Enduring

by Donald Harington

  Jessica spoke, the first actual words Latha had ever heard her say. “Take me.”

  These words were addressed to the man in such a way that Latha wondered if Jessica was asking to have sex with him. But maybe she just wanted to be rescued too.

  The man said, “I caint. No time. Sorry.”

  Jessica said, loudly, “Take me!”

  “I’m sure sorry,” the man said, then he began pushing Latha out through the door.

  Chapter twenty-three

  The man closed the door and re-locked it, but even the door closed would not muffle the sounds of Jessica, who was sobbing, and then started loudly humming a message to Latha begging her to persuade the man to let her go along with them. There was nothing Latha could say, to her or to him. There was nothing Latha could hum to her.

  “Wait right here,” the man said, then moved quickly down to the corridor to a desk where Nurse Pritchard was sitting, sound asleep. The man gently laid a ring of keys on her desk. Then he returned to Latha quickly and said “Come on” for a second time and led her up the corridor stairway, past the fourth floor to the fifth. Down the corridor on the fifth floor he led her to a spot where there was a hatch leading to the attic, but he looked up at the hatch and smote himself on the brow. “Of all the boneheaded stunts!” he said. “How’m I gonna get back up there?” He looked around for a ladder or even a box to stand on, but could find nothing. There were storerooms all over the fifth floor, but they were locked. His face was creased with worry, even panic.

  He came back to Latha and put his hands on her shoulders and spoke very slowly and gently, “Now listen careful, Latha, here’s what we’ve got to do. I’m going to boost you up there and you climb up out through that hatch and then you’ll find a triangular vent-hole and right outside that vent-hole is my rope. A whole coil of rope. You get that rope and bring it back to the hatch and drop it down to me. Okay?”

  It was so difficult to figure out. She stared at him, as if she could read in his eyes some confirmation of the request. If he had been able to hum it to her, she would have grasped it better.

  “Kin you understand me?” he pled. “It’s our only chance. The rope, we got to have that rope. I’ll boost you up to the attic, and you’ll see that vent-hole that I opened up, and right outside it on the roof is a coil of rope. Bring me that rope.”

  All she could do was crane her neck and stare in the direction he was pointing, up at the hatch.

  He clenched his hands together and opened his palms to make a stirrup for her foot. She stared at the stirrup. “Come on, honey, you kin do it!” he urged. She put her foot in the stirrup, then raised her arms and put her palms against the wall. He began to lift. Up, up she went. When her feet were level with his chest, he unclenched the stirrup and got each of his palms under the soles of her feet and pushed upward until his hands were as high above his head as he could reach, and him on tiptoe. The blanket in which she was wrapped fell off of her and covered his head. Her fingers strove upward and felt the rim of the hatch. She caught hold. She tried to pull herself up. She strained. They had never given her any exercise at the asylum, and she was weak.

  She fell. He caught her, breaking her fall and falling with her to the floor, where they lay tangled together for a while getting their breath back. She could feel the tools he had in his pockets jabbing against her. He got up, sighing, and helped her to her feet. He covered her nakedness with the blanket again, knotting two corners of it around her neck.

  “Let’s try it once more,” he said. “See if you caint get your hands on the sides of the hatch, that way you’d have more leverage.”

  Again he made the stirrup with his hands. Again she rose slowly up the wall until her hands reached the hatch, one hand on one side, the other hand on the other. Again her feet left the palms of his hands. Again she began to strain, every muscle in her arms and shoulders exerting itself.

  She began to rise, but reached a point where she could strain no longer and was on the verge of falling again. Suddenly he leapt. He leapt upward mightily, shoving his hands upward against her feet and propelling her upward beyond the crucial point. She got her chest up onto the attic floor and clambered up and out of sight.

  But then she forgot what she was supposed to do next, if she had ever known in the first place. She wandered around the attic, which was hot and stuffy and filled with cobwebs which clutched at her. There was nothing up there. It was very dark. The only light was a glimmer of moonlight coming in through a three-cornered hole in the roof. She meditated upon that hole, struggling for a word she had learned in tenth grade geometry. Eventually it came back to her, giving its name: triangle. She heard a man calling her name down below the hatch. She pondered this enigma, trying to decide whether to move back to the hatch to the man, or to the triangle. She chose the latter after much thought, and peered out through the triangle. She could see the lights of the town in the distance and stars up in the sky along with the moon. She could also see, on the roof right outside the triangle, a coil of rope. And she remembered then what she was supposed to do. She clutched the coil of rope and crawled across the attic floor to the hatch. The man was very glad to see her, as if he hadn’t seen her for a long time. “Just drop it down,” he said, and she dumped the rope onto him.

  He fashioned one end of the rope into a lariat, with which, after two or three misses, he lassoed the dangling hatch-cover, pulled the rope tight, grabbed hold and climbed hand over hand up the rope with his feet braced against the wall until he could reach the hatch. He pulled himself up and through it, untied the lariat, and replaced the hatch cover, screwing the hinges back on it. “You had me worried there for a minute or two there,” he said. Then he led her out through the triangle. “Keerful you don’t fall off the roof,” he cautioned her. “Best keep one hand on my belt.” She gripped his belt. He replaced the louver in the vent opening, and bolted it back on. Then he fashioned a small loop on one end of his rope and dropped it over an iron finial atop a drainpipe on the corner of the roof’s edge. “Now here comes the tricky part,” he said. “There aint no way you could climb down that rope by yourself, so here’s what I want ye to do. “Just wrap your arms tight around my neck, okay?” She was uncertain and hesitated, so he reached back and took her hands and raised them and wrapped her arms around his neck and clenched her fingers together and said, “Hold on as tight as you can.”

  Then he threw the coil of rope down off the roof and it uncoiled down and down toward the earth. He knelt with her straddling him at the edge of the roof and grabbed hold of the rope and edged himself over.

  Then he began to lower himself, with the weight of her on his back, hand under hand down the rope. He dared not release one of his hands from the rope but had to slide them down the rope and she could smell the rope burning his hands. This made her panic at the thought of falling and she tightened her grip around his neck until she feared she was choking him. The thought of her choking him panicked her even more and she wished she could do something to stop choking him or to help him slide his burning hands down the rope. It was becoming so dreadful that she considered letting go of him and falling on her own. Were they still a long way from the ground? If she let go and fell, would it kill her or break all her bones?

  He was moaning with the pain of his burning hands and her choking him, but kept on making slow progress down the rope. There came a point where he just couldn’t stand it any longer, and he let go of the rope. But he discovered that he was standing on the ground.

  He collapsed. She collapsed with him and let go of her choke-hold on his neck, and finally he got his wind back and stood up. He lifted her to her feet. He looked up at the rope he had managed to climb down, still attached to the finial at the top of the drainpipe. He grasped the rope and gave it a whip, the whip waving upward almost but not quite to the top. He tried it again, and then a third time before the whip rose to the top, snapped, cracked, and the loop popped off the finial and fluttered to the ground. He coiled the rope and
said to her, “Okay, we’ve covered all our tracks. Let’s go.”

  The grounds of the asylum were deserted and they crossed them to the place where the man had left his automobile. He opened the door for her and got her into it, then threw the rope and his tools into the backseat, and got in. He started the motor and drove away.

  “You’re free, gal!” he cried. “Call me a monkey’s uncle if you aint free, by granny!” And as he drove he began whistling loudly and happily the tune of “She’ll Be Comin Round the Mountain When She Comes!” Latha hummed it quietly along with him, thinking of the possibility that she might never see Jessica again.

  She quietly uttered the first word she’d spoken since the time, months or years before, when she had tried to explain bluebirds and redbirds to Nurse Bertram: “Free.”

  She could not help feeling that her joy in freedom was all mixed up and confounded with her loss of Jessica. The tears which began to run down her cheeks could have been caused by either, or both.

  But the man had his eyes on the road and did not see her tears. He did not drive into Little Rock to cross the Arkansas River. He emerged from the park of the asylum into a dirt country road, and he kept to the backroads for a long time. He talked a blue streak the whole time, trying to be amusing, and she tried her level best to put a name to the voice she heard, which was so familiar and reassuring in contrast to the voices she’d heard in the asylum. She could not understand why, if unkind voices had driven her mute, she was not able to say anything in response to his kind voice.

  He told tales and jokes by the dozens that were meant to remind her of home. “You remember back when the big craze was riddles,” he would say, “and folks would stop strangers right on the road to try out some new riddle they’d heard? Well, I was riding up to Jasper one day with old Till Cluley when the wagon got stuck bad in the mud, clear up to the hubs. Ole Till was whipping all four horses and hollerin cuss words at the top a his voice. Just then this preacher from Parthenon come along and says to Till, “My friend, do you know the name of Him who died for sinners?” And ole Till says, “I aint got no time for no goddamn riddles. Caint you see I’m stuck in this son-a-bitchin mud?”

  And he would slap his leg and laugh, and then turn to see how she would be taking it, and she could only wonder if she had lost the power to laugh also. Try as she might, she would not be able to manage even a giggle at his jokes.

  Speaking of being stuck in the mud, those old backroads were in pretty soggy condition, what with the spring rains. Most of the time he would put the car in low gear and bull his way through, slipping and sliding wildly with the engine roaring. But a few times he got mired.

  The first time the car got stuck, he told Latha to get behind the steering wheel while he got out and pushed. But when he pushed her free she drove on for nearly a quarter of a mile before finding the brake, and that must have given him a bad scare, because the next time the car got stuck he made her get out and push, and pretty soon that blanket she was wrapped in was considerably splattered with mud.

  Then before long the car lurched into a mud hole that seemed more like quicksand than mud, so both of them had to get out and push together. It was very laborious, and by the time they got the car back onto a semblance of dry land, they were both covered with mud from head to toe.

  She stood there panting and staring at him in that fine pin-striped suit all covered with mud. The dawn was coming up. Something about his muddy appearance, and an awareness of her own weird appearance in a mud-soaked blanket, suddenly got through to her, and she discovered that she had not forgotten how to laugh, after all.

  And when she laughed, he began laughing too, and the two of them just stood there and pointed at each other and howled with laughter. Maybe that was the moment when she began to get well. Suddenly they were not howling with laughter but standing in each other’s muddy arms. And either he was kissing her or she was kissing him, but their muddy mouths were pressed tight together for a long little spell.

  The man stopped the car in a small little hamlet named Bigelow and got the keeper of the General Store to leave his breakfast and open the store long enough for him to buy some fresh clothes for the two of them, and a jar of salve for his rope-blistered hands. Then he persuaded the storekeeper’s wife to sell him some boiled eggs and biscuits and pork jowl and a Mason jar full of steaming coffee. When the storekeeper’s wife saw Latha, the man said to her, “My wife and I got pretty bad muddied up down the road a ways and my wife ruined her dress and had to wear that blanket.”

  “Them roads is sure awful this time a year,” the woman said. Then she asked, “Whar you folks heading?”

  “Conway,” the man said.

  “Wal, I’ll tell ye. Ron Lee Fowler don’t start runnin the ferry till noon, but he lives not too awful fur up the road that runs north of the landin, so if you’uns was to go to his house and ast him, he might take you on across.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Much obliged,” he said, and they drove on.

  Before going on to the landing, he pulled off at a creek, and the two of them cleaned up, washing all the mud off, and donning the new clothes he’d bought. Her dress was a size too small, but it did nice things for her figure and was the first dress she’d worn in years. Her shoes were two sizes too big, but they were real shoes, her first footwear in years. Then they sat on the grass and ate breakfast together. It was very good, the first real breakfast she’d tasted in years.

  Ron Lee Fowler agreed to take the car across, for thirty-five cents. The roads on the other side of the river were better, and they reached the city of Conway before any of the stores had opened. They left the town behind and headed east, not north. Was this the way home? She wanted to ask him where they were going, but assumed he knew what he was doing. He would announce the name of each village or town as they passed through it. “This here’s Vilonia,” he would say. “This here is Beebe.” Somewhere east of the latter town, he turned off onto an old trail that led through a grove of cypresses in and alongside a bayou. He drove as far as he could before the road got too muddy, then he stopped. It was a cool place, nearly dark, like a primeval jungle, with all the big cypresses and their beards of Spanish moss.

  “Let’s take us a nap,” he suggested, and got out of the car and found a shady patch of soft ground with a bed of cypress needles. She followed. She felt very sleepy, and she was grateful for this chance to stop and rest and maybe nap a bit.

  The two of them lay down, a few inches apart. He folded his arms over his chest and closed his eyes, and she could see that he was dead-tired. She turned her head and smiled at him, and then she snuggled against him. He opened his eyes and smiled back at her and then he wrapped one arm beneath her and she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. She had just a few dreams of Jessica.

  She woke, in the same position, about seven hours later, and as soon as she raised her head from his shoulder, he woke too. The two of them rose and brushed the cypress needles off of them, and resumed their journey.

  He drove all night. Sometimes he sang songs, “Old Joe Clark,” “Sourwood Mountain,” “The Jealous Lover,” and “Sally Goodin.” He sang so loud and off-key that he probably couldn’t hear her humming the songs along with him.

  Sometimes he just talked, telling funny stories. “I remember that day we was going off to war, and the Jasper Women’s Club come down to the staging area where the Army was fixin to pick us up, and those women said they was throwin a seein-off party for us patriotic fellers. So they served us punch and cookies and this one lady comes up to me and says, ‘Young man, would you make a speech?’ and I choked on my cookie and says, ‘For God’s sake, what about?’ And she says, ‘Just anything you like, and tell em what you think about it.’ So then I stood up and says, ‘Well, I like Miss Latha Bourne better than anything else, and I think she is wonderful.’ And then I sat down, a-wiping the sweat off my brow, and afterwards everybody comes up and says that is the best speech they ever heard.”

  Latha
thought of several things she could say, but she was able to speak none of them. Could this man really be Raymond? He sure had changed a lot.

  He said, “J’ever hear the one Doc Swain used to tell about one time he gave Granny Price a dose of medicine and he says to her, ‘Keep a close watch, and see what passes.’ Next day he come back, and she was feeling a little better. He asks her, ‘Did anything out of the ordinary pass?’ ‘No,’ says Granny, ‘just a ox-team, a load of hay, and two foreigners on horseback.’ Doc Swain he just looked at her. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better.’”

  Did she laugh? She wanted to. She thought that a spontaneous burst of amusement would pop out of her mouth, but she couldn’t hear it. She wondered why she could not laugh. Hadn’t she laughed yesterday when they were stuck in the mud? The man kept on telling funny stories but she was not able to laugh again at any of them.

  “This here’s the mighty Missippi River,” he announced around midnight, as they crossed a big bridge. “And this here big city is Memphis.” Latha remembered enough about geography to know that Memphis was due east from Little Rock a good little ways, and therefore they were not heading in the direction of Stay More. When he stopped at a café to pick up coffee and consult his road maps, she wanted to ask for a piece of paper to write on, to ask him why they were not going in the direction of Stay More, but she could not even pantomime the request for something to write with and on. Nor was she sure she’d be able to write if she did have something.