Temperance

A cautionary tale, unnamed but unmistakable

Temperance herself directed AI to create this image of her. The author was not consulted.

Temperance Wigglesworth was a floozy to her core, and her shenanigans caused many a kerfuffle every Saturday night.

Now, you’d think a name like Temperance would breed a woman of restraint, a churchgoer, a doily-crocheter, someone who says “my stars” when the toast burns. You would be dead wrong, and dead is nearly what she made half the men in Cudgel Falls before she was through with them.

She kept company with a rapscallion named Ferdinand Butts, a man so thoroughly a ne’er-do-well that the local reverend used him in sermons as a cautionary tale, unnamed but unmistakable, everybody in the third pew turning to stare at the back row where Ferdinand sat picking his teeth with a matchstick and grinning like the devil’s own errand boy. Temperance loved him the way a raccoon loves a garbage can, completely, and without a lick of shame about it. Her mother had wanted better for her. Her mother had wanted a lot of things, and got exactly none of them.

The kerfuffle in question started, as kerfuffles do, with gin and a misunderstanding. Temperance had been canoodling with Ferdinand behind the feed store when Mildred Applewhite, a woman built like a grain silo and twice as immovable, caught the two of them and let loose a shriek that startled every crow off every fence post in the county. Mildred had designs on Ferdinand herself, designs she’d been nursing for three years the way some women nurse a grudge or a sourdough starter, and seeing Temperance there with her hand in his coat pocket, presumably fishing for his flask, was more than her constitution could bear.

What followed was not a fight so much as a full-blown hornswoggle of the senses. Mildred came at Temperance swinging a rolled-up copy of the Cudgel Falls Gazette, Ferdinand tried to play peacemaker and got clipped across the ear for his trouble, and Temperance, never one to take a beating lying down, grabbed a bucket of chicken feed and flung the whole business skyward. The chickens, sensing opportunity where others saw chaos, arrived in force. There is nothing quite like forty Rhode Island Reds descending on a catfight to change the tenor of an evening, and change it they did. Mildred fled. Ferdinand fled. A rooster named Deacon took a personal interest in Temperance’s ankles that lasted the better part of a block.

By the time the sheriff arrived, summoned by a neighbor who described the scene only as “some manner of tomfoolery involving poultry,” Temperance was sitting on the feed store steps, hem torn, hair full of straw, laughing so hard she’d gone silent, which anyone who knew her will tell you was the only warning sign that ever mattered. The sheriff, a patient man named Elijah Pruitt who had hauled Temperance in for public malarkey no fewer than eleven times that year, didn’t bother writing anything down. He just sat next to her on the step, took off his hat, and asked if she’d saved him any gin.

She had not.

He stayed anyway. He always stayed anyway, and everybody in Cudgel Falls had noticed it, and nobody had the nerve to say it out loud, least of all Elijah, who could arrest a man for spitting on the sidewalk but couldn’t manage a sentence about how he felt.

“You ought to arrest me one of these days,” Temperance said, picking a feather out of her collar. “Properly. Cuffs and all.”

“For what?”

“Disturbing the peace. Corrupting a rooster. Wasting a decent lawman’s whole Saturday.”

Elijah looked at his boots for a while and didn’t answer that. Ferdinand came limping back eventually, one boot missing entirely, his coat torn where Deacon had apparently decided a man’s backside was as good a target as any woman’s ankles. He didn’t apologize for running. Men like Ferdinand never did. He just flopped down on the step on the other side of Temperance, sandwiching her between himself and the sheriff like the world’s worst church pew, and asked whether anybody had thought to check on Mildred.

“She’ll live,” Temperance said. “Woman’s constitution could survive a train wreck.”

“That’s unkind.”

“It’s true too. I’m allowed both.”

The reverend, watching from the church steps across the square, shook his head the way he always did on Saturday nights, and went inside to write next week’s sermon, which everyone already knew would feature an unnamed woman of loose character, and which everyone already knew Temperance would sit through Sunday morning, late, hungover, singing louder than the choir, chin up, daring him to say her name.

She never gave the sheriff his handkerchief back. He never asked for it. That, more than the chickens or the Gazette or any of it, was the closest thing to a confession either one of them ever managed, and it sat between them for years, unspoken, the way most of the true things in Cudgel Falls did.