The Magic of Ordinary Days Read Free Page B

good life, Olivia.”
    Outside my window, locoweed growing along the side of the road made me recall the story of Johann Gottfried Zinn, an explorer who wandered the mountains of Mexico. When he discovered some purple flowers he had never seen before, admiring them, Zinn pulled the flowers and put them in his bag. When thieves later attacked him, they tore open his sack and found the wilted flowers. Assuming he was a simpleton, they let him go, believing it to be bad luck to harm the dim-witted. Perhaps if I bolted from the car and dove out headfirst into the wild grass, maybe they’d deem me unfit for marriage. Maybe they’d let me go, too.
    We came to the town of Wilson, which lay along the Fort Lyon irrigation canal. North of the Arkansas River and surrounded by farms and ranches that ranged from modest to impoverished, the town consisted of a church, cemetery, school, and post office. The reverend parked in front of a wood-framed church building covered with red peeling paint and topped with a narrow steeple complete with belfry. As Reverend Case showed us inside the church building, I again found it difficult to envision the friendship between my father and this man. Reverend Case had once studied alongside my father at one of the finest seminaries in the country. Certainly he could have served in many churches, but it seemed he focused his ministry out here by choice. After ushering us into the kitchen, the reverend said he would leave Mr. Singleton and me to ourselves for a spell, that he would await our decision in his office.
    Before the ceremony, it was one final chance to change our minds.
    Ray Singleton poured lemonade from the icebox and sat down across from me at a long table where I could easily imagine the church buffets spread out on Sunday after services. He cleared his throat but seemed unable to speak.
    â€œMr. Singleton,” I began.
    His cheeks reddened before he spoke. “Ray, please.”
    â€œRay, then.”
    I hoped he wasn’t too bashful to answer the question that had plagued me ever since first mention of this arrangement. Since the beginning of the war, the pressure on women to marry soldiers had been as powerful as the pressure put on men to enlist. It was everywhere: in the newspapers, magazines, songs, and movies. After all, the soldier was often heading to war to risk it all—his health, his body, his youth, even his life. A good girl didn’t have sex before marriage, so if a soldier wanted her, the best choice was marriage. In the popular movie The Clock, Judy Garland agreed to marry a serviceman within hours of meeting him. Women had been marrying soldiers they barely knew out of some patriotic code, but I wondered why a single man would agree to a union such as this one, sight unseen, and for no apparent benefit of his own. “I was wondering ...” But I was having trouble asking it. “I was wondering why you have agreed to this marriage.”
    He shifted his weight in the chair, and one deep line sank into the center of his forehead. “When the pastor come out to see me and told me about your situation, I thought ...” He paused and swallowed hard. “I thought, maybe it’d be God’s will.”
    God’s will. Hadn’t I been damning God and His will of recent? And had the reverend imposed some kind of religious pressure on Ray, similar to the patriotic pressure that had been placed on so many girls?
    Ray waited long enough to take one deep breath. “And seeing as how my folks are passed on, and my brother got killed over there at Pearl Harbor ...” He cleared his throat again, raised a loose fist to his mouth, and half coughed into it. “Out there at my place, it’s been right lonely lately.”
    Lonely, he said. Loneliness was a reason to marry I could accept. After all, marriages of convenience had inked the scrolls of history far back into earliest recorded time. Politics, power, greed, and graft,