450
PARTISAN REVIEW
easy to tell a virgin. According to the local wits, when you push a girl
over and she just lays there, it means she's willing.
If
she gets up again,
she ain't.
Most of the time, we work all day, eat supper, and then to bed.
However, there's plenty to do, if you want entertainment.
On cool fall evenings you can go fox hunting. You get up on top of
a hill with a jug of whiskey and listen to the hounds chasing the fox over
the hills. Every man knows his own hound's voice, and it's easy to follow
the chase that way. Then you take another drink and listen to the next
tall story.
You can go hunting or fishing. There's deer and wild turkey and
quail and squirrel in the woods, and bass and cat-fish and buffalo and
perch in the creeks.
You can get up a square dance, and I personally don't know of any
finer fun. Almost everyone can play a fiddle or pick a gittar, and with
somebody to call the figures, you're all set. On Saturday nights you can
go to town and drink beer and round-dance in the honkey-tonk to the
blaring music of a nickelodeon.
There's almost always a revival somewhere in the neighborhood for
those int:lined to religion. In the summer we build brush arbors and have
revivals lasting a couple of weeks. We sing the old hymns, and the
preacher thunders against whiskey-drinking and card-playing and dancing,
and after things get warmed up the women begin to scream and roll on
the ground.
Here lately a lot of women evangelists have been going through the
hills holding revivals. They wear shiny silk cloaks and play on trombones
and accordions and sing in rasping, husky voices and bellow out sermons
much in the manner of barkers at a county fair.
Going to town on Saturdays
is
the big thing. The whole family piles
into the Ford or into chairs set in the wagon bed. The men meet their
friends and talk crops and politics. The women drag the children about
through the stores, pricing calico and exchanging gossip with their friends.
If
the town is big enough, there will be a Wild West movie that night, but
it usually costs too much. In our little county seat we have a movie once
a week in the Legion Hut. Last week we saw "The Hunchback of Notre
Dame."
On
Sundays we go visiting or have company. The whole family makes
the visit, and it lasts all day. The young uns play and fight together, the
womenfolk help with the cooking and exchange news, and the menfolk
sit on the porch and swap yarns.
Everybody in the county knows everybody else, and usually everybody
is related to everybody else, in a complicated scheme of second-cousin·
three-times-removed that the womenfolk have to keep track of. Grampaw's
exploits in the Civil War are still a matter of conversation, but Cousin
Logunza's adventures over in France during the World War don't make
much impression. That was too far away, whereas you can still see the
