Southern Discomfort by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online

ground, temporary elevated platforms called scaffolds are erected to support the craftsmen, their tools and materials."
    Wednesday was a holiday—Fourth of July picnic at the Jaycee Park, fireworks over the river. Thursday was a duplicate of Tuesday, and I figured that if all the odds and ends left over from the week's calendar could be heard by noon on Friday, it would give me at least half a day to fritter before I had to start toting barrels and lifting bales for Lu Bingham on Saturday.
    Which is how I wound up at my brother Herman's on Thursday evening.
*      *      *
    Make an X.
    Nip off one of the stabilizing legs and what's left?
    You got it, sugar: a lopsided Y, perpetually off-balance.
    Every once in a while when my friends and I are skirmishing through yet another battle of the sexes, we speculate about what's actually on that little part of the X chromosome that we still have and men don't—besides the antidote for testosterone poison, I mean.
    Toni Bledsoe, who got married again last year and really wants to make it work this time, swears it holds the gene that'll let a woman ask directions.
    "When it's perfectly obvious Pete hasn't got a clue where we are, I tell him I've got to pee. RIGHT THIS MINUTE! Honey, if there's ever been a man willing to argue with a woman's bladder, I never met him. And don't want to. So he heads in at the nearest service station and while I'm inside asking for the ladies' room key, I'm also asking the clerk, 'What's the fastest way to highway whatever from here?' Then back in the car I say, 'Pete-Sweet, I bet we could make up some of the time I just lost us if we took a left at that light up yonder... '
et voilà!
He thinks I've got a great sense of direction and I don't have to watch him pout for the next hour 'cause he feels emasculated."
    My sister-in-law Amy, Will's wife, mutters about being the only one in their house with the physical dexterity to put a fresh roll of toilet paper on the hanger; and K.C. Massengill, who used to work undercover for the State Bureau of Investigation, keeps wondering if that's why there's so much hurling and flatulence on
Saturday Night Live
when, presumably, all the eight-year-olds are asleep.
    I myself think that extra segment gives us a more rational attitude toward tools.
    Ever notice?
    It's almost as if their try squares and saws and electric drills are some sort of ceremonial totems that will be profaned by secular (i.e., feminine) use unless ringed by ritual promises and protected by sacred vows. Probably goes back to the Stone Age and the first fire-hardened pointed sticks or roughly flaked rocks:
"You woman. No touch my axe."
    Some men'll let a new puppy mess all over a hundred-year-old Persian rug, use a hand-embroidered guest towel to wipe it up, then get bent out of shape if you pry open a can with one of their screwdrivers or dirty up their hammers cracking black walnuts.
    Uncle Ash is a sweetie about most things but he's never real happy if Aunt Zell or I take anything other than simple gardening tools from his well-stocked shed back of the house.
    All the same, if I was going to labor in the vineyards of the Lord, I needed to show up with more than empty hands and a willing heart. Fortunately, my brother Herman has four truckloads of tools and he lives right here on the edge of Dobbs. He growls worse than our daddy ever did, but he's not Daddy and I don't pay him too much mind.
*      *      *
    He was growling at Annie Sue when I drove into their backyard after supper that Thursday evening. Annie Sue was huffed up and sir-ing him in that snippy-polite way teenagers do when they want to make sure you know that the respect is only on their lips, not in their hearts.
    "I told Lu Bingham I'd wire our WomenAid house and now he says I can't," she told me hotly, her Knott-blue eyes flashing in the late afternoon sunlight. "He never lets me do anything!"
    "She never did a circuit box by herself and she don't have a