The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  The funeral dinner was held at my place. Where else would have been suitable? Not everybody stayed for it, but those who did expected the traditional groaning board of potluck dishes, to which all of them had contributed something, at least bread or salad or pie, and there was plenty of fried chicken and of course the Ingledew ham that George still turned out at the plant down the valley. Extra card tables had been set up in the kitchen to accommodate all the food, and the main part of the house, which had once been the store and post office Latha Bourne Dill had run as storekeeper and postmistress, was still as much like the original as I could keep it, and contained for this occasion enough chairs to seat about half the guests; the others had to eat on the porch in the cold, sitting wherever they could find a spot or standing up. Every last one of them, before they left, felt obliged to give me a hug or at least shake my hand, and say what a good man Daddy had been, and how we would all miss him terribly.

  After all of them had gone, we children of the deceased sat around a while and visited for at least an hour before the governor had to get on back to the capital. Larry obligingly took the other four husbands into his study to watch a professional football game on TV. I was nervous, expecting that one or more of my siblings would take me to task for the fact that Daddy had remained dead without being discovered for three weeks, but nobody mentioned that, possibly because each of them also felt some guilt: Why hadn’t any of them called him? We did discuss our various reasons for not keeping in close touch with him. He wasn’t easy to chat with. Eva claimed that she couldn’t even understand him any more. “The older he got, the worse he started sounding like an old hillbilly, talking in that outmoded country-boy dialect that nobody speaks anymore. What are ‘lashins and lavins’? He’d say something like, ‘I just got lashins and lavins of time to beguile.’ What does that mean?” None of the other sisters knew; Vernon said he’d heard Daddy say something like that but wasn’t sure what it meant. I offered the opinion that possibly it was just his way of saying that he had a lot of time on his hands.

  Patricia raised the subject of how Daddy was found, with a big smile on his face, and each of us conjectured about the possible reasons for that. June, who was named after her mother Sonora but referred to as Sonora Junior, from which the “June” derived, said she was sure that Daddy in his last breath of life had caught sight of his long-departed wife waiting for him. Vernon scoffed. “Waiting where?” he said. “Heaven? No, and I’m not so sure he would have been happy to see her if he had.” Patricia said that of course it was commonly believed that in the last moment of existence one’s entire life flashes before one’s eyes, and maybe Daddy was amused, or at least pleased, to have that fast-forward—or fast-backward—look at his whole story. Eva insisted that the smile was proof of the Scientology belief that we enter a new life at death, and that Daddy was smiling at the prospect of his new life. Vernon told us about the Etruscan sarcophagi, on which sculptural images of the dead usually have big smiles on their faces. From my training as a nurse, I offered the opinion that the smile might just be a kind of reflex as rigor mortis sets in. In hospitals I had seen several people who died with smiles on their faces.

  “Did Daddy love us?” Patricia abruptly posed that rhetorical question, and each of us (Vernon had to leave) had a chance to offer variations on the opinion that although Daddy hadn’t been very good at expressing affection, he had treasured each and every one of us. When it was my turn to concur, Patricia said “But you were the last girl before Daddy finally got the boy that he always wanted, and I know for a fact, since I was the next-to-last, that Daddy didn’t like having so many girls, and he probably held it against us.” Latha agreed, pointing out that even though she was the oldest, he had made his dislike of females obvious long before I was born. But I had to point out, as they seemed to have forgotten, that all Ingledew men, through countless generations, were congenitally shy toward females, and it wasn’t that Daddy had actively disliked us, he was just uncomfortable in our presence. “Amen,” two of them chorused, and that was the end of our discussion of Daddy.

  There was one other topic of discussion, as long as all of us (except Vernon) were still together, and who knew when we would ever be together again with a chance to talk? What were we going to do with Gran? Most women not nearly her age who aren’t dead are confined to bed in a nursing home. But Gran insisted on staying at the old dogtrot log cabin which her husband’s grandfather had built and where she had lived ever since the post office closed down and she left this house to me. Vernon had insisted on paying to make a number of improvements, “modernizations,” to the dogtrot, including plumbing, electricity, telephone, television, a fully equipped kitchen with refrigeration, garbage disposal, and even a handy microwave. Gran had resisted the idea of having a computer, not because she was afraid to learn how to use it but because she didn’t have room for it, and its printer and scanner, etc. She still raised chickens, for their eggs, and had only recently given up her latest cow (named Mathilda like all of the cows she’d ever had) because she couldn’t comfortably squat to milk her. Vernon had tried for years to persuade her to move into a very nice new “assisted living facility” in the county seat, Jasper (she hated the name nursing home because she had no use for nurses, except me, but me not as a nurse, just a friend and, as my sisters knew too well, a favorite granddaughter).

  “Doesn’t she have anything wrong with her?” her namesake Latha wanted to know. My sister Latha herself was now sixty-six years old and was decrepit in ways her grandmother had never been. I said that physically Gran did not have a single complaint, although she had never permitted me to use my stethoscope on her, so I could only assume that her heart and lungs were as strong as they always seemed to be.

  “But mentally?” Eva said. “Isn’t she showing any signs of Alzheimer’s or just plain memory loss?”

  I said that I, in my fifty-fifth year, the youngest of the sisters, had worse problems with my mind than our grandmother did. Her only mental problem was that she still had not fully recovered from the loss of her long-time companion, a big shaggy dog named Xenophon, called simply “Fun” or sometimes “Funny,” who had simply disappeared some years before, at an age which in human years would have exceeded that of his mistress.

  “But doesn’t she still feed a bunch of cats?” Patricia wanted to know.

  “Dozens,” I said. Our grandmother had always had an over-population of felines on the premises, and had never thought of having them fixed by a vet.

  June wanted to know, “Hasn’t she ever even fallen down?”

  “Yes,” I had to admit. “Last summer she was out picking blackberries and tripped over an old barbed-wire fence—anybody would have tripped on it—and fell hard. She didn’t break anything, but her knee hit a rock and was cut open and skinned up, and she had to let me put three stitches in it. It was the only time she has ever allowed me to treat her.”

  “She’s been lucky,” Latha said. “But how long can that go on? How long can she endure? Living alone like that….”

  I pointed out that Vernon had had installed, against her wishes, something called “Lifeline,” a system of buttons in each of the rooms of her cabin, and all she had to do was push a button to summon aid…and also set off an alarm in my house and the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. And I still phoned her at least twice a week, not to check up on her but just to chat.

  “But,” Patricia said, “yesterday June and I tried to visit her, and we couldn’t even find her house! The road is all choked with trees and brambles, and George told us it isn’t possible to get a vehicle there. What if she needed to call for an ambulance, and it couldn’t reach her?”

  This question was addressed to all the sisters but Patricia stared at me as she asked it, so I felt obliged to reply, “She wants it that way. She wanted the road to disappear. The few of us who are her best friends know how to reach the cabin on foot. The rest of the world can go fuck itself, as she likes to say.”

  Patricia
said. “She must get awfully lonely.”

  “Not at all,” I said, and named those best friends: myself, George, Bending Bear the Osage Indian, and Day and Diana Stoving-Whittacker. “Trust me, she is the most unlonely person I’ve ever known.”

  Eva asked, “What do you chat about? Does she ever talk to you about her life?”

  “Not unless I ask her something, and I don’t usually do that.”

  Latha said, “You know, just for the record, you ought to write down anything she tells you about her life. It would make a book.”

  The sisters eagerly nodded their heads in agreement, and Eva said, “I’ll bet there are all sorts of things that have happened to her in those hundred and six years that nobody knows about.”

  June said, “Mother once told me that when she was a young woman Gran was locked away for several years at the state hospital. That’s the nuthouse, right? What was she doing there? She’s one hundred percent sane. One hundred and ten percent.”

  Patricia said, “Ask her about the state hospital.”

  Eva said, “Ask her about those seven missing years after she escaped from the nuthouse before she showed up here again.”

  Latha said, “Ask her about everything.”

  “It will give me something to do,” I allowed.

  Chapter two

  My earliest memory, the first prosaic awareness of consciousness that manages to keep itself in the cluttered store of my head, is of walking at the age of three down the main road of Stay More, holding the hand of my grandmother, the heroine of this book, who was giving me a guided tour of the little village or what was left of it. I knew that my grandmother was important, not just because she owned the building called the store and P.O. where people had once got groceries and letters, but also because she seemed to know everything about anything and could tell me the story behind every building we passed. Although I had been born in California, I had no memory of that place, which, according to my grandmother, was under a curse placed upon it by my ancestor, Jacob Ingledew, the founder of Stay More, who lost his firstborn son in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of western pioneers.

  “That was my first memory, and you were in it,” I said to Gran one day in February, not long after Daddy’s funeral (his will had left all he had—the house—in equal shares to his six children, but although the house was listed with a real estate agent and for that matter is still listed, nobody has bought it). “Do you remember your first memory?” It was my way of prompting her into the beginning of the story of her life. I knew she had been born in Stay More, in a cabin on the east side of Ledbetter Mountain (my house is at the foot of the south side of the same mountain). I knew that her father, Saultus Bourne, was a poor farmer just barely raising enough to feed his family, and her mother, Fannie Swain Bourne, although descended from one of the original settlers of Stay More, had come from an even poorer family, and had given her daughter Latha only her good looks and her engaging smile (but, oddly, had not given these to her other two daughters, Latha’s sisters Barbara and Mandy).

  Gran smiled, as she often did, that Swain smile (she did not, to the best of my knowledge, wear dentures.) “My first memory, huh?” She stared out across the road as if she could see all the way to the Bourne cabin, which no longer stood, but would not have been visible from the Dill dogtrot if it had, what with all the wilderness she had allowed to grow up around her. “I was three years old. I was walking down the main road of Stay More, holding the hand of my grandmother, who was giving me a guided tour of the little village or what was left of it.”

  I was more puzzled than annoyed, and wondered if indeed she was verging into Alzheimer’s. “No, Gran, that’s what I was just telling you. I want to know what your first memory is.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “One more thing that you and I have in common. The difference was that I walked you from south to north on the main road; my grandmother walked me from north to south, and the first building we came to was the same building which I was destined to take possession of eventually as my store and post office, your house now, where the tour I gave you as a child ended up. In the time of my grandmother, it was Jerram’s general store, one of four in the town, but I had never seen a store before and didn’t know what it was. ‘Is a store where you get stories?’ I asked Grandma, who was a great storyteller. She laughed, and said ‘Why no, but a right smart of stories sure do get told at stores.’ She didn’t take me into Jerram’s. She showed me each of the other buildings and told me what they were: two doctor’s offices, blacksmith shops, a dentist’s, and the gristmill. I had never seen any buildings other than our cabin and our barn and our outhouse. Seeing all these buildings so close together must have been like your first view of Chicago. I don’t remember what thoughts were running through my little head, but I must have been struck all of a heap at this display of metropolitan goings-on. We came to the biggest house in town, which was Ingledew’s hotel, that actually had a second story on top of the first! And across from it Ingledew’s big general store, also two stories.

  It was the last of all these buildings that she took me into, the first time I’d ever been inside a commercial establishment. She led me to the candy showcase and gave me a penny, which might have been all she had to her name, and told me to pick out one piece of candy. She had to leave me alone during the long, long time that it took me to make up my mind, trying to choose among the gum drops, chocolate bars, jelly squares, licorice sticks, mint kisses, cinnamon balls, caramels, cream wafers, marshmallow bananas, rock candy, bonbons, cracker jacks and I don’t know what. It seems hours went by, but my grandmother was lost in chitchat with some other ladies. Finally I picked an I-don’t-know-what, a chocolaty thing with nuts inside, and pointed to it, and Mr. Ingledew fetched it out of the case for me, and I handed over my penny. I had never tasted chocolate before, and I can remember it to this day. Then while I greedily consumed it I just wandered around the store, looking at all the stuff. They sold clothes and shoes and dry goods and hardware and all kinds of groceries. They even sold toys (play pretties we called them), among which were figures of small, pudgy people that were called, I would soon learn, babies, although I had never seen one before. I searched for Grandma to ask her to buy me one of the babies, and I found her among a group of women who were holding and admiring a real live baby. They let me get a close look at it, and even to touch it. It looked just like those figures of babies I had been admiring except that it moved and looked at you with real eyes. I asked my grandmother if babies came from stores. She laughed harder than when I’d asked about stories coming from stores. But she never did tell me where babies come from.”

  Little Latha would not hear an acceptable answer to that question for several more years. As she squeezed from infancy into childhood, she would keep asking that question, whenever she saw a baby or whenever a baby crossed her mind, even when her sisters Barb and Mandy allowed her eventually to hold one of those figures of babies that they had come into possession of, which they called a “dollbaby.” When she asked her sisters where babies come from, they said that this one had belonged to Eunice Whitter and before her to Violet Duckworth, and little Latha said yes but not a dollbaby, one of those babies that really cry and look alive. Barb, the older sister, said that babies come from under a gooseberry bush. There was only one gooseberry bush, out behind the cabin, and Latha explored it thoroughly and watched it for weeks and weeks without ever seeing any sign of a baby. Her sister Mandy agreed with her that that was a pretty dumb notion, and she knew for a fact that you could order babies from Sears Roebuck the same way you could order anything else. Latha waited until the next time a catalogue from Sears Roebuck arrived in the mail (the previous issue had been used up as toilet paper in the outhouse). She hunted and hunted through the pictures in it until finally, way off toward the end, she found two pages covered with babies! She showed it to Mandy but Mandy hadn’t learned to read yet so they had to take it to Barb. Barb read aloud but slowly the words about “doubl
e riveted patent joint hip and knees, fine bisque head, pasted wig, comes in three sizes,” and Barb said, “These here aint but dollbabies. There’s not no real baby. As usual, Mandy don’t know what she’s talkin about. Real babies are found under gooseberry bushes.” Latha waited as long as she could stand it, checking that gooseberry bush nearly every day, until finally she asked her mother why their gooseberry bush didn’t have any babies under it. Her mother laughed and said that must be some old wives’ tale.

  “But where did I come from, Momma?” Latha wanted to know. Her mother explained that she had been brought by a granny-woman, not Grandma Bourne, bless her heart, but a woman who lived way back up in the hills and had to be called whenever a baby was expected, and who brought the baby in her tote-sack. Some folks who had no modesty but had money could afford to call in Doc Swain or Doc Plowright, who brought the baby in their doctor bag, but most ordinary folks like us has to make do with the granny-woman, who’s just as good as them doctors anyhow and don’t embarrass the mother.

  “But where did the granny-woman get me?” Latha asked.

  Her mother said, “In the barn, of course.”

  Latha told her sisters what their mother had said. Barb allowed as how the barn might be more private and protected than the gooseberry bush. Mandy said that probably the baby came from Sears Roebuck anyhow but the postman couldn’t stuff it into the mailbox so he left it in the barn. The Bourne’s barn wasn’t much of a structure, just big enough for one cow and enough hay to feed her through the winter. Latha gave it a good looking-over, and found several places where hens had laid their eggs in the straw, and Latha gathered these up and took them to the kitchen. But there was one place where a hen had made a nest, with several eggs in it, which she was sitting on. The hen pecked Latha’s hand when she tried to reach under it to get the eggs, so Latha left those alone. Latha was watching closely on the day when the eggs hatched, and she studied all the baby chicks. She wondered if a woman would have to sit on a big egg in the barn for the baby to be born. Or did the granny-woman just find the baby in the hay and take it to the mother in the house? Latha spent a lot of time in the barn, and by and by their cat, Jasmine, gave birth to a litter of seven kittens, and Latha watched each one of them come out of the cat’s bottom. Latha was taken aback because it looked like Jasmine was doing her business, only making kittens instead of do-do. But it was unmistakable that both chicken babies and cat babies were born in the barn, so it stood to reason that people babies came from the barn too, and thus her mother had been correct.