Dark Don't Catch Me by Vin Packer

on and come along!”
    â€¢ • •
    â€œNo more to it than that?”
    â€œNope. That’s the funny thing about it.”
    â€œBut that didn’t make Ada the way she is now, you think?”
    â€œThe whole story ain’t been told, for my cotton!”
    â€œImagine the bastard getting her to do a regular old striptease up in Awful Dark Woods!”
    â€œAw, sheet anyway! He’s crazy! Didn’t even fight in the war!”
    â€¢ • •
    â€œVery, very good!” Kate Bailey says at the end of “Loch Lomond.” “Now we’ll try ‘Turkey In The Straw’!”
    Marianne Ficklin hollers over to Ada Pirkle, “Ada, honey? How come you don’t take up an instrument? Do you good, honey!”
    â€œ ‘Turkey In The Straw,’ “ Kate Bailey says. “Page Six. Ready?”

6
    V IVIE HOOPER turns the volume down on the small portable, and leans forward in the rocker to see who is driving up to the pumps outside. Then she gets up: twenty-eight, not too tall, but straight-standing, and quiet and graceful looking, as though her own awareness of her beauty has made her feel some sense of responsibility which must make her express to others an aura of inviolate dignity and stunning, kindly poise.
    Her magnificent pitch-black hair spills to her shoulders, the gleaming soft-white-skinned perfectness of them, hidden by the simple black dress with its round Peter Pan collar. The dress is not designed to highlight her voluptuous figure — Thad ordered it for her from Atlanta; a surprise — but almost as if in protest the breasts and hips of her push through the cotton fabric proudly to show themselves. She is long-legged for a girl her height, her ankles curving thinly and exquisitely above the black ballet slippers. Her face is radiant, even now when its expression is solemn; the long black lashes of her deep blue eyes are lowered; the wide lips curving generously, lightly painted rose color; her skin is flawless, like burnished ivory. She has, for someone so vitally beautiful, some sweet and incredible shyness to her make-up; striped with a paradoxical air of calm composure. Her voice is husky, low; its tone, gentle.
    Walking to the door and opening it, she calls out, “Hi, Storey! What brings you around this time of afternoon?”
    He cuts his motor and grins at her, wiggling over and getting out on the right side of the new light-blue Ford. “Thought you’d be up at the house fixing for the barbecue, Vivs.”
    â€œHus is doing all the fixing. You know Hus. She hates meddling.”
    He stands under the stark black-lettered sign which reads:
Hooper’s Place — Gas and Pop,
with the smaller sign attached:
Scuppernongs For Sale
—
50¢ gallon
—
20¢ for all you can eat!
    And he thinks as always with wonder upon the fact he, Storey Bailey, made more of himself than Thad Hooper; he, Storey Bailey, head superintendent at the Galverton Mill, with his farm growing a good crop in corn and cotton too, came out the better. For he never would have thought it as a boy — younger than Thad by eight years, beholden to Thad Hooper. He was so very beholden that the night with Vivs, even before Thad and she were officially engaged, had made him vomit afterwards, and swear no other lapse in loyalty to Thad — because even though it was not official between Vivs and Thad, who better but Storey Bailey knew his idol’s intentions toward her. And he had forced it out of his mind, rooted it out, married Kate (a really good woman) and paradoxically done better than Thad. He was almost ashamed because he had.
    â€œHey, girl, how come you’re minding the station? Ole Thad got you working now, huh! Whew, hot!” He mops his brow with a large square white handkerchief. The roundness of his face, the ruddiness of it and the tilt to his near-pug nose, coupled with the towhead, gives his countenance a boyish