Virtue

 
I am not a hateful person. I don’t know why Lottie or anybody else would ever have said such a thing about me. I’m strong-willed and I take action, and I don’t see anything to apologize for in that. It’s the weak among us who fall prey to temptation and sin of all kinds. I’ve seen how envy and jealousy can shrivel a person, make ’em strike out like a snake. Take Lottie, for instance. And I will have to say that of me and Paul, he’s the weak one. I try to point things out to him, in the gentlest way, but he gets mad and stomps out on the porch and sits there in the dark with the tip of his cigarette glowing, dropping ashes on the glider.
        “Paul,” I say, “if you’re going to indulge in that filthy habit, would you go away from the house!”
        He knows I can’t stand the smoke curling in the screen door, and besides he’s likely to burn holes in his clothes. He goes as still as a statue sometimes, and lets the cigarette burn down right to his fingers. Manys the time I’ve had to bandage up his hand. I just don’t understand it.
        On Sundays we go to the Spiritualist Revival Chapel to hear the guest preachers all the way from Lilly Dale sometimes. It’s a sweet little place with bouquets on either side of the altar sometimes, for the Flower Message Service. Otherwise, you get your messages right after the more regular—that is the more Christian—part of the usual Sunday service. I wish somebody from the other side would say to Paul that he ought to quit mistrusting people and that smoking is bad for his health. Maybe someone who’s passed on from lung cancer. Maybe that would scare him! Truthfully though, I don’t know that he really listens. I think he only goes along to keep an eye on me.
        When I was young I was the pretty one. My sisters were always jealous of my beaux. Well, I had the better figure, clothes looked good on me, and the boys would come around. Lottie had buck teeth; it wasn’t her fault of course, but people teased her. She had this best friend, Nancy Dix, very plain. Thick as thieves, they were. It seems to be a law of nature that ugly people tend to make friends with their own kind. Now next door to Nancy was where Paul lived. He was a sweet boy, and he and Nancy and Lottie all played together, you know, as kids do, all the time they were growing up. But then came high school and Paul shot up to six feet tall and got handsomer and handsomer, and Lottie used to go on about how handsome he was. So one day, I overheard her conniving with Nancy. The plan was that one of them would ask him to the dance and then get sick, and at the last minute the other one would step up and volunteer to go. It was difficult to make out every word through the glass I was holding to the wall, but of course it was plain that Nancy would ask him and he would say yes out of neighborliness, and then— Well, not only did it not seem right that he would get stuck with an ugly girl either way, but the deceit! I marched right over to Paul’s house and I told him that I’d been wanting and wanting to ask him and had been too shy and wouldn’t he please go with me. Meanwhile, Lottie told Nancy that I knew of their plan, and she was so ashamed that she wouldn’t come out of her room for a week. So Paul ended up going to the dance with yours truly. Lottie got so mean over the whole thing; that jealousy is such an evil genie. Out of its bottle it makes a person go crazy! So when she snuck into my room that night of the dance and cut up all my pretty dresses and even my underthings, I knew I had to help her get over her affliction. They call it something today—rough love or tough love or— Anyway, I knew her life would be a living hell if she wasn’t able to overcome it, so, even though I had planned on giving Paul over to her, I decided to keep him for myself. Decided I’d marry him if anyone would, right on the spot of that scene of destruction I encountered when I arrived home after the dance. Did I get angry at my poor sister? No. Did I retaliate? No. I simply marched into her room and told her she’d have to learn to control her devils if she ever wanted to get into heaven and that I, her older and wiser sister, was going to help her by marrying Paul.
        Convincing him was easy enough. Men are simple creatures, really. They’re so pliable, especially when they’re sniffing after a pretty girl. I let him go “all the way” just one time, and then told him I’d missed my monthly, and that was really all it took. I made Lottie my maid of honor, so as to strengthen her character. She held her bouquet up over her face so nobody could see she was crying up there on the altar, but I knew and gave her an awful pinch to make her stop. I wasn’t about to let her spoil things!
        We were never blessed with children, but that’s all right. After that one time of conjugality, I knew I could not endure it again, so I put an end to all that nonsense. Truthfully, I’d rather not think about that part of my body at all. Or his. One can have a perfectly respectable Christian marriage without indulging in the sins of the body, after all. Paul didn’t seem to mind much, after he got used to it. His most enduring passions in life are his fishing rod and his books in any case. He goes off with one or two of each on a Saturday morning and doesn’t come home till dark.
        “I’ve got the frying pan on,” I holler as I hear him come crunching up the driveway, but he mainly doesn’t bring home any fish to speak of. Likes to let them go after he catches them. A regular soft-hearted man if there ever was one. He’d’ve made a nice father for a little girl. Weekdays he works down at the station, taking in money and handing out tickets and schedules. Occasionally on Saturday or Sunday he might have to fill in, but he’s got enough seniority by now that he shouldn’t have to. I ask him sometimes about getting us some kind of a deal on a cross-country bus trip, but he just shakes his head in that bewildered way he has. He likes it fine right here at home, he says. I mentioned once about going off on my own to Trumansburg to see my sister Lottie and he nearly had a fit—put his foot down absolutely and said no respectable woman went off gallivanting around on a bus by herself. He’s so old fashioned in some ways, but I kind of like the fact that he’s so protective of me. He says there’s all kinds of evil intentioned men out there that would love to compromise a woman like me. That’s what I mean about him being jealous. I don’t understand what in the world he could be thinking sometimes! I know I’m still quite a handsome woman that could turn a few heads, but I really didn’t think a little bus trip to visit my own sister could be considered less than respectable. I told him I’d just stay over for a few days with Lottie, but he shook his head, said he needed me here. So I told him that passage from Proverbs 20:3 “It is to a man’s honor to avoid strife, but every fool is quick to quarrel.” And he answered me right back from Proverbs 21:19 “Better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome and ill-tempered wife.” Can you imagine? I was dumbfounded. Then he stomped off to the front porch with his tobacco and his Bugler papers, and I slammed the door when the smoke came in, but it was really too warm an evening for the door to be closed. So after a while I opened it up and the smoke still lingered there, but he was nowhere to be seen.
        Straightaway I telephoned Lottie, but her line was busy and busy and busy. So I got out my pieces of cloth and settled down to the quilt design I was working on, and just waited there till Paul took it into his head to get over his fit of pique and come back from the barn or wherever he’d gone to to sulk. I worried that he’d maybe gone into one of his torpors, but I wasn’t about to go out looking for him in the dark. I figured he’d get over it eventually. He always did, even if it went on for a whole night sometimes. Why, I’ve come downstairs in the morning to make up the coffee and found him sitting in one of those easy chairs in the parlour asleep awake–that’s what I call it. His eyes are open and he’s looking straight ahead but it’s like he’s sleeping. Sometimes the sound of my footsteps snaps him out of it, and sometimes I can walk right in front of him and he doesn’t stir. It’s like his mind is working on a terrible problem inside himself, and his eyes are turned in so he can squint at his own brain, and he can’t turn them rightside out again. The man terrifies me sometimes. I hate to think of what he’d do if something ever happened to me!
        Of course after I do die, I plan on making my presence known and advising the poor man on a regular basis. We got going to the Spiritualists because I felt that we needed something a little different from the Baptist point of view on things, given Paul’s, well, his peculiarities. And the Spiritualists are Christian, even though some people get put off by the messages from the other side. Really, when you think about it though, it makes a lot of sense that when people die they don’t just disappear or land up in heaven completely cut off from us left here below. I find it a comfort to imagine my loved ones who’ve passed on in a kind of heaven where they can still come forward and speak to you, send you help and advice in troubled times.
        I remember, not too long after we started going to the Spiritualists, the guest preacher said, “Can I come to you,” nodding his head at me. And I said “Thank you,” the way we do. And he said, “I see a woman. A middle-aged woman in an apron. She’s carrying a bouquet of flowers—does that mean anything to you?” Well, I just nodded and waited because quite often it takes several clues to get an idea of who it is, and I wasn’t sure but I wanted to encourage him. He said, “It’s someone who wants to offer you something. Her flowers. She says that it’s all over now and that she hopes you will forgive and forget, as she has done.” And I almost wept right there in the pew because I knew it was Lottie, and that she must be dead, and I forgave her stubbornness and hurtfulness right on the spot. I elbowed Paul for a handkerchief, but he wasn’t there beside me. He must’ve got up and gone out back and I hadn’t noticed, I’d been so captivated by Lottie’s presence and her message to me.
        Later on I told Paul that Lottie must be dead because she’d come to me, said everything was forgiven and that she sent her love. “After she got her teeth fixed, I had wanted to straighten things out between us, but she refused to speak to me for years as you very well know,” I told him. “And she was my sister even if she acted perfectly horrible about me and you.” He just looked at me and shook his head and sputtered something unintelligible. Then he went out for a smoke. I swear, the man gets more taciturn by the hour.
        I figured there wouldn’t be anyone at Lottie’s, so I phoned my other sister LuLu, who lives way across the country, even though it was a during the day long distance call. I never did understand why she left like that, and went so far away from home. She’s rather plain looking, but managed to get herself a nice enough husband. Kinda mousy and small—he was already starting to bald when they got hitched thirty years ago. I thought it would be nice—all of us in the same general neighborhood. I just assumed we’d spend our adult lives in the same town, since we’d grown up in it together, but it seemed like she and Lottie couldn’t wait to get away. It is a small town, but that can be a nice thing, the way people look out for one another. I figured they’d buy places down the road after me and Paul moved in here, into the family place. It only made sense, me being the oldest and all, and I’d have been perfectly happy to share but that it’s just too small, and we had all the care of Mama for those months before she passed on, so it seemed perfectly plain to me that we had a right to it.
        Well, LuLu said that as far as she knew Lottie was alive and kicking and that that Spiritualist stuff was a lot of—well I won’t use the word she used. She kind of snickered about it, I would swear, but when I asked her what was so very charmingly funny, she clammed right up. So I called Lottie who her very own self answered the phone all bright and chipper! I was floored, as you can imagine. I told her that I had received her message and that I forgave her too, and she hung up. In my ear. Imagine! That’s the last time I’m going to reach out to her, as you can easily understand.
        Two days later, I got an envelope in the mail from Lottie. I say envelope because what was in it was not a letter, as any person of normal intelligence would expect, but an obituary notice clipped from the newspaper: Nancy Dix, of all people! Turns out she was living in Trumansburg all those years. And she never married, poor girl, at least there’s no mention of a husband. But here’s the scandalous thing. She left a daughter! Name of Loretta P. Dix. Can you imagine! No wonder she never let anybody know where she was!
        So now I’m off to the Spiritualists Ladies Quilting Association meeting over at the camp grounds meeting hall to work on our annual raffle quilt. I do not understand what happened at that service or who the woman who came to me that day might have been, but my faith has only deepened since that experience. It is not for us to know all things, as the good book says. Somebody forgave me and I forgave them right back, so all is well. This summer it’s a 7 Blessed Virtues quilt, and we’ll talk across the frames about what pictures we’ll use to represent chastity, charity, and all, and how these qualities have manifested themselves in our lives.
        When I got home from Dorrie Yuba’s house the other evening after we decided on this theme, for some reason I found myself trying to recall the 7 Deadly Sins instead of the 7 Blessed Virtues. Then I was thinking about a design that could maybe match the virtues and the sins on the quilt (though I think that might scandalize the some of the ladies), and I found that I could only bring 4 to mind: jealousy, of course, sloth, gluttony, lust, and— Well, never mind, I’m sure the others will come to me. It occurred to me to make a spiritual inventory of the deadly sins and whether any of them might have manifested in my life, and if so to face it head on, to stamp it out with complete ruthlessness. But then I thought that might be to focus on the negative, when the preachers are always trying to get us to dwell on the positive. So I’m going to think about the 7 Blessed Virtues and the glories of Heaven instead, and say a prayer for that homely little pullet Nancy Dix.