Enduring

by Donald Harington

  As long as she was having fantasies, Latha went right ahead and had several good long fantasies about being a prostitute. Could she do it with a dozen different men in one night? Rodney said he had no idea how many customers the women serviced, but he imagined it was a plenty. Prostitution would pay a lot more than what she was making as a maidservant. And she would meet a lot of men.

  More than these fantasies, though, she liked to escape into the various worlds of the many books in the library, not The Romance of Lust, but all the others that were readable. She read the whole set of a British author named Anthony Trollope, and then another full set by George Meredith. She read all that had been published by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. She read all six of the Jane Austens. She read Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair. In her years at Lombardy Alley she read nearly everything.

  One Christmas Mrs. Cardwell was too ill to do any shopping, so she gave Latha her very best dress, but Latha refused to take it. The woman was so ill that Latha was required to give her injections of morphine. The woman said that the “statute of limitations” would expire in the springtime, and Latha would be free to go then. But Mrs. Cardwell said she hoped to die before Latha left.

  Rodney had used up all his savings to frequent the whorehouses in town. Then he tried to borrow money from Latha, but spring was coming and she could only think that she would need every penny she had to get back to Stay More…although she had no idea what she would do for a living once she got back there. Rodney pestered her for a loan of money worse than he had pestered her for sex. But she refused. Then she began to reflect that soon she might never see him again, and she wondered if she should make herself available to him as a kind of farewell. This thought excited her, and allowed her to begin to flirt with him. He was at first surprised, but then he flirted with her in return and made so bold, one day, one afternoon on the lawn, as to say to her, “You really do want some jazz, don’t ye?”

  She was not familiar with the word, except in its recent musical sense, but she nodded her head.

  “Then beg me for my cock!” he said. “If it’s taken you this long to want it, I want to see you beg me for it.” She would not beg him for it although she did crave it. He put his hands on her shoulders and pressed her down. “Get down on your knees and beg me for my cock!” he yelled. She went down on her knees, but could not beg.

  Mrs. Cardwell, in her housecoat and supporting herself with a cane, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Rodney, you’re dismissed. Leave at once.”

  Rodney wheeled around and struck Mrs. Cardwell. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking, or had no idea of his own strength, but a single back-handed blow from his hand hit the side of her face with such force that it broke her neck, and she flopped to the ground like a rag doll. Latha knelt and tested her pulse, which fluttered and stopped.

  “You’ve killed her,” she said to Rodney.

  He looked down at her body and then he looked around them, as if there might be witnesses. But there were no witnesses, except for Latha. It was Sadie’s day off, and her brother always came and got her and took her home for her day off. When it dawned on Rodney that Latha was the only witness to the murder of Mrs. Cardwell, he whipped off his belt, threw Latha to the ground, and bound her hands together behind her back. She was reminded of Every binding her with his belt that time he’d raped her. She screamed at the top of her lungs, but the property was so large that the nearest neighbor was far out of earshot. And when she tried to scream again, he wadded up his handkerchief and stuffed it into her mouth, which Every had also done. But at least Every’s handkerchief had been clean.

  She thought, And now he is going to rape me. But just then he didn’t have time for that. He dragged and shoved her into the front seat of the limousine, and with a piece of rope he tied her ankles to the underframe of the seat. He said, “I’m going to ask you a question, so I’ll have to take this gag out of your mouth, but if you holler I’ll stuff it right back in. Okay. Here we go.” He yanked the gag out with such force she felt he’d chipped a tooth. “Now, where’s your money?” When she refused to tell him, he said, “That cash aint gonna be a bit of use to you if you won’t tell me where it’s at.”

  “What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

  “If you’ll tell me where you’ve hid your money, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. If you won’t tell me, I’ll kill ye too.”

  The way he said it was as if he meant it, so in fear for her own life she told him that her savings were inside a cotton tow-sack inside a dress which was hanging in her closet. She hoped he would share part of it with her. He stuffed the filthy gag back into her mouth and ran up to her room to get her tow-sack full of money, which he tossed into the rear seat of the limousine. And then he dragged Mrs. Cardwell’s body up underneath the verandah. Then he began pilfering the house, loading the silverware into the rear seat.

  He took the gag out of her mouth once again and asked her, “Do you have any idee where the old bat kept her money hid?”

  “In the bank, probably,” Latha said. She had no idea. He put the gag back into her mouth, and returned to the house again, and she could hear him ransacking it, tearing open doors and drawers and boards. Latha thought that her only hope would be for some visitor to arrive. But the old woman had had so very few visitors. Latha began to cry for that, not that Mrs. Cardwell was dead, which was perhaps a mercy, but that she had had so few visitors in all those years that Latha had worked for her.

  She sat there on the front seat of the car, her hands painfully bound behind her with his belt, her ankles tied too tightly to some underpinning of the seat, and she cried and cried, not for herself, but for all the visitors who had not come and would not come now in the hour of most need.

  Chapter twenty-seven

  For the rest of her life, which is still going on, Latha would remember what happened next as if it has happened just a moment ago.

  She lifted her face, streaming with tears of sorrow for Mrs. Cardwell’s lonely life, to see the outline of a strange man approaching, blurred through her tears. He was holding an infant, a girl-child, in his arms.

  He came up to the open window of the limousine and said to her, “Beg pardon, ma’am, but I was wonderin could I git a drink of water fer my baby.” She laughed in relief, and then the man noticed the dirty red bandanna stuffed into her mouth. He opened the door of the limousine with his free hand, the hand not holding the child, and he pulled the handkerchief out of her mouth and said, “What’s the trouble, ma’am? What in tarnation is a-gorn on?” As he asked this, he noticed that her hands were bound behind her back, and he quickly unbound them.

  “My feet…” she said, and he noticed how her ankles were tied, and he untied them. She stepped out of the car, wiping away her tears and getting a good look at him and his girl-child: he was a well-favored man in his fifties, old enough to be the baby’s grandfather, and the little girl a pretty blonde who looked to be in her second year of life. Latha pointed at the house. “There’s a man in there who just killed the woman who owns this place. He’s trying to find her money.” She indicated the back seat of the limousine, which was loaded up with silverware and paintings and the woman’s prized possessions. “He’s already taken all of that. Now he’s searching for her money but I keep telling him that all her money is in the bank.” She pointed at the tow-sack, “That’s all of my money in there. I work here. I used to work here. I don’t do anything anymore.”

  At that moment Rodney emerged from the house, carrying a pair of expensive brass andirons. The stranger held out the child to Latha, saying, “Hold my baby, ma’am.” She took the child, who seemed frightened of her, and cuddled it to her.

  Rodney came up to the stranger and said, “Who in hell are you?”

  The stranger replied, “Sir, I’m jist a passin wayfarer tryin to git a drink of water fer my little gal. Who in hell are you?”

  “None a yore business. Git all the water ye want. This lady is a-gorn wit
h me.”

  “Supposin let’s ask her if she keers to do that,” the stranger said, and then he asked, “Ma’am, do you aim to go with him?” Latha shook her head vigorously. “Well, then,” the stranger said to Rodney, “I seem to git the impression she don’t particularly keer to go with you.”

  Rodney yanked the baby from Latha’s arms and thrust it at the stranger, who took it. Rodney took one of Latha’s arms and tried to force her back into the limousine. The stranger sat the child down on the lawn, and pulled Rodney away from Latha and struck him a blow that almost broke his neck. But Rodney got up, and lifted one of the brass andirons high above his head and brought it down swiftly toward the stranger’s face. The stranger ducked, simultaneously throwing a punch into Rodney’s stomach that nearly ruptured his kidney. Another punch to Rodney’s chin chipped four molars and dislocated a bicuspid. A punch to Rodney’s shoulder cracked his collarbone. A punch to Rodney’s chest broke three ribs. A punch to Rodney’s face broke his nose and collapsed two sinuses. Another punch to Rodney’s stomach crushed his diaphragm. A final punch to Rodney’s jaw caused brain damage and unconsciousness.

  “Can you drive the car?” the stranger asked Latha. “Reckon we’d best go and fetch the sheriff or somebody.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” Latha said.

  “Me neither,” he said. “Well, you stay here with the baby and I’ll hoof it back into town. I don’t think he’ll wake up, but if he does, conk him on the head with one of them andirons.” He turned to go, but turned back. “And please, ma’am, give my baby some water.”

  The child did not want the man to leave, and began crying and reaching out toward his disappearing back. But Latha soothed her and hushed her and gave her a big long drink of water. Rodney never regained consciousness. Latha realized with dismay that there was a telephone in the house, and she could have told the stranger to use it to call the sheriff. Two hours went by before three vehicles from the County Sheriff’s Office arrived, one of them bearing the stranger. Rodney was dragged to his feet, handcuffed, and placed into the rear seat of one of the vehicles and taken away. She would never see him again. Several of the officers asked her several questions. Then they asked the stranger some questions. A hearse arrived for the body of Mrs. Cardwell. The men roamed the house, taking photographs, asked Latha a few more questions, then the Sheriff and his men left.

  Latha invited the stranger and his child to stay for supper. On Sadie’s day off, Latha always did the cooking. At supper, Latha learned that the stranger had already hiked some five hundred miles from his previous home—not on foot the whole way; occasionally he was given a lift.

  “Where are you going?” Latha asked him.

  “I don’t rightly know, tell ye the truth,” he said. “I’m just a wayfarer. A vagabond, looking for the right place. The hills of Vaucluse.”

  His name was Dan. The little girl’s name was Annie. Since it was late in the day, Latha invited them to spend the night, so they could get a “soon start” in the morning. After the little girl was put to bed, Latha and Dan sat in the library talking for the rest of the evening. Dan claimed it was the largest library he’d ever seen. Latha told him about Richard Cardwell, the murdered woman’s late husband. She considered telling him about Mr. Cardwell’s huge but hidden collection of erotica, but did not know the word “erotica” and thus did not know what to call the collection. “Dirty books” wouldn’t be right, because there was nothing dirty about them. Even calling them “indecent” wasn’t decent. She supposed she could call them “wicked,” but Dan was still a stranger.

  He told her more about himself: he had always been a wayfarer, but had stayed a number of years in the last town, up in the mountains of western North Carolina. He’d been born in the mountains of western Connecticut, and lived for a time as a schoolteacher in the mountains of Vermont.

  “I was born in the mountains of Arkansas,” Latha said. And she told him more about herself, including the years in the state lunatic asylum.

  “You don’t seem the least bit daffy to me,” he said.

  “Thank you. I wasn’t. Until at some point trying to escape from that world and being unable to, I escaped into madness. But blessedly I don’t remember that part.”

  They talked until bedtime, and she started to have the most urgent desire to invite him to sleep with her. He might be twenty years older than she, but he was still virile and good-looking and, to a woman who had not had any loving for seven years, extremely desirable. She told him that she knew where Mrs. Cardwell had kept her liquor, if he would care to have a nightcap of some whiskey or something. But he said he had sworn off the hard stuff last year and didn’t want to go back to it. She was tempted to pour herself a drink, to get up her nerve, but didn’t want to drink if he couldn’t. So she just gazed at him fondly and covetously for a long moment before going up to her room.

  She woke at dawn and packed what few belongings she had into a suitcase and went down to the kitchen to find something for breakfast. Then she wrote a note for Dan, which she left on the kitchen counter. It said simply that she was eager to start her journey home to Stay More, and that he was welcome to help himself to anything in the kitchen for breakfast and for that matter he might as well stay and have the whole mansion until somebody tried to run him off. Then she hefted her suitcase, wrapped a rolled blanket around her neck, went out to the limousine to retrieve her tow-sack full of money, put it inside of the suitcase, and began her long walk to Stay More.

  She did not reach the end (or the beginning) of the long avenue of Lombardy poplars leading to the highway before she heard a shouting behind her. “Hey! Wait up!” and she turned to see Dan running toward her, hampered in his running by the weight of little Annie in his arms. But he caught up with her. Panting, he asked, “How come you’re taking off without me?”

  She laughed. “I couldn’t wait to get away from that wretched place.”

  He laughed. “Well, why should I want to stay there?”

  “I thought you might need a place to stay.”

  “Not that place.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  They reached the highway and turned westward. She had no idea just how to get home. She had no memory of the time her rescuer had stopped in Memphis to get coffee and consult his road maps, and thus she did not know that there is such a thing as a road map.

  They walked until it was time for dinner (Latha was glad that that was what Dan called it too, not lunch), and stopped at a café in Dickson and had a square meal, which Latha insisted on paying for. When they resumed their journey, she offered to carry Annie for a while. Annie was no longer so shy toward Latha and even put her arms around Latha’s neck. “She knows how to walk,” Dan said, “but she’s not very fast.”

  It took them three days to reach Memphis. At one point a traveling salesman gave them a ride for fifty miles. They spent the first night in a barn beside the road, but for the second and third nights Latha insisted that Dan allow her to pay to stay in inexpensive hotels, where they registered as Mr. and Mrs. John Jones. A hotelkeeper in one place told Latha that her daughter sure did look a whole lot like her, even though Annie’s hair was blonde. Dan and Latha were both too tired from walking to even think about getting amorous. But she woke the fourth morning to stare at him and to ask silently at what age did men lose their ability to have sex. He never flirted with her, not in that way, and she wondered if it was because little Annie was in the same room, although asleep.

  She was thrilled when they walked over the pedestrian walkway of the Mississippi River bridge and found themselves in Arkansas. It was ugly flatland delta country, but just the thought of being in her home state made her optimistic that she might indeed someday see her hometown. Dan did not seem to care for the scenery, such as it was, and they couldn’t wait for their first sight of a hill, although it took them a couple more days to find one. At one of the cafés where they stopped to eat, there was a large map of Arkansas on the wall, and Latha was
able to find Newton County and the Buffalo River and Swains Creek, although Stay More wasn’t indicated. For a moment she panicked with the thought that it was just a dreamland she had carried around in her screwy head, but she found Parthenon on the map and knew that Stay More was just down the road from there.

  Since talking made them thirsty, they did not talk an awful lot during their long trek through Tennessee and Arkansas, but still they talked enough to tell each other practically their entire life’s stories…except for the parts that had been erased from her memory, and except for the parts that he could not bring himself to narrate because their earthy content would not have been polite. But Latha learned the whole story of how Annie’s mother, Dan’s truelove named Ammey, had died in childbirth and how Dan had fought and won a duel with Ammey’s husband, thereafter abducting Annie and absconding ahead of the law. And Dan learned the whole story of how Latha had been raped and impregnated with a daughter she’d had taken from her by her sister Mandy, and the subsequent committal to the lunatic asylum.

  Latha was determined not to go through Little Rock on her return home, not because she was afraid of being caught (the statute of limitations had expired) but because she knew she wouldn’t be able to resist making an attempt to see Sonora, who was probably in the first or second grade of school now. Besides, according to that map she had seen, Little Rock was too much of a dip in the straight line between Memphis and Stay More, although there were no roads that approximated a straight line anywhere. They spent a night in Searcy and another night in Damascus, and had to stop for hours in Russellville to have their shoes re-soled and repaired, and at a small hotel in Clarksville, where they came as close as they ever would to having sex.

  She woke before Dan or Annie, which was her custom, because she always slept in the nude and wanted to be dressed before they woke. The weather was getting hot now. In pulling the sheet down from her body, she exposed his, which was naked also. He was not only exposed but his penis was standing like a helmeted soldier at full attention. She could not take her eyes off it. She wondered what he was dreaming about. It more than dispelled whatever doubts she had had about fifty-year-old men. The very sight of it lubricated her vulva. She began to consider the possibility of kneeling over him, straddling him, and receiving that magnificent instrument into herself. Could she do it without waking him? But if she did it to the complete ascent of the mountain, and got over the mountain, she knew she would faint, and what would he think when he woke? It was a terrible temptation. She would have to be careful. Could she do it slowly enough, softly enough? She put one knee on the bed beside his hip, then swung her other knee over him and planted it beside the other hip. She had reached the point of no return, and was all ready to lower herself upon that luscious member, when a small voice said “Mama?” and she turned her head to see Annie standing there staring at her. Quickly she whipped the sheet up to cover Dan’s body, then she grabbed her dress off a chair and slipped it over her head.