped and dragged itself out of sight.
She unbuckled her belt and unbuttoned her jeans and sat down on the dirt floor to tug them off her legs, and then sat upon them as a mat of sorts. The light in the cavern was dim, but not dark, not really dark enough. For this reason, Dolph Rivett could not remove his trousers; he merely unbuttoned his fly. She got a fleeting glimpse of his privates before he knelt before her: one of the heavy hirsute stones was still inside the fly, the bolt swollen and bolt upright, taut and straining.
He didn’t bother with any preliminaries, assuming she was already aroused and ready. The sight of his equipment would have anointed her passage with some erotic dew, but not enough, not enough to ease his sudden hard deep entrance. It hurt. She cried out. It had been so long since she last harbored a bloated penis within her that there simply wasn’t room.
He stopped. But only for a moment. Yet a moment of welcome respite that gave her time to expand and to lust and to seep. Then he, having groaned repeatedly and having mumbled “Ah, Lord Jesus,” could have begun to pump, from the first stroke driving at full speed, an unvarying tempo of banging jolts. She wanted to churn in response, but because of his weight upon her and the hard earthen floor beneath her she couldn’t. So all the work was his. And he didn’t last very long. J
ust as she began to catch sight of the top of the mountain, he, crooning “Goody,” to the beat of each shuddering sock, disgorged his gob into her and she felt the pulsing spasms of the unloading, the throbs shortening and weakening, until there was no movement or sound remaining but his breathlessness.
He rolled off of her, and lay by her side.
After a while, she said, not bitter nor even teasing, but dispassionate: “Rooster.”
“I beg pardon, Sue,” he responded. “I reckon I just had it stored up too much.”
Then he talked to her about his wife, who, it seemed, would only let him “bother” her about twice a year.
The two of them lounged for a while on the dirt floor of that rock shelter, talking to each other about themselves. She didn’t learn much of consequence. Then they talked, idly, about various things. He even talked about politics. “I been readin in the papers about this here D.A. feller up to New York, fergit his name, but they say he could shore give old Franklin D. a run fer his money.”
“Dewey,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s the one. I heared tell that one of them gallop polls says that Dewey’d git fifty-two per cent of the vote right now. ’Course, I’ve voted Democrat all my life.”
By and by, she impulsively reached out and wrapped her fingers around his drooping piece. It was what she thought was the first time she had ever touched one. What Sonora had told her was called “petting.” And because it was also what she thought was the first time she’d ever had an opportunity to take a good look at one up close in the light of day, she began to study it while she fondled it. He was fidgety at first, because nobody had ever fondled, let alone studied, his member. But then he became less fidgety and more fiery as he felt himself beginning to stir beneath her touch.
She was thinking that it was a durn shame that society compelled a man to keep his genitals always covered, because there was something uniquely handsome about a smooth, sleek, sinewy, tall-standing stalk of healthily pink flesh. There was a carnal grandeur about it unequaled by any of Nature’s other deliberate inventions.
And she didn’t need to tell him that she needed it.
He started to bestraddle her again but she asked him if he didn’t mind taking off his pants. Blushing deeply, he did.
Then he was into her again, and this time, because there was no great pent-up gism thrashing to break loose, he managed to last a good bit longer, his strokes steady and not quite so violent—a mechanical piston, a skin-sheathed ramrod. If she had bothered to count, she would have found that he kept that up for nearly three minutes before reaching the point where he quickened, and his breathing began to puff “Goody, goody, goody” to the beat of his beats, and her cinctures expanded and contracted with the throbbing of his spewing.
But this time, when he rolled off of her, she had the mountaintop in sight and she rolled with him and pinned him down and climbed aboard, and in the brief minute left to her before his magic wand lost its turgid magic she rode upon him, tilting and pitching her hips, fashioning her own elaborate alternating measure, with irregular stresses that sung a cadence of touch and sensation her strings could be moved by. She would have been so busy constructing this great resplendent ascent of the mountain that she would not have noticed that Dolph Rivett was beginning to say “Goody goody” yet again. All that she could have been conscious of, as she closed her eyes and wildly wrenched her bottom, was the surge of her substance merging with all nature, while in the background the cockles of her heart rollicked and roistered.
When she came to, how much later she did not know, she found that Dolph had soaked his handkerchief in cold creek water and spread it over her brow and was fanning her with a frond of fern.
“Why, I declare, Sue, darlin,” he declared when she opened her eyes, “if you didn’t just pass plumb dead out. Give me kind of a skeer. But, boy golly, I liked to of passed out myself.”
She rose and put her jeans back on, and climbed down to the creek and found a spot along the bank where a spring flowed into it, and she cupped her hands and lapped up a refreshing drink.
“You know somethin?” Dolph, at her side, said, “That there was the first time in my life I ever let off even twice, let alone three times. Holy snakes! Who would a guessed I had it in me?”
She retrieved her fishing pole and her catch, and asked him a test question: “I wonder how far it is from here to Stay More.”
“Couldn’t rightly tell,” he replied, to her relief. “If we was up on the road I might could spot a landmark, but it’s hard to say from here. I reckon it aint more’n maybe three, four mile, at the most. You aimin to head that way?”
“No, I’m just going on back down to Demijohn.”
“Sue…could I…I got me a horse…could I sometime maybe ride down to Demijohn to see you?”
She pretended shock. “Lord have mercy! Dolph, my daddy and my six brothers would shoot you on sight if they even caught you talking to me!”
“Well.” He seemed dejected for a moment, but then he brightened. “Is there any chance you might be comin back here fishin again?”
“More than likely,” she replied.
“Then maybe me’n you might could…might could get together again.”
“Sure.”
“Then I’ll be lookin fer ye, Sue. I shore am much obliged. You’ll never know what a good turn you did me.”
Then he was gone, and she heard him off up the creek whistling for his dog.
She started home, reflecting, But he didn’t even kiss me.
Chapter thirty-three
Sweet June passed into sluggish July, hotter than usual and dry. All the Stay Morons either worked at the tomato canning factory or in connection with it, and all of them spent part of their earnings at Latha’s store. Often Latha when she was alone with her daughter was tempted to tell her of her experience in the cavern up on Banty Creek, but there was always the worry that Sonora might tell Hank and it might start a chain of gossip. Latha felt it wasn’t fair for Sonora to describe in detail her carnal exploits with Hank if Latha couldn’t return the thrill of storytelling. As all good storytellers knew, the pleasure worked as much for the teller as for the listener. One night when Sonora was off somewhere enjoying herself with Hank, Latha was alone with Dawny and was tempted to find out if he knew the facts of life, and, if not, to begin his education. But if that got back to his Aunt Rosie, it would be the end of Latha as far as Stay More was concerned.
One night toward the latter part of July when she was sitting on the porch with nobody except Dawny and a few dozen of her cats, and Dawny had, as he usually did, requested her to tell him a story, she realized she needed to visit her outhouse first and she told Dawny she’d be right back. The outhouse was always a good place for thinking deep thoughts, and entertaining fantasies, and she practically relived the entire episode of meeting Dolph Rivett, moment by moment, before realizing that Dawny was waiting for her to tell him a story. When she got back to the porch, Dawny announced, “There was a man here.”
Something in his voice made it sound like it wasn’t a man that anybody knew. “Who?” she said.
“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me his name.”
Her first thought was that it could have been Dolph Rivett, somehow managing to track her down. “What did he want?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just wanted to know who lived here now. I told him. Then he wanted to know if anybody was livin on the Dill place, so when I said no he headed off in that direction, said he was just gonna look around up there.”
Latha had some trouble breathing. Could it possibly be—? No, it couldn’t possibly be. “What did he look like?” she asked, realizing her voice was quavering.
“I couldn’t much tell. He was on the other side of a flashlight. Sort of tall, I guess. Seemed like a nice man.”
Latha did not know what to say, so she said nothing, for a long time. Finally Dawny had to remind her that she was going to tell him a story. She found her way out of the flood of ol
d memories that had captivated her. She smiled and rumpled Dawny’s hair. “Sure, Dawny,” she said, but was reluctant to let go of all those memories, and selected one of them that was a ghost story of sorts. “Would you care to hear a strange tale about a dumb supper? Have you ever heard tell of a ‘dumb supper’?”
“Caint say that I have,” he said. So she decided to tell him the story about her high school classmates having a party at one of the girl’s houses in Parthenon, where they decided to have a dumb supper.
“Well,” she said. “Once upon a time, in a month of May a long time ago, a bunch of girls who were just about ready to graduate from high school decided to set themselves a dumb supper, which is an old, old custom that must go all the way back to the days of yore in England.
“The idee is that you take and set out a place at the dinner table, just like you were having company, except you don’t set out any food. You put out the plate and knife and fork and spoon, and the napkin. Then you turn the lamp down very low. A candle is even better. Then you wait. You stand behind the chair and wait to see what happens.” She said these words with ominous mystery, and although she could not see Dawny in the dark she could feel that he was getting excited. “Well,” she went on, “there were six of these girls, and they set out six plates, and then the six of them stood behind the six chairs and waited, with only one candle to light the room. They waited and they waited. The idee is that if you wait long enough, the apparition—not a real ghost, Dawny, but a ghost-like image—the apparition of the man you will marry will appear and take his seat before you at the table.
“Oh, of course it was all a lot of foolishness like all that superstitious going-on, but these girls believed in it, and anyway it would be a lot of fun. So they waited and they waited.
“Sometimes, if a girl was wishing very hard that a particular boy would appear, somebody she was crazy wild about, then she might get hysterical and really believe that he had come! Imagine that, Dawny. But the other girls would just laugh at her.
“Anyway, these girls waited and waited, but of course nothing happened. Some of them closed their eyes and mumbled magic words, and some of them prayed, but no boys showed up, and no apparitions of boys showed up. Until finally…” Dawny had stopped breathing and she feared he might suffocate. “Until finally there was this one particular girl who was wishing very, very hard, and she opened her eyes, and there coming into the room was a boy! With his hat pulled down over his eyes, he came right on over to her chair and sat down on it! And then in the candle-light she saw who it was! It wasn’t the boy she was wishing for at all! It was another boy, the one she had already turned down twice when he asked for her hand!
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 75