Enduring

by Donald Harington

  As if to wipe away the inconsequential sevenfold years, something huge and horrible happened the year I was eleven and Vernon was ten: Latha had one of her daily visits from her daughter, who reported that Hank had just taken her to Harrison to see a doctor, who reported that she had cancer of the breast. “And, Mom, it’s spread!” Sonora wailed.

  Latha didn’t understand. “Do you mean the children have caught it?”

  No, she meant that it had—the doctor used the word “metastasized”—to other parts of her body, and couldn’t be cured. All he could do, and Latha reflected upon the irony of her prescription to Doc Jelena, was to give her injections to keep her as free from pain as possible and comfortable until death finally took over. Hank had been shown how to prepare a syringe of morphine and inject it, but his hands trembled so much that she had tried to do it herself, without success. Latha offered to do it, then told Every she might not see him again for a while, and she moved into the hilltop house of Hank and Sonora and shared a bedroom with Vernon, and gave Sonora the morphine whenever she needed it. Vernon was an exceptionally bright ten year old but he couldn’t understand what was happening to his mother. It had been just a year earlier that he had been evicted from her bed after spending the first nine years of his life sleeping with her. Latha considered but rejected the idea of offering to let him sleep with her. But each day she had to try to prepare him in advance for the inevitable, and when they sang “Farther Along” at Sonora’s funeral, Latha tried to explain to him what the words meant, but he refused to believe that farther along he would ever understand it, and for that matter Latha doubted if she would understand it herself. Her wracking grief was mingled with intense regret that Doc Swain had not been alive to catch the cancer early enough to do something about it.

  The rain that fell during Sonora’s funeral made the rainfalls of Dan’s and Doc’s and Piney’s funerals seem like light sprinklings. Both Swains Creek and Banty Creek began to overflow their banks before the funeral was over. The water swirled up as high as the porch of the old Ingledew store and over the porch of the old gristmill, whose timbers began to creak ominously. Hank was not too submerged in his grief to realize that the old mill, which had been built by his great-grandfather Isaac, was doomed, and he told his brother they had better try to remove the glass showcase containing the body of that old Connecticut peddler, whatever his name was, and load it into a pickup truck and get it the hell out of there, which they managed to do just in the nick of time: with a thunderous roar the old mill collapsed and was swept away down the creek. They transported the showcase to higher ground, to the abandoned yellow house of the old near-hermit Dan, where they left it in an upstairs bedroom, and then returned to the village and with the help of Every and Hank’s uncles they used sledgehammers to demolish the old abandoned bank building and stack its stones against the side of the road as a kind of dike to keep the swollen creek from washing away the road.

  Every and Latha needed a long time to recover from their daughter’s death. “We don’t need two more such events to make a total of three,” Latha said to him. “Hers is three all by itself.” And she was not just saying that. There were no significant events of any sort, unless you count the fact that cousin Jelena graduated from Jasper High as valedictorian, and could probably have won a college scholarship if she had applied for one, but after the death of Vernon’s mother, she was old enough and smart enough to realize that it had been foolish of her to plan, all her life, to marry Vernon Ingledew when he grew up. When he grew up, she would be twenty-six, at least, past marriageable age, and besides he was her first cousin, and nowadays first cousins did not marry, and even if they could marry, she had never been able to get him to notice her, except for that one time when they had played “doctor.” At Sonora’s funeral, when Jelena had tried to embrace him and say something comforting to him, he did not seem to be aware of her existence. So she apparently decided that if she couldn’t be Vernon’s wife she would become his stepmother. Some months after Sonora’s funeral, Hank told Latha that Jelena had come to him and proposed. Hank had told her that he was her uncle and couldn’t marry her. “Vernon needs a mother,” Jelena insisted, and kept after Hank about it, until finally Hank had said, “Tell you the honest truth, Jelena, nothing against you personal, but I don’t honestly believe that Vernon would want to be your child.”

  So Jelena gave up on the idea and eventually married Mark Duckworth, grandson of Oren who had operated the canning factory. Their wedding, in the Stay More schoolhouse, might almost have constituted a second happening in the sequence of three, except that such sequences are always of awful things, if not calamities, and it would be years before Jelena would learn how calamitous marriage to Mark Duckworth was. Latha ordered a suit and tie from Sears Roebuck for Vernon to wear, his first. As Uncle Jackson was leading Jelena down the aisle, she paused and bent down and whispered something in Vernon’s ear. He looked at her strangely and shook his head and whispered something back to her. At the wedding feast, Latha asked Vernon what Jelena had said to him and what he had answered. Jelena had said, “I was going to wait and marry you when you grew up. Will you marry me when you grow up? If you say ‘yes,’ I’ll call off this wedding.” He’d thought she might be teasing him, but after realizing she was serious, he had shaken his head and declared, “I will never marry.” Latha told him that he might be wrong about that. He shook his head for his grandmother too, and repeated himself, “I won’t.”

  But others got married. June, who tried unsuccessfully to restore her original name, which was Sonora, not Junior, after her mother’s death, married her high school sweetheart, who worked in a Harrison hardware store. Patricia saved up her allowance until she had enough to move to Kansas City, where she married a pharmaceutical salesman. Latha’s favorite of the granddaughters, Sharon, or Little Sis as everyone called her, including her father, came to Latha privately seeking advice on whether or not she should elope with her boyfriend, Junior Stapleton, since there was no chance she would get permission from Hank, who thought that Junior was an all-around scamp. (I must be forgiven for talking about myself as if I’m just a character in a book, but after all, that’s what I am.) For several reasons Latha had loved Li’l Sis more than her other granddaughters (without letting any of them know it, of course, except Li’l Sis herself): partly out of compassion and empathy, remembering her own relationship with her older sisters and also observing how the others, including Sharon’s father, treated her as redundant or surplus; partly because Sharon was the one daughter who most resembled Sonora, in appearance as well as personality; and mainly because Sharon was the most likely to come to Latha for advice, for comfort, for companionship. Latha had met Junior Stapleton several times and knew his family well, and didn’t have a very high opinion of him or them, but she thought it might not be a bad idea for Sharon to get away from home and develop some independence from her sisters. She was only sixteen, and hadn’t finished high school and Junior didn’t intend to hang around for her to finish Jasper High but she could finish up at Harrison High, where Jelena had gone. Junior was twelve years older than Li’l Sis, and already the manager of a supermarket, so she would be well taken care of. Latha observed, “If you marry him, then your monogram will be SIS.” Li’l Sis hadn’t thought of that. So they ran off to Chicago and got married.

  Back Home In Harrison, They Settled Into Married Life In A Nice Little House. Junior Was Not Willing To Visit Stay More As Often As Sharon Wished, So Sharon Got Herself A Driver’s License And Began To Drive To Stay More At Least Once A Week, Not To Visit Her Father Or Remaining Sisters, But To Visit Latha, Who Continued To Offer Plenty Of Advice, Comfort, And Companionship. Junior Lost His Job And They Lived On Unemployment Until He Got A Lesser Job As Assistant Manager Of Another Supermarket. In Time, During One Of Sharon’s Visits, Latha Couldn’t Help Noticing Some Bruises Around The Girl’s Face, Which Sharon Claimed Were The Result Of Falling Out Of The Bathtub. But Latha Was Able, Gently [Thanks, Gran], To Get T
he Girl To Confess That Her Husband Had Been Regularly Slapping, Punching, And Mauling Her. Latha Advised Her To Move Out And Come Back To Stay More, Which She Did, But Junior Considered Her To Be Still Married To Him, Which Gave Him The Right To Batter Her. Only After He Had Broken Her Arm And Left Her Jaw Needing To Be Wired Did Her Father Hank At Long Last Pay Some Attention To Her, Accosting Junior And, In Sharon’s Words, “Beating The Living Shit Out Of Him,” Leaving Him In The Hospital, From Which He Never Returned To Stay More. After Her Own Injuries Had Healed, She Ran Away To Chicago, Partly To Escape The Chance Of Ever Meeting Junior Again, Partly In The Desire To See If There Weren’t Some Good Men In This World, And She Worked As A Waitress To Put Herself Through Nursing School At Northwestern, Where She Met [But I’ve Been Interrupted By The Author, Who Promises Me That If I’ll Be Good, And Finish Telling Latha’s Story, He Will Give Me A Novel Of My Own One Day.]

  Latha watched Vernon grow, which was considerably faster than watching grass grow or watching paint dry, and infinitely more interesting. He spent all his weekends walking in the woods, and often would report to his grandmother things that he had seen: ruined houses or cabins or barns, stone fences, barbed wire embedded in tree trunks, evidence of habitation, and she would attempt to tell him who had lived there and why they had failed or died or moved to California. When he was sixteen, he discovered the abandoned yellow house of Dan, and his grave on the hillside behind it. Exploring the interior of the house, he found a good fiddle and attempted to play it but made only screeching noises. Upstairs he found a feather mattress, and lay down on it; he had never lain on a feather mattress before and was surprised at how comfortable it was, so comfortable that he fell asleep and slept for several hours. When he got up he went into the other of the two bedrooms of the house and was startled to discover an old glass showcase containing the body of an old, old man. He told Latha about this and asked if she possibly knew who the old man was, or had been. “You’d better ask your father about him,” Latha suggested.

  The next time she sees Vernon, he is wearing on his wrist an expensive gold chronometer watch, which his father had buried in the back yard and had been keeping for him until he was old enough to appreciate it. Vernon tells his grandmother that the watch is magic. “Make it do a trick,” she suggests. It doesn’t do any tricks, he says, and what it does only he can tell. It keeps perfect time, but if he blinks his eyes, months or even years can pass. The watch has “told” him how to capture a wild razorback hog and he blinks his eyes and finds one up on Ledbetter Mountain and captures it and brings it home and breeds it to three Poland China gilts. Vernon blinks his eyes and possesses twenty-six piglets. He fattens them, feeding them not the corn which their mothers eat but the diet of the wild razorback: acorn mast and wild fruits, all they can eat. Luther Chism’s nephew, Jick, who is still distilling Chism’s Dew up on the mountain, gives Vernon the corn mash that is used in the distillation process, and he feeds this too to his piglets, who are kept constantly happy by the residue of alcohol in the mash. In hot weather, when most pigs suffer, Vernon regularly showers down his pigs with cold water from a hose. Vernon blinks his eyes, and the gilts are old enough to go into heat, so he breeds them to their father, producing pigs that are even more razorback than themselves. Normally, wild razorback sows farrow only four to six piglets, but Vernon’s hogs have become so contented and domesticated that they farrow eight to twelve piglets each.

  From his great-great-aunt Drussie Ingledew, Vernon gets a secret family recipe for curing ham. He hires George Dinsmore, who as “Baby Jim” was the youngest of Serena Dinsmore’s huge brood, to help him slaughter the hogs by a painless method, which he keeps secret even from Latha. He keeps everything in the process a secret, especially the smoking, which uses the burning of cobs and husks of a certain wild weed. He gives Latha and Every the very first finished ham from his production, and they are overwhelmed by its flavor, texture, sweetness and taste. It melts in their mouths, and they finish the whole ham in no time, at breakfast, dinner and supper, and then Every offers to buy another one from Vernon, but Vernon will never charge them for it. He will blink his eyes and discover that Ingledew Ham is famous all over the place, and the demand for it so great that George and Vernon have to hire some help to start a mail-order business.

  For a while there it seems that Stay More is in complete decline, with everybody moving out, and Latha has even boarded up the windows of her old store, but now Ingledew Ham is becoming an industry. And then people begin moving in…or at least two people, young folks who take over the yellow house that was Dan’s.

  Chapter forty-four

  Vernon knows their names, but he’s not telling, not even to Latha. He tells her that they are not hippies, as the young folks re-inhabiting the Ozarks in all directions are called (a family of them have taken over the old Chism place up on the mountain and can sometimes be seen walking barefoot past Latha’s house with their long hair and outlandish clothes). The young couple who have moved into Dan’s house have a good reason for being there, but that’s all Vernon can say about them. The young man is just about Vernon’s own age, the first coeval male friend he’s had in a life surrounded by females. The young woman seems to be a few years older than the man, and when Latha meets her she is struck by the resemblance to the previous female occupant of that yellow house, Dan’s daughter Annie. Vernon doesn’t have to tell Latha the girl’s name; on her own, Latha guesses that she might be Diana Stoving, Annie’s daughter, who had lived in Stay More for a short time as a small child when Dan had taken her. Latha hopes that the couple will not be recognized by that villainous state police corporal Sog Alan, who had killed Dan and who regularly patrols all the roads. It is a custom of Ozark folk from time immemorial to wave at anyone who passes, neighbor or stranger, friend or foe, but Latha and Every never wave at Sog Alan, nor does he wave at them. Only the thought that Every would miss her chicken and dumplings if she went to prison has prevented her from shooting Sog Alan, at least twice, in the back.

  Vernon uses his pick-up truck to help his young friend, whose name is Day Whittacker, move the glass showcase containing the body of Eli Willard out of the yellow house and back to its original location, the abandoned Ingledew store, where it will remain for several more years. In death as in life, the old peddler is a peregrinator. Latha offers to tell Vernon’s friends the story of the old man’s travels, and in the process she tells them also about another traveler, Dan, but learns that they know more about Dan than she does: they know where he was born, in Connecticut, where he taught school, in Vermont, and where he lived in North Carolina before he met Latha. Since she has already suspected that the girl is Dan’s granddaughter, that might explain the girl’s taking up residence in Dan’s house, but what about the boy? It soon becomes apparent that the girl is pregnant, and therefore the boy must be responsible for that.

  Jelena Ingledew Duckworth, Vernon’s cousin, complains to Latha that she is trapped in a loveless marriage. The chores of a chicken farmer’s wife are endlessly uninteresting. She has borne two children, both sons, to Mark Duckworth and with his permission has had herself sterilized. She has been so despondent that once, when Vernon was fourteen, she had walked up the mountain to Leapin Rock and stood on the edge of it, looking down, and would probably have jumped except that, providentially, Vernon had found her there and stopped her and talked her out of it. In gratitude she had given him some of her books, and told him how to find or order books for himself, and they had started a kind of book-group-of-two, never before known in Stay More. If a man is so congenitally shy of women that he can’t bring himself to look at them, he can at least look at a book held between them. Vernon will never go to college, but Jelena will be his college. Such an academic situation leads naturally to the realization that all learning is but a sublimation of the sexual impulse, and if one allows it to lim rather than sublim, then it becomes a real delight. Vernon and Jelena have become lovers. Hearing it from Jelena, Latha is reminded of how Sonora as
a teenager would describe her meetings with Hank, so passionate, adventurous, and amorous that Latha is glad that this time she has Every to drag to bed at other than bedtimes. But their meetings—Vernon’s and Jelena’s—are too good to last: they are found out by Jelena’s husband Mark, who puts a stop to it, threatening Vernon with his life. Soon everybody in Stay More (there are only twenty-one people this year) knows about the affair. His sisters [not me] tell him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, and Hank says to him, “You’re too old for me to cut off your tallywhacker, but I got a good mind to do it anyhow.” It is at this juncture of his college experience that Vernon joins a new fraternity-of-two with Day Whittacker, also nineteen, and they share their boundless curiosity about life and nature, and begin a friendship that will last all their lives. They not only explore the woods and fields and streams together, but they also begin poking around in the various abandoned houses, finding bits and pieces of Stay More’s history, archaeological as well as anthropological and sociological. Vernon copies into a leather-bound journal the various writings that Dan had left on the walls of the rooms in his yellow house. Vernon’s obsession with Stay More replaces (or sublimates) his obsession with Jelena. In the attic of his grandparents Bevis and Emelda Ingledew’s house, he finds a box of dozens of photographs, taken early in the century by Eli Willard, and showing just about everybody who lived in Stay More when its population was over four hundred. In the attic of the old hotel that had been built originally as Jacob Ingledew’s house, Vernon finds the unfinished but nearly complete manuscript of The Memoirs of Former Arkansas Governor Jacob Ingledew. He also finds there, in a trunk containing women’s old clothing, concealed beneath the clothing, eighty-nine small journals, which turn out to be diaries, a daily record of the existence of the woman who had been the social secretary to the governor’s wife. Latha practically begs Vernon to let her borrow the diaries and read them, which keeps her busy for a long, long time. She learns what came as a great surprise: the woman was not simply the friend and social secretary of the governor’s wife but also Jacob Ingledew’s lover and therefore is referred to as The Woman Whom We Cannot Name. The two of them had conspired so that Jacob’s wife Sarah not only did not know of their affair, but also invited the Woman to come back to Stay More with them after the governor’s term was finished and spend the rest of her days in that house. Latha will be able, farther along, to point this out to Vernon when he himself will take a mistress while running for governor, not that the reminder will stop him but only confirm his (and her) deeply developed belief that everything works in cycles and seasons and synchronicities.