Free Deliver Us from Evie by M. E. Kerr Page B

too, that it was a Duff doing me in. Lately we were always in deep shit because of that family.
    I’d never be able to walk away from the farm, probably.
    It’d be on my conscience.
    Then like God was reading my mind, Angel’s voice rang out loud and clear on the last verse.
    C-L-O-C-K— “ And I’ve a loud alarm ;
    Conscience says Wake up ! Sin wants to do you harm !
    Keep awake ! wake ! wake ! wake !
    With a merry chime working all the time.
    Tick!” said the clock ;
    “ What ?” said I ;
    “ You can learn a lesson from my ’larm , if you try. ”
    That night I woke up in a cold sweat from a nightmare.
    Evie was being buried over in Duffton Cemetery.
    Patsy Duff was standing there weeping, holding a smoking gun.

21
    “Y OU NEVER HAD A beer?” said Cord. “Not one?”
    “I’ve had a taste,” I told him. “It didn’t thrill me.”
    “It’s an acquired taste, Parr. Like those oysters Patsy Duff’s got Evie swallowing. You heard about that?”
    “I didn’t hear oysters.”
    “Yeah, oysters! Yuck!”
    It was the week of Easter vacation, and I’d gone over to King’s Corners with him, the mower we’d bought at the farm sale last winter loaded in back.
    It needed repair, turned out, and Evie’d given up on it.
    We were sitting in the rear of the pickup with our feet dangling, taking in the sun of an afternoon like summer smack in the middle of April.
    Cord was holding an empty beer can, crushing it with his fingers, tossing it into the bin behind Howell Hardware, a favorite parking place for the farm trucks.
    He plucked another can from a six-pack and said, “Here’s yours. Try it. It’ll cheer you up.”
    I took it.
    I told him my worst fears about Doug and Evie leaving the farm on my hands.
    “Evie could have fixed that mower, too,” Cord said.
    “Probably.”
    “Evie could fix a space shuttle if she put her mind to it. She knows machinery like she knows soil. It’s in her blood.”
    “Or was,” I said.
    “That thing’s not going to last, Parr. You think a girl like Patsy Duff’s going to want Evie once she’s met herself a man? Thing is, those girls go to private school don’t have the opportunity to find out what the male sex is all about. They keep them like nuns at those places.”
    “Patsy used to date Ned Thacker.”
    “He’s just a kid! He’s a preppie. He’s not a man!”
    “I don’t know anything about it,” I said.
    “That’s why I’m telling you about it. Now Evie’s got her man’s ways, for sure, but a lot of women from the farm do, because they do men’s work. She’d have snapped out of it if this thing hadn’t gotten blown all out of proportion.”
    “That’s what I think. It’s Patsy’s fault.”
    “She turned Evie around, next thing she’ll take a walk.”
    “I hope so.”
    “I know so…. What do they do together? Two females! Hah!”
    “I don’t know what they do together.”
    “Not much.”
    “I don’t even know what two guys do together.”
    I knew. I’d learned about it in health and nutrition, and nothing to do with sex is all that mysterious to a farm boy. I guess what I meant was I couldn’t figure out two guys feeling that way.
    “Two guys get AIDS together,” said Cord.
    He was fooling with a thick, black perma-marker he’d used to make a sign advertising the pickup for sale. We’d fixed it up in the window behind the gun rack, hoping to attract a buyer. Cord had his eye on a secondhand Dodge with a larger truck bed.
    He was making a big black heart, with EVIE LOVES PATSY inside it, on a hunk of cardboard.
    “Do you think being a dyke is sinful?” I asked him.
    “ Hell no! It’s not serious enough to be a sin. It’s kid stuff. Two women is … Now two men—that’s another matter. That’s sin in the Bible.”
    “What are you doing that for?” I looked at the black heart he was drawing with their names inside.
    “I’m fooling around. I had to take the whole afternoon off because of them, didn’t I? Patsy could have