“Dawny, I wish you wouldn’t say ‘nekkid.’ That makes it sound bad.”
“Okay, can I sleep undressed too?”
She was regretting her mistake more and more. “Dawny, you’re commencing to make me nervous. If you ever told anybody, your Aunt Rosie or anybody, that me and you slept together, let alone without our clothes, do you know that they would cover me with hot tar and feathers and ride me out of town on a rail?”
“Aw, Latha! Do you honestly think I would ever tell anybody? I aint never gon tell anybody anything about me’n you.”
“Maybe,” she said, “maybe I better get a quilt and fix you a pallet on the floor in the other room.”
Dawny began to cry.
“Oh, shush, Dawny, a big boy like you!” she cooed. “Lie still, and shush.” But he kept on crying. She reached over and grabbed him by his undershirt and tugged the undershirt over his head, and then pulled his shorts down and off his feet. “There!” she said. “Now shush.” He shushed. “Close your eyes and go to sleep.”
“I’m not much sleepy,” he said. “Are you?”
“Not much, I guess.”
“Then tell me a story.”
“All right,” she agreed, and from her store of great ghost stories she selected the most special ones, the scariest ones, even ones that he had heard before, knowing that there’s nothing wrong with hearing the same story twice if you liked it the first time, especially the stories that have the most powerful climax. In the climax of her best stories, Dawny would reach over and squeeze her hand. Because the storyteller has as much thrill as the listener, she too was transported by her stories, and likened the ascent of the climax to the ascent of a mountain in sex, although of course neither she nor Dawny went quite over the mountain.
After a particularly intense climax, which left them both panting, Dawny said, “Latha, I love you.”
She turned and became aware that the moon had shifted from behind a tree and its light was pouring into the room, and Dawny was staring at her breasts. She reached out and rumpled his hair and said to him, “I love you too, and if you were a growed-up man I would marry you right this minute.” She pulled him to her and gave him a hug and then put him back where he was. “Now let’s try to get some sleep.”
They tried to get some sleep, but they were both listening. They listened for a knock or for footsteps on the porch. The night passed on. The symphony of the bugs and frogs never stopped. The night cooled. Footsteps! A voice! But it was a girl’s, it was Sonora, coming home. Her screen door opened with its noisy twang and then it was silent again, and stayed silent for a long time.
By and by, Dawny whispered into her ear, “Do you think that it might really be him up there? Do you think it’s really Every Dill?”
“Oh, I know it,” she said, because she had given this much thought, and the thought did not scare her nor worry her but filled her with the loveliest anticipation. “I know it is.”
They both slept.
The following day dawned bright and fair. She woke much earlier than Dawny, dressed, and stood for a while contemplating his small body. In the heat of the night he had kicked off the sheet and was naked and cute, his tiny dinger cutest of all. She was tempted to give it a kiss, but instead kissed him on the brow, at the same time reproaching herself for having allowed him to spend the night with her. Then she went to the kitchen and took a platter of day-old pork-flavored biscuits and carried them out onto the back porch and threw them one by one to her cats, saving the last one for herself. She munched it slowly and lingered to watch the cats fighting over the biscuits. She stayed even longer to watch the cats loll in the early morning sun and lick themselves and each other, then she returned to the kitchen and got her milk pail and filled it a quarter ways with water dipped from the water pail. She carried this up the hill to the cow lot, pausing only briefly at her out-house. She squatted by the Jersey’s flank, not needing a stool, and after washing each of the teats carefully with the water in the pail, she swirled the rest of the water out of the pail and began to milk.
The milk was good; Mathilda had been grazing lately on the orchard grass, free of the lower pasture’s bitter weeds that gave the milk a pungent taste. The pesky flies of July bothered Mathilda, and she fidgeted restlessly while she was milked. “Saw, Jerse,” Latha would croon at her, “saw.” Latha closed her eyes while she milked and enjoyed the feel of the long cool dugs. She filled the pail and carried it down to the springhouse to crock it and leave it to cool.
By this time her free-ranging chickens had assembled in a packed flock around the back steps of the house. She walked through them to the back porch and scooped into the feedbag and flung several handfuls into the yard. The chickens made a racket.
Then she took down the slop bucket hanging from the porch ceiling and carried it to the sty, for her four Chester Whites. Pigs were her favorite animal, not alone for the ebullient gratitude they showed for the garbagey swill she showered upon them, but for the noises they made, which seemed to her an expression of basic life forces.
Now for a moment she spoke with these hogs in their own language of intricate reiterated snorty grunts. Then she chanced to look up and catch sight of a redbird in a tree. Quickly she made a wish, and waited. Soon the redbird flew down to a lower limb. If it had flown upward, her wish would have come true. But I really didn’t mean that wish, she decided, I don’t honestly want for that to happen. The animals all taken care of, it was time for the vegetables. She returned to the house and consulted her calendar and discovered it was turnip-planting day. Personally she hated turnips, but you always plant turnips on turnip-planting day. She entered her store and took a package of seeds from the rack. Then she gathered up her hoe and her rake and headed for the garden across the road, on the land which Doc Plowright had given her to pay his grocery bill.
Crossing the road she saw Penelope sitting in the road. Penelope was one of her cats, an all-white. To see a white cat sitting in the road is good luck. So there, that takes care of that down-flying redbird.
She planted the turnips, reluctantly. Sonora likes turnips but she’ll be gone back to Little Rock before they’re ready. Well, I will make a turnip pie for Tull Ingledew. Or will Sonora be going back? I wonder if Every likes turnips. After the turnip seeds were in the ground she took her hoe and chopped weeds out of the lettuce and cabbage and beans, chopping hard, working up a sweat, a real lathering sweat.
She began to sing:
Well met, well met, my own true love
Long time I have not seen thee
Well met on such a shining day
but stopped, shocked at herself, stopped hoeing too, stood still and remembered: Sing before breakfast, Cry before supper. It means I will be crying before this day is out because I haven’t had my breakfast yet. Well, it’s likely I will. Serves me right. It’s like as not I’ll have more than enough reason for crying before suppertime.
She resumed chopping weeds, with a vengeance. Accidentally she decapitated a cabbage. Still she kept chopping, until her shirt was soaked through with sweat. She grabbed up the cabbage head and ran back to the house. She went to her room and got a towel and a dress. The boy had rolled over, embracing the place she had left, but was still sound asleep. She left the house once more, crossed the road once more, entered the garden once more. At the end of the vegetable rows, beyond her tall corn, was a dense line of trees, bordering Swains Creek. She went into these trees. She began to remove her sweaty clothes, but noticed for the first time that she had her chambray shirt on wrongside out. Oh, great gracious sakes! she sighed. Isn’t this just dandy? Anybody knows that if you accidentally put something on wrongside out, the only way you can keep from having bad luck all day is to keep wearing it wrongside out until bedtime. But this shirt was all dirty and sweaty, even if it was fit to wear for company coming.
She continued unbuttoning it. Latha dear, she said resolutely, once in your life you’ll just have to quit being so all-fired superstitious. And while s
he finished undressing, she reflected upon the nature of superstition, and remembered something that Dr. Kaplan of D Ward had tried to get her to believe, just before he had consigned her to E Ward: “Superstition is the harmless but invalid attempt of the individual to cope with the unknowns and intangibles and the factors in fate and environment over which he has no control. Superstitions vanish as the person becomes more civilized and develops more sense of control over his fate and environment.” Remembering this, Latha laughed, and reflected that now she was thoroughly civilized and thoroughly in control of her fate…but maybe there was more to come.
Now in her nakedness she stepped through the thicket and slipped into Swains Creek and lay down in the shallow water and cooled. She loved her body; that was her one certainty; not the sight of it, nor even the feel of it, but the it of it, the itness of it, that it was there, that it was hers, that it could feel something like cool creek water swirling around it and washing the sweat from it, that it could sweat, that it could be cleansed, that it could tingle. I am a jar of skin, a bottle of flesh, a container. All the things I contain….
She leaned her head back and gazed up at the sun rising above Dinsmore Mountain, and gauged it. It was about five-thirty. Stay More was waking up. She could hear, louder than roosters, Doc Swain and Doc Plowright yelling at each other from their porches on the opposite sides of the road. She could hear the chime of hammer and anvil in Lawlor Coe’s blacksmith shop. She thought she could hear it answered by the distant anvil in Dill’s wagon shop, deserted these many years except for the time Dan used its lathe to turn his porch posts.
She lay in the slow-running green stream but a few moments more, then got up and waded out, and toweled herself dry. She put on the dress, a blue one with yellow daisies printed on it, and carried her work clothes bundled in the towel back to the house.
Chapter thirty-four
When the coffee was making, she noticed that the coffeepot was rattling on the stove. That was sure enough a sign that a visitor would come before nightfall. She ate her breakfast alone but left a platter of eggs and bacon and biscuits on the warming shelf for Sonora and Dawny. The former would sleep for another hour; the latter got up at eight and came to her asking to have his shoes tied, and she told him that on a hot day like this he could go barefooted, and she reminded him that he had promised not to tell anyone that he had spent the night with her. When Sonora finally woke she took a bar of soap to the creek to wash her hair. People began arriving in anticipation of the mail truck, which came this morning shortly after ten o’clock. Ted the driver brought in the mail bags and then the blocks of ice. Latha sorted the mail. There were two pieces of mail for herself, a letter from her sister Mandy and some business from the Post Office Department.
The letter from Mandy said that she and Vaughn had been doing some thinking and some talking, and had decided that it wasn’t good for Fannie Mae to stay all summer in Stay More, it wasn’t good for her attitude or for her manners or for her speech, and if it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to Latha they would rather that Fannie Mae just came on home to Little Rock right now. The letter made Latha laugh, because she knew there was no way that Sonora could be persuaded to leave Stay More.
Then she opened the other envelope. Usually she never even bothered to read any of the duplicated stuff the Post Office Department was always sending to her, but something in this one caught her eye. It was duplicated too, just a form letter, but there were blanks that had been filled in, directing her to close (“discontinue” was their word) the post office on August 1. They spelled “Staymore” as all one word, and enclosed a notice to be posted in a public place informing the patrons of the U.S. Post Office at “Staymore, Ark” that their post office was discontinued and they’d have to do their business with the post office in Parthenon.
Latha swore, which she rarely did. “Goddamn those bastards!”
Doc Swain stepped over to see what she was swearing about and she showed him the letter. He swore also, and read the notice aloud to the others in the store. Then there was considerable swearing and considerable talk about why the government would close the post office. Doc Swain tried to point out that the population of Stay More had simply shrunk too much, but he got into an argument with Oren Duckworth, who maintained that his industry, the canning factory, was a sign that the village was still thriving. Latha went into her bedroom to drown out the noise of the bickering going on in the store. She sat at her dresser and got out her stationery and wrote two letters, one to the post office regional controller pointing out that his letter was incorrectly addressed and mailed to “Staymore” and since there was no such place it would be disregarded. The other letter she sent to Mandy telling her that Sonora, as she preferred to be called, was having such a good time, and was so taken with her boyfriend John Henry “Hank” Ingledew, that she would never consider for a moment the idea of returning to Little Rock.
She returned to her post office and mailed these letters but realized it was Saturday and they wouldn’t go out until Monday. She told herself that she might as well close up the store and go fishing again and she might even run into that fellow Dolph Rivett. She had managed to get through ten years without doing any mountain-climbing and had reached the point where she wasn’t all torn up with desire, but once Dolph Rivett had ended that dry spell, she couldn’t get it off her mind.
She was just about to close and lock up when Dawny came running into the store, yelling “He’s coming down the road!”
It took her a moment to realize that Dawny had met him the previous night, even if in the dark, and thus would know him. Then she stepped onto the porch, where the usual Saturday afternoon loafers were still loafing and whittling and spitting, and she looked out into the road as he came into view.
It was sure enough him, though you’d hardly know it. She calculated that he’d be almost forty years old now, and he looked it. He was wearing eyeglasses too, and with long sideburns and his hair parted in the middle and a necktie he looked like a drummer, or a county judge, or a preacher or something. But even so Latha heard herself sighing at how sightly he was. He didn’t look the least bit like a pickle any more, and she was ready to clobber anybody who tried to call him that.
He did not approach the store, though. He just stopped, out in the road, nearer the far side, and after a quick glance at the store he turned and stared at the bank building. She could not see his face then but she could imagine what thoughts might be going through his head as he looked at the empty old bank building with its broken windows and its door sprung loose. I bet he is thinking, she said to herself, Did I do that?
He was carrying in his hands a sheaf of papers. He was wearing a light summer suit, gray-colored, with a white shirt and a thin necktie. He was a tall, lanky man and the suit hung loosely on him. His brown hair, even though it was greased and parted down the middle, was thick and long, even the heavy sideburns. He had not shaved this morning, and there was a stubble of beard on his strong firmly chiseled jaw. She strained her eyes to see if there might be any glimmer from a gold band on his ring finger but that hand was wrapped around the sheaf of papers and she could not tell.
“I aint scared,” Dawny declared, and he ran down from the porch and into the road, and began talking to him. Latha could not hear what they were saying to each other, but her left ear was burning and that was a sure sign that somebody was talking about you.
He gave Dawny a sheet of the papers he was carrying and then Dawny brought it to the porch and handed it up to Latha. “Here,” Dawny said. “He wants to know if you would mind putting this up on the store.”
Latha looked at it. It had a handsome photograph of him printed on it, and beneath that in large letters BROTHER EVERY BANNING DILL, EVANGELIST. She started laughing before she read the rest of it, the announcement that he would be holding a revival meeting at Stay More the week of July 26 through August 2. Her laughter increased at the invitation: EVERYBODY WELCOME! and her laughter was out of hand over t
he quotation from Acts 28:31 of the Bible: “Preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with, all confidence, no man forbidding him.” Her laughter reached him out there in the road, and he turned his face away. Her laughter infected the loafers on the store porch, who began chuckling and guffawing.
Dawny said to her, “He wants you to sell him a box of tacks so he can nail these up on trees and places, all around.”
Latha, still laughing, said, “Well, if he wants to buy something he can darn well come up here and get it.”
Dawny returned to Every to tell him this. Every seemed to fidget, and he said something to Dawny, and Dawny came back to the store and said, “He doesn’t know if you want to see him or not. He says he don’t want to cause you no embarrassment. Latha, he’s a awful nice man.”
She stood on the edge of the porch and stopped laughing long enough to say, as nicely as she could, “Howdy, Preacher.” And then she added, “Come in out of the broiling sun before you get stroke.”
“Howdy, Postmistress,” he said and began walking toward her. She knew that when he got close she would want to rush into his arms, and she had to will herself not to reach out to him. He came up into the shade of the porch, and for a moment there his hands seemed about ready to spring out and grab her, but he stuck one of them into his pocket and the other one, the one holding the posters, behind his back.
She noticed for the first time Sonora sitting there on the porch, watching and listening, and Latha said, “Sonora, this is Every Dill. Every, this is my niece Sonora.”
“Howdy,” he said. “Barb’s girl?”
“No, she’s out in California and none of us have heard from her in a coon’s age.”
“Then…” he said, “is she Mandy’s?”
“Yes.”
“Mandy?” he said, and stared at the girl. “Don’t favor her too much.”
Enduring Page 34