Enduring

by Donald Harington

  One of the drummers who were responsible for stocking Latha’s store with its various goods and merchandise, offered her a free sample of something called Lava, a soap that had pumice and other special ingredients for removing all manner of filth, and sure enough it cleaned Every’s hands, as well as Lawlor’s and Hank’s, but Hank had enjoyed some of the no-hands positions that he and Sonora had devised and he went on using them. One of Sonora’s girlfriends, who clerked in the Jasper drugstore, gave her a package of prophylactics, explaining their purpose and use, and Sonora insisted that Hank use them on certain occasions. “What’s that fool thing for?” he wanted to know. She explained, but he protested, “Heck, that won’t be no fun.” Let’s try it and see, she suggested. And they did.

  But when Sonora graduated from high school in June, she threw away the prophylactics, and in short order found herself pregnant. She asked her father to become a minister again just long enough to perform the ceremony but he protested that if he did it, somehow it wouldn’t be official.

  “But you did it for your own self and Mother,” Sonora pointed out. “Do you call that ‘official’?”

  “Back then,” he explained, “I still had just enough of the preacher left in me; he hadn’t all got out—there was enough left over and I used up the last of it doing it. I spent the last and there wasn’t any more. But anyhow, I want to walk you down the aisle and give you away.”

  Which he did, with the Stay More schoolhouse converted into a church for the occasion, and all the Stay Morons in attendance, even the hermit Dan and his daughter Annie, who was getting to be a big girl. (Mandy and Vaughn sent their regrets.) Since there were no ministers in Stay More, only one ex-minister who was the father of the bride, they had to import a preacher from Parthenon, who wasn’t very practiced himself, and Every had to prompt him from the front row. Latha had no problem shedding some genuine tears.

  That night they had the noisiest shivaree in memory. The word, coming from the French word charivari, meaning headache, denotes the Ozark tradition of the bridal night activities, during which all the townsfolk “serenade” the newlyweds by a riotous harassment of noise and merrymaking, firing off shotguns, banging pans, pulling cats’ tails, making it impossible for the couple to hear each other, let alone have any privacy for romance. In anticipation of the shivaree, Sonora and Hank had already had their honeymoon the night before, when Hank broke his record by two. Latha and Every had not been given a shivaree because nobody had known they were getting married.

  But after the shivaree had gentled down and Hank and Sonora had furnished the requisite treats for everyone (a full demijohn of Chism’s Dew and five kinds of pie and cake), the newlyweds were finally alone in the upstairs bedroom of Hank’s parents’ house, and Hank told his bride the story of the gold chronometer wristwatch which the peddler Eli Willard had given him and which he had buried to await the appropriate time when Hank could give it to his son. Sonora thought that was the marvelousest thing she had ever heard, and she said they ought to name their son Eli Willard Ingledew, and Hank agreed that would be very appropriate. For nine months they talked every day about Eli Willard Ingledew; they could even picture him grown up, wearing the magic watch that kept perfect time and never lost a second, in compensation for the defective clocks that Willard had sold to Hank’s forebears. Latha knew those old stories, and she was delighted to learn about the gold chronometer wristwatch which would be worn by her grandson, Eli Willard Ingledew. She taught her daughter how to sew, and gave her the use of her sewing machine, so Sonora could make all of Eli Willard Ingledew’s clothes, not just as a baby but for each year up until the age he would receive the wristwatch, which would be sixteen. Word spread, and before long all of Stay More was talking about Eli Willard Ingledew and looking forward to his birth, almost as if the baby would be an actual reincarnation of Eli Willard. Thus, when Sonora went into labor, instead of fetching Doc Swain and having the baby at home like everybody else had always done, she was taken all the way to Harrison, where the nearest hospital was, and the car Hank was driving was followed closely by Every’s car with Latha, and for good measure Doc Swain’s car, and then all the other cars of Stay More, so that practically all one hundred of the Stay Morons were en route to that hospital, and everyone else on the road, mistaking all the cars for a funeral cortege, pulled off the road and stopped until they were passed. The waiting room at the hospital wouldn’t hold a fraction of the Stay Morons, but they milled about in the corridors and out on the lawn. Eli Willard Ingledew took an awful long time to enter this world, but nobody seemed to mind, and they all stayed late into the night, when at last the obstetrician lifted the baby by its ankles, slapped its bottom to induce crying, and they discovered that Eli Willard Ingledew had no penis.

  When they took the baby home, Hank and Sonora got their heads together and considered naming the baby Ela Willa or Elise Wilma or Eleanor Willardine, but finally Sonora named her simply Latha, after her mother. Then, as soon as Sonora was able, they got busy again, in the morning, afternoon, and evening, and tried to create Eli Willard Ingledew on the second chance. But the second child was also a girl, who was named Eva. Latha pointed out that her own parents had had nothing but girls, and what was wrong with being a girl? Nothing, Sonora said, except that Eli Willard had made Hank promise to give the magic wristwatch to his son.

  A war started over in Europe. Unlike the previous war, which had caused little notice or comment in Stay More, and only two men had joined the service, Raymond Ingledew and Every Dill, this new war created a good deal of argument, the general consensus of which was that if that feller Hitler wanted Europe, why shouldn’t he have it? But he was also trying to get England, and that was where our foreparents came from, and we oughtn’t to let him have England, so we ought to at least help the British hang on to their lands. This time several Stay More boys went off and joined the service. When the war spread from Europe to the Pacific after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, nearly all the able-bodied Stay Morons enlisted, and Hank chose the Navy because they would train him for a better job than fixing cars. He was in fact taught how to repair and put together radio equipment, and since no one in Stay More had ever seen or heard a radio, that in itself was an extraordinary undertaking. Also, no Stay Moron had ever seen the ocean. When they shipped Hank out across the Pacific after a brief furlough long enough for him to impregnate Sonora again, he could write home to tell her that he was now “Semen First Class,” to which she replied, “You sure are, honey.”

  The only direct effect that war had on Stay More, other than removing all the young men, was that the canning factory had to shut down because of a shortage of tin. The war was good for Stay More in the sense that all its young men fighting overseas sent most of their paychecks home, and there was so much mail from them and to them that for the duration of the war Latha was permitted to reopen the post office, and of course she made a good profit in her mercantile trade from all the money the servicemen sent home. Every didn’t join up, for several reasons: he had already served in the previous war, Doc Swain convinced him that his heart wouldn’t hold out through another war, and somebody had to stay home and pump gas and service vehicles. All that money coming from the servicemen made possible the purchase of several more vehicles by their wives and parents.

  The younger boys who weren’t old enough to enlist or be drafted kept themselves amused by playing at war: they dug foxholes all over the place, they fought for possession of Latha’s store porch, they hurled potatoes at one another as pretended hand grenades, they marched and saluted and eventually organized themselves into two groups: the Allies, who were the biggest, meanest, and toughest; and the Axis, who were outcasts or drips or teacher’s pets. Latha was bothered to learn that Dawny was in the latter category—not that she minded him being a teacher’s pet, because he was smart as a whip, but she hated to see him relegated to the enemy side in the various games. The Allies used as their clubhouse the long-abandoned tree-house of Noah Ingledew, cofo
under, with his brother Jacob, of Stay More, whereas the Axis used a vacant back room in the old Ingledew store. Practically the only contests that the Axis could ever win from the Allies were games of baseball, because Gerald Coe was a better pitcher than anyone else, and his brother Earl was the best catcher, although the third of the triplets, Burl, was the leader of the Allies, at least until he was drafted into the service. Latha sometimes watched their games, for want of anything better to do. The Axis had Dawny at shortstop and at third base they had Joe Don Dingletoon, from a large family who were “squatting” at an abandoned homestead just the other side of Dan and Annie’s place. The father, Ace Dingletoon and his wife Bliss, had run up a large bill at Latha’s store before Ace ran off and joined the Army and apparently did not send home any of his paycheck, so Latha had to carry the bill, but could not give the family any further credit, and they were in poor circumstances. Dan, their nearest neighbor, allowed them to help themselves to his large vegetable garden, and that kept them from starvation.

  When the canning factory closed, Latha offered Dawny an after-school job as her janitor, stockboy and general factotum. He was getting to be a big boy at eleven, and he saved the tiny salary Latha gave him until he had two dollars to order a “hectograph,” or gelatin board for spirit duplication, the remote ancestor of the copying machine, and with this he established a newspaper, which he chose to call The Stay Morning Star, a weekly of local news, such as it was: who was visiting whom on Sunday afternoons, which servicemen came home on furlough, and what the scores were of the baseball games between Allies and Axis. Latha was proud of Dawny for his little newspaper, and gave him the use of the side room that had been Sonora’s for his newspaper office. She also ran ads for her store in each issue, which cost her twenty-five cents per page and helped Dawny purchase his newsprint, which was getting in short supply because of the war.

  Dawny’s personal hero since the beginning of the war was Ernie Pyle, who was a war correspondent, nationally syndicated, whose column appeared regularly in the “real” newspaper, the Jasper Disaster. Latha sold that paper in her store; it cost five cents but she refused to take Dawny’s copy out of his salary. Dawny always turned first to Ernie Pyle’s column and sometimes asked Latha if there was a word he didn’t understand, which wasn’t too often.

  Dawny explained to Latha that he wanted his newspaper to be impartial, a fancy word in his expanding vocabulary, and Latha admired him for that (both his vocabulary and his impartiality). One day somebody threw a rock through the window of Dawny’s newspaper office, with a note tied to it. It was a small pane of glass and Dawny offered to pay her to have it replaced. “One of the Allies must’ve tossed it,” he said, and showed her the note, which said “Name eny names and your dead.” Latha suggested showing it to Miss Jerram to see if she could recognize the handwriting, but Dawny explained that the Allies and the Axis agreed on one thing very strongly: they would not involve any grown-ups in their activities, a circumstance which Dawny was violating by explaining the circumstance to Latha. Latha always read every word in The Stay Morning Star, not just because she was proud of Dawny but because it was a fairly reliable source of information and even gossip about all her neighbors. There was only one time Dawny made an error, not intentionally. Each week’s newspaper had a page listing of who had been visiting whom. It was a custom on Sunday afternoons for people to honor the Lord’s Day of Rest by visiting with their friends, and Latha admired Dawny’s diligence in asking everybody who they had been visiting with the previous Sunday, and reporting it in his newspaper. But he reported that a certain man had visited a certain young woman whose husband was overseas in the Army; the man had told Dawny, “She’s jist my little niece, you know.” But Dawny’s reporting of that fact created a scandal, and when Dawny revealed his hurt and puzzlement to Latha, she tried to explain to him, “He’s not really her uncle. They’re not even any kin to each other, which is unusual for any two people in this town.”

  Just as a big newspaper which appears to support the Democrats might actually back a Republican candidate, it was hard for Dawny, being a member of the Axis, to maintain complete impartiality toward the Allies. One front-page story was headlined, ALLIES STAKEOUT INNOCENT HERMIT UNDER SUSPICION AS NAZI SPY. The story reported that the Allies were convinced that Dan, being a “furriner,” was possibly a German and therefore likely a Nazi who was spying on his American neighbors. It struck Latha as simply one more in a long list of possible “explanations” of Dan, no more creditable than the idea he was a gangster in hiding. This time, as Dawny explained to her, he was inspired by the example of Ernie Pyle to name actual names, and he named the three ringleaders of the Allies, Sugrue “Sog” Alan, Larry Duckworth, and Jim John Whitter.

  Thus, when a day after the paper appeared, Dawny was found unconscious in the newspaper office with a broken arm, a blackened eye and other bruises, it wasn’t hard for Latha to guess who the culprits were.

  Chapter forty

  Doc Swain patched Dawny up but the boy had to wear a plaster cast on his arm for nearly two months. Fortunately it was his left arm, not the arm that held the hand that held his tools for writing the newspaper and doing his duties around the store, although Latha offered him a vacation until the cast came off.

  She was indignant to discover that Dawny’s aunt and uncle, with whom he lived, were not indignant over the episode of the brutality committed upon Dawny. Even Sonora, who had always been teasing toward Dawny if not openly disparaging, thought it was a terrible deed that should not go unpunished, and she urged her father, who was perfectly capable of it, to demolish the Allied ringleaders, especially Sog Alan, who kept on flirting with Sonora even though she was married and the mother of two children and expecting a third.

  Jim John Whitter was the baby brother of Latha’s erstwhile friend Dorinda Whitter, from the poor family of Whitters who had already produced one thug in the oldest son Ike, who had been lynched. Of the three ringleaders, only Larry Duckworth was from a halfway respectable family, since his father had owned the canning factory, but Larry had a mean streak in him. As for the Alans, Sog’s sister Betty June was just a few instances away from becoming the town hussy, and the parents were not among Latha’s friends or favorite customers. She knew them well enough that they recognized her when she knocked on their door and asked, “Did you know that your son broke Dawny’s arm?”

  “Dawny who?” said Mrs. Alan, but Sog himself came up behind her and said to Latha, “What business of your’n is it?”

  “I’d like to break your face,” she said to him. “What did you do it with?”

  “My ball bat,” Sog said. “He tattled on us in that there newspaper of his’n.”

  Latha addressed his mother. “The boy, who’s not half the size of your son, has to wear a plaster cast. Do you plan to punish your son?”

  “What business of your’n is it?” the mother said.

  From that day forward, Latha refused to sell anything to Sog. If he needed a bag of Bull Durham and some papers to roll himself a cigarette, he’d have to walk to Parthenon to buy them. Latha couldn’t understand why Every didn’t simply give the scalawag a sound beating. Every said it wasn’t really any of their business.

  Except for that, Every was a perfect husband, once he started using the Lava to clean the grease off. He did all the chores around the house without being asked, let alone nagged. He kept the water bucket filled and on Saturday nights he filled the washtub with a mixture of cold well water and steaming hot water off the stove. He went out of his way to gather wildflowers to make into bouquets for her. Night after night he would massage her tired feet, and each night at bedtime he would lovingly brush her hair. He had overcome his habit of saying grace before each meal, so she didn’t mind that he still read the Bible regularly. Sometimes on Sunday mornings he seemed restless at about the time he would have been giving a sermon; it reminded her of an amputee who still feels twitchings in a missing arm. It had taken her a while to convince him that th
ere was nothing sinful about sleeping in the nude on a hot summer’s night, so they both slept in the raw, and in time she stopped having sexual dreams because she didn’t need them.

  One by one, all the loafers who had once congregated on Latha’s store porch shifted their venue to the shade trees at Every’s garage where, she learned, he fixed not only vehicles but also hearts and souls, freely dispensing the sort of wisdom that a modern day counselor would be paid outrageous amounts for. Everybody loved him, and even women (no, especially women, now that most of the younger menfolk were overseas fighting the War) were known to bring their personal problems to Every for his sage advice. He told Latha that at that Lipscomb Bible College in Tennessee he had taken courses in counseling and psychology, and all he was doing was putting it to good use. It gave him something to think about while his hands were busy tinkering with the cars; he made an analogy to the barber who listens to his customer’s woes while he cuts hair.

  For only one reason, Latha was glad to see the loafers vacate the store porch in favor of Every’s garage: they still bought their plugs of Brown’s Mule and twists of Days Work at her store, but they chewed the stuff at Every’s, and spat the stuff at Every’s, and she was no longer required to mop the porch floor at the end of each day, although most of the spitters had been accurate enough to clear the edge of the porch. Inside the store was posted a sign, KINDLY DO NOT EXPECTORATE UPON THE FLOOR, but she was not convinced that all the Stay Morons had the word in their vocabularies. Someone had expectorated at the sign.