The Day Big Earl Got Married

Once, way back in the land of Golden Leaf, there was a man everybody called Snookum. It was planting time, and during planting time a person labored from sun to sun without stopping, since there was a window of days to get things completed for the entire year, and then it was make or break for the whole year. Well, near eleven o'clock in the morning, one day Snookum was plowing his field, and a dirty blue nineteen-sixties model Chevelle pulled off the dirt road on his side. A woman named Moonglow Mattie, dressed in a tattered ankle-length home-stitched gray skirt and wooden shoes, got out of the car, waddling out into the freshly plowed field toward Snookum sitting proudly upon his tractor seat.

“Hey, Snookum!” Mattie yells as she walks toward him. “Have you seen Big Earl lately?

   Snookum paused his 1940 Massey Ferguson tractor, shutting down the motor so he could hear what was being said.

“No, I haven’t!” He yells back. “What about him?”

“Well, he hasn’t come home in might-near two weeks,” Mattie said aloud to him, “We were all worried sick, to tell the truth. We didn’t know if he was in prison or dead.”

“I tell you what,” replied Snookum, “ I have this work to do right now, but if I see or hear anything, you’ll be the first I tell about it. And I clearly understand your concern about his condition, considering how big Earl lives these days.”

“Fair enough,” Mattie replies, and she waddles back out to the old, dirty blue car.

Two more weeks pass, and Snookum is out plowing his fields again. The same dirty blue Chevelle pulls off the dirt road, pausing. Out steps Mattie in what appears to be the same over-worn ankle-length dress.

“Well, Snookum, I just wanted to tell ya Earl came back home a day ago, all safe and sound.”

“Well, where was he?” Snookum asked as the tractor motor quietened.

“Big Earl ran off and got married!” Mattie replied.

“Married?! Hell, I didn't even know he was seeing anybody,” Snookum says to her.

  “Neither did any of us,” Mattie replies. “But he’s back home, and I guess that is about all we care about in the end.”

“Well, who was this woman?” Snookum asked with a half smile on his face.

“Name is Charmon Grinder,” Mattie said to him.

“I swear that name really rings a bell with me, but I just can’t seem to match a face with it, to tell ya the truth.” Sighs, “I tell ya what, soon as this planting is done, my days will slow and I will have a spare one, and I’m riding over there for the sole purpose of meeting this woman. I simply can’t stand it, I have to do that,” Snookum said to her.

“Fair enough, we’ll see you then, I guess,” Mattie says to him with no expression on her face. She then turns around, walking back across the freshly plowed dirt toward the faded blue car by the roadside.

Two more weeks of working from sunup to sundown, and finally, Snookum has a day to spare. At eight thirty in the morning, Snookum tips up his coffee cup and heads out the door of his home. He drives three miles down the road, taking a break in the road heading deep into the woods. After a mile of riding through the wilderness, the road turns sharply to the right. Slightly around the curb and off the roadside, fifty yards or so into the woods, sat a wooden shotgun cabin. Snookum pulls his beat-up brown 1950 Chevy pickup truck off the road and up to the front of the cabin door. He gets out of the truck, walks up the steps onto the porch, and then knocks on the heavy wooden door. The hound dogs behind the cabin are going crazy. The door snaps, and out steps Moonglow Mattie herself, totally void of any facial expression whatsoever.

“What might we do fer ya, Snookum?”

“I came here to meet Earl’s wife, remember?” Snookum asked her.

“Well, you know her. Her name was Charmon Grinder before she married Big Earl,” Mattie said to him.

“I declare that name sounds so familiar, but I want to meet her. Where is she?” Snookum asked in a voice of near astonishment.

“She sits right there,” Mattie tells him, flinging the heavy wooden door open, revealing a staggeringly unattractive woman donning patched-over faded jeans and a ripped-up tee-shirt sitting in a wooden chair up against the right-hand wall. She gazed over toward him with an expressionless, spaced-out appearance on her face. He could hardly look her in the face; she was so unattractive. Suddenly, the answer to his question dawns on him! It comes to him who she was. She was a prostitute downtown without clients due to her abnormal unsightliness. Earl may have been one of her few clients, and he paid her three hundred dollars for a single lay!

Suddenly, Snookum commences laughing to the point of collapsing there on the porch. He turns and places his forehead upon the wall. The thought kept reverberating through his mind: this woman certainly must have had some good crotch if Earl paid three hard-earned hundred dollars for a lay, but marriage? The thought was far too much for him to digest. He simply couldn’t shake it out of his mind.

“What ails you, man?” Mattie asks him. He turns to face her absolutely expressionless face.

Snookum grabs hold of his stomach, turns around, and then staggers toward the steps, laughing to the point of collapsing. He grabs the wooden railing on the steps, supporting himself while he staggers down, laughing to the point of near-crying. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t shake the thought out of his mind. First Earl paid the ugliest piece of crotch on earth three hundred dollars to lie with her, and now he’s gone and married her? The picture simply wouldn’t hold in his poor, rattled mind. He finally staggers over toward his pickup truck, catching himself on the door handle, laughing until he eventually collapses face down upon the grass. Finally, he gasps for a breath and rolls over on his back. Mattie is standing over him without any expression whatsoever on her face.

“My word, man, what on earth ails you today?”

The thought of everybody having such a lifeless face, speaking in a worn-out monotone. The fact that Big Earl paid the ugliest woman on earth three hundred dollars to lie with him. The thought that Big Earl actually married this woman simply overloaded Snookum’s poor bourbon, sun, and cigarette-wasted brain. When his laughing finally settled enough, Snookum took one more near-weeping gasp.

“Well, did he dare to tell you how much he paid to lie with this woman?” Snookum asked.

“Yeah, he did. Three hundred dollars,” Moonglow Marttie tells it with absolutely no expression on her face and in that same overbearing, worn-for-wear monotone.

Snookum finally makes it back up into his truck seat after a serious struggle and some time. He could hardly drive back home. All that day and for maybe a week afterward, he simply couldn’t shake that single thought out of his mind.