affectionate baby. He was solemn, spoke few words; and he reminded me of everyone I loved. There was nothing excessive about him. He lacked the confidence of O.T. and the tenderness of Dick. He was slow in everything he did, from math problems to fixing the engine of the tractor. He would disappear for hours at a time, down at the creek or out riding a horse.
He was awkward and yet easy to be with, unassuming and honest. And unlike O.T., who in the beginning seemed to regard me as some accomplished goal or some event he had planned, Jolly treated me like I was someone he could never have imagined. To my husbandâs younger brother, I was a complete and unexpected surprise.
Sally, the young woman Mrs. Witherspoon brought home for her middle son, was keen to both her mother-in-lawâs suspicions and her own intuitions about what was between me and Jolly. So that as soon as they were married and the war was over, she and Jolly moved to Alabama to work in her uncleâs ladder factory.
I have only seen them four or five times in over fifty years, his parentsâ funerals and a wedding or two. I called when O.T. had a stroke. I thought it was the right thing to do. Sally answered the phone and was curt but appropriately sympathetic. She said that she would tell Jolly but that she wasnât sure they would be able to come. Shesuffered terribly with arthritis in her hip. âHad to have been all those years standing on a concrete floor,â she added and then quickly mentioned a bridge game and said good-bye. Jolly never called; and I never made anything of it.
After O.T. returned from Europe and before Emma, I had forgotten what was between me and his younger brother. O.T. and I had to learn and relearn each other several times. He was burdened by a soldierâs sorrow and I, because I so desperately wanted a child, by the disappointment of a monthly period. For most of our marriage, these experiences defined who we were. And even though I didnât really know him before the warâhe came into my life and left so quicklyâI knew that what happened during the years he was gone had changed O.T.
He was blank by the time he got home; and because I was already accustomed to the silent nights and the cooling of cravings, and then later when my baby came and went, we knew how to manage our life together. We expected little and were therefore rarely disappointed. Once I was off the mountain and living in the home of Oliver Thomas Witherspoon, his mother and father and two younger brothers, once I gave birth to death, I realized I hadnât a lot of hope for happiness.
I suppose it is this choice to accept an unfulfilled life that has caused me to be surprised that most people livetheir whole lives in a state of disappointment. I discovered this initially at the mill, where I spent the majority of my adult life. Loading needles and tacking elastic to the tops of womenâs panties, I was shocked to learn that most of the people there were expecting something more.
The women who gathered around the tables at lunch talked openly and without shame about the poor states of their children, the lack of opportunities for them in the textile industry, and the heaviness of unfulfilled dreams. Then theyâd peer over at me, while I was eating my can of pork and beans or dry bologna sandwiches, and Iâd just shrug my shoulders.
âNo dreams,â Iâd say, remembering the hunched shoulders and empty palms of my motherâs kin, the fading of the colors when Emma died. âMight lend itself to boring sleep, but it sure does let you get up in the morning.â
And theyâd stare at me like I had just grown pointed ears and a tail. Most of them did not know what it was like not to have dreams, least not the young ones, anyway. Of course, by the time most of them hit forty or so, divorced, bored with children who would not leave their houses, still working at the same job, they realized that
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