Sharyn McCrumb - If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

She knew him entirely too well, did Donna Jean. That came of their having been married since time immemorial. She had been a pretty, shy little thing in ’59, big-eyed with admiration at his white-walled red Fairlane and his Wildroot Cream Oiled hair. He had some ambitions of becoming a singer, based on a weak but pleasant baritone and a passing resemblance to Elvis Presley; but that hope had come to nothing. He lacked the drive as well as the talent to make it in country music. He was too easily distracted by revelry.

Chevry had been a wild one in those days, bad to drink and quick to throw a punch at anybody who crossed him. When you break up the furniture in a roadhouse brawl, they don’t ask you back again to sing. He’d even done a month or two in the county jail for his recklessness, but Donna Jean had stuck by him. She’d never said a hard word to him, even when he drank up his pay or gambled it away in some smokehouse card game. And finally he had outgrown all the tomfoolery of sowing wild oats. He turned thirty-five and found the Lord.

Donna Jean had been so proud when he’d announced that he had felt the call to preach. She’d looked at him with shining eyes and believed that he had been summoned to the pulpit from On High. Well, maybe he had, but he could not quite block out a stubborn memory of the young, sly Chevry Morgan, sizing up a trusting congregation and thinking: This gig is easier than show business.

Sure, it was. You didn’t have to be drop-dead handsome and you didn’t have to be able to carry a tune. Anybody could holler. The rest of it was patter and snake-oil showmanship, and he had been born with more than his share of that. He knew the Bible well enough from childhood Sunday school ( thank you, Mama !), and he read up on it in the evenings, looking for new material. There was some good stuff in there, too. In his opinion, the Song of Solomon was a showstopper, and anybody who thought that its meaning was metaphysical had grits for brains. He’d got himself a black suit with the trousers one size too small, and a string tie, and he’d preached fire and brimstone with a little Presley swivel to his hips, and the women-congregations are mostly women and hostages- had moaned with righteous fervor. He was hotter than Elijah’s chariot.

Within a year, he had become the minister of his own little rural church, a respected man in the community, and a happy performer, with his own flock of pious fans. He wished that preaching paid well enough to let him give up carpet laying, but he was realistic about his prospects. Moses might have been able to get water from a rock, but he couldn’t have got a Cadillac from a minimum-wage congregation. So be it.

The years had rolled on, and he’d stayed strong and passionate, and-with the help of Grecian Formula-young; while Donna Jean had just faded more and more each day, until her face was as gray as her hair, and her waist and ankles thickened with age and indifference. She had let herself go, all the time claiming that the Apostle Paul didn’t want women to dye their hair and paint their faces. Which was fine when they died at thirty, like they mostly did in biblical times. He didn’t argue with her, because fundamentalists mostly discourage vanity and artifice, but it saddened him to think of himself saddled with an old lady. She was a good woman-yes, she was; but she hadn’t gotten his motor out of first gear in years.

Sex. That was the gulf between them. He thought young, and he lusted young. Donna Jean faded and didn’t even care.

He reckoned Donna Jean could last until Judgment Day without another roll in the hay, and never miss it, but he was getting hornier by the hour. That’s when he’d started noticing Tanya Faith at services. She was fifteen then, but she had a ripening body and a sultry look about her that could have sold apples to the seraphim guarding postserpent Eden. He’d found himself at the pulpit, preaching straight to her and gauging the success of his sermon on her reactions. The time she got up and started speaking in tongues, slumping back against him in a swoon afterward, he thought he would sweat a bucketful. How could he live out his life in tapioca nothingness with Donna when he burned for Tanya Faith?

Maybe the Lord had put the idea in his head. Chevry had got to thinking about roosters and stallions, and it suddenly occurred to him that man was not meant for monogamy. Didn’t the biblical King David have scores of wives, and didn’t his son Solomon have a gracious plenty, too? And God had liked both of them well enough. Surely, a modern prophet like himself was entitled to one over the limit.

The revelation of multiple wife taking had been a miracle, as far as Chevry was concerned, but, of course, Donna Jean was furious over it, and now Tanya Faith was being cold and stubborn, claiming she couldn’t be a real wife until he gave her a home of her own to be a wife in. If he didn’t finish these renovations soon, he’d catch pneumonia from cold showers. And now he was getting frosty letters from some lawyer in Danville, threatening him with legal action for sexual improprieties. Chevry sighed with the weariness of the unhonored prophet in an unwired kitchen. He wished the Lord had given him a little help in persuading the rest of the planet that this idea was divinely inspired, that was all.

His reverie was cut short by a howl of pain, and he bent double, clutching his abdomen and gasping for breath. His gut felt like somebody was inside him with a weed-whacker. In a wave of dizziness, he lowered himself to the kitchen floor. What the hell had Donna Jean put in those sandwiches? he thought as the decor of the room faded to black.

BILL MACPHERSON HESITATED as he gazed through the windshield at his mother’s new home. “I didn’t expect to see so many cars here. Do you think I’m dressed properly for the occasion?” he whispered to his sister. He fingered his second-best necktie and attempted to look at his reflection in the rearview mirror of his car.

“Oh, I don’t think anyone will take much notice of you, Bill,” Elizabeth MacPherson murmured sweetly.

“That’s a great dress,” he said generously. “It looks like a party frock. It’s stylish. Basic black, right? I mean, it makes your point without being obtrusive.”

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “If you mean that I’m not wearing jet beads, elbow-length black gloves, and an opaque veil, then, yes, in a simple black dress I’m not being obtrusive . It doesn’t matter to me whether anyone knows that I’m wearing black for mourning. I know.”

“Sorry I mentioned it,” muttered Bill. “You won’t brood about it all evening, will you?”

“I never brood.” Elizabeth made a mental note to disparage Bill at her next session with Dr. Freya.

They had driven out from town to attend their mother’s Saturday dinner party at the home of her new roommate, Casey. Elizabeth had described it to Bill as a get-acquainted party, arranged to introduce Margaret MacPherson’s family to her new set of friends. She had not managed to be more specific than that about the nature of their mother’s new life, so Bill was happily unaware of anything unusual. He’s so amazingly dim in social matters that he may not even notice, Elizabeth told herself. She resolved to keep a watchful eye on him, though, for the duration of the evening.