Enduring

by Donald Harington

  Each night at lightning bug time, after the fights between the W.P.A. boys and the local boys had concluded and Sonora had chosen Hank to go somewhere with, Dawny sat in the porch swing while Latha sat in her rocker and Every sat in a straight-backed chair, with Gumper on the porch floor, at least until his dreams caused his tail to strike the wooden floor so noisily that he would be evicted. Latha reflected that if she had a tail, it would be vigorously wagging too, although the only dream she was having was of getting this man into bed before wedlock. She and Every went on arguing the topic, although not in Dawny’s presence. This particular night she had grown tired of the idea that Every still had some preacher left in him, but she hit upon the idea that if there was indeed any of the preacher remaining in him, he could use it to perform the ceremony of their marriage at the same time their bodies married themselves with themselves. She smiled at this clever notion, thinking, And when he says “I now pronounce us man and wife,” I will faint. This thought made her laugh at the same time she was overcome with desire, and she met Every’s eyes and held them until she was sure that possibly the thought had crossed his mind also. Then she glanced, taking his glance with hers, at the door leading off the porch into her room.

  But she remembered the boy and shifted her glance to him, saying, without any tinge of rudeness, “Get lost, Dawny.” Which made him laugh too, but he excused himself and whistled up old Gumper and headed for home.

  She took Every’s hand and led him into the bedroom, and without lighting a lamp she began to unbutton him. He said he had worried about what to wear at his wedding and never thought of the idea of not wearing anything at all. Soon she was also without anything at all. They clasped hands and moved closer to the bed. “Dearly beloved,” he intoned, in his silver-tongued preacher’s voice, “we are gathered here in the sight of God to unite ourselves in holy matrimony. Moses tells the story in second and third Genesis of when God had finished a-making all the critters of the earth He noticed that only Adam was alone and had no mate, and God thought that wasn’t good and that poor man ought to have a helpmate, so He put Adam into a deep sleep and took one of his ribs and created Eve, the first woman. Why’d He take a rib? She wasn’t taken from his head that she should rule over him, nor from his foot that he should walk over her, but taken from his side, near his heart, that hand in hand they could go together throughout life.”

  “I never thought of that,” Latha said.

  “Sshh,” Every said. “I’ll do the talkin.” Still holding her hand, he led her up onto the bed, where they lay together. He said, “Marriage is a joyous occasion and is the most important event of our lives. Its sacredness and unity are like the mystical relation between Christ and His Church and therefore the most significant and binding covenant known in human relations.

  “It is the duty of me, Every Dill, to be a considerate, tender, faithful, loving husband: To support, guide and cherish you in prosperity and trouble, sickness and health, to thoughtfully and carefully enlarge the place you hold in my life; to constantly show to you the tokens of my affection, and to shelter you from danger. With this ring—” He dropped his preacher’s voice, whispering, “I left it in my pants” and jumped out of bed to fetch it from his pocket, then climbed back into bed and put it on her finger.

  “Where’d you get a ring, Every?” she asked.

  “Hush,” he said. “This here wedding ring is the outward and the visible sign of an inward and spiritual bond which unites two hearts in endless love. The circle, the emblem of eternity; the gold, the type of what is least tarnished and most enduring—it is to show how lasting and imperishable is the faith now pledged to you.”

  “But I don’t have a ring for you,” she said.

  “Yes, you do,” he said, and behold, he rose above her and put himself through her ring, and she made another ring of her arms around him, and another ring of her legs over his back.

  As he began to move, and she too, she remembered the words she would never forget that he had spoken to her, and she was able to repeat them to him, “It is the duty of me, Latha Bourne, to be a considerate, tender, faithful, loving wife: To support, guide and cherish you in prosperity and trouble, sickness and health, to thoughtfully and carefully enlarge the place you hold in my life; to constantly show to you the tokens of my affection, and to forsake all others until death do us part.”

  Every had begun to pant, but he wasn’t saying “Goody goody goody” or even “Ah, God!” He was saying, “After all this long winding trail we’ve come in the sight of the mountaintop and I am ready to step over it but I’ll wait for you.”

  She had never ascended the mountain so rapidly in all the times she’d done it. It must have been the power of his words. “Finish the ceremony,” she breathlessly requested.

  Every took a deep breath. “Forasmuch as we two have consented together to be married, and by the power vested in me by God and the state of Arkansas, I now pronounce us man and wife.”

  He kissed her and everything went black.

  She woke at dawn, as usual, but not as usual, because there was a man in her bed, and he was her husband, although she was a bit distressed to hear that he was mildly snoring. She got out of bed, put on her work clothes, visited the outhouse, came back to the house, grabbed her hoe and headed for the garden, where she happily performed her daily chores of weeding and cultivating. She was pleased to see that one of her best cantaloupes had ripened; its stem slipped off easily, and she took it to the creek with her to cool while she bathed, then took it to the kitchen, peeled it and sliced it. It was still cool, and she ate an ambrosial slice while she fried some bacon and made some biscuits. Sonora came in while she was doing this. Latha expressed surprise to find her up and about so early.

  “Hank proposed to me,” Sonora said.

  “Really? Well, bless his heart. Bless your heart. Did you say yes?”

  “No, because I have to go back to Little Rock, don’t I?”

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “Do you mean I can stay here with my real mother and father?”

  By way of answer, Latha held out her left hand to show her daughter the ring on her finger.

  “When did that happen?” Sonora asked.

  “Last night.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “Who married you?”

  “Every, of course.”

  “No, I mean who performed the ceremony?”

  “Every, of course.”

  Sonora thought about that for a moment, then laughed. “I wish I’d been here. I could’ve been your maid of honor.”

  “You were out somewhere getting proposed to. And besides, we had no guests. Not even Dawny.”

  “That’s the way everybody ought to get married, I reckon,” Sonora said.

  Mother and father and daughter had breakfast together, just the three of them. Every complimented Latha on the cantaloupe (“mushmelon,” he called it), saying it was the best he’d ever eaten. Sonora congratulated her father on marrying her mother and told him how glad she was that he was her true father because she thought Vaughn Twichell was a jerk.

  After breakfast when Latha went to open her store, Every went down the road to see Doc Swain, the justice of the peace, and get him to legalize a marriage certificate. He reported back to Latha that Doc Swain had agreed, if anybody asked, to say that he had performed the ceremony himself. Thus, when the news spread throughout Stay More that Miss Latha Bourne was now Mrs. Every Dill, nobody was puzzled about how it could have happened. Latha still wanted to know where Every had got the ring, and he explained he’d bought it at the Ingledew store. Latha thought that might be appropriate, since that was the first store she’d ever visited, back when she was too young to know what a store was. In fact, Latha’s wedding ring was the last thing that Lola Ingledew sold in the store before shutting the store down for good, a sad event which made Latha feel guilty for driving Lola out of business.

  Was it in atonement that Latha
went out of business as far as the P.O. was concerned? Latha had forgotten that irksome letter from the regional Post Office controller, and thus was baffled when, on August 1st, the mail truck did not come. The postal patrons too were baffled, some of them hanging around until past noon just in case the driver might have had a flat or a wreck. But it didn’t come on August 2nd either. The weather was hot as Hades and when the ice melted in Latha’s icebox and in her soda pop cooler, she finally realized that Uncle Sam simply wasn’t going to send the mail truck out any more, and that, according to the instructions in that notice, everybody had to go to Parthenon for their mail. But she couldn’t go to Parthenon for ice, she’d have to go at least as far as Jasper and maybe even Harrison. She pointed out to Every that it seemed kind of ridiculous for him to be in the auto repair business if he didn’t have an auto himself. So he borrowed Doc Swain’s car and drove to the Ford dealership in Jasper and, with money given him by his new wife, bought a second-hand ’36 Ford, and loaded a hundred pounds of ice into the trunk to take back to Stay More.

  He offered to teach Latha how to drive, but she wasn’t interested. He had to drive Doc Swain back into Jasper to get Doc Swain’s car. Then the first thing he did after setting up his auto repair shop in Stay More, after putting up the big hand-lettered sign that said “Dill’s Gas and Service,” was to take his ’36 Ford apart, piece by piece, and put it back together again, just to prove that he could do it, and for the practice. “Preaching is a whole lot easier,” he complained to Latha.

  Latha did not miss the post office too awfully much, although it hurt to take down the sign that announced to the world that this was the U.S. Post Office of Stay More, Ark. The mercantile trade of the store wasn’t really heavy enough to keep her busy, so she went fishing whenever she felt like it, and if anybody needed something from the store they would just have to wait until she got back or else, if Sonora was around, Sonora could wait on them.

  At her earliest opportunity, she apologized to Dawny for having told him to get lost, she said she hoped his feelings weren’t hurt, but she and Every needed some privacy in order to get married. Dawny said that was okay, although he was sorry that she couldn’t have waited until he was old enough to marry her. She pointed out that by the time he was old enough, she would be an old lady. She also told him that being married to Every wouldn’t keep her from being Dawny’s girlfriend. He smiled real big at that.

  Ned the former mail truck driver showed up one afternoon, bringing some blocks of ice which she didn’t need because Every had filled her cooler, and he apologized that the post office had been shut down, which had sort of left him out of work too. But he wanted to call her attention to the fact that Stay More was now a Rural Free Delivery route and all she had to do was set up a box on a pole beside the road, and in fact he had one in the rear of his truck he’d be glad to give her, and he’d even help her stick the pole into the earth. The box was a kind of loaf-shaped steel thing with a red flag that could be flicked up to indicate there was mail waiting to be picked up, and a flap-door in front, which Ned lowered and stuck an envelope into the box, and closed the flap. “See,” he said, “there’s your first mail.”

  It was a letter from Mandy, insisting that Fannie Mae come home right away. She and Vaughn had thought it over and decided they just didn’t want Fannie Mae associating with the riffraff of Stay More. Latha read this letter while Ned was still there and asked him to wait a moment while she fetched a postcard out of the abandoned post office. She wrote on the card that Hank Ingledew had proposed to Sonora, who in the near future would become Sonora Ingledew, not Fannie Mae Twichell. She also had room to write that she herself was now Mrs. Every Dill, and Sonora’s parents were hereby reclaiming custody of her and if Mandy didn’t like it, she could take it to court. Latha stuck this card into the box and raised the red flag. “There you go, Ned” she said, and he retrieved the card, and, as all postmen do, he read it. He expressed astonishment but also congratulations on her marriage, saying he was sorry she couldn’t have waited until Ned was rich enough to afford a bride. She said if she’d done that, she would have been an old lady.

  By the end of August, the W.P.A. gang had finished the construction of the bridge over Banty Creek, and impressed into the first pier of its cement crenellation “Built by W.P.A. 1939.” The crew no longer fought with the local boys after work because word had spread among them that Sonora was no longer up for grabs, or even touches; she was Hank’s for good. Oren Duckworth, who considered himself the town’s leading citizen, if not its mayor, held a ceremony for the opening of the bridge, with a red ribbon strung across it, to be cut by himself after a few well-chosen words, and Doc Swain had the privilege of being the first to drive over the bridge, with Every right behind him.

  In the old days, when everybody traveled by foot, horseback or mule-drawn wagon, the bridge had not even been necessary, but now that the bridge was in place, more and more people began to acquire autos or, the most popular vehicle, the “pick-up” truck, and Every’s business began to pick up.

  Chapter thirty-nine

  Sonora and Hank did not get married that summer. Her father, Every, felt that she ought to finish high school, and Latha agreed, although her memories of Jasper High School were not special, but the fact that she had been accompanied to that high school by one of Hank’s uncles, Raymond Ingledew, had a certain quality of closure or rather foreclosure to it. Hank did not accompany Sonora to the Jasper school; he had already graduated. Sonora enjoyed the school and made a number of friends and, nice to relate, made good grades. At Little Rock High School, she had struggled to maintain a C average. At Jasper High School she made straight As. The moral of this is that you should always go to school at a place you like. Sonora’s only problem during her senior year was that all the boys fought over her and showed off for her the same way the summer evening gang had done in Stay More. The principal sent Latha a note calling this fact to her attention, saying several youths had been injured in the fracases, which left Latha wondering what she was supposed to do about it. Make Sonora wear a sack over her head? Latha had been just as pretty, if not prettier, when she had attended Jasper High School, but nobody had fought over her…maybe because Raymond kept them from it. One day when Hank was sitting on the store porch waiting for Sonora to come home from school, Latha showed him the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, from which he could order, for a price, a diamond engagement ring. He didn’t have the money. Every put him to work in his auto repair business, and Mr. and Mrs. Dill advanced their future son-in-law enough to buy the diamond ring, which Hank presented to Sonora one memorable night (it was just before her period) when they made love a record nine times, and which the next day she flashed on her ring finger to all her Jasper classmates, particularly the boys, who forthwith gave up fighting for her attention.

  Sonora told her mother what she and Hank had done the night of her engagement, and wondered if that might have been excessive, because she still felt a kind of soreness in her vagina. Latha assured her that there was no such thing as too much. It is possible to eat too much food and to drink too much liquor and to sleep too many hours of a night and day, but it is not possible to make love more than you want to. Sonora’s confession made Latha envious, and she challenged Every to match Hank’s performance, but Every simply wasn’t up to it. Three times was the best he could manage, but, since she fainted after the first one and was out during the other two, she simply had to take his word for it that he had accomplished three of them. Every was always truthful; that much of the preacher remained in him. But for the rest of her life (which hasn’t stopped) Latha would go on wondering what nine times would be like, although she never would be permitted to know, since the first one always knocked her out.

  More and more people, recovering from the Depression just as the country itself was doing at the start of the Second World War, were acquiring automobiles or trucks, and Every had so much repair business that he was able to employ his old friend Lawlor Coe, the vi
llage blacksmith who no longer had many horses or mules to shoe or wagons to repair. Thus for a few years until Hank joined the service, there were three able-bodied men working at Dill’s Gas & Service. Every recalled seeing barber shops which had signs saying “Three Chairs, No Waiting,” so he hung up a sign saying “Three Shade Trees, No Waiting,” since it was the habit of country auto mechanics to hang the engine block from the stout limb of a tree while working on it, although it was rare that all three of the oak trees in the yard of Every’s shop would have engines suspended from their limbs at the same time. But Every and his two men were the only mechanics in the county outside of Jasper, and people from all over the southern part of Newton County brought their vehicles to Dill’s Gas & Service, or, in a number of cases, had to have their vehicles towed, by car or mule-team. In fact, even some people in Jasper preferred the extra miles to Stay More because Every Dill and Company had a reputation for good service. The story is still told that once, when Doc Swain complained to Every about his bill for repairs, which was a good bit higher than Doc Swain’s own bills, Every observed a major difference between Doc Swain’s trade and his own: that Doc Swain had been treating the same basic body and parts that were created in Adam and Eve, whereas the cars that Every worked on kept changing their model year after year.

  Every was so good at car repair because he truly loved doing it and had a natural talent for finding out what was wrong. (Another story retold was that a Stay Moron asked Every if he could find what was causing the problem with his car, and Every took a good look and said “Crap in the carburetor,” and fixed it, and the fellow later asked, “Do you mean I have to take a shit in my carburetor?”) Latha’s only complaint about Every’s line of work was that he came home every evening with his hands hopelessly soiled with grime and grease. So did Lawlor, and so did Hank, and Lawlor’s wife gave them some bars of old-fashioned homemade lye soap, with real strong lye, but that wouldn’t quite get their hands clean. Sonora stopped allowing Hank to hug her, because she was afraid his hands would soil her dress. Since it was pretty difficult to make love without holding, she tried doing all of the holding herself, but that wasn’t very good. So they had to invent a whole bunch of new positions for love-making that allowed Hank to refrain from touching her. She passed these ideas along to her mother, and Latha suggested a few of the positions to Every, but he was of the school who believed, like nearly all Ozark men, that there was only one position, and you didn’t have to be an ex-missionary to use it.