Homefires (2 page)

“
You’re
so
beautiful, Sis,” sighed Trish, my thirteen-year-old sister, whose bottomless, soulful eyes reflected the robin’s egg blue of her bridesmaid dress. Her fingers fluttered gently over my bridal veil as Callie’s not so gentle hands grasped the zipper of the candlelight white satin and lace wedding gown and tugged hard.

“Suck in,” she hissed and commenced to Saran-wrap me in my pastor’s wife’s size six gown. Mrs. Hart had weighed one hundred ten pounds when donning it for her own wedding. Eleven years and four children later, it would, she declared, take two angry, strong armed wrestlers to squash and stuff her into it. A couple of inches shorter than hers, my one hundred seventeen pound, five-foot-three frame packed into it solidly. “Just barely,” groaned Callie, my co-maid of honor, who shared this role with Trish. She stepped back and, hands on saucy hips, surveyed the hemline.

“My spike heels you’re wearing take up almost all the extra length.”

“Almost. Lord have mercy, I’ve
starved
five pounds off in order to wear this thing,” I grumbled as the seams seized my flesh. My reflection in the church restroom’s long door mirror did not reveal my discomfort and I found when I relaxed, it wasn’t so bad. After all, the festivities would be over in a couple of hours.

My buddy Cal’s five-foot-eight
, Ava
Gardner-incarnate presence usually dwarfed and paled me, but today, it didn’t. “Spittin’ image o’ Doris Day,” Cal muttered, fluffing her wild, shoulder-length dark-mahogany mane while her sultry brown eyes surveyed me like a chemist’s through a microscope.

“Yeah,
right!
With these D-cup hooters and dishwater
bland
hair.” I trailed my hands over the snug bustline to the cinched waist. Yet…I angled another look at the mirror. My short sun-streaked hair fluffed becomingly from overnight pincurls. Strawberry pink lipstick glazed my lips and a light brush of Cal’s Max Factor Plum Heat rouge focused my features rather nicely. I had to admit, today, I
felt
pretty.

A thrill shot through me at the thought of Kirk in black tux and blue ruffled shirt.

While Cal and Trish fussed with their hair and makeup, I meandered into a Sunday school room of my home church, needing solitude to rhapsodize. I raised the window then perched gingerly on a bench next to it, letting memories waft in on the fragrant, cooling, June honeysuckle breeze.

Kirk, my knight in shining armor, rode onto my horizon atop a cut down peach flat,
a clattering Beverly Hillbilly’s version, startling and scattering all my romantic dreams of
him –
Mr. Right, a John Saxonish stranger who kidnapped me to his penthouse where he ravished me, then forced me to elope with him. ‘Course, I knew that should I succumb to fornication, I’d not only inhabit Hell in the hereafter but would immediately become earthly discarded slop, which surpasses leftovers and is only good for hogs.

Such was the aftermath of underground sex in the fifties. Partly mine was spiritual restraint, but in large part, it was because of my dad, hovering next to God-almighty in my conscience cranny,
watching.
And Joe Whitman, with his regal bearing and no nonsense confrontations was a force I cared not to reckon with. His sunny William Holden good looks – which endured into his sixties – evolved, with provocation, to stony Walter Matthau, freezing me mid-stride. No, I did not want to displease him by being loose like Callie.

Anyway, I smiled today, thinking about the night not far into our courtship, when Kirk – not John Saxonish at all – and I nearly crossed the line. We’d parked in a remote corner of thickly wooded Crenshaw forestland, the only collateral standing between them and destitution – hiding from Daddy and the world. “Tell me about your family,” I’d coaxed and settled my head against his solid shoulder.

He did. Seemed once it started, it tumbled out like a slotmachine gone crazy, all of it – his dad’s alcoholism, his mom’s subjugation, his sibling’s insecurity and anger and the poverty, the near squalor. He finished in a voice as low and rough as velvet embroidered with thorny vines. I recognized behind the timbre of those words a pulsating, palpable anger. Eclipsing his mortar-set face, green eyes blazed into darkness. A chill rippled up my spine.

The car radio’s dim light cast his features into starkly hewed lines and angles while its speakers oozed rhythm and blues from Ernie’s Music for Lovers out of Cincinnati and I wondered
who is this person?
for the first time divining that our differences made us virtual strangers. Then he turned his head, caught my gaze and smiled, in a blink dispelling the harshness from his features as he turned me into his arms and began to kiss me.

The night seemed different, more urgent. Soon, I found myself lying beneath him in the seat and for the first time, felt Kirk’s hardness against my belly and it was like getting slammed there with a warm, slushing current and everything went white-hot. God knows, I’d always berated girls for being “that way” and pooh-poohed the idea that one gets “carried away” with passion, and here I was, my hormones gone crazy, my limbs gone liquid and my breath coming in spurts. And poor Kirk, in a frenzy, all hands and lips and pelvis, nearly incoherent. And my brain kept saying “
stop, stop, stop”
while my body kept screaming “Yes! Yes!
Now!”

They were new, the volcanic rapids carrying me away from rationale, away from
me,
whose velocity pinned me to that seat like a gnat against a cyclone. I don’t know where it came from, the strength to say “
stop, Kirk.”
Probably from the deep down me who knew I could hide from Daddy and the world but not from
Him.
It was a mere wisp of sound Kirk seemed not to hear.

The next “
No, Kirk. Stop!”
carried more momentum and he halted as if startled from a feverish trance to sudden wakefulness. Kirk quickly disentangled himself, apologized profusely, then spread-eagled his arms and plastered his red face to the steering wheel for a long time. His abashment matched my own.

Later, we talked. Both virgins, we agreed that neither wanted to consummate our union outside of marriage. From that time, despite incredible chemistry between us – his look or
touch always melted my bones – we honored our commitment to chastity.

Today, on our wedding day, my eyes misted at the wisdom of that decision because what had developed between us was love in its purest form.

Golden afternoon sunlight spilled over the heart pine vestibule floor, where Daddy fiddled with his blue shirt ruffle. “Does it look too
sissy
?” he muttered out the corner of his mouth, his features stricken with apprehension.

“You look just like a movie star,” I whispered, “Only
better-looking.”

He relaxed, became Daddy again. Strong. The rock beneath my wobbly, stilettoed feet.

I clutched his arm and felt his hand squeeze my icy fingers. Lordy, was I nervous. Then I saw the groom’s party enter the front of the church, filing to stand before the pulpit. Horace “Moose” McElrath, a barrel of a fellow with corkscrew dark curls and eyes so smiley half-mooned I had yet to detect their color, took his honored place at Kirk’s side. As usual, his turkeynecking chuckle – always present when Moose was nervous – pressed a very latent giggle button deep inside me.

Daddy felt me shaking and gazed worriedly at my lowered head. “You okay?” he asked, patting my hand. I drew in a deep breath and brought the uncharacteristic mirth-seizure under control, nodding.

Then I really focused on Kirk. Another fierce thrill flared through me. Lordy – how did I ever
not
think him handsome? His loosely waved, wheat blond head glistened, awash with afternoon sunrays pouring through stained windows. From that distance, past one hundred heads, with me nearly hidden behind attendants, his gaze sought me out, found me. The connection – hokey as it sounds –
szzzzzz
ed.

In a single heartbeat,
I was back on my porch, nearly two years earlier
, that evening Kirk’s contraption had idled to a halt before my mill village house, where I rocked and sang gustily along with Fats Domino’s
Blueberry Hill
drifting through my bedroom window. Moose, my friend from English class, hopped off the passenger seat and chatted with me when I moseyed to the
curb – actually a front yard easily spanned in four giant steps – to join them. I quickly labeled the wiry, sun-bleached guy the Quiet One, who sat behind the wheel of his peach flat, his gaze studiously transfixed to something beyond that bug-splattered windshield.

“What you guys doin’?” I’d asked.

“We been fishin’,” Moose replied, grinning.

“Catch anything?” I slid a glance at the Quiet One.

“You kiddin’?” Moose yuk-yukked. “We eat all our Vienna Sausages and crackers and drunk all our Cocolas, then left. Lookin’ fer girls, hey, Kirk?”

The Quiet One merely grunted. Or did he? Feeling bad for Moose, I quickly said, “Moose, did you ever learn how to conjugate them danged verbs?” We laughed and guffawed over that because Moose usually copied my homework paper.

The driver of the vehicle remained statue still, arms akimbo, eyes straight ahead like a horse wearing blinders. Frozen, yet relaxed in an odd sort of way. Curiosity ambushed me.

“Who’s he?” I asked Moose, not caring what the other guy thought since he wasn’t even
trying
to be polite. Least he could do was speak to me, concede that I existed. So my question was in the same pretend-he’s-not-here category as his silent disregard.

“Kirk Crenshaw,” Moose offered glancing curiously at his buddy.

“He’s in my homeroom.” I’d just recognized him. “
Hey! You’re in my homeroom.”
Let him ignore
that.
A thing that truly nettled me was disdain. It pounced against this thing inside me that simply
must
placate everyone. Fact was, I felt compelled to befriend every danged person I met and would, in fact, have taken them home with me had Daddy been more social-oriented.

For the first time, the wheat blond head turned to acknowledge me and his hard mouth curved slightly, as if in amusement, or annoyance, I couldn’t tell which. “Yeah?” he muttered, as in “so what?” Little did I realize that he waved a red flag before me, with his Elk majesty and male mystique. I knew so little of myself in those young days that it was much later before I recognized what that flag represented.
Challenge.

Monday morning in homeroom, I watched Kirk Crenshaw’s brisk entrance just before the bell. His carriage
bordered on cocky. But wasn’t. His energetic presence affected me, as did his crisp, freshly pressed shirt and slacks – slacks that showcased firm buttocks and long slender legs. It wasn’t that he was all that good-looking, though with wavy sun-bleached hair, his rugged features weren’t bad. Kinda nice, I decided, in a tousled, inexplicable way. It was something in the way he moved, like harnessed steam, smooth yet forceful. Even the way he shoved his hands in his pockets, infinitely male, held me rapt.

Later, a prickly ‘being watched’ sensation moved me to suddenly swivel in my desk to face the back of the room, catching Kirk’s study of me. Spring-green eyes, set amid olivecomplected features, startled me with their intensity, making my stomach turn over as a warm feeling trickled through me like summer branch water.

I smiled. He smiled back, his gaze never wavering. Then a strange phenomenon occurred. The tough guy blushed. Yeah. He really did, though his eyes never left mine. And that blush changed my whole perspective of Kirk Crenshaw.

Today, across the church, I smiled at him. He smiled back.
De ja vu.
Only this time, his blush was because a whole danged church full of villagers eyeballed him flirting with me.

I moved down the aisle to a slightly out-of-tune piano’s rendering of the
Wedding March,
thankful for Daddy’s strong arm to hang on to. Else, I’d surely have tripped over the long gown or turned my ankle in Cal’s danged heels. All those eyes on me terrified me senseless. S
crutiny
– my worst scenario. The veil helped me feel a tad hidden, but each step was like those in a nightmare where one is partially paralyzed or mired up in quicksand. Even the lush greenery and white mum arrangements, vivid against the crimson velvet-dressed seats and floors of our little village church, blurred before me.