Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology

Jo Van Arkel

Jo Van Arkel Jo Beth (Walker) Van Arkel was born in Kansas City and within two weeks of her birth shuttled down to the Ozarks to be in the company of all of her relatives, living and dead. Her mother hailed from Hog Eye, otherwise known as Charity, Missouri. Her father was a Berryville, Arkansas, man. She received her MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Oregon and teaches writing at Drury University. Her stories have appeared in literary magazines including The Northwest Review, The Literary Review, Sou’wester, Elder Mountain, Big Muddy, Roanoke Review, and others. She is the author of three books: The Things I Got Growing Deep Down Inside, a collection of stories, and Give Me a Hat to Wear, a collection of poems, and In Dog Years, A Small Book of Short Shorts. She has a new book forthcoming. The short story “Swimming at Flat Bridge, 1963” won the Missouri Writers Biennial Award funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. qQ Swimming at Flat Bridge, 1963 Mother and Aunt Mel were already tight-lipped because we’d been swimming at Flat Bridge three hours with no sign of the men or even their flat-bottomed river boat. They got tight-lipped when the men went on weekend fishing trips by themselves. It was like they knew those men were having fun without them. Probably whizzing off the side of the boat and cussing and looking out for women sunning themselves on the river banks, and Mother and Aunt Mel didn’t like 173 it one bit. Only Aunt Wildeen didn’t seem to care. She was the youngest, and she had been sunning herself on the banks of the river by Flat Bridge all afternoon, while a few of the Poindexter boys stole glances at her as they paddled by in their underwear. She did look good in a bathing suit. She had on a two-piecer print of yellow flowers with bottoms that came to just below her belly button. Her blond hair was tied up in a red scarf. She was married to Uncle Benny, my dad’s youngest brother. They’d only been married three months. She was from Chicago, and she always kept her hair done up and painted her toenails and wore lipstick so red it was all I could see on her face when she talked to me. She had never been outside of Chicago until she married Benny, and they moved back home. She called herself “Pioneer Wildeen” and said her friends from high school would never believe she could move this far south. She typed letters and mailed them off and got letters back from places like Milwaukee and Toledo. I watched her type once when I was over at their house to bring Uncle Benny my dad’s monkey wrench so Benny could work on his bathroom pipes. She typed a whole page in about a minute. Her name before she got married was Wildeen Wilde. I remember that because I read it on the invitation, and because at the party after the wedding my Uncle Benny, who was already drunk before he even stepped up to the altar, took my daddy by the lapels and danced around the room with him saying, “I married a Wilde woman!” I was in the wedding. I threw flower petals on the floor just before Wildeen marched down the aisle in her wedding dress. I was thirteen, and it was the first time I’d ever worn a long dress, and it wasn’t bad except for the girdle and nylons, and the lace on my slip which made me break out in a rash. For some reason Aunt Wildeen liked me from the first time she met me. Uncle Benny had brought Wildeen over for dinner to meet Daddy, and when Benny said, “Oh yeah, and this is Esther,” Wildeen came straight over to me and shook my hand. “You’re tall for your age,” she said to me. I nodded and let go of her hand. “Your hair’s too short and could use a perm,” she said. She studied my face. “You’ve got good bone structure though. You’ll always be pretty ’cause you’ve got good bone structure.” 174 Jo Van Arkel Benny thumped me on the head as he walked into the family room where the ball game was going...