Enduring

by Donald Harington

  George Dinsmore, who is even more solicitous of Latha’s welfare than her grandson Vernon, will protect her from assorted newspaper reporters and television anchors who want to interview her and ask her for the secrets of her longevity. A good thing, because she hasn’t paused to consider what if any secrets she possesses, other than the secret of Ekaterina’s famous pen name. She has never smoked, she drinks in moderation, preferably champagne on such occasions as this, she gets plenty of exercise, she still goes fishing now and then, she loves life and she tries not to dwell upon the faded glory of Stay More.

  If a note of magic realism is needed, Latha is not surprised to discover that all of her cats and dogs gather in the dogtrot (and/or cat-trot) of her house and sing “Happy Birthday” to her. She has no human witnesses, however, so if anyone would like to accuse her of senility, they are free to hold whatever beliefs they like.

  The only “interview” she will grant, for now, is with a handsome woman named Lydia Caple, who is Vernon’s “media manager” or press secretary in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor. The woman appears on foot one day, reminding her of her previous visitor, Robin. Of course she comments on the great number of cats and dogs about the premises but instead of asking her “Why so many?” she answers it, “You’ve got plenty of company, haven’t you?” and Latha says, “Not more than I can handle.” Lydia Caple admits that she has a half dozen cats herself but they are more than she can handle.

  Lydia broaches the topic of a human-interest story about Latha, with an interview and a photographer, to help Vernon’s campaign for governor. Latha answers, “Miss Caple, whatever that boy Vernon does has always been okay with me, but when it comes to his wits and his ways and his twists, he takes after his momma, my daughter Sonora, and I’d just as soon not have anybody looking at me as if I had anything to do with it.”

  The woman seems to know a lot about Sonora, as if she’d asked Vernon about his mother. She asks, “What about his daddy?” Did Vernon inherit any of his character or features?”

  “You haven’t met Hank Ingledew?” Latha asks, surprised.

  “I haven’t been aware he existed,” Lydia says. “Vernon hasn’t talked about him.”

  “I’m sorry to say my son-in-law and I don’t visit, but I reckon that’s as much my fault as his,” Latha says.

  In time Latha will come to know all of the campaign staff of Vernon, who has spared no expense in hiring a corps of professionals. For the next several months, until the primary balloting, and then for another several months until the election, Stay More becomes a busy town again, and Ekaterina complains that some of the visitors have offered her money to put them up for the night, or the week, or the month. Latha is sorry for her, that she has gone to such pains to obliterate her existence in order to achieve some privacy, but then has had that privacy invaded, although none of the visitors, including Vernon’s staff of professionals, ever discovers that the lady living in the Governor Jacob Ingledew house is the legendary novelist V. Kelian.

  Ekaterina comes to relax her restrictions about visitors in the case of a woman and a man from Oklahoma, both Native Americans, because they happen to be Osage Indians, the original inhabitants of Stay More (after the Bluff-Dwellers), and V. Kelian has written a nonfiction book called The Dawn of the Osage. They are not a couple. The woman is young, beautiful, tall (like all the Osage), and has inherited untold amounts of Oklahoma oil money. Her name is Juliana Heartstays. The man is just as young but much taller, much bigger, in fact positively huge, but not with a menacing mien. He is very courteous and his name is Thomas Bending Bear. He is apparently Miss Heartstays’ bodyguard, chauffeur and general handyman. Latha learns from Ekaterina that they have come to Stay More with the express purpose of obliterating all of the Ingledews, who descend from the Jacob Ingledew who had supposedly driven away the original Osages, and who had impregnated his Osage friend Fanshaw’s squaw, who was the ancestress of both Juliana and Bending Bear. In time, the visiting Osage pair are able to learn to their satisfaction, and with the help of Jacob Ingledew’s journals, that Jacob had not actually raped Fanshaw’s squaw, as they had believed for generations, but rather that he impregnated her with Fanshaw’s consent and with the squaw’s joyful cooperation. But having learned this, Juliana and her major domo do not leave. In time, Latha will watch with fascination as Bending Bear, with the help of George Dinsmore, builds a double-hut beehive basketry dwelling in the same spot where supposedly Fanshaw had had his dwelling when he met Jacob Ingledew, and, later in time, Latha will watch the erection across the creek of a full-blown modern mansion in the same style for Juliana, who falls in love with Vernon and complicates his run for governor and, later still, his years in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. Latha knows that somehow Dawny will find out about all of this and use it in a future book of his, and she decides just to wait and read the book instead of trying to keep up with all of the things that are happening in Stay More, which stops being a ghost town for the duration of Vernon’s campaign and governorship.

  In fact, there are so many strangers coming around that Latha decides to withdraw a bit from the world. With the help of George and of Bending Bear, a “two-spirit” or “man-woman” who takes a great liking to her and remains her faithful friend for the rest of his life, Latha contrives to make her double-pen dogtrot house inaccessible to autos, the roadway itself planted with seedlings of pine and oak which will in time grow to a size sufficient to keep out any traffic except foot travel along a path known only to Latha—and to Bending Bear, who, after Vernon has gone to the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, will assume Vernon’s regular habits of bringing to Latha what few staples she needs, primarily cat food and dog food. She uses this path to visit her mailbox at the spot where the path empties into what is left of the main road to Stay More. Her house thus becomes hidden to all the world except those few like Bending Bear and George and of course Sharon, who still come to visit her. Jelena also visits, at least once for sympathy or advice on the fact that Vernon has impregnated Juliana. This is all so complicated that only Dawny can make eventual sense out of it, but even he, Latha will conclude after reading that novel, does not know how to deal with the fact that Vernon is not going to be the last of the Ingledews after all, although the boy when he is born is not given the Ingledew name but an Osage name not directly translatable into English but which his parents will shorten to “Conundrum,” further shortened by his mother to Con and by his father to Drum, the name by which Latha will call him all the years of his life, as he becomes devoted to her as no one but Dawny has ever been devoted to her. Drum has red hair but resembles his mother much more than his father, and there is scarcely any Ingledew in him, so that those who prefer to believe that Vernon was indeed the last of the Ingledews are perfectly free to go on thinking that. Vernon will never abandon Jelena. But Juliana will never abandon Stay More. We will realize that we have employed the future tense over twenty times already in this chapter, as if eager to get to that tense in which nothing ever comes to an end, so we will decide that we might as well make the tense shift official as of now. We will be forgiven, first by Sharon whose handiwork this narrative is, and eventually by Dawny, who will seem to be desperately tugging at the future tense to save us all.

  Thus it will come to pass that Latha, who has loomed so large at the entire center of this great story, will, like a great variety of other inhabitants in the history of this amazing town of Stay More, endure henceforward as what is to all intents and purposes a hermit—or rather a hermitess, the first of her gender. She will have earned that right. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses will not be able to find her. But four “suitors” will ply her with their attentions: old George Dinsmore, who will confess to her one day that the only reason he never remarried is that he didn’t think he’d ever meet her equal; George’s good friend Bending Bear the Osage, who will tell her, “I may never know if I’m an homosexual or not but I do know that homosexual men are usually the best o
f friends with women, and you are my best friend”; the abovementioned Conundrum, or simply Drum, who from the age of five onward will remind her greatly of Dawny; and one more “D”: the son of Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker, whose name is Daniel Donald Stoving-Whittacker. Danny will have grown up in Stay More, in the house built by his grandfather Daniel Lyam Montross (who was also his great-grandfather), but after college will have embarked upon an extended wanderjahr that will have taken him all over the world and will have provided enough material for a novel, but who will have returned in middle age to his hometown, Stay More, to live for the rest of his life, much of it spent in the company of the woman who had accompanied his grandfather on an exodus from Tennessee to Arkansas.

  All four of these men (or rather three men and a boy) will be madly in love with the ancient Latha and will have prevented her from being a complete hermitess. If she will need anything done that she can’t do herself, one or more of them will do it. Her various appliances, like all appliances, will be prone to break-downs and built-in obsolescence, and even if the repairman’s truck could reach her house, which it could not for all the trees and undergrowth, the repairman could not as speedily and knowledgeably keep all of Latha’s equipment functioning.

  We will be permitted a glimpse of a simple tableau or event which will not have occurred anywhere in the world before and will probably not ever happen anywhere again: the four men (or three men and a teenager) sitting with Latha around the four sides of a quilting frame suspended from the ceiling of the second of the two pens of her double-pen dogtrot house. They will be “piecing,” that is, cooperatively contributing their stitchery to the making of a patterned quilt, sometimes in a pattern like Nine Patch Lover’s Link or Star Flower or Flying Bird but more often in a random pattern known as “Crazy Quilt” or “Friendship Quilt,” the latter embroidered with golden stitches spelling out in script their full names: James George Dinsmore, Thomas Bending Bear, Daniel Donald Stoving-Whittacker, Conundrum Heartstays, and Latha Bourne Dill. Each of these people at their various residences will sleep at night beneath one or more of the quilts. They will give to John Henry “Hank” Ingledew the quilts he will have been sleeping under back when he will have died and started this story.

  Quilting bees will have always been the prerogative of womenfolk, and thus Latha’s quilting bees with her four suitors will have been not only unheard-of but well-nigh unthinkable, especially in view of the fact that the four suitors will not get along very well with each other, except for George and Bending Bear. A conventional quilting bee of womenfolk will have usually been viewed as a gabfest, an occasion for gossip and chatter, but the Friendship Quilt will be pieced by a group of four men (or three geezers and a young man) who would just as soon have exchanged insults, because they will all be rivals for Latha’s affection, and only the advanced age of three of them will have prevented them from fighting exactly like the kids who competed for Sonora’s attention during lightning bug time in the summers of yore.

  They will, however, have some sense of responsibility for discussing business matters, such as whether or not the next quilt will be crazy or geometric, whose turn it will be to sweep up the loose threads off the floor, whether or not Governor Ingledew should run for senator, and whether or not Larry Brace, who will have recently died, is entitled to burial in the Stay More cemetery with the native Stay Morons. The latter matter will be decided in the affirmative, and they will contribute a fine satin and linen quilt in a cockroach pattern for Larry to be buried in. His widow, Sharon, who will have been telling this whole story since page 1, will survive her husband for only a few years before the Bee will need to piece a special quilt in the pattern of this book, or rather in the pattern of a later book called Rose of Sharon, in which she will be buried beside Larry in the Stay More cemetery.

  Which will leave an enormous problem furnishing the quilters with seemingly endless hours of debate while they will piece: if Sharon will have been telling this story, what will happen to this story after Sharon will have died?

  Chapter fifty

  Latha will be so consumed with grief over the death of her favorite granddaughter that she will not even notice that Sharon’s narrative will have come to an end, although the life it will have sought to chronicle will not have. Latha will reflect that the worst thing about being a survivor is that one must be all alone in one’s memories of the departed. There will be no one else to share all of Latha’s recollections of what a wonderful person Sharon Ingledew Tate Brace was and how difficult it will be to miss her so miserably that life will seem scarcely worth enduring. Not even the devoted readers of Rose of Sharon, of which there will be several, will be able to fully identify with Latha’s sorrow. And she will be rather shocked to reflect that she is mourning Sharon more than she had Sharon’s mother, her own daughter Sonora, or for that matter her husband Every or anyone else who has predeceased her in Stay More. In time, as the funeral hymn “Farther Along” sung at all these funerals will have promised, Latha will come to realize that only the survivor will understand the depth of the loss, while only the lost will understand that they are not lost at all, but found. And she will remember what she herself had realized years before, that the secret of enduring is not to harden oneself against loss but to soften oneself in acceptance.

  Softening herself, Latha will design the pattern, “Rose of Sharon” for the quilt which her suitor/quilters will stay up all night long finishing in time for the funeral, each of them not needing to be told how special Sharon was to Latha and how magnificent this particular quilt would have to be, with threads of gold and silver and titanium. It will be during that all-night quiltathon that they will discuss the solution to the problem of how this story can continue to be told although Sharon will no longer be alive to tell it. Latha herself will get credit for voicing the answer: that we have all of us become so familiar with Sharon’s narrative techniques throughout this enduring chronicle that we can each of us go on doing the telling ourselves. We can hear Sharon’s voice still speaking and telling. And since, as we already know or have guessed, this chronicle has no conclusion, the perpetual rights of storytelling may be allowed to devolve upon whoever may endure thus far through a reading of the book.

  Once this solution is agreed upon among the quilters, old George Dinsmore, who first appeared as the “Baby Jim” of Lightning Bug who fell through the hole of the outhouse, prompting his mother to remark that it would be easier to have another one than to clean him up, and who will have all these years served as Vernon Ingledew’s right-hand-man, manager of the ham factory, and the only one of Latha’s quilters capable of sewing a respectable fan stitch of quarter rounds, will expire of natural causes at the age of eighty-six, which, he will have been heard to comment back, “is a good age to go.” His former boss, Vernon, retired for many years from the governor’s office and unsuccessful in his bid for senator, will be required to close down the Ingledew Ham Factory and to lay off with pensions its few remaining employees. The razorbacks who will not have already been converted into ham and bacon will be permitted to live and to return to the wilderness where Vernon had found them back in the twentieth century, and where they may still be found to this day.

  Vernon will ask of his grandmother permission to take George’s place at the quilting frame, and will prove to be an intelligent and nimble stitcher, at least for a while, but will refuse to discuss politics and thus will seem unfriendly to the other quilters, who will suggest politely to His Former Excellency that he ought to stick to his laboratory, where, having discovered a cure for cancer early in this century, he will now be hard at work on curing the common cold. Vernon’s place at the quilting frame will remain vacant until eventually another old geezer will show up, a stranger, a retired professor from St. Louis who has brought a letter of introduction written by Dawny himself and wishes to do a 3DTV interview with Latha. She, having given no interviews for the previous two dozen years, will be at first be indisposed, but the professor’s possess
ion of a letter from Dawny will almost win her over. She will introduce him to the other quilters, each in his turn, and the professor will look the men over and make an allusion to Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’ forlorn wife pestered by suitors during his absence, she who relieved herself of their importunities by promising to choose among them as soon as she finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law (but each night unraveled what she had done during the day and thus put the suitors off until Odysseus’ return).

  Upon revealing his name as Brian Walter, the suitors (not Penelope’s but Latha’s) will realize that it was he, along with his wife Lynnea, to whom Dawny had dedicated his noble novel With.

  “Can you quilt?” she will ask Professor Walter.

  “I can juggle,” he will assert, pantomiming the suspension of six balls in the air simultaneously. He will be as tall as Dawny and it will occur to Latha that having him here would be almost as good as having Dawny here, and in fact he contends that he loves her as much as Dawny ever did, or as much as any of these suitors do, a declaration which brings a loud protest from Ben, Dan and Drum.

  She is charmed, and tells him to go right ahead and ask her anything he wants to ask. The first question, once he has turned on his senseo camera, will be, “How has Dawny changed over the decades you’ve known him?”

  “He was just a little spadger, five going on six, when first I laid eyes on him,” Latha will say. “And the last time I got a chance to lay eyes on him, many years ago, he was white-haired and stooped and slow, but I could tell he was still the same tender sentimentalist he’d always been.”

  Brian Walter will snatch the senseo out of the air in which it has been floating while recording in three dimensions with sound, smell and taste, and feeling the scene it perceives. He will make adjustments to it, explaining he wants to get more of the background, which includes the quilters busy at work, as well as an assortment of cats in various attitudes of languor, curiosity, contention, and self-washing. If Brian Walter will bother to ask, she will gladly identify the cats by name, pointing out that three of the males are named after three of the quilters: Ben, Dan, and Drum.