Southern Gothic

Ms. O’Connor, my hero

Richard said, “I guess that door done gone and got the water in. It’s a full half inch in at the bottom. That kinda thing happens round here this time of the year.”
Richard drove a truck for the State. Sometimes it carried salt, in the winter especially when it was cold and the frozen precipitation would spill from the sky. Sometimes it was okra that had seemed to take to the landscape only second to kudzu, another Asian foliage.
In summers his whole truck, leased by him, and rented by the state via him, would carry truckloads of okra as far as Raleigh and the Polk Youth Detention Center. He reckoned them boys ought to like okra alright. Hell, from what he had heard, everything went as it wanted to in that prison and things resembling okra were a-okay as well. In the mouth or other places, it mattered not. He measured his successes and failures by the fact that he had never had to eat delivered okra in a concrete building 350 miles from home.
Cassard Willoughby bought the inn in town around 1953 and had owned for the last ten years or so. The economy of Shelby had not changed that much in the time despite so many of the local college folk had decided to stay around. He did not know what they did to make a living, nor did he care. He heard there was one man who worked for the United Nations as a translator and was not around that much, always flying on big airplanes to this city or another, and that was alright with him. The place had always seemed small when he was growing up and, although he had no desire to leave, other than the occasional romp in Charlotte, he thought it lent the town a certain air of cosmopolitanism that it had always needed and deserved.
Priscilla made cakes at Ms. Lucille’s place. Ms. Lucille was dying and fewer people called on her these days. Those in the know, however, knew that her cakes were the best this side of the Mississippi river and so she kept fairly busy through word of mouth and the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter.
Priscilla made cakes and had been hand-trained by Ms. Lucille since the trip to Myrtle Beach immediately after high school – the trip on which she and Richard had met. Myrtle Beach had seemd so odd to her. Even the beach had seemed so odd to her. She understood nothing of waves falling, changing of tides, drunken men or the danger that was entailed therein. She liked baking cakes because it made sense to her. Her mother had baked cakes before the fire, and she had always love them. Red velvet cake for a Sunday when Rev, Lewis would arrive.
Richard met Priscilla Dean Carpenter when they were on their post-graduate tour of the greater coast region of South Carolina, and it was within minutes that they had fallen in love. She loved the creases of his permanantly sun-burned neck. They way is crazy eyes fell over her on the quartz sand of that summer evening. She loved the way he talked of being state senator one day. How he, alone, could make it better for everybody.
Only if things could have been so, she supposed.
It was within three months of their return to Shelby that Richard had scrapped and scraped and managed to put a ring on her finger and declare his undying love. She had realized him in the interim to be a redneck and alcoholic and that it would take some great deal to make him any better. She had allowed him, upon his asking, to slip the ring deep upon her finger. His friends appeared out of a small junkyard car and sang a lullaby and ‘He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. He had arranged it all, but somehow it was not enough. At least not right now. She had dreams, and who could shoot down a dream, forgodsake!
She allowed him to slip the ring deep down on her finger and she at first swooned. Then thinking more properly of the family order, of what the kinfolk would say, she remembered his drinking. She remembered the situation of her mother. The way in which her mother had always wanted a doctor. That Richard could change a tire, but doctors could now change a heart. She could wait, she thought. She said fuck it. She used the “F” word the first time, in a non-performative sense, that she ever had. She thought of mother, father, friends and other family not frequently thought about. She realized that the opportunity should never be blown. And, Priscilla thought of how she could never marry him, not now, or ever.