Rose remembers her rebellious stage:
I cringe at some of the stunts I pulled when I went through my
rebellious stage. Like climbing out my bedroom window and stealing my
father’s truck to drive to a bar in the city to meet Clel Lightener. Oh,
Clel was the cutest boy at our high school. He was also the only
sophomore old enough to get into a bar. I sat in the truck for hours,
paralyzed with fear. I kept thinking to myself, “What is a simple
Protestant farm girl doing in the parking lot of a gin mill in a flashy,
fast-paced city like Tyler’s Landing?”.
I marched up to the door, and I
ran right into Reverend Mackenzie coming out of the bar on the arm of
Millie Beasley, wife of Emmett Beasley, our town’s most decorated war
hero. Emmett received three Purple Hearts…all for head wounds. He ran
the feed store in our town. ‘Course, if the truth be known, Millie was
the one who had to make change for the customers.
Oh, sorry. Anyway, Reverend Mackenzie made a deal with me. He said if
I didn’t tell on him, he wouldn’t tell on me. So, I went home. He kept
my secret, till the day he died. Which was two days later. Emmett found
Millie and the Reverend skinny-dipping in the church’s fountain and he
shot the both of them. A week later we became Lutherans.
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