Enduring

by Donald Harington

  “You’ve got a bite,” she said. She couldn’t help pointing it out to him.

  “Huh?” he said, a little panicky, perhaps thinking she’d made some accusation which precluded the anticipated tumble.

  “There,” she said, pointing out the line being unreeled and disappearing into the water.

  “Shoot fire!” he exclaimed, and grabbed up his rod and began reeling it in. After a minute’s work, a large fish appeared, a gollywhopper, the biggest catfish you’d ever seen, thrashing around and trying to pop the hook loose from its lip. Dolph Rivett was as a man torn. He would love to land that prize cat, but feared that during the several long minutes it took him to play the fish out Latha might change her mind, and thus he’d lose the larger fish.

  “Aw dad hackle it!” he said and jerked the line hard to remove the hook from the fish’s mouth. “What’s a ole fish at a time like this?” He reeled in his line and put down the rod and asked her, “What about that willow thicket over there?”

  She shook her head. “The chiggers’d chew us alive.” Then she pointed up at a ledge on the side of the mountain. “There’s a little cave up there.” Immediately, she regretted saying this. If she supposedly came from Demijohn, how would she know about the cave?

  “Just lead me to it!” he said, rubbing his hands together.

  The two of them climbed up to the ridge, a hundred feet above the creek, and walked along beneath an overhanging ledge until they came to what was not actually a cave so much as a nook, a recession in the rock where ancient Bluff Dwellers had had a shelter. The dirt floor of this cavern was still littered with the fragmented relics of this strange non-Indian tribe that had owned the Ozarks in the time of Christ. With his foot Dolph swept an area clean of bones and shards.

  His black and tan mongrel had followed them. “Go tree a bird!” Dolph commanded it, but it sat firmly on its haunches with its head cocked to one side, curiously watching these two crazy people. She didn’t mind, but Dolph did, and eventually he threw a piece of two thousand-year-old pottery at it, and hit it, and it yelped and dragged itself out of sight.

  She unbuckled her belt and unbuttoned her jeans and sat down on the dirt floor to tug them off her legs, and then sat upon them as a mat of sorts. The light in the cavern was dim, but not dark, not really dark enough. For this reason, Dolph Rivett could not remove his trousers; he merely unbuttoned his fly. She got a fleeting glimpse of his privates before he knelt before her: one of the heavy hirsute stones was still inside the fly, the bolt swollen and bolt upright, taut and straining.

  He didn’t bother with any preliminaries, assuming she was already aroused and ready. The sight of his equipment would have anointed her passage with some erotic dew, but not enough, not enough to ease his sudden hard deep entrance. It hurt. She cried out. It had been so long since she last harbored a bloated penis within her that there simply wasn’t room.

  He stopped. But only for a moment. Yet a moment of welcome respite that gave her time to expand and to lust and to seep. Then he, having groaned repeatedly and having mumbled “Ah, Lord Jesus,” could have begun to pump, from the first stroke driving at full speed, an unvarying tempo of banging jolts. She wanted to churn in response, but because of his weight upon her and the hard earthen floor beneath her she couldn’t. So all the work was his. And he didn’t last very long. Just as she began to catch sight of the top of the mountain, he, crooning “Goody,” to the beat of each shuddering sock, disgorged his gob into her and she felt the pulsing spasms of the unloading, the throbs shortening and weakening, until there was no movement or sound remaining but his breathlessness.

  He rolled off of her, and lay by her side.

  After a while, she said, not bitter nor even teasing, but dispassionate: “Rooster.”

  “I beg pardon, Sue,” he responded. “I reckon I just had it stored up too much.”

  Then he talked to her about his wife, who, it seemed, would only let him “bother” her about twice a year.

  The two of them lounged for a while on the dirt floor of that rock shelter, talking to each other about themselves. She didn’t learn much of consequence. Then they talked, idly, about various things. He even talked about politics. “I been readin in the papers about this here D.A. feller up to New York, fergit his name, but they say he could shore give old Franklin D. a run fer his money.”

  “Dewey,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s the one. I heared tell that one of them gallop polls says that Dewey’d git fifty-two per cent of the vote right now. ’Course, I’ve voted Democrat all my life.”

  By and by, she impulsively reached out and wrapped her fingers around his drooping piece. It was what she thought was the first time she had ever touched one. What Sonora had told her was called “petting.” And because it was also what she thought was the first time she’d ever had an opportunity to take a good look at one up close in the light of day, she began to study it while she fondled it. He was fidgety at first, because nobody had ever fondled, let alone studied, his member. But then he became less fidgety and more fiery as he felt himself beginning to stir beneath her touch.

  She was thinking that it was a durn shame that society compelled a man to keep his genitals always covered, because there was something uniquely handsome about a smooth, sleek, sinewy, tall-standing stalk of healthily pink flesh. There was a carnal grandeur about it unequaled by any of Nature’s other deliberate inventions.

  And she didn’t need to tell him that she needed it.

  He started to bestraddle her again but she asked him if he didn’t mind taking off his pants. Blushing deeply, he did.

  Then he was into her again, and this time, because there was no great pent-up gism thrashing to break loose, he managed to last a good bit longer, his strokes steady and not quite so violent—a mechanical piston, a skin-sheathed ramrod. If she had bothered to count, she would have found that he kept that up for nearly three minutes before reaching the point where he quickened, and his breathing began to puff “Goody, goody, goody” to the beat of his beats, and her cinctures expanded and contracted with the throbbing of his spewing.

  But this time, when he rolled off of her, she had the mountaintop in sight and she rolled with him and pinned him down and climbed aboard, and in the brief minute left to her before his magic wand lost its turgid magic she rode upon him, tilting and pitching her hips, fashioning her own elaborate alternating measure, with irregular stresses that sung a cadence of touch and sensation her strings could be moved by. She would have been so busy constructing this great resplendent ascent of the mountain that she would not have noticed that Dolph Rivett was beginning to say “Goody goody” yet again. All that she could have been conscious of, as she closed her eyes and wildly wrenched her bottom, was the surge of her substance merging with all nature, while in the background the cockles of her heart rollicked and roistered.

  When she came to, how much later she did not know, she found that Dolph had soaked his handkerchief in cold creek water and spread it over her brow and was fanning her with a frond of fern.

  “Why, I declare, Sue, darlin,” he declared when she opened her eyes, “if you didn’t just pass plumb dead out. Give me kind of a skeer. But, boy golly, I liked to of passed out myself.”

  She rose and put her jeans back on, and climbed down to the creek and found a spot along the bank where a spring flowed into it, and she cupped her hands and lapped up a refreshing drink.

  “You know somethin?” Dolph, at her side, said, “That there was the first time in my life I ever let off even twice, let alone three times. Holy snakes! Who would a guessed I had it in me?”

  She retrieved her fishing pole and her catch, and asked him a test question: “I wonder how far it is from here to Stay More.”

  “Couldn’t rightly tell,” he replied, to her relief. “If we was up on the road I might could spot a landmark, but it’s hard to say from here. I reckon it aint more’n maybe three, four mile, at the most. You aimin to head that way?”

 
“No, I’m just going on back down to Demijohn.”

  “Sue…could I…I got me a horse…could I sometime maybe ride down to Demijohn to see you?”

  She pretended shock. “Lord have mercy! Dolph, my daddy and my six brothers would shoot you on sight if they even caught you talking to me!”

  “Well.” He seemed dejected for a moment, but then he brightened. “Is there any chance you might be comin back here fishin again?”

  “More than likely,” she replied.

  “Then maybe me’n you might could…might could get together again.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then I’ll be lookin fer ye, Sue. I shore am much obliged. You’ll never know what a good turn you did me.”

  Then he was gone, and she heard him off up the creek whistling for his dog.

  She started home, reflecting, But he didn’t even kiss me.

  Chapter thirty-three

  Sweet June passed into sluggish July, hotter than usual and dry. All the Stay Morons either worked at the tomato canning factory or in connection with it, and all of them spent part of their earnings at Latha’s store. Often Latha when she was alone with her daughter was tempted to tell her of her experience in the cavern up on Banty Creek, but there was always the worry that Sonora might tell Hank and it might start a chain of gossip. Latha felt it wasn’t fair for Sonora to describe in detail her carnal exploits with Hank if Latha couldn’t return the thrill of storytelling. As all good storytellers knew, the pleasure worked as much for the teller as for the listener. One night when Sonora was off somewhere enjoying herself with Hank, Latha was alone with Dawny and was tempted to find out if he knew the facts of life, and, if not, to begin his education. But if that got back to his Aunt Rosie, it would be the end of Latha as far as Stay More was concerned.

  One night toward the latter part of July when she was sitting on the porch with nobody except Dawny and a few dozen of her cats, and Dawny had, as he usually did, requested her to tell him a story, she realized she needed to visit her outhouse first and she told Dawny she’d be right back. The outhouse was always a good place for thinking deep thoughts, and entertaining fantasies, and she practically relived the entire episode of meeting Dolph Rivett, moment by moment, before realizing that Dawny was waiting for her to tell him a story. When she got back to the porch, Dawny announced, “There was a man here.”

  Something in his voice made it sound like it wasn’t a man that anybody knew. “Who?” she said.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me his name.”

  Her first thought was that it could have been Dolph Rivett, somehow managing to track her down. “What did he want?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Just wanted to know who lived here now. I told him. Then he wanted to know if anybody was livin on the Dill place, so when I said no he headed off in that direction, said he was just gonna look around up there.”

  Latha had some trouble breathing. Could it possibly be—? No, it couldn’t possibly be. “What did he look like?” she asked, realizing her voice was quavering.

  “I couldn’t much tell. He was on the other side of a flashlight. Sort of tall, I guess. Seemed like a nice man.”

  Latha did not know what to say, so she said nothing, for a long time. Finally Dawny had to remind her that she was going to tell him a story. She found her way out of the flood of old memories that had captivated her. She smiled and rumpled Dawny’s hair. “Sure, Dawny,” she said, but was reluctant to let go of all those memories, and selected one of them that was a ghost story of sorts. “Would you care to hear a strange tale about a dumb supper? Have you ever heard tell of a ‘dumb supper’?”

  “Caint say that I have,” he said. So she decided to tell him the story about her high school classmates having a party at one of the girl’s houses in Parthenon, where they decided to have a dumb supper.

  “Well,” she said. “Once upon a time, in a month of May a long time ago, a bunch of girls who were just about ready to graduate from high school decided to set themselves a dumb supper, which is an old, old custom that must go all the way back to the days of yore in England.

  “The idee is that you take and set out a place at the dinner table, just like you were having company, except you don’t set out any food. You put out the plate and knife and fork and spoon, and the napkin. Then you turn the lamp down very low. A candle is even better. Then you wait. You stand behind the chair and wait to see what happens.” She said these words with ominous mystery, and although she could not see Dawny in the dark she could feel that he was getting excited. “Well,” she went on, “there were six of these girls, and they set out six plates, and then the six of them stood behind the six chairs and waited, with only one candle to light the room. They waited and they waited. The idee is that if you wait long enough, the apparition—not a real ghost, Dawny, but a ghost-like image—the apparition of the man you will marry will appear and take his seat before you at the table.

  “Oh, of course it was all a lot of foolishness like all that superstitious going-on, but these girls believed in it, and anyway it would be a lot of fun. So they waited and they waited.

  “Sometimes, if a girl was wishing very hard that a particular boy would appear, somebody she was crazy wild about, then she might get hysterical and really believe that he had come! Imagine that, Dawny. But the other girls would just laugh at her.

  “Anyway, these girls waited and waited, but of course nothing happened. Some of them closed their eyes and mumbled magic words, and some of them prayed, but no boys showed up, and no apparitions of boys showed up. Until finally…” Dawny had stopped breathing and she feared he might suffocate. “Until finally there was this one particular girl who was wishing very, very hard, and she opened her eyes, and there coming into the room was a boy! With his hat pulled down over his eyes, he came right on over to her chair and sat down on it! And then in the candle-light she saw who it was! It wasn’t the boy she was wishing for at all! It was another boy, the one she had already turned down twice when he asked for her hand!

  “And then she fainted dead away.”

  After a while, Dawny said, “Well? Then what happened?”

  “Well, after they got her revived, with smelling salts and cold compresses, one of the girls explained it all to her. Somehow that boy had found out about the dumb supper. The boys weren’t supposed to know, but somehow he had found out. And came on purpose. The other girls had thrown him out of the house, after this poor girl fainted, and told him he ought to be ashamed of himself. And maybe he was.”

  “Well,” Dawny said, “did she ever marry him?”

  “No.”

  “Did she marry the other one, the one she was wishing for?”

  “No.”

  “That other one, the one she was wishing for, his name was Raymond, wasn’t it?”

  Latha gasped in surprise. “Why, Dawny, I didn’t know you knew about that!”

  “What was the name of the one who came to the dumb supper?”

  She could not answer.

  A minute passed before Dawny begged her to please tell him, and when she wouldn’t, he suggested a couple of people it might have been, like Tearle Ingledew or Doc Swain, but she would not tell him. Not until he threatened to go away and never come back and “never love you anymore,” did she relent and confess. “All right,” she said. “His name was Dill. Every Dill. Isn’t that a queer name? It wasn’t Avery, but Every. He was William Dill’s boy, old Billy Dill who used to make wagons.”

  Dawny, his voice trembling, asked, “What…whatever…what did ever…become of him?”

  “Nobody knows, child.”

  “Maybe…” he said, pointing up the road toward the Dill place.

  “Yes, Dawny, that’s what I’ve been wondering about too.”

  Suddenly Dawny requested, “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

  She smiled at the charming thought. “Whatever for?”

  “To protect you.”

  She started to laugh but decided it might hurt his
feelings. She said, “Your Aunt Rosie wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Aw, sure she would. She don’t care where I sleep.”

  “But you’d have to let her know where you are, and I bet you she wouldn’t allow you to stay with me.”

  Dawny stood up. “I’ll be right back, fast as I can.” And he took off for home, running as fast as his little legs would carry him, with the dog Gumper hot on his heels. She did not expect to see him again that night, and couldn’t imagine what he might say to his Aunt Rosie to get permission. She went out to the side of her house, where mullein were growing tall, and selected the tallest one and named it Every Dill, then bent it down to the ground. Then she went into her bedroom and prepared for bed. But she hadn’t completed her preparations when there came a knock at the bedroom door and there was Dawny.

  “I just told her a bunch of kids are having a bunking party at your store, laying out pallets all over the place and that we’re going to have a real jamboree of ghost stories, with free sody pop. She believed me, but told me to behave myself.”

  She admired his resourcefulness at the same time she regretted having consented to his plan. “Dawny, close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t want to watch me undressing, do you?” She turned off the lamp.

  “But it’s pitch dark, I caint see you noway.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “Okay.” She continued removing her clothes and climbed into bed.

  “Well,” she said. “Now you can open your eyes. But don’t look at me.”

  “Why caint I look at you?”

  “Because it’s so hot and we’d have to pull the covers up because I don’t have anything on.”

  “You mean you’re nekkid?” She could sense that he was looking at her.

  She pressed the side of his face to turn it away. “Don’t look.”

  “But it’s so dark I caint see nothing noway.” He climbed into the bed. The faintest breeze came through the bedroom window. “Can I sleep nekkid too?” he asked.