“Good God in heaven, Linnie Mae!”
Because by now, they were doing it. They’d been doing it since their third date. They didn’t go to movies anymore, didn’t go for ice cream, certainly didn’t meet up with friends. (What friends would those have been, anyhow?) They just headed for the river in his brother-in-law’s truck and flung a quilt any old which way under a tree and rushed to tangle themselves up in each other. One night it poured and it hadn’t stopped them for a minute; they lay spread-eagled when they were finished and let the rain fill their open mouths. But this wasn’t something he had talked her into. It was Linnie who had made the first move, drawing back from him in the parked truck one night and shakily, urgently tearing open her button-front dress.
He could be arrested.
Her father grew burley tobacco, and he owned his land outright. Her mother came from Virginia; everyone knew Virginians thought they were better than other people. They would call the sheriff on him without the least hesitation. Oh, Linnie had been so foolish, so infuriatingly brainless, to meet him like that at the drugstore in the middle of her hometown wearing her dress-up dress and her high-heeled shoes! Junior lived over near Parry ville, six or eight miles away, so maybe no one who had seen them together in Yarrow knew him, but it couldn’t have escaped their notice that he was a grown man, most often in shabby clothes and old work boots with a day or two’s worth of beard, and it wouldn’t be that hard to find out his name and track him down. He asked Linnie, “Did you tell anybody about us?”
“No, Junior, I swear it.”
“Not the Moffat twins or anyone?”
“No one.”
“Because I could go to jail for this, Linnie.”
“I didn’t tell a soul.”
He made up his mind to stop seeing her, but he didn’t say so right then because she would get all teary and beg him to change his mind. There was something a little bit hanging-on about Linnie. She was always talking about this great romance of theirs, and telling him she loved him even though he never mentioned love himself, and asking him if he thought so-and-so was prettier than she was. It was because it was all so new to her, he guessed. God, he’d saddled himself with an infant. He couldn’t believe he had been so blind.
They folded the quilt and they got in the truck and Junior drove her back to town, not saying a word the whole ride although Linnie Mae chattered nonstop about her brother’s upcoming graduation party. When he drew up in front of the drugstore, he said he couldn’t meet her the following night because he’d promised to help his father with a carpentering job. She didn’t seem to find it odd that he would be carpentering at night. “Night after that, then?” she said.
“We’ll see.”
“But how will I know?”
“I’ll get word to you when I’m free,” he said.
“I’m going to miss you like crazy, Junior!”
And she flung herself on him and wrapped her arms around his neck, but he pulled her arms off him and said, “You’d better go on, now.”
Of course he didn’t get word to her. (He didn’t know how she had thought he would do that, seeing as he’d said they couldn’t tell anyone else.) He stayed strictly within his own territory—two acres of red clay outside Parryville bounded by a rickrack fence, in the three-room cabin he shared with his father and his last unmarried brother.
As it happened, the three of them did have work that week, replacing the roof on a shed for a lady down the road. They would set out early every morning in the wagon, with a tin bucket of buttermilk and a hunk of cornpone for their lunch, and they’d turn their mule loose in Mrs. Honeycutt’s pasture and go up on the roof to work all day in the blazing sun. By evening Junior would be so bushed that it was all he could do to force supper down. (His brother Jimmy had taken over the cooking after their mother died—just fried up whatever meat they’d last killed, using the half-inch of white grease that waited permanently in the skillet on the wood stove.) They’d be in bed by eight or eight thirty, workingmen’s hours. Three days in a row they did that, and Junior didn’t give more than a thought or two to Linnie Mae. Once Jimmy asked if he wanted to go into town after supper and see if they could find any girls, and Junior said, “Nah,” but it wasn’t on account of Linnie. It was just that he was too beat.