If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

Elizabeth nodded. She had not expected much drama to come out of Bill’s practice. “The bigamist sounds interesting,” she commented. “I trust you’re not defending him?”

“No. I’m trying to get him to quit,” said Bill. “His original wife is a nice dowdy woman in her fifties, who shouldn’t have to put up with his shenanigans. I hope I don’t turn all peculiar when I hit fifty. You don’t suppose it’s hereditary?”

“Maybe they’ll have a cure for it by then. By the way, have you talked to Mother lately?”

“I guess so,” said Bill, trying to remember. “She’s all right, isn’t she?”

“She’s quite cheerful,” said Elizabeth, not precisely answering the question. “She has a new roommate, and she’d like us both to come over for dinner so that we can get acquainted.”

“A new roommate?” So great was Bill’s distress that he put down his fork to pursue the subject. “It’s not a man, is it?”

“Urn. No.”

“Well, that’s a relief. So who is it?”

“An English professor named Phyllis Casey. I haven’t met her yet myself, but Mother said they get along… um… like a house afire.”

“That’s good to hear. I’m glad the old girl’s perking up again. Maybe they can take macrame classes together. Form a couple for duplicate bridge.”

“A couple. Yes.” Elizabeth seemed inordinately preoccupied with her salad. She hardly looked at him at all. “So, can you make it for dinner on Saturday? I promised I’d let her know.”

“Oh, I guess so,” said Bill. “It’ll be dull, but I’ll bet they’re both great cooks.”

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “The evening may surprise you.”

“Well, I’m glad Mother has found a nice woman friend to spend time with, instead of some predatory man in a midlife crisis,” Bill said with a happy smile. “I should have known we could trust Mother to be sensible. But you know me: I always expect the worst.”

Elizabeth gave him a sad smile. “No, Bill. You don’t.”

Chevry Morgan set down his hammer, leaned against the old oak mantelpiece, and wished he had a cold beer. This was not a desire he would share with his parishioners, many of whom felt that Jesus had been unnecessarily frivolous when He turned the water into wine at the wedding at Cana. (“Surely grape juice would have been sufficient, and perhaps some cookies,” as Mrs. Harville of the Senior Ladies’ Circle phrased it.) Still, carpet laying was thirst-making work, and Chevry did not feel that the Lord intended for His servants to avoid the pleasures of the flesh. Who else had He made them for, after all?

A prophet lacking both honor and distilling facilities in his own country, Chevry saw that he would have to make do with well water instead of spirits. Donna Jean had given him sandwiches, but nothing to drink with his evening meal. She had mumbled a gruff apology for forgetting to bring a drink, and he’d let it go-but he suspected that the oversight was intentional. For a meek and God-fearing woman, Donna Jean certainly had been huffy lately. Every time he saw her, she looked like she was about to spit nails. There was no pleasing her. First, she had a hissy fit about chores, demanding that he get his sweet baby Tanya out of the house, and then when, after prayerful consideration, he took steps to do so, Donna Jean fumed about the time and expense of fixing up the new residence. He said he thought she was undergoing a crisis of faith about the Lord’s new revelation, and he suggested that she pray about it. This spiritual counsel was not well received.

Chevry mopped the sweat from his brow with a big cotton handkerchief. It sure was hot in the old house, being after sunset like it was. The tin roof soaked up the sun’s heat and held it for hours. He hoped that boded well for keeping the place warm in winter. He struggled to his feet, trying to ignore the aches in his legs and back. He would have to go to the kitchen and get his own drink. Wasn’t that a hell of a note? A man with two wives has to get his own dad-burned glass of water.

He stumped into the kitchen, feeling sorry for himself, remembering all the envious leers he’d gotten lately from the men in the community. He knew that they must have dirty movies running in their minds when they thought of him and his domestic situation. He was glad they didn’t know better. The truth was, he hadn’t been getting his ashes hauled at all lately. Why, there were probably men in prison who saw more carnal action than he had seen these past few weeks. That wasn’t much of a change as far as Donna Jean was concerned: sex had been boring her shitless for decades, and now that she was furious with him, she was even less inclined to perform that wifely chore. Once, long ago, he had tried to convince Donna Jean that oral sex was a marital variation of Holy Communion, but two days later she had countered with a few pertinent verses from Leviticus. Furthermore, she had threatened to bring up the matter for discussion in church if he persisted in his arguments. Billy Graham took her side in the matter, too; at least, Chevry had always suspected that the letter to Billy Graham’s column in the Roanoke Times had come from Donna Jean.

He took a jelly glass from the sparsely stocked cupboard, blew the dust off it, and turned on the tap. The water ran rusty for half a minute, and he waited for a clear stream before filling his glass. He downed it in one gulp and filled the glass again. Then he splashed cold water on his sweaty face and hands. His backache was worse now. It occurred to him that a man could work so hard on wife maintenance that he could be too tired to reap the pleasures of connubial bliss. He’d be finished renovating this house soon, though, and then his procreative powers would return. Damn, he needed a beer.

The thought of frosty bottles of beer brightened his mood. That was one advantage to having a second home: he could keep beer in it, something Donna Jean would not permit back at the house on Pumpkin Creek. She didn’t hold with imbibing liquor, not even for medicinal purposes. He’d once thought of introducing snake handling into the church services so that he would have an excuse to keep whiskey on the premises, but Donna Jean had put the quietus on that plan, faster than the Lord had deconstructed the Tower of Babel.

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