It’ll Do – LOVE STORY OF MAVIS McEWN

It’ll Do
Copyright William J. Conaway, 1989

Chapter 16 – LOVE STORY OF MAVIS McEWN

 
“I’m not the best person to be telling this,” said J.C. “But I guess I know Mavis about as well as anyone here. She’s my friend”.

No-one would have thought it—after all, Mavis is somewhere on the long side of forty. If you haven’t been dumb enough to fall in love before that age, its no time to start and Lord knows, not with him.

Who was he? Well, Sully didn’t know, nor any of the rest of us either. He had come into the It’ll Do several times and we under- stood that he was out of Kansas City looking over places for a new Wal-Mart.

Every time I saw him his shoes were shined and he wore a coat and tie. He had a city hair-cut, and he was polite in a way that had nothing to do with being polite. How he attracted Mavis, I don’t know, but it wasn’t by reciting poetry.

“Now, Mavis doesn’t have any money to speak of, at least not that I could tell. She looks all right, but nothing that you’d send a snap-shot to all your friends about”.

The feeling in the It’ll Do was, it was love on her part—we all knew exactly what HE was interested in.

“I want to describe Mavis, because you don’t know her. Perhaps you should: she’s one of the best people in Cherryville. She is a librarianand looks like one. Except she smiles a lot and there’s nothing phony about it”.

“She makes everyone at the bar feel a little better when she comes in. She showed up in Cherryville about fifteen years ago. She had her Teaching Certificate but got a job in the county library instead. I wasn’t in town at the time, but I know she took over the library and made a popular place of it. When I got back in town she had some of the retirees reading right along with the kids. I don’t read much myself”.

“She doesn’t dress like an old maid school teacher, everything is well packaged. She wears her hair long, and always smells nice. She’s like when the leaves are turning and the wind is coming from the north”.

“What did she see in this gopher from Kansas City?”

He was driving one of those four-banger foreign sports cars that, I’ll admit, looked pretty slick. The car was the best thing about him. He was a good five years younger than Mavis.

They came into the It’ll Do together and he went over and shoveled some quarters into the juke box. Sully should have been happy about that—it doesn’t get played that often. Then the dude slides and greases around, inviting Mavis to come out and dance.

Hardly anyone dances at the It’ll Do except, maybe when there’s some occasion and everyone has had a little too much and there’s an urge to jump around with someone else. There’s, this ass who thinks he is cutting some figure when all he is really doing is embarrassing everyone—Mavis included. She, being the Lady she is, acts as if she didn’t notice the dead silence that came over the people of the It’ll Do.

The music was going and the dude was singing along with it. She just slid into one of the booths and sat there until finally the guy gives up and goes over to join her.

I would very much like to tell you that I went over and bashed his head in, or even that Orville did. Or Sully—but he wouldn’t because he likes a quiet, family, sort of place.

Mavis McEwn would have had her head on a little straighter if the County hadn’t come in and changed the Library into a Computer/ Communications Center and took away most of the books and replaced them with what-all, Mavis changed. Even though she stayed on at the Carnegie Library as the new Computer Communication Center Coordinator, everyone could see that she was fit to be tied.

I was looking down into my glass of beer and brooding, thinking that this was no cause for her to take up with some dude who didn’t know how to pour piss out of a boot; no-one—and sure as hell not me—was going to sit around and see her get hurt.

Orville was looking into his beer and he didn’t look very friendly either. Sully had cleaned all the glasses around the bar a couple of times.

Normally Old Man Williams wouldn’t get up off his bar stool unless maybe it was for a fire, but he went over to where Mavis was sitting (the dude was up again, waltzing around the little dance floor alone with a beer in his hand). Now, Old Man Williams weighs the better part of four-hundred pounds. When he goes somehere you’d best be out of his way.

When I saw him going across the room I thought maybe he was going to go sit on the dude. I wanted him to. If you knew Old Man Williams, you’d know he never has much to say. So, naturally, I didn’t think he was going over there to talk. He kneeled down beside Mavis. It was quite a sight.

“Mavis, dear, there is not much left for me in my old age but to share my wisdom, with those I truly admire. I’ve come to know and love you through the years. I’ve seen your goodness. How you’ve inspired the children and the old folks. You’re a torch that lights Cherryville with a kindness and an appreciation for the best within us.”

Well you could have heard a pin drop then because the music had stopped and nobody had ever heard Old Man Williams talk so much before.

“Mavis,” he continued, “I going to beat this son-of-a-bitch to a rag picker’s pulp right here, or would you prefer that I take him out in the back to do it?”

Mavis breathed what we took to be a sigh of relief, and gave Old Man Williams a kiss on the cheek.

The last we saw of the dude was his back-side going out the door. Old Man Williams couldn’t pay for a drink that night. Nor all the next week—and they weren’t all drinks on The House, either.