Deelie
By Ayleene Thompson
Long before the accident and the
tragedy that changed her life, members of the Tuesday Morning
Bible Study Group referred to her as poor Deelie McDougle. While gazing
out the windows of the Butte City Tabernacle Holiness Church, they
sometimes spotted her bending down to pet the old bob tail tomcat
sunning in front of the post office next door, or noticed how skillfully
she picked her way around spots where roots of the giant red oak had
buckled the concrete sidewalk.
“She is quite nimble, for a large girl,”
one of the ladies might point out. “Poor Deelie. Martin married her on
the rebound after Clarisa broke his heart.”
Clarisa had caught the eye of Martin
McDougle on the first day she came to work as a teller at Butte City
Bank Of Commerce where he was head of Mortgages & Loans. Within the
month he had escorted the willowy blond girl to the July Fourth
fireworks display and three times they had driven across the mountain
to Beeville twenty miles away to clog dance.
Martin’s mother, Maggie McDougle,
confided to the shampoo woman at the hair dressers where she kept a
standing ten o’clock Friday morning appointment that she was not pleased
to see her son involved with a young person who was always traipsing off
to beauty pageants, a girl living in a double wide with a father who
raised thoroughbred horses but admitted he didn’t know jack about
bringing up a headstrong daughter.
“Still,” Mrs. McDougle had been quoted
as saying, “the two of them could produce fine looking grandchildren.”
A tall muscular man, Martin’s hazel eyes
twinkled when he smiled and he always wore brightly colored bow ties
with the dark blue suits his mother picked out for him. He had a gap
between his upper front teeth, which some of the older citizens called a
mark of virtue.
“You can trust a man with a gap,” they
said.
By the end of summer, Clarisa had agreed
to marry Martin, but two days before the wedding she left town with his
diamond and emerald ring still sparkling on her finger. She went with
the lean swarthy man who had come looking for her, claiming to represent
a modeling agency in Atlanta. He said he had seen her picture in the
newspaper the year she was crowned queen of the Miss Crape Myrtle Beauty
Pageant.
Clarisa just up and went without a word,
deserted Martin in the shadow of the altar, was how his mother described
it.
Deelie, a young woman who worked
week-ends only at the pastry shop she owned, was hired by the bank as a
temporary replacement. She was short, stout and plain as Clarisa was
tall, slender and stunning, which prompted an employee in Investments
Service to remark that Deelie was not likely to bring home any beauty
trophies.
On Martin’s thirtieth birthday
celebration that year, Maggie McDougle invited a small group of friends
to her home to share her traditional chocolate layer cake served with
raspberry sherbert and little triangles of wheat bread topped with cream
cheese and pineapple. After the last guest had left, the maid who came
to tidy up said she overheard Mrs. McDougle say to Martin it was time he
got down to the business of starting a family.
“She told him she wasn’t getting any
younger and neither was he. She said if he didn’t have a child to carry
on the family lineage by the time she passed, his inheritance from her
estate would go to the Maggie McDougle Shelter For Abandoned Animals.”
Deelie and Martin got acquainted the
following week in the snack room at the bank. He was sitting at a table
near the door when she came in for some nacho chips and a Pepsi. After
introducing himself, he asked if she had registered downstairs in the
lobby for a chance to win two tickets to the John Wayne Film Festival on
Saturday night.
“He was my favorite actor,” Martin said.
“Mine, too,” Deelie smiled. “My very
favorite.”
They went together to the festival and
the next week-end to a folk music concert over in the next county.
Before the new year was under way, she accepted his proposal of
marriage.
After the wedding ceremony, Mrs.
McDougle gifted the couple with money for a down payment on a gray stone
house with four bedrooms and a fenced back yard overlooking the valley
of silvery spruce pines. Deelie interspersed their pieces of new
furniture with heirlooms: an antique corner cupboard, two mahogany drop
leaf tables and the blue fainting couch that had belonged to her
great-grandmother.
Maggie McDougle confided to members of
her Sunday school class that the new home was indeed tastefully
furnished.
In the mornings after Martin kissed
Deelie goodbye and left for the office, she sat at her desk in the
breakfast nook and looked out the windows at the ridges along the
mountains where, in winter, snow lay white and silent. She wrote stories
about a dog named Flippo, the dog who meowed like a cat. In the evenings
when she heard the rumble of her husband’s car in the driveway, she
swept the pages into a stack and hid them inside a locked drawer.
Their little girl, Sarah, was born the
second year after they married. As she grew, her hair lay in gold
ringlets and her teeth were like little kernels of white corn.
Occasionally, upon seeing her, one of the elderly ladies might
discretely whisper to another that some day Sarah would become lovelier
than Clarisa .
Clarisa began to make trips back to
Butte City for Christmas holidays to visit her ailing father. Each time
she seemed more blond, more supple and beautiful than before. Deelie,
who had developed a scattering of varicose veins and added weight since
giving birth, acknowledged her with a tight lipped smile when they met
by chance one night at the Elk Club’s winter dance party. Clarisa had
come alone, saying she was no longer with the man who had come to Butte
City looking for her, that he had left her in New Orleans..
Two of Martin’s co-workers, who were
standing near the dance floor when Martin and Deelie waltzed by, said
Martin didn’t seem to notice that Clarisa gazed at him with a hungry
sadness in her eyes.
After they left the party, Martin
stopped at the Polar Bear Ice Cream & Sandwich Bar. While he picked up
Deelie’s order of a chocolate malted and double order of fries, she
telephoned home to remind the sitter that Sarah’s cough medicine was
in the refrigerator if she should need it.
On Sarah’s fifth birthday, Deelie
buckled her in the back seat of the car and headed for Beeville to watch
the troop of clowns and acrobats perform in the traveling circus. It was
a morning in early autumn. Wispy patches of fog still hovered over the
hollows and the first splashes of reds and yellows had started to brush
the tree tops along the high ridges. Later that day, a neighbor recalled
waving to Deelie at the stop light before she entered the highway.
The accident happened just outside the
town limits of Beeville. An eyewitness to the tragedy said the truck
loaded with sheets of plate glass went out of control on the steep
downgrade of the mountain road and slammed into the rear of Deelie’s
car. Sarah, when it was over, still sat upright in her seat. Her head
lay on the floor, severed from her body by a jagged piece of glass.
Weeks later Deelie left the hospital
with her right arm in a cast and her face laced with rows of angry red
stitches. When friends came to bring a potted plant, or if they saw her
walking along the street, nobody seemed to know what to say or to look
directly into her eyes. Their glances appeared to be unfocused, as
though they must greet her quickly and be on their way.
“The poor thing,” a woman whispered to a
friend one morning while waiting in the check-out line at the grocery
store. She wiped the tears from her eyes at the sight of Deelie pushing
an empty shopping cart back and forth past the mound of cabbage heads
stacked one on top of another in the produce department.
Clarisa came back to town that year for
the annual Christmas dance at the Elk’s Club. She wore a red sheath
dress that accentuated her thinness and the pale skin low on her back.
Deelie, who insisted on going to the dance despite Martin’s protests
that she needed to rest, covered her scars with a heavy application
of medium beige blemish concealer and drank three double vodka
martinis, one after another, before Martin took her home and put her to
bed.
Deelie began to write again, more
stories about the dog named Flippo, and hiding them in the drawer with
the other pages. One day when the holidays were over, she put away her
typewriter, dropped a sharp knife and a hairbrush in her pocket and
drove across town to the new K-Mart. A clerk who was taking inventory in
the toy department said Deelie walked up and down the aisle, starring
at the rows of dolls before taking one of the more expensive ones off
the shelf.
“She just stood there, brushing its long
blond hair,” the clerk later told the store manager, “and then she
whipped out a knife and chopped off its head.”
The officer investigating the incident
said Deelie’s screams could be heard outside in the parking lot. He said
to his wife at supper that it was the saddest sight he had ever seen ,
this poor woman cradling the severed head of a doll against her breast,
brushing its long blond curls. And the wailing, he said, the awful
sounds of her sorrow.
Later, Maggie McDougle told one of the
members of her garden club, when Martin took Deelie away to the
sanitarium in Nashville she hardly carried a thing with her except the
clothes on her back and a drawer full of papers. The ladies all agreed
he had no choice but to commit her to the psychiatric clinic. Poor
Deelie might never be quite right again, they sighed, and speculated on
what would happen now that she was gone and Clarisa was moving back to
take care of her father.