Fickle Women

Masseyville, a whistle-stop whose porches sag under the weight of gossip, greets its doughboy with silence; Calvin Price, lungs still rattling with cordite, steps from the train into a hush so absolute it hums. Janie Cullison—once the copper-bright coin of his every trench-night thought—has swapped promises for Lin Sparklin’s ring, and the town’s tongue, forked and venomous, has already licked Calvin’s name clean of honor. His mother, face a crumpled telegram, refuses the salute of a mother’s eyes; the grocer, the parson, even the mongrel cur, turn away as though cowardice were contagious. Calvin, bewildered, tastes the ash of rumor: that he hid behind supply crates, that he swigged contraband gin while boys bled. The Sparklin brothers—two scarecrows stitched from envy—have seeded the lie. In the gas-lamplit dusk Calvin drags truth like a bayonet across their fiction, forcing public retraction; suddenly the same lips that cursed him now chant his gallantry. Janie, draped in remorse like a widow’s veil, kneels for absolution, but Calvin’s heart has already emigrated to Rosy Redhead, the girl who wore loyalty as quietly as a wildflower wears scent.