Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology

Gary Guinn

Gary Guinn Gary Guinn’s great-great-grandfather, a lieutenant in the Second Kentucky Mounted Rifles, moved his family to northern Arkansas after the Civil War. They have lived there ever since. Guinn was born in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and lives there now with his wife, Mary Ann, and his lab mix, Seamus, and his Corgi mix, Peanut. He is retired from teaching writing and literature at John Brown University. His novel, A Late Flooding Thaw, was published by Moon Lake Publishing in 2005. His poetry and fiction have appeared in a variety of magazines, a few of which are The Midwest Poetry Review, Carve, in which his story was a finalist for the Raymond Carver Prize, The Bryant Literary Review, Ghoti, Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozark Studies, and The Arkansas Literary Review. qQ Being a Doaks and All The boy was fifteen, tall and thin, uncomfortable in town, where people stared at him, at the faded overalls that hung on him like a sack, at the worn denim shirt, the sleeves not quite long enough. The girl walked up to him as he stood on the mercantile porch, waiting for Virgil. Her white blouse, clean and pressed, was tucked into the narrow waistband of a gray skirt. The lines of the pleats in the skirt dropped away from the curve of her hips. Her penny loafers were freshly polished. “You’re a Doaks, aren’t you?” she asked. “What’s your name?” He turned away. 67 She walked around to face him again, looked up into his eyes, daring him not to answer. “I said what’s your name?” He looked at his feet, then glanced at the closed and silent door of the mercantile. “You don’t look mean to me,” she said. “Ollie Delphia told me a body might better run up on a rattlesnake in a dry creek than meet a Doaks in close quarters.” Her brown eyes were steady and unblinking . “What’d she mean by that?” Her lower lip dropped in a moist curve beneath the slight shadow of her nose and the handful of freckles sprinkled high on her cheeks. The arc of flesh beneath her eyebrows rose above the long lashes. His thin frame leaned slightly toward the alley that ran down the side of the mercantile, as if drawn to it by invisible wires, but he stood rooted to the porch, his face flushed and his ears burning. He remembered the slumped figure of his mama the day Virgil made her drive him to town, the only time he ever remembered her leaving the farm. Job Fincher had looked out the window of the butcher shop next to the mercantile and had come out and stood on the porch and wiped his hands on his bloody apron and looked at her through the windshield and smiled the smile of a man who knows some private joke. She had stayed in the truck, gripped the steering wheel and stared at the hood. The boy wondered if he looked that way now to the girl. “Nate Farley says you can’t talk. Is that right?” The girl pushed her lips out. “Well? You can nod your head, can’t you?” The words lay heavy in the base of his throat—that his name was Mason, that she was prettier than the women pictured on the covers of the magazines in the rack in the mercantile. He swallowed. Pleasant Varner, the schoolteacher, had stood over him, her arms folded in weary silence, her tired face saying that his resistance must be a perversity of stubbornness. A boy, no matter how shy, could speak out, if only he chose to do so. The girl waited. His feet were brown with dust, and he wished he had worn his shoes. In the stinging absence of words he looked out at the street, across the square to the hotel, where Willie May Boseman had stood the day her husband Samuel was killed when he fell from the scaffolding there as Willie May waited for him to come 68 Gary Guinn down and eat the lunch she had brought. Mason had stood in the open square a few yards away, watching the men work. He remembered the look on Willie May’s face after Samuel fell, as she stood there without moving, holding the red bandanna, its corners tied up to make a sack for...