Enduring

by Donald Harington

  And nothing of any consequence happened to Latha for several years. Compared with the madhouse and Lombardy Alley, it was all a peaceful routine. Some of Latha’s customers who had been allowed to pile up credit for their purchases skipped out on her and moved to California, but these losses did not put her in the red. An honest customer who also moved to California paid off his bill by delivering to Latha the family cow, which she kept in the little barn behind the store. She named her Mathilda, pastured her in the orchard on the hill, and milked her each day, making her own butter with a churn. Another honest customer paid off his bill by giving Latha four piglets, fat little Chester Whites, which she kept in a pigpen behind the store and fed with her table slops and surplus vegetables. Doc Plowright, the town’s other physician in competition with Doc Swain, decided to retire, and paid off his bill at Latha’s Store by giving her the use of his well-fertilized garden patch, which he was too old to plant each year. It was directly across the road from Latha’s store, so she didn’t have far to go in order to plant it and hoe it and weed it and harvest it. She had a vegetable garden that was the envy of several veteran gardeners of Stay More, and grew some magnificent cantaloupes.

  Her salary as postmistress wasn’t very much, but it paid for her clothes, and she had some nice dresses and things, ordered from Sears Roebuck. She surprised herself by discovering how much she enjoyed chatting with customers of the store and the post office, after years of an almost hermit-like existence at Lombardy Alley.

  One hot day in April, Ted Sizemore, who drove the pick-up truck that brought the mail each day from Harrison, told her that he had in the rear of his truck, protected beneath thick canvas, several blocks of ice. He showed it to her, and even chipped off a piece with his ice pick and gave it to her to sample. Ice in Stay More was unheard of except in the dead of winter. He explained that Latha could order it a block at a time, usually in twenty-five or fifty pound blocks, and it would allow an icebox for her kitchen as well as a cooler in the store for sody pop to sell to her customers, and the Coca-Cola company would gladly furnish her with a cooler if she notified the sody drummer next time he showed up. Which she did, and began the regular practice of stocking and selling cold drinks, an attraction which brought in many new customers, who liked to stand around, or sit around, and visit with each other while they sipped their sody pop. The abundant furniture on the store’s porch, which ran the whole length of the building, was constantly occupied.

  Not everyone in Stay More was a customer, not by any means, because there were still a lot of people, mostly women, who were either loyal to Lola Ingledew or else they felt that the only thing good about Latha was that she furnished much cause for gossip. These were the women who started and fed the rumors that Latha must have been a prostitute in some big city to earn the money with which she had bought out Bob Cluley. There was talk that Latha practiced witchcraft. It was a secret to no one that Latha had spent several years in the insane asylum, and some women were simply afraid of her. And while no one had ever seen Latha and Dan together, there was much speculation that the mysterious hermit in the yellow house might be Latha’s secret boyfriend, who came to her only in the dead of night.

  Dan and Annie came to her store in broad daylight not more than once a month, and Annie was always thrilled to see her, although Dan put a stop to Annie’s calling her “Mama,” which she had not done within earshot of any customers. Latha treated them just like any other customers, and always gave Annie a little paper poke filled with candy, expecting no payment for it, not because Dan had no money, which he didn’t, but because she had made it clear to him that her debt to him, for saving her life in Tennessee and escorting her home to Stay More, was such a great debt that it would cover whatever he might ever need from her store, and what he needed was usually trivial: a piece of rope, a few nails, some salt, a spool of thread, some matches, or a five-cent bottle of castor oil.

  And in time he brought her things in payment for what little he’d acquired: a ham, some pork chops, a bushel of rye, some maple syrup, and he was always ready to do any odd jobs she needed done around the place. He never received any mail or sent any, except a few times when he ordered some books, The Bobbsey Twins and other children’s books for Annie, and for himself an unabridged dictionary and an anthology of Elizabethan poetry.

  Chapter twenty-nine

  A picture of Latha’s daily life during these years ought to include not simply her easy chores as storekeeper and postmistress, her gardening and orchardkeeping and husbandry of her cow, hogs and chickens, but also her amusements, such as they were. One amusement was her superstitions, which had never left her during the asylum years or the years at Lombardy Alley but had scarcely ever had any chance to prove their efficacy. Not only had there been no mullein stalks to bend down, but there had been nothing lost (except her freedom) that she hoped to find. Now there was mullein all over the place, in fact too much of it, because when the cow ate it the milk would have a slight bitterness to it. But one handsome stalk of mullein on the north side of the house was out of reach of the cow, and Latha saw nothing wrong in bending it down to the ground and naming it Sonora and telling it that it would never straighten up until Latha could lay eyes on her daughter again. She never gave up her old beliefs, such as walking naked around the bedroom three times each morning to ward off neuralgia, and, if afflicted with hiccups, running around the house while holding her breath.

  Her other amusement was her cats. Some people frame and hang the first dollar bill they earn in a new business. Latha’s store porch and the rail along it and various other perches around and within the store were decorated with the offspring of a cat that had been offered to Latha in barter by a poor farmwife who needed a bucket of lard. The cat was pregnant and soon there were kittens hither and yon, and before long the place was overrun with them, as if to make up for the dearth of felines at Latha’s two previous residences. Whenever Latha made biscuits for herself, she always tripled the recipe so the cats could have the leftovers, usually flavored with pan soppings from one meat or another. Her cats also wandered down to the creek and helped themselves to minnows and an occasional small fish, and of course there was not a mouse or rat to be seen anywhere near Latha’s general store.

  Did she give names to all of those cats? Of course she did, and she never ran out of names, and never confused one cat with another. Sometimes she would name a tomcat after one of the men who had at one time or another made gestures, insinuations, or outright proposals, attempting to take Latha to bed. These included a variety of drummers and other traveling salesmen, the fellows who came to her store to take orders for her merchandise and, finding that she was alone, unwed, and highly desirable, made polished or crude attempts to seduce her. Also included was Oren Duckworth, who was Stay More’s leading citizen now that John Ingledew was dead, and wasn’t at all bad-looking but happened to be married with four sons, three of them adolescents. For two years after Latha opened her store he came regularly not just to pick up his mail but to linger after the other mail patrons had gone and to flirt with Latha. He stopped just short of coming right out and asking her if she’d care to sneak off to her bedroom with him. Finally, having heard some of the gossip that Latha may have raised the money to buy her store by working as a prostitute in some large city, Oren Duckworth came right out and asked her if she had a price, which insulted her, and ended her friendliness toward him. She remained friendly with two of Raymond’s bachelor brothers of whom she was fond: Tearle (“Tull”) Ingledew, who was the town drunk, and Stanfield Ingledew, who was so madly in love with Latha that even if he had not been afflicted with the legendary Ingledews’ woman-shyness would never have been able to summon the nerve to suggest dalliance. Tearle also suffered the Ingledew curse of gynophobia, but when he had enough Chism’s Dew under his belt he would engage her in a kind of gallant chitchat that was always conscious of their sex difference. Latha had numerous opportunities to witness the mating of her cats, although they preferred
the privacy of being under the porch when they did it, and she could not help but notice that the male cat simply grasped his partner by the scruff of her neck with his teeth while he mounted her, and there were times she wished that either Stanfield or Tearle could get up enough nerve to do that. Once when Tearle was drunk, and would remember nothing of it the following day, he slipped his hand up her dress and briefly twiddled her gillyclicker, as they called it, enough to impart a heady fragrance to his fingertips but not to amount to a requisite act of foreplay. The closest she ever came to yielding to any of the various overtures was one time when Doc Colvin Swain, many years her senior, after giving her a regular annual physical and pronouncing her in excellent health, began to question her in a halting and roundabout manner as to whether or not her life had enough “satisfaction.” She admitted only that sometimes she had trouble falling asleep at night. He wrote her a prescription for that, and then he took a swig of some nerve-giving medicine and said to her, “By God, Latha, I may be gittin on in years, but I swear I can still coax a respectable stand out of the ole dingbat down here, so if there ever comes a time when you feel like you just got to have it, I’ll gladly be at your service.” But the effort of this announcement had cost him so much—he grew red as a beet in his hands as well as his face and had a terrible coughing fit—that she never got a chance to answer him, even if she had been able to. Later she thought of writing him a letter, or even leaving a perfumed note in his box at the post office, but that notion ended up filed away in her rich store of fantasies.

  All of these men, especially Doc Swain, not only furnished the names for her tomcats (and the one named Colvin was sometimes permitted to sleep on her feet at night) but also furnished the dramatis personae for an intense fantasy life that she had begun while incarcerated at the state hospital and which she would continue for the rest of her life. If she had known, by reading any of the modern literature on the subject, that nearly all women have such fantasies, she might have been less shocked at herself, but she often reflected, after a particularly wild and abandoned fantasy, that it was quite possible she was crazy after all. And yet she never said or did anything that was zany. Until she decided to write her sister Mandy a letter, Latha’s life was conservative, conventional, and uneventful. She had her pleasures, her substitutes for a sex life, although she had not made herself go over the mountain a single time since once early at Lombardy Alley when her swoon had greatly alarmed Mrs. Cardwell at a time when the woman needed her for something or other. On Sundays when the store was closed she liked to take her cane pole and go up Banty Creek to fish. She loved sunperch fried in cornmeal, but that wasn’t her main motive. Her main motive was just to get out into Nature and become part of it, and then to experience the thrill, not too far removed from sex although she never thought of it as such, of hooking a fish and playing it in.

  Most women in Stay More did not fish, and Latha’s activity fed the gossip mill. Sometimes a man would try to follow her, but she knew some spots on Banty Creek that were impossible to reach except for the nimble-footed and, once-reached, very secluded. She enjoyed solitude above all else, especially after a week of dealing with customers and postal patrons, and helping the illiterate fill out their orders to Sears Roebuck. If the handsomest man in creation, on a silver horse, had shown up while she was fishing, she would have run and hid.

  Some people swallowed by solitude manage to turn off their minds, to allow no thought to penetrate their isolation. But Latha’s mind never slept for a moment, and it was during one of her fishing trips that she began to think again of her child Sonora, and to compose the wording of her letter to Mandy.

  As soon as she got home and gutted and cleaned her day’s catch of fish and put it in the icebox, she washed her hands and visited her store to purchase from herself a box of stationery. In her ledger under “Sold To” she wrote “me.” It was only forty-eight cents. She took a clean sheet and wrote “Stay More, Ark” at the top with the date, and then: “Dear Mandy.” She studied that for a good little while and decided there was nothing dear about Mandy, even as a courtesy. She wadded up the sheet and took a fresh one.

  Mandy,

  I know you are surprised to hear from me. It has been such a long time. I hope you and Vaughn are doing okay, and I hope above all that Sonora is happy and thriving. She’d be about fourteen years old now, wouldn’t she? I know you’ve probably never told her who her actual mother is, and I wouldn’t expect you to. Long ago, I gave up any hope of seeing her again. But now I find that hope has returned.

  I would like to come to Little Rock and visit, but I’m now the postmistress of Stay More and couldn’t get away from the job long enough to make a trip. I own what was Cluley’s General Store, which you may remember as Jerram’s Store. I’m not getting rich, but I’m comfortable.

  Do you think there’s any chance you and Vaughn might bring Sonora and come back to Stay More for a day or two? There’s plenty of room, and I’m a much better cook than I was when I lived with you.

  Your sister,

  Latha

  P.S. If you’re thinking of reporting my whereabouts to the Lunatic Asylum, I’ll save you the trouble. The statute of limitations has expired.

  On Monday she bought a postage stamp from herself and mailed this letter, and then she began to wait anxiously for an answer, wondering if she should have tried to be more friendly. She knew that it took only two days to get mail to and from Little Rock, and after the fifth day she began to fret. After a week she began to wonder if the sheriff might show up and arrest her. Two more dreadful weeks went by before finally she got an answer:

  Sister dear,

  You can bet I was surprised. So was Vaughn. So was Fannie Mae, who has been told about her Aunt Barbara and her Aunt Latha, but never laid eyes on either of them. Barb is somewheres out in California and sends us Xmas cards but that’s it. When you busted out of the nuthouse, it was in all the papers but we never showed it to Fannie Mae, who wasn’t old enough to read at that time anyhow.

  Me and Vaughn figured you’d head for SM, but we didn’t think it would take you all that much time to get there. What have you been up to? How’s everything in SM? Is the old homeplace still standing?

  Fannie Mae has turned into a real looker. People say she looks more like me than Vaughn, although she’s got red hair. I don’t think she looks the least bit like you except for being so pretty, so maybe she takes after whoever that guy was that raped you. We’ve never told her anything about any of that.

  I am sorry but I don’t have any feelings toward visiting SM again. Vaughn says he wouldn’t mind visiting some of his folks up around Parthenon, but he doesn’t want Fannie Mae to see you. I feel the same way.

  Your sister,

  Mandy

  Latha spent a long time thinking about this letter but since she couldn’t bring herself to answer it she finally managed to put it out of her mind. The only way to handle life’s disappointments is to forget them. The last thought she remembered having about the matter was that it was a great pity the upbringing of her daughter had fallen upon such a stupid and mean couple, and that probably Sonora had turned out just as bad.

  One day months later she got an interesting letter on printed stationery from the secretary to the director of the Arkansas State Hospital, as it had been renamed. The letter said that the topic of Latha’s escape was still in circulation among the staff and the patients, and while Latha should rest assured that no one any longer had any interest in recapturing her, everyone would simply like to know how in the world she had managed to escape, since she was the only patient who had ever escaped from E Ward. If Latha didn’t mind, could she kindly satisfy everyone’s curiosity about this matter? Latha made sure that her reply was thoroughly sane and as intelligent as she could compose it. She said that she had no idea on earth just how she had managed to make the escape, that the last thing she remembered was something in D Ward, not E Ward, and the next thing she knew she was in a hotel in Nashville, Tenne
ssee. The secretary replied to this thanking her for her answer and regretting that no light could be shed upon the escape.

  Latha had managed to keep some memories of the asylum (she thought “state hospital” was a joke) and sometimes when she was fishing, or just sitting in her rocker on the front porch of the store, she would remember the nurses, “Turnkey” and Shedd and Richter and Auel and Bertram. She would remember the doctors, Meddler and Silverstein and Kaplan. She would remember her friends, Mary Jane Hines and Flora Bohannon and Betty Betty Chapman and her best friend of all, Rachel Rafferty, who, Dr. Kaplan had tried to convince her, existed purely in her imagination.

  Sometimes she wondered what had become of them, and whether any more of them, like Susie the Imbecile, had died. She remembered how horrible the food had been, and how unspeakably vile the toilets. She wished she had mentioned some of this to the director’s secretary, whose query she had answered. Whenever she remembered the asylum, all she had to do was to look around at the woods and hills of Stay More to realize how lucky she was.

  One Sunday evening after she’d finished her supper of catfish and asparagus and was sitting in her rocker on the front porch of the store, watching for the first lightning bugs, she heard music, which she identified as a violin, or fiddle. She hadn’t heard that sound since Isaac Ingledew played his fiddle. Isaac was the giant who had rescued Latha as a child from the Ike Whitter gang at the general store. He had been a great fiddler but had last played his instrument when his grandson Raymond went off to war. That had been “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” but what Latha was hearing now was unfamiliar, perhaps improvised, something soft and slow, maybe even classical. The sound was enough to touch off a flash of memory of her lost time in the E Ward, of an albino girl Latha would hum with, but it was only a quick flash of memory and quickly dissipated before Latha could fully recapture any of it. Now the fiddler—or violinist—came into view, and she recognized Dan! He kept playing as he climbed the steps to the store porch and then sat down in the porch swing near her. When he finished playing, Latha applauded for a few moments, and he made a little bow.