Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Stan DuncanApproximately 5,800 words57 Bradford Commons LaneBraintree, MA 02184standuncan@post.harvard.edu

The Indiscretion of Mary Jo Harwood

As I recall, it was the change over to the new trains that first brought them to Heavener. TheKansas City Southern was needing a whole new crew of big husky guys like Dave Harwood tolay new track for those big Nash 2000 locomotives they wanted to put in. They were phasing outthe older diesel trains and installing forty of GM’s new Nash series that could outrun anythingelse on the track. The new trains were much bigger than the diesels, so they hired on forty or fiftynew rail men to rework and reinforce pretty much the entire set of tracks all the way from KansasCity to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And that’s why Dave and Mary Jo Harwood moved to town.They moved here from somewhere up around Ft. Smith, Arkansas, where Dave had workedfor the parks department before he heard that the Kansas City Southern was hiring. He got onwith a work crew whose job was to tear down the old water tanks and phone boxes that wouldn’t be used anymore, and straighten out some of the nasty curves in the tracks so the new trainscould get through on them. Some of those old stretches, like the one coming out of the valley byRich Mountain down toward Mena, Arkansas, came close to being eighteen-degree turns, and thenew engines would be going too fast to make a curve like that.Dave was perfect for the kind of heavy work they were needing on the line. He stood aboutsix two and had a wide pair of shoulders. He threw cross ties around like they were firewood and1

loved doing it just to show off. In fact, his size would have made him look a bit scary except thathe jabbered on and on too much, and had this big beefy smile on his face too much of the time.When I first met him, that smile seemed real sweet and disarming, but it never went away and Ifinally decided that he had a little too much smile for one face. Eventually that too-big-of-a smileof his began to go sour on me. I began to get this eerie feeling that when he wasn’t out haulingrail or smiling at someone down by the drug store, he was strangling dogs or drowning cats andsmiling while he did it.Mary Jo, on the other hand, kept to herself and was always very quiet. Especially when shewas with Dave, she didn’t say much. She used to go to the Ladies’ Bible Class before church and —it was funny—she’d open up some in that class and say a few words now and then to the other women, but just as soon as it was over with, and Dave would come to get her, she’d clam up andnot say anything until they were way out of sight. It was sad, too, because once I got to know her I got convinced that all she wanted was to have people in town like her and accept her, but shedidn’t seem to have a clue as to how to go about getting that to happen.When they first moved to town, I misunderstood that shyness of hers, just like I’dmisunderstood Dave’s smile. I thought maybe she was mad or offended or something. But after awhile I figured out that if she was mad at anybody at all, it was probably her own self and not us.She was quiet, but also real self-conscious about her looks and her clothes and her people, andalmost anything else you could think of about herself. Most times it came out in the shyness, butoccasionally it showed up in ways that were more odd.I remember one of those times at a luncheon meeting of the Women’s Fellowship at thechurch. I’d been real pleased when I heard she joined the Fellowship, but even then she never got2

too close to any of the women. She went to most all their meetings, and worked hard on some of the projects, but she always held back, like she didn’t think she was as good as the rest of them.This day they had a lunch before their program, and so I got myself invited to the meal. Igenerally try to do that whenever the ladies in the church serve up food. There’s not much elsefiner in the whole world than cooking by church women, and I wouldn’t miss one of their mealsfor anything. They’d lay out table clothes and use their family china, and act like they’d puttogether a fancy spread. Invariably they would make too much food trying to impress each other,so at the end of the luncheon they’d all want to send some food home with me and I would eat potato casseroles and Jell-O-salads for a week.As it happened, I sat at a table just off to the side of the one Mary Jo was at and occasionallyI’d look up at her during the meal. As I recall she was eating politely and listening intently at allthe conversation going on, but not saying too much, which was normal for her. She was a quietthing. But what caught me was something she said during the program when they werediscussing changing the kind of booth we set up at the town fair. For years we’d been sellingthese crafts there that the women made, and most years we did all right with it. They made thingslike potholders, and refrigerator magnets, and a whole bunch of these little pink furry bunniesthat you put over a roll of toilet paper in your bathroom to keep people from thinking youactually kept toilet paper in your bathroom. But in recent years they hadn’t been making muchmoney on the crafts, and this day the subject came up to change our product.One new lady that had just converted over from First Baptist said that she knew for a fact thather Baptist friends had been making a whole lot more money than we were for some years now,and that they didn’t have nearly as much work put into it. What crafts were they making, thewomen asked? That’s just it, the woman said. It wasn’t crafts. All the while that the women here3