A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) by Kaye Gibbons Read Free Book Online Page A

he didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll do it, Lonnie. I like Tiny Fran okay.” But the fact was he thought the same about her everybody did. More times than a plenty I’d be out in the tractor yard with him and we’d see Tiny Fran go across the yard in something poured-on-looking and he’d do his made-up rhyme, “Between Franny’s thighs is where her fanny lies, and that’s what makes my britches rise.” So you see, he didn’t think she was okay. You generally don’t marry somebody you feel like you can tease about like that. He wasn’t a innocent lamb with blinders on, led, not knowing what all he might be in for with a girl like her. I just don’t believe he had a clear idea how much and how long he’d have to pay. I always heard paybacks is hell.
    Sorry as she was, though, I cannot honestly say I’d have turned her down if she’d been offered to me. That’s a lot of property, and it’s a lot of ways you can think up to stay out from under a woman, stay drunk, stay at work, stay in front of the television set.
    But I did turn down one piece of property, Ruby’s shegot when her parents died. I said, “I can’t take it, Ruby. I can’t take your land,” and she said, “It’s not mine!” I told her, “It’s got your name on it,” and she told me that was all that made it hers. I knew how she felt. She’d talked to me before. And it won’t so much like I felt like I’d be cashing in on marrying somebody with some money, I’d wanted her before I knew what she’d come from. I just didn’t want a place I didn’t know. I know this place. Not taking the land was a choice I and Ruby had to make, and after we made it, we just had to close the door.
    And I act like Burr was out there in that field with a choice, but he wasn’t. He saw all that land he’d wanted and his daddy’d wanted and it wasn’t a choice at all. That sun hitting the hill where his acres would start must’ve been the best-looking thing he’d ever seen, except for his dream woman, but she was in his head and she’d have to stay there.
    Go ahead! Say how trading a happy life for land is foolish, how your peace of mind is more important than a piece of fertile land. But let me tell you this, when you grow up out here, when you know your family’s been here long as theirs, meaning somebody like a Lonnie Hoover, when you know you can match time with them day for day, year for year, all this stretched out beside the road, back to the woods farther and farther, it pure hurts sometimes to look at it, looking at it after all that time you’vespent with your face so close down on it over a bean row, touching it, turning it over, then going home to not one damn thing that’s yours but some clothes and some pots and pans and a stick or two of furniture. You don’t rent a boy a corner of a toy store, one down on that Main Street, and let him play all day until dark, every day, then send him home. No! You let him play a while, get attached to something, then say, “Take it, son. You can have it. You handled it enough. It’s yours. It’s right you should have it.”
    Let’s say Burr’s family rented from Lonnie’s crowd a hundred years. That’s a long time, especially when it looks to you like the whole rest of the world is drawing interest and all you’re doing is putting in sweat and taking out the tired frustration. Then something comes along like Lonnie’s bad situation that can end it and you and the rest of your line can have something, even if it is on account of what some teenage whore did one afternoon in the corn-crib with God knows who or how many. That’s one way of stopping what’s gone on.
    School’s another way. Burr’s girl, June, got a college degree, but what do you think would’ve been her chance if Burr hadn’t told Lonnie he’d marry his girl? Not much. She’d have either been a Tiny Fran or swung back the other way around and been head over heels into the church down there and worried the pure living