Enduring

by Donald Harington

  But on the third day of the massive manhunt, word came down that Dan had been seen and shot twice by a corporal of the state police named Sugrue Alan. The little girl was found unharmed and taken to her relieved parents. Latha questioned Sheriff Flud and learned that the searchers had been under orders not to kill but to capture, and ole Sog had been alone at the time so nobody knew if he’d violated the orders or not, but that he claimed he’d got the drop on Dan and ordered him to lay down his arms and surrender but Dan refused so he shot him twice. Doc Swain, inspecting the body as the local physician, said that any fool could see that Dan had been shot in the back and it wasn’t very good shooting, either, because it took Dan a good long while to die. There was a legend that as a young man in St. Louis, Doc Swain had revived a corpse, and he spent a long time with Dan’s body but apparently wasn’t able to get his pulse or breathing started again.

  They didn’t bury him in the Stay More cemetery because it was argued that that sacred ground was reserved for Stay Morons and despite the twenty years Dan had lived here he didn’t qualify as a “residenter.” He was buried up on the hillside above his yellow house, on his own property, or, rather, the property of whoever owned that land but had never objected to Dan building his house on it. Mother Nature doesn’t care whether you’re a Stay Moron or not, and She drenched the funeral with a downpour, but the few in attendance didn’t mind getting soaked in tribute to poor old Dan. Every had one umbrella, which he held over Latha while she read a poem from one of the few books she had found in Dan’s house, an anthology of Elizabethan poetry. It was called “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” by John Donne, and Latha did not cry until she got to the last verse:

  Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

  Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;

  Thy firmness makes my circle just,

  And makes me end where I begun.

  Through her tears Latha insisted that the few in attendance honor the departed with all four stanzas of “Farther Along.” From Dan’s yellow house just down the hill came the unmistakable sound of Dan’s fiddle, accompanying them through all four stanzas and repetitions of the chorus. Every handed the umbrella to Latha and ran down to the house to investigate, but tripped on a tree root and fell hard. Latha ran to join him. He was all right; he’d just had all the wind knocked out of him. Together they listened to the fiddle music, then went inside the house, where they found Dan’s fiddle, but nobody was playing it. Latha couldn’t escape feeling while she was in the house that Dan was still there, and it spooked her. They returned to the grave, which was rapidly filling up with water, and finished the singing of “Farther Along” while the fiddle music went on and on. Every asked her, “Shouldn’t I say a prayer or something?” She shook her head. They began shoveling dirt atop the coffin in the grave, and the rain came down harder. Thunder started crashing all around, and they ran for their cars. A bolt of lightning zipped out of the sky and struck Doc Swain with such force it reduced him to ashes.

  Latha wanted to die. She held her arms wide to the sky and yelled over the sound of the thunder, “Hit me too, goddammit!” Every had to drag her to their car, and she cried all the way to Parthenon, their car slogging and slithering through the mud, where there was a telephone that Every could use to call the coroner about Doc Swain.

  It kept on raining throughout Doc Swain’s funeral, two days later. What remained of him was put in a canister and buried beside his beloved Tenny Tennison in the Stay More cemetery, in a plot over which Doc had erected a double headstone many years before. Despite the downpour, quite a lot more people attended Doc’s funeral than had been at Dan’s. Coming from all over were Swain relatives and former patients and dozens that Doc Swain had delivered into this world and former students at the Newton County Academy, where Doc had taught for several years as a young man. Doc’s first wife, Piney Coe Swain, also showed up, the first time Latha had seen her since Piney had left Stay More after catching her husband with Tenny. There had been rumors that Piney had been working at a store in Harrison, and that she was seen visiting her sister Sycamoria in Demijohn. Latha wasn’t sure that Piney would remember who she was, so she introduced herself and explained she was one of Colvin’s best friends and patients.

  “We all loved him,” Latha said.

  “He was an easy man to love,” Piney said.

  “And he had plenty of love to give,” Latha said. “Too much for any one woman.” Latha told Piney that over the years Doc had told her the whole story of himself and Piney and Tenny, who was the love of his life but not to the total exclusion of Piney, for whom he had carried a torch until his last thunderstorm. Piney’s eyes began to seep teardrops, and throughout the brief ceremony, which consisted of a reading by former Rev. Every Dill of some passages in the Bible having to do with life everlasting, plus the singing of “Farther Along,” and then the traditional sprinkling of handfuls of earth over the coffin or rather canister by each person present, Latha and Piney sat together and held hands. The funeral feast was held inside the schoolhouse, the only building that would accommodate all those people in out of the rain. Latha told Piney she might as well take any of Doc’s belongings that she might want, except for his journal and other papers, which should be sent to a major library, since it was commonly rumored that Doc had conducted experiments which led to the discovery of streptomycin, which helped eradicate tuberculosis.

  Piney took a couple of Doc’s shirts, but she did not want his medical and lab equipment, which remained in the house for kids to play with for a number of years. Nor did Piney want Doc’s dog, or rather pup, Galen (actually Galen XIV, the last in a long line of Doc’s dogs by that name), so Latha persuaded Every that they needed a dog on their property, but she couldn’t persuade her countless cats that they needed a dog, and the poor pup had a hard time of it for nearly a year before the cats accepted him as one of their own.

  Before she left, Piney pointed out to Latha that there was a vacant spot of earth on the other side of the double headstone that Colvin shared with Tenny, and she wondered if it might be possible to reserve it for her own burial. Latha pointed out that Stay Morons had always been very strict about keeping the cemetery free of “furriners.” Piney countered by pointing out that her family, the Coes, related to the dozens of Coes already in the cemetery, had lived on the far south side of Ingledew Mountain, which was well within the township limits of Swains Creek township, and Piney had never stopped thinking of herself as a Stay Moron since the day she’d first met Colvin Swain and he had cured her of hookworm. The problem was that the sexton of the cemetery, in charge of such matters and the reservation of burial plots, happened to be Colvin Swain, deceased. But Latha discussed it with Every and he discussed it with the older Ingledews, and it was decided that Piney Coe Swain could indeed have the resting place to Colvin’s left, beside him, and thus, like Jacob Ingledew, who lay interred between his wife Sarah and his mistress Whom We Cannot Name, Colvin would have an heraldic grouping through eternity.

  Latha was too stunned by the double deaths of Colvin and Dan to be depressed, just yet. Her main desire was to take a gun and shoot Sog Alan. They searched Dan’s yellow house for a will, but couldn’t find one. The walls of the house were covered with his writings, in the same elegant script as the notes he’d written for Dawny. The writings were about Nature, philosophy, life, love, and his blessings and damnings toward humanity. He had left few books or anything of value, and the contents of Latha’s store which she had given him were still pretty much intact. Annie had had her own room, which was nicely decorated and still had a few of her toys and dolls in it. Latha gathered these up and mailed them parcel post to Annie, with a note suggesting she might want to give them to her daughter Diana.

  Doc Swain’s house and clinic contained nothing much of interest or value, apart from his medical and lab equipment, and various items that indigent patients had bartered to pay off their medical bills: perishable foodstuffs like eggs and bacon and flour, hundreds of jar
s of canned fruits and vegetables, and an assortment of rings, other jewelry and pocketwatches. A woman named Rowena, who had been Doc’s nurse until he no longer needed one for lack of patients, came and hauled off most of this stuff, including his kitchen equipment. But enough remained that my sisters and I, as well as Jelena, and Vernon too when he was able to walk, could spend a whole day playing “doctor” inside the clinic. Sometimes Latha would join us, and pretend to be our patient. She had been careful to remove all the real medicines from Doc’s supply, so that none of the children could dose themselves or each other. Latha took Doc’s best leather Gladstone bag and filled it with his journals and papers and shipped it off to the University library in Fayetteville. Several weeks later she had a nice letter from Dawny, who said that he had a part-time job in his freshman year working in the library, and he was helping with the sorting of Doc’s papers and was thrilled to see them and read them.

  Doc’s house and clinic went on the real estate market and remained there for years and years, but nobody bought it. Likewise, Dan’s nice, sturdy, golden yellow house failed to find a buyer. Latha wondered if Stay More was really dying. As superstitious as always (and with good reason in the face of such things as mullein stalks), Latha believed devoutly in “the rule of three”: whenever anything of significance happens twice, it is bound to happen one more time. This can apply to household mishaps as well as calamities: things always happen in threes, including deaths. The deaths of Dan and Doc made only two; now one other person was fated to die, and the possibility greatly perturbed her. She didn’t fear that it might be herself. All of us believe, or hope, in our own immunity to death. Dawny in his book called Lightning Bug, written to her, had promised her immortality. But he hadn’t promised it to Every. Could it be that Every would be the third in the set of three to die? She begged him to stay home and not go to work, but he tried to reason with her and said that he had some cars at the Ford shop in Jasper which nobody else but him could fix. She told him to be extra careful whenever he left home. Since one of Doc’s last jobs before his death was listening to Every’s heart and saying it had a peculiar rhythm to it, Latha urged Every to find a doctor in Jasper.

  But Every’s heart would hold out for some years. A heart that wouldn’t was that of Piney Coe Swain. It just stopped one day, and her sister Sycamoria, with whom she lived, notified Latha. They dug another grave so close to Doc’s grave that the canister holding his ashes was accidentally struck by a shovel and knocked open, spilling some of his remains into Piney’s grave. Every read the same passages of the Bible that he had read at Colvin’s funeral, and for the benefit of the few in attendance, including her sisters Dogwoody and Redbuddy as well as Sycamoria, he explained that not only was the burial up against Doc’s according to the departed’s wishes, but also Doc himself would have approved of it, and he who had administered so many “dream cures” in his fabulous life was now going to meet in his eternal dreams both Tenny and Piney, who, God willing, would always love each other too. Amen.

  Chapter forty-three

  I don’t remember attending any of those funerals. Gran tells me that I attended all of them, and it was right after the one for Piney Coe Swain that she took me by the hand for a guided tour of Stay More, my earliest memory. Why would I remember the latter but not the former? Maybe I was too young to know what a funeral was; more likely I had no idea of the significance of Doc Swain, Dan, or Piney. Most likely I had even then a great disliking for death and anything associated with it. I had a great interest in watching my baby brother Vernon grow up, and it must have pained me to imagine that someday they would have a funeral for him too. My sisters, like my father, considered me superfluous, even freakish, like a sixth finger, and I think I must have been glad when Vernon was finally born and took away their resentment of me. Of course I was fascinated by that polyp sticking out of his groin. Daddy called it his “tallywhacker” and when Vernon was four and had begun to misbehave, Daddy threatened to cut it off unless he behaved himself. I must say that gave me pause. Had I once possessed a tallywhacker too but misbehaved?

  I do remember the way we Ingledew children, and Jelena too, took over Doc Swain’s clinic for the purpose of playing. By the time I was six I was usually the “nurse,” prophetic of my later career, and a year later when Vernon was six he finally agreed to be the doctor himself. In those days there weren’t any women doctors, or, if there were, we’d never heard of them. Vernon would put on one of Doc Swain’s white smocks with the sleeves rolled up, and we put a stethoscope around his neck and a round reflex mirror on his forehead. I wore one of the nurse’s caps that Rowena had left behind. Eva served as the receptionist, and the other girls were patients. Of course Vernon had been to the doctor himself often enough, with mumps and measles etc., to know how a good doctor deports himself, and he gave a fine performance, putting the stethoscope to our chests and listening to our heartbeats. Cousin Jelena’s breasts at the age of fourteen were already pretty well developed, and it thrilled her when Vernon’s hand put the stethoscope on her breast.

  “What’s your complaint?” the six-year-old boy said to her in as deep a voice as he could manage. I think that must have been the first time Vernon had ever spoken to her.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” she told him.

  “Hmm,” he said, and gave her a bottle of yellow pills. These were actually Doc Swain’s bottles that Gran had emptied of their contents and refilled with candy. “Well now,” Vernon said, “take two of these a day, and come back if it doesn’t go away.”

  We all laughed uproariously, which embarrassed him. As his nurse, I said to him, “You’re s’posed to examine her. She’s s’posed to get on that table and have you take a look at her.” Jelena was nervous but also excited at the idea, and she climbed onto the examination table and raised her skirt and removed her panties and put her feet in the stirrups. Vernon came and took a quick look, but wouldn’t come close.

  “Nothing wrong with you,” he declared, “’ceptin they cut off yore tallywhacker fer bein bad.” I thought we would all die from laughter. Vernon threw off his smock and stethoscope and marched out, saying, “I don’t want to play dumb games.” And he never again joined us in Doc Swain’s clinic. But Gran assured us that there wasn’t any law against female physicians, and no reason why one of us couldn’t be the doctor, so Jelena assumed that role, and went on treating her cousins for impetigo, whooping cough, rickets, chicken pox, and the common cold, until she had cured all of the diseases known to us, and then we had to ask Gran to tell us what were the diseases we didn’t know about.

  Latha told us girls that Shakespeare had said there were a thousand diseases that we are heir to, and she knew less than a hundred of them, but she told us about arthritis and rheumatism and meningitis and polio and lockjaw and pneumonia and tuberculosis (which had carried off Doc’s Tenny) and hepatitis and ptomaine and shingles and leukemia and epilepsy and asthma and gangrene and diabetes and the worst of them all, cancer. A few of us had heard that word and knew that it was something dreadful. Latha couldn’t tell us how you get cancer or what causes it, just that it can show up in any part of the body, and there’s hardly anything that can be done for it, so Doc Jelena would just have to try to keep the patient as free from pain as possible, and comfortable until death finally took over. It troubled Latha to be telling these things to us, and she finally told us the old proverb that an ailing woman lives forever, and tried to explain what that meant: as long as we have something to complain about, we can keep complaining forever. “Try to imagine a world in which nobody ever got sick,” she said to us. We wondered if Gran herself ever got sick, because if she did she kept it to herself, although she had been to see Doc Swain a number of times for various aches and pains, trials and tribulations, worries and vexations. I hurt, therefore I am.

  The idea of cancer actually scared us so much that we finally gave up playing doctor and left Doc Swain’s clinic to the mice and spiders and cockroaches. On any given day we’d
much rather go up the road to Latha’s dogtrot to play with her cats or her dog Galen, or to have Latha tell us stories. Daddy had opened a TV store in Jasper and we had a good TV in our house, but we still had yet to get reception good enough to show shows, and thus Gran’s stories remained a principal source of entertainment.

  The years went by and Latha seemed to lose track of them. She considered the possibility that any period of dramatic events, such as the deaths of Dan, Doc Swain, and Piney, would naturally be followed by a fallow period during which nothing ever happened. If the “rule of three” always worked, then there must be a “rule of seven” during which years would elapse without any happenings worth remembering, and she told me that she could not distinguish between my fourth year and my eleventh year. She had photographs of all of us that she sometimes looked at, and she had a newspaper clipping from the Jasper Disaster, to the effect that Miss Haskins, the English teacher at Jasper High, was pleased to have in her class a senior, Latha Ingledew, who was not only the daughter of a former pupil of hers, Sonora Dill, but also the granddaughter of another pupil, Latha Bourne, thus there were three generations of girls who were scolded if they ever said or wrote “aint.” But Latha neglected to pencil a date on the clipping and thus she could never remember just which year it was.