Men, Women and Rattlesnakes by Franklin P. Collier Jr

Author:Franklin P. Collier Jr. [Jr., Franklin P. Collier]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: 1930's Farm Life, Noir, Wry Humor, Misogyny
Publisher: William Godwin Inc.; New York
Published: 1933-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXVIII

PAUL TURNER PRESCRIBES AN ABORTIFACIENT

MAY CLINE was very much irritated by the fact that she was going to have a baby. She had been complimented on her increase in size by her mother, who was pleased to have her daughter gain weight and assured May that the extra poundage would soon be circulated about her body in a more proportionate manner.

“What we eat goes into the stomach, you know, and stays there until the body takes it to other places,” she said.

Andrew Cline’s comment, “Is it goin’ to be a boy or a girl?” had been squelched by his wife’s reply, “Your evil mind will be askin’ next whether Miss Hummer’s baby’s goin’ to have a baby.”

May’s somnambulations had not been made on the usual regular schedule of late and had recently been discontinued altogether. When nobody else was in sight, she often spoke to Paul Turner, who worked for her father and lived in a room in the rear of the kitchen. He tried to avoid these private interviews.

“You can’t say it was me,” he would insist before May had a chance to speak. “It’s so dark out there in the barn you couldn’t tell who it was.”

“But it was you, and you’ve got to do something

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about it,” she would reply. “You said everything was goin’ to be all right.”

“And so ’tis,” he would answer, “I can prove I been goin’ with Minnie Muller all this time.”

“But you said you was just goin’ with her so they wouldn’t suspect us.”

“And so I was. I been goin’ with her. You don’t know who you been goin’ with.”

May Cline did not want a baby. What would she do with it? It would be like playing with a doll again except that this doll could move and cry whenever it wanted to. She couldn’t throw it into a corner and forget about it when she wanted to play something else.

A baby would play with her, rather than she with it. Whenever it screamed she would have to go and see what it wanted, or try to find out what it wanted. A baby could only make noise. It couldn’t talk so that she could understand it. She would have to bring silence by experimental offerings of things she thought might be desired. It would be like trying to silence a live and drunken idol that insisted on having a certain sacrifice placed before it but could not remember what it was.

This live doll would be her dictator. Whenever it decided to call her, day or night, she would have to respond. Babies probably cried several times a day just to amuse themselves by having their mothers run to them.

If she could have had a baby when she was a little girl and liked to play with dolls it would have not

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been so bad. She would have enjoyed the live doll part of the time at least. And, being nearer to babyhood herself, she could have understood its whims better. She might have been able to understand what it was talking about.

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