Mary Frances Jilts Mr. Corder

Whilst Will Earp was courting me and Pa was saying No, I wasn’t idle. Or maybe I was, being in the primrosey choose-a-husband path of life, and it was my other suitor Mr. Corder who was busy. He had Pa’s consent, or he sure believed he had. He had already bought a house and installed a marriage bed. Maybe you could understand this better if I told a bit about Mr. Corder. His first name was Francis, the same as my name, and he come from a large and prosperous land-owning family over in the southwest corner of our township. There were so many of them, and with that big property they owned, they stayed around there till they filled up the cemetery they’d started. It’s called Corder Cemetery, and they must be thirty of them buried there, not to mention their kin. I knew three of them, Francis and two of his brothers or brothers-in-law and I didn’t cotton to any of them. 

I had a picture of the three of them Francis gave me that I kept a few years, I couldn’t tell you why, except out of some kind of sentiment that makes a girl want to remember another man who has proposed to her and how lucky she was not to have accepted him. It’s a studio photo, from the kind of place no one in my family ever had enough money to set foot in. Either, that or the background comes from some painted boards the traveling photographer brought with him. The Corder men are all suited up the same like three bears on a log basking in the sunshine. One has a lean hungry face and his ears stick way out. The other has a clean square cut face like politicians have, all jaw, and he looks like he’s thinking what a great man he’s bound to be someday. Then there’s Francis, the youngest, who looks like a stunned bullfrog after someone came up behind him and whopped him in the back of the head with a stick. Three Worldly Wisemen from the Town of Carnal Policy. To me they smelled of Vanity Fair. 

So I jilted Francis Corder. “Jilted”--I like that word. Sounds like tilt and stilt and joust. He lost that joust, I tell you. Took just one well planted blow from my lance to knock him off his high horse, though I got to say that he got right back up and over the years married three times before he went to his long rest. I never did try to learn whether he installed all the wives in that house and bed he bought. I wish him joy of them all. I showed that photo of the Corder boys to Will once and he had a good laugh at it. He agreed with me that I’d made the best choice. Yes ma’am, that’s what I call busy, buying a house and installing a marriage bed and only forgetting one small thing. Francis Corder had Pa’s consent, or thought he had, but he forgot to ask mine.