Charlie is my Darling. Her sweet tenderness had cracked the ugly crust I’d carried south from Edgefield. From the dull clay of melancholic anger she had fashioned an irreverent fellow who loved to tease and banter, tell outrageous stories. Alone, we could talk seriously, and over time I would confide to her most though not all of what had happened in my boyhood. When finally I blurted out my pain and guilt about the awful way the Owl-Man died in that black ruin, she fell silent for a while and my heart pounded. Then she took my hand. “Our Redeemer always forgives a repentant sinner. We need never speak of this again.”
With my scrimped pay, I leased an old cabin on Robarts land just west of the plantation. The front door was gone and the back door, too. The one window was boarded closed and even those boards were half loose and awry. The roof had rotted under heavy moss and fallen deadwood from the live oak and the tin patches were dark copper red with scaling rust, but it would be our house and so I worked on it every spare hour.
One day I was mending roof with cedar shakes when Charlie stepped inside and peered up at the big hole under the peak, her elegant small head turned upward like the head of a slender tree snake paused on a sunlit branch. Seeing me silhouetted on the sun, she sang, “My hero! He Who Patches the Blue Sky!” Next came a cry of delight because just at that moment an oriole had flown in one window, out the other. “Did you see it, Mister? Our good omen!” she called.
I could not bear so much feeling any longer. I climbed down and took both her hands, asked her to marry. Those black eyes widened. Fearing I’d been too abrupt, I implored her to forgive me. “Give it some thought, at least,” I begged when tears came to her eyes. She raised a finger to my lips.
“I have given it far too much thought already. I shall marry you,” she whispered, kissing my cheek.
We dined in the oak shade out of her napkined basket. Afterward we lay together and we kissed, as we had done on so many desperate occasions, debating old spidery ideas of sin. This day we stopped without a word and turned our backs and clambered out of our cumbersome farm clothes. When I said “One-two-three,” we turned, not looking, starting to laugh. I stuck my hands out and when she took them we kneeled naked, facing, on the sun-warmed linen. Excepting the burned copper of our arms and faces, we were milky white. I drew her close and at once felt mysteriously complete.
We were brave virgins, shy and clumsy, but we trusted each other with all our hearts. Trembling, I laid her down and held her tight for a long while before kissing her cheek and her warm throat under her ears and at last her lips. But very soon my monkey hand wandered the small breasts and taut nipples, the silken skin of her inner thigh. When it touched her wetness, she gasped and closed her eyes. Her thigh slid over mine and I eased her over on her back and lay between her legs for near a minute, feeling blessed. When I realized that, awaiting me, the poor thing held her breath, I ran my hands under her hips and raised her gently, and she bent her knees as her legs rose. With a groan of relief, I entered that pearly glisten.
I was awkward and too urgent and I hurt her. Pain was the reason she cried out. A moment later, I cried out, too, as scent, touch, birdsong, Indian summer night were stitched into delirium by a magic insect walking the sun-warmed skin of my bare bottom. Afterward I lay astonished, home at last.
Shyness had returned when we sat up. On a cowardly and idiotic impulse, I took refuge from our silence in one of Sammy’s jokes. “You know what Woodson Tolen would have said if his son brought you home and told him you were still a virgin?” A bit puzzled, trying to smile, she searched my eyes. Wary then, she freed her arm, reached for her shift and held it to her chest. I should have stopped right there but did not know how. “ ‘Vir-gin?’ Ol’ Man Tolen would have hollered. ‘Hell no, boy! Don’t matter how sweet and purty that gal is! No virgins ain’t allowed, not in our Tolen family!’ ” I grinned, desperate to enlist her. “ ‘But Daddy-!’ the boy said. ‘Nope,’ says Tolen. “If that li’l gal ain’t good enough for her own men, she sure ain’t good enough for our’n!”
How could I stoop to such crude mockery of our Christian pieties? How could this innocent creature understand far less forgive such insensitivity at her bravest and most undefended moment? “Turn away, please,” she entreated. Covering my bloodied loins-so suddenly my shame-I turned my back on my beloved. We dressed without a word.
I pled for forgiveness, tried to walk her home. “I know the way,” she said, looking straight ahead. I stopped then, watched her disappear down the woodland lane. But not long after that, Lem Collins reported, when she overheard some Tolen in the store, she had to stifle laughter and would not say why. I knew why and was delighted, and soon thereafter, she accepted my apology.
She was fifteen then, I twenty-one, but she turned sixteen before we wed. Gaily she sang out “Miss Charlie Collins” when giving her name for the marriage record at Lake City. It is there still: November 24 of 1878. Thanksgiving.
Though raised by Mama an Episcopalian, I attended the Methodist services that the Collins clan had started with the Herlongs in a small house on what was now called Herlong Lane. I prayed hard, frowning, right up front where those tale-bearers from Edgefield could behold me and perhaps bear witness in their letters home that Ring-Eye Lige’s son was often to be seen down on his knees seeking redemption. This was not true. I was offering my fervent thanks to the Great Whoever who had blessed my life with such a loving bride.
As the months passed, I would learn Charlie’s heart perhaps better than my own. I still hear her little cries as we escaped mortality in each other’s arms and fell back awed. Who are you, Mister? But I only shook my head, kissing her softly until finally she hushed up and began to touch me.
“Now look what you’ve gone and done,” I’d smile. “Mister is my Darling,” Charlie whispered.