My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams

getting to where she could play a few tunes. Maggie finally said she had to go outdoors. While she was gone he said he banked the fire and got in the bed. The next thing he knowed it was morning and there was Maggie straddling Hackley on the pallet in front of the fire. He said she was naked as the day she was born, and though he wanted to look away he could not. I knowed how he must’ve felt. I wanted to tell him to hush but could not. And he said that Maggie knew he was watching too and I said, “How do youknow?” And he said, “Because the whole time she was riding him she was looking me right in the eye.”
    I did not know what to say about that. You can believe I studied about it a lot over the next few days. I thought about talking to Zeke about it, but I already knew he’d just say
Goodness
or
They law
or something like that. Or he might have surprised me and been real interested in that little tale. I was not real sure how I would have liked him being in such a big way to know about that so I just didn’t mention it. And I caught myself wondering what Granny would have said. But then I already knew.
Bullshit.
    I SAW M AGGIE AT the store the day that the big cat had been at my chickens. She’d killed two, leaving feathers and blood all over the snow off the end of the porch. She eat one and carried the other off to her kittens I reckon. Zeke said the cat would have to be hunted down and killed, but I said, “She does not have to be killed, she is just hungry and trying to see to her young’uns just like us. We just need to put the chickens up where she can’t get to them.” His eyes got all darkish blue like they do sometimes when he looked at me. “I love you, Arty,” he said. I said to him, “Why, I love you, too.” Men are funny creatures, and I will never figure them out if I live to be a hundred, and ain’t that a grand thing? They is some things that needs to remain a mystery in this world and the love between a man and a woman is one of them things.
    So I had gone to the store to get some nails and there was Maggie buying some cheese. I sidled right up to her and was hoping she was in the mood for talking, but she did not say much while she was running Cassie’s big old tomcat off of the cheese wheel and cutting herself a wedge. We just talked about this and that, and I could not gether to talk about the this or that of which I most wanted to hear. I felt like I was going to start hopping from one foot to the other if I didn’t ask her. Finally I just blurted out, “Well, have you seen Hackley or Larkin lately?” And she come right back at me with, “Well, damn, Arty, why don’t you just come right out and ask me?” And though I felt awfully sheepish I looked her eyeball to eyeball and said, “Well, I reckon I just did.”
    We walked home together and she talked and talked. Mostly about Hackley, and I could tell that Maggie had done give her heart away. She denied it to me, though. I told her I hoped she had not because my brother was a lover boy with all the women, but he would wind up marrying just the one—and that would be Mary Chandler because she was the only one that was not letting him have what all the other women did. Maggie turned red as blood when I said that, and I could tell it sort of made her mad. But they is one thing about me, and that is that I will call a spade a spade. She denied all about Larkin and that kind of made me mad. She said, “I don’t know nothing about Larkin Stanton, Arty.” And I told her I believed that he might be a little bit sweet on her, and she said, “I would not hurt that boy for nothing in this world.” And though I wanted to believe her, I thought to myself that Maggie just might bear watching where it concerned Larkin. She got right fiesty when I mentioned Mary again. She said, “Well, the virgin Mary might need to set up and take notice of Miss Maggie.” And I looked at her standing there with her head up and her shoulders throwed