Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement by Grif Stockley Read Free Book Online

almost strangers in Bear Creek that last summer before college. She had moved to town in January with her father, the new manager of Bear Creek’s one industry, a pants factory.
    I had been off at Subiaco all through high school. So when we met the first week in June at the public library, we hit it off immediately.
    For the rest of the summer we were inseparable.
    Angela was the first liberal I had ever met, and before I was ever permitted to make love to her that summer in the back of my mother’s ‘58 Fairlane, I had to endure an earful about the South. It was 1963, the year of the civil rights march on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Segregation, with all its humiliations, was still in full flower in Bear Creek. Angela was appalled by our treatment of blacks and told me so at every opportunity, which was practically every
    night, since there was only one movie theater and nowhere to go except the Dairy Delight.
    When I confided to her how the Taylors had cheated my mother and then ostracized my family, it was simply confirmation of all she had read about our “morally bankrupt Southern way of life,” as she used to delight in calling it. That summer she must have been so grateful I took her seriously that one night our necking on Spire Road outside of town got out of hand, and in timehonored fashion, we made love by the glow of the dashboard lights. What actually bonded us forever that night was less our lovemaking than our frantic but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to get a speck of Angela’s virgin blood out of the seat covers That fall I drove off to the University in Fayetteville in the ‘58 Fairlane, and Angela flew east to Goucher College in Baltimore, but each summer we resumed our romance in Bear Creek until I did my Peace Corps training the summer after I graduated. After I left, Angela began to date Dwight Marr, whose father had just died and left him and his brother a thousand-acre farm east of Bear Creek. When I came back that summer from Albuquerque after completing my training, Angela was engaged. She married Dwight that December. He was a super guy, the kind who wins the county “Farmer of the Year” award, and Angela, who originally had hated the South, became a farmer’s wife. If she had been willing to wait on me, I am convinced we would have married, but it worked out for the best. In her December letter she called Dwight, a couple of years younger, as fine a man as she had ever known, and though I haven’t kept up with Angela much over the years, I have never heard a word differently. And, in my own case, I was truly happy with Rosa, who, as the saying goes, melted my butter like nobody ever has before or since.
    “I was afraid you’d be out digging ditches or whatever farmers do in
    winter,” I say when Angela opens her front door to me.
    After registering a look of total surprise, she smiles broadly, making me glad I decided to stop by.
    “You never did know a thing about farmers,” she says, as if we were continuing a conversation we had begun earlier this morning.
    “You look cold. Come on in. I was about to heat up some vegetable soup.”
    As I come through the door, she steps forward and hugs me.
    “I got your letter,” she sniffs, beginning to cry.
    “It was sweet.”
    I press her close to me, amazed at how familiar her body feels after thirty years. I had written her back and told her how sorry I was about Dwight.
    A great marriage is hard to find.
    I stand back from her and take her in. She looks wonderful for a woman who, if memory serves, has just had her forty-eighth birthday. I notice a few crow’s-feet around her brown eyes, and there is some gray in her once jet-black hair, but she is still petite despite the birth of two kids, twin boys whom I presume are in their second semester at Arkansas State in Jonesboro. As a teenager, Angela’s most discussed physical feature among the boys was her perfectly rounded ass, but today, dressed