by Rita Durrett
either woman on her own half-acre lot. This was quite common for Mr. McCoy's customers. Whenever anyone brought him a vehicle for repairs or picked one up after its repairs were completed, Mrs. McCoy was never around, but Mrs. Hatfield was.
Now as I've said, Hometown is a good conservative American community, and good conservative Americans have a duty to keep aware of what people around them are doing in order to do whatever may be necessary to make sure no one does anything that isn't good, conservative and American. So the people who saw Mrs. Hatfield in the place where they expected to see Mrs. McCoy were morally obliged to bring this to the attention of other townsfolk. And they did. Thus, in short order everyone in Hometown knew something highly unusual, highly inappropriate and highly immoral was happening at the Hatfield and McCoy places.
A major reason why we good conservative Americans are universally admired and respected, at least by the better class of people, is our charitable disposition, our willingness, indeed, our eagerness to find some reasonable, non-culpable reason for immoral behaviors. It took a while to figure out such a cause for the Hatfield-McCoy situation, but in time everyone hit upon the probable exculpatory explanation: Some aphrodisiac had infected the Hatfield and McCoy half-acre lots. Perhaps it had somehow gotten into the water of their respective wells, or maybe it was a reaction between the chemicals Hatfield was using on his flowers and the soil on his lot, or perhaps it was the strong solvent McCoy was using to clean engine parts. But whatever it was, the four people probably weren't themselves as morally deprived as their behavior. According to this idea, they were probably the victims of some unknown chemical.
Whatever your scientific opinion of the aphrodisiac hypothesis, you have to concede it showed a high degree of charitable forgiveness on the part of Hometown's citizens. Nevertheless, it was creating a potential serious problem. People were sneaking onto the Hatfield and McCoy lots in the middle of the night to steal soil and/or water samples. Luckily, the owners of the properties had not taken up arms against these trespassers, probably because in the middle of the night they were preoccupied and had never noticed. So nobody had yet been shot. Any day, however, that might change. And who knows who's body might be found some morning, bullet hole in head and water sample jar in hand?
But in some other ways the aphrodisiac notion, and especially the cross-coupling that had led to it were already causing problems, disrupting the town's ordinary necessary activities. For example, they were making the high school bus chronically late and causing an increase in the cost of its fuel. This happened because the giggling and snickering when the bus passed the Hatfield and McCoy places had gotten so totally out of hand the driver had been forced to change his route, to make a big, long, fuel wasting detour away from those properties each morning and afternoon in order to keep from salaciously stimulating and morally damaging Hometown's innocent but impressionable teenagers.
Because of things like the school bus problem, a couple of the town's fathers quietly came to me and suggested that, since as the real estate broker who had sold them their half-acre lots and therefore the person who knew the parties better than anyone else in Hometown, I should go out to both the Hatfields and the McCoys and quietly inform them that townsfolk knew what was happening out there, and, aphrodisiac or not, it should stop. It was a delicate assignment, but as a good conservative American I felt obliged to undertake it. So on the pretext of just seeing how they were doing, I drove out and chatted with each of the husbands. Without ever saying anything direct or specific, I tried to leave enough fairly obvious hints to let each man know that the townsfolk knew what was going on, that they didn't approve, and that they wanted it stopped.
As much as I could, I tried not to be accusatory or judgmental. I was subtle, but I wasn't obscure. I was sure the two couples got the town father's message and knew that everyone knew about their cross-coupling and highly disapproved of it. However, the goings on going on on those two half-acre lots didn't stop. As I learned from them later, the couples got the message alright, but they decided they couldn't let gossiping and rumors control them. They were testing the reliability of their altered love attachments, and the test was vital to how they would live the rest of their lives. So they resolved to keep up the testing till they were sure of the results. They couldn't allow themselves to be forced into a premature bad decision. They had to be sure the new mating arrangement was the best and only thing for them to do.
The four hadn't set any specific criterion for making a decision, but an appropriate venereal one naturally evolved during their cross-coupling tests. That first tentative week when the wives were every day shuttling back and forth between houses, every night each couple enjoyed several of those encounters which would have been considered conjugal encounters if the parties had been married to each other. In fact, none of the four got much sleep that week. However, when the wives moved in with their new lovers, each of the newly partnered couple's ardor subsided considerably to a once-a-night event. But after a month or two things with each new couple settled down to the two-to-four-times-per-week frequency which the sex researchers tell us is normal with married couples. When the cross-couplers got to this level and still felt completely satisfied with their new partners, they decided the time had come to make the new mating arrangement permanent. Both of the couples then hired me to file for divorces.
V
For privacy they might have gone to one of those hotshot, big city lawyers. But that would have been much more costly and inconvenient. Both men were doing well in their respective businesses, but neither was getting rich. They couldn't afford to change their business locations the way they were exchanging wives. So no matter how or where they got divorced, they would have to continue living in Hometown where folks could easily see exactly what had happened. Furthermore, by the time the couples filed for divorces they knew that everyone in Hometown knew about the cross-couple coupling going on the Hatfield and McCoy half-acre lots. So going out of town to get their divorces wouldn't have preserved their privacy.
I must say, handling those two divorces was completely unlike any other divorce cases I've been involved with. To save money, I was the only lawyer on the two cases. This was possible because there was no disagreement. Neither couple was fighting, they all simply had fallen in love with their neighbor. So there was none of the vicious arguments, open resentment and bitter recrimination which accompanies most divorces, none of the hostility which in all my prior experience was detectible just under the surface even when it wasn't openly expressed. I never had to run back and forth between parties because they couldn't be in the same room for more than five minutes without coming to blows. In fact, all our client-lawyer meetings included all four clients. We would meet, sometimes at the Hatfield house and sometimes at the McCoy house, where we all would sit around the kitchen table amicably discussing and resolving matters, with the lady living in the house, who of course wasn't yet the lady of the house, serving coffee to everyone. If we had been planning the next PTA bake sale things couldn't have been any more pleasant and productive.
Because of this, I became firmly convinced that a change of affection, and not sexual hanky-panky, was the sole and genuine cause of everything that had gone on with the two cross-coupling couples. After all, if they had just been playing sex games, as many Hometown citizens claim, why would they have gone to the bother, expense and public embarrassment of divorcing and remarrying? They could have just thumbed their noses at everyone in Hometown and gone on with their sexual play.
And in our meetings all four expressed regret for the effects which their affection testing cross-coupling had had on townsfolk, especially on the town's children. They asked me about such things, and when I told them, using the high school bus problem as an illustration, all four were genuinely ashamed and sorry.
As a good conservative American I do not condone mate exchanging. I strongly disapprove of the sexual infidelities that led up to it, and I esp
ecially disapprove of the immoral cross-coupling way the McCoys and Hatfields tested their changed affections. Still, as I worked with them, trying to help them straighten out their marital mess, I became strongly convinced that all four sincerely hoped that with remarriage to their newly found true loves things in Hometown would settle down. I truly believe each of the four hoped that with time folks in Hometown would forgive and forget their cross-coupling tests and accept the new couples as regular Hometown citizens. And maybe in time they could even become good conservative Americans too.
Our state doesn't have those so-called no-fault divorce laws where a couple can just call it quits and the courts have to go along. In our state a couple has to show evidence that a husband or wife has broken their marriage vows. That's why depositions had to be taken. With all that had gone on out on those two half-acre lots, these depositions provided more than enough evidence of broken marriages. So although our judge is a good conservative American, he had no recourse but to grant the divorces. Nevertheless, immediately after granting them,
