The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Wal howdy now, little miss chickabiddy,” Ike said to her, and then he said to the other men, “This here little darling’s gon marry me soon’s she’s big enough to put out.” The other men made comments about her prettiness. Ike Whitter offered her a sourdeen, on top of a sody cracker. She had never had sourdeens or sody crackers. The sourdeen looked like a little fish and was salty but she kind of liked it. Ike said to her, “Where’s your maw or paw? What’re ye doin out here all by yoreself?”

  She opened her fist to reveal the penny in her palm. She thought for a moment of telling him she’d got the penny from one of his kid brothers. And even of telling what it was payment for. But she decided to simply say, “I’ve got a penny to get me some candy.”

  “Why, sweetheart, you just march right on in there and help yoreself to all the candy you can grab. Heck, git yoreself a paper poke and fill it up to the brim. This here’s my store now.”

  She didn’t understand how Ike Whitter could have taken possession of the Ingledew’s store, but she was thrilled at the idea of not having to choose among the countless different kinds of candy. She could have one of each! So she went into the store and made a beeline for the candy counter. She did not see Mr. Ingledew anywhere so she decided he must have sold his store to Ike Whitter. The paper pokes were stacked in three different sizes. She had never had a paper poke of her own before. She picked the middle size and began to drop into it a gum drop, a chocolate bar, a jelly square, a licorice stick, a mint kiss, a cinnamon ball, a caramel, a cream wafer, a marshmallow banana, a rock candy, a bonbon, a cracker jack and an I-don’t-know-what. In fact, there were several different I-don’t-know-whats, so she took one of each. And while she was doing this, it suddenly occurred to her that she ought not be selfish; she ought to get some candy for both of her sisters. So she started over again, picking one of each for Mandy, and then one of each for Barb. The paper poke was getting heavy.

  She heard the sound of gunfire, and suddenly there was a crash and one of the store’s big windows was shattered. Two more crashes and two more windows were smashed and splinters of glass flew over her head. Was somebody shooting at her? Maybe Ike had played a trick on her and didn’t really own the store, and the Ingledews were firing at her for stealing the candy? But then Ike Whitter and the other two men came into the store. Ike yelled at her, “Babydoll, you’d best get down on the floor and stay down!” Then the three men started firing their rifles and six-shooters out through the three front doors of the store. She lay on her tummy on the hard floor and watched and listened. “Got two of the bastards!” Ike said. “Let’s kill ’em all!” The gunfire went on and on. Things over her head and around her were punctured with bullets. They would never stop. Every window in the store was busted out by bullets. Latha knew that if one of those bullets hit her, she would be dead. There would be no more. Of anything. She would bleed all over and then could never watch the sun come up in the morning ever again. The thought made her begin to cry. She did not cry very often, and then only after she had been hurt bad, and she had not been hurt now. Nobody could hear her crying because of all the noise the gunfire made, which went on and on and on, until she wanted to stop crying and start screaming.

  The rear door of the store opened and in walked the biggest man that Latha had ever seen. He was old enough to be Latha’s granddaddy, but he was a giant, bigger than a house. He saw her and moved his finger to his lips to tell her to shush. She didn’t know whether he just meant for her to stop crying, or he meant for her to be quiet so the shooting men wouldn’t see him. She guessed the latter, because very quietly he sneaked up behind the shooting man in the farthest doorway and whopped him on top of his head with his fist then broke both his arms then hit him so hard in the stomach he doubled over then picked him up by the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants and flung him right out through the doorway, so that he flew over the porch and crashed into the dirt road and just lay there crumpled, maybe dead. Then the huge old man moved to the other doorway, the nearest one, and did the same things to the other shooting man and flung him like a dishrag into the road. Ike Whitter, who was shooting in the main doorway, turned around and saw the big man and said “Lord god amighty, Coon Ingledew, you done went and knocked hell out of both of ’em!” He raised his rifle to shoot, but the big old man knocked it out of his hands, then whopped him on top of his head the same way he’d done the other two, broke his arms, hit him terribly in the stomach, then picked him up and tossed him right out through the doorway into the road, where he lay crumpled up and unmoving beside the other two men. All the gunfire had ceased. Then the big old man came to Latha, lifted her up, and led her out through the rear of the store toward the gristmill. “You’d best take off for home,” he said to her. “You don’t want to hang around and watch them fellers get lynched.”

  “Lynch” was one of those words that she hadn’t heard before and she couldn’t ask anyone what it meant. The main road of Stay More was filling up with people as she walked through them to get home. She was almost all the way home before she realized that she had left the paper poke full of candy at the store. Not only that, but she’d left her penny, or lost it. Her sisters wouldn’t believe her if she told them that she had had a whole poke full of candy, so she didn’t tell them. She was happy to see that Rouser the dog was okay. He must have lit out for home as soon as the gunfire started. At supper that evening she heard the word “lynch” again, several times. She learned that there was a big oak tree near the Ingledew store and hanging from one stout limb of it were the bodies of three men, one of them Ike Whitter. As she listened she was able to figure out the details so she could understand that “lynch” meant to tie a rope around somebody’s neck and hang them from a tree limb until they were dead. Latha’s daddy was angry because the Whitters were friends of his, even if Ike Whitter was “a no-good rowdy, a bully and a drunk.” Latha learned that Ike Whitter had gouged out the eyeballs of several men he had fought with, including the sheriff who had tried to arrest him. Lynching, Latha learned, was against the law, which meant that although the three guys hanging from the oak limb were bad guys, and Ike Whitter had done many bad things, including taking out the sheriff’s eyeball and taking possession of the Ingledew store, it was not the job of citizens to punish him, and those citizens who had done so would be tried in a court of law for taking the law in their own hands. This was complicated, but Latha managed to figure it out and her only question, which she did not utter, was, “How often does this kind of thing happen in the world?” She could not know, then, that Ike Whitter was the only outlaw in the whole long peaceful history of Stay More. She eventually learned that the big old man who had started the lynching was the town’s miller, Isaac Ingledew, who was also the father of the Ingledews who owned the store and hotel, and the grandfather of Raymond Ingledew, who would become Latha’s boyfriend by and by…although of course she didn’t know this at the time, or even know what a “boyfriend” was.

  The next day her daddy went off to the village to see for himself the lynched men hanging from the oak tree, and he brought home some folded sheets of paper which he said was a “newspaper,” called the Jasper Disaster. The newspaper was made in the town which was the seat of the county they lived in, Newton, where the sheriff lived. Barb said that someday they would find a way to go there and see all the buildings around “the square.” Saultus Bourne was not able to read, so he asked his wife to read the newspaper for him, at least the parts about the lynching. The story was called, “Stay More Vigilantes Put Noose on Villains.” Latha listened and was able to make out that Ike Whitter had not only taken out the eyeball of the sheriff but also had killed the man who had married his sister. So the Stay More vigilantes had done a good deed by killing Ike Whitter, but the one-eyed sheriff had arrested the Ingledews and the other vigilantes and taken them to Jasper to a jail, which is a place where you lock up evildoers, even though the deed was not evil but good. Latha was very happy to learn that there was such a thing as
a newspaper to tell the stories of such amazing things as the lynching. Although she would never ask questions again, she knew that you could still put in for something you want without asking a question, so she requested of her mother, “Could you learn me how to look at the newspaper and tell what it says?” And her mother just replied that that was what schools were for, and if she’d be patient she could go to school one of these days.

  Latha and her sisters did not go with their parents to Ike Whitter’s funeral in the Stay More cemetery. Just as well, because there was a pouring-down rain, but the rain stopped in time for all the wet mourners to dry off and go to the Whitter house for the funeral dinner, and Latha got to go to that, where there was better eating than anybody had ever had before or could even imagine. Latha couldn’t believe all the plates and platters and dishes of everything you always wanted to taste, including every pie and cake known to man. The Whitter boy who had paid Latha the penny whispered in her ear that he would give her all his lemon pie if she would go out to the barn with him, but she told him he was silly because she could just help herself to all the pie she could handle. His sister Rindy told Latha, “Don’t pay him no mine. He’s prunier than a billy goat.” Dorinda Whitter was just a little bit older than Latha, and had never spoken to her before. This was the beginning of a friendship, although it would be a while before Rindy would get around to answering Latha’s unasked question: what does “pruney” mean? After the funeral dinner, the two girls separated themselves from the others and Rindy showed Latha her doll, which was something Latha didn’t have yet. They confided in each other: Latha told Rindy something she hadn’t told her parents or sisters, that she had been present during the fight at the Ingledew Store and that Rindy’s big brother Ike had been nice to her. Rindy snorted and said that her brother had never been nice to her, and as far as she was concerned it was a good thing he was dead. Rindy said that she was sure her big sister Clara had been shagged by Ike many times, which was why Ike killed Harley Bullen when he married Clara although maybe one reason was that they hadn’t invited Ike to the wedding because he was such a bad feller. Latha was pleased at the thought of becoming best friends with Rindy and she was sure that Rindy would probably, without being asked, tell her not only what “pruney” meant but also what “shag” meant. She had a notion that both were wicked, and she was beginning, all on her own, to figure out what “wicked” meant.

  Chapter four

  She had first heard of wickedness when her sisters Mandy and Barb were whispering to each other in bed. All three of them slept together in that one small bed, with hardly enough room to turn over. It was good when the nights were very cold because she could feel the heat from the others’ bodies, but when it was hot—and she had already figured out that heat rises and therefore it was much hotter up in the sleeping loft than in the lower part of the cabin—it wasn’t very good to sleep with her sisters but she had to. She was supposed to wear a nightdress, made out of a flour sack with pretty flowers on it, but when it was hot she always slept without anything on. Her sisters lay there with their mouths up against each other’s ears, talking in tiny little voices that Latha could not overhear, and Latha felt left out of the secrets that they were giving each other, mysteries that teased and tormented her. She had once asked them what they were talking about, and Mandy had said it was just too wicked, and that’s where she first heard that word. In an effort to join in their whispering, Latha had whispered, loud enough for them to hear, the only secret she knew at that time: she had a kitten hidden in the barn, named Cutie-Pie Face. The next day Mandy had told their father, and their father had cut a switch from an elm sapling and had switched Latha’s legs with it until she cried, and he had searched the hayloft until he found Cutie-Pie Face, and had taken the kitten away somewhere so that Latha never saw it again. Latha hated Mandy so much for that that she almost didn’t put any candy for her in that paper poke when she was loading up on candy at Ingledew’s the day Ike Whitter was lynched, but it didn’t matter because she went off and forgot the poke of candy anyhow. One night in bed she was so jealous of their whispering that she couldn’t keep her mouth shut and went ahead and told Barb and Mandy about the candy, and about the gunfight and about the old giant who had lifted her off the floor. But her sisters told her she was just making it up, and they wouldn’t believe her. From then on, she just let them do their whispering, and when they were so busy doing their whispering they didn’t hold on to their doll, whose name was Sally, so Latha would take Sally and whisper things to it.

  Then after Rindy Whitter became her friend she didn’t need to whisper to Sally any more. She and Rindy told each other everything they knew to tell, they told each other so much that they ran out of things to tell and could only sit together in silence or try to teach Rindy’s doll, whose name was Florrie, how to talk. Florrie never learned to talk, so it was pretty quiet whenever the girls got together, unless one of them had heard or seen something new to tell the other. The girls had observed that whenever their fathers, Saultus Bourne and Simon Whitter, were sitting together on the porch, the men usually talked about the weather, at least for a while until the weather was completely covered. So Rindy and Latha sometimes did that. But the weather lately wasn’t changing at all; day after day it didn’t rain or even cloud up and Rindy said she had forgotten what thunder sounded like, so Latha had to pretend to be the thunder and speak a big boom to remind her, but Latha’s voice was too girlish to sound like the thunder. She got a dishpan from the kitchen and beat on it with a wooden spoon, until her mother told her to cut out that racket.

  Latha would take Rindy out to the milk lot and boost her up onto the back of the calf so she could ride the calf around, and then they’d swap places, and Latha would ride while Rindy would lead the calf around and around, even out to the garden and around it. The Whitters had a mule, which the Bournes didn’t have, because, as Saultus Bourne sometimes said, they was too pore to buy one. The Whitter’s mule’s back was too high for the girls to boost one another up there, so they couldn’t ride the mule, but they could pet it, and Latha liked to reach up and run her hand down the mule’s long face. But one time the mule bit her hand, and it bled so much blood that they had to take her to the doctor to have stitches put in. It was her third visit to the village, and she saw how all the shot-out windows had been replaced. The doctor, whose name was Plowright, scared her and hurt her more than the mule had. And Latha’s father raised a big ruckus because he didn’t have the dollar that the doctor wanted for doing the job and hardly anything to offer in place of it except a piglet, which the doctor accepted, but Latha’s father complained that the piglet was supposed to be their meat for the next year, so it was going to be a sorry Christmas.

  Little by little Latha was becoming aware of just how poor they were. The reason for it, according to her father, was that “I aint got no boys to help out around the place, and you gals aint fit for nothing.” Which wasn’t true. All three of the girls had to keep weeds out of the garden, as well as the cornfield and the cottonfield, and it wasn’t easy spending the whole hot day out there trying to chop with a hoe whose handle was too long, or bending over for hours plucking out weeds, and having to know the difference between a weed and a plant, which wasn’t too difficult although Latha never learned why the weeds were thought to be bad. Weeds are strong and healthy and vigorous, and some of them are real pretty. All three of the girls also helped their mother and grandmother in the kitchen and had other chores around the place. Latha was now in charge of all the poultry: the leghorns for eggs and the Rhode Island reds and buff orpingtons for eating, and also some guineas and a few geese. Latha gathered eggs every day and whenever she found a goose egg she’d put it under one of the setting hens, who would adopt the gosling when the egg hatched. Latha’s main job was to collect all the eating eggs each day. One time when her father said that she was fit for nothing, she said, “You eat plenty of eggs, don’t ye?” and he said that was “back sass” and took the switch to her
again.

  When it got so cold that Latha could barely stand to go out to gather eggs, and the chickens weren’t laying much anyhow, she knew it was time for Christmas, although Christmas wasn’t very special, except that they had a little cedar tree right inside the house, and her sisters made strings of paper dolls holding hands to decorate the tree, and a few strings of popcorn. Grandma Bourne made popcorn balls with sugar syrup and wrapped them in buttered paper to stuff into the girls’ stockings hanging over the fireplace. That year Grandma had also knitted for each of them a pair of mittens, and that was their Christmas present. Later, when Rindy came over to compare Christmases, Rindy claimed that Sandy Claws had put into her stocking some ribbon candy but she didn’t bring Latha a piece because she didn’t want Latha to feel obliged to give her something in return. Latha’s maw had made for Latha a rag doll, not half as big as the doll Sally that Mandy had, or the doll Florrie that Rindy had, and with its embroidered face and wool hair it wasn’t nearly as real as the other dolls, but it was Latha’s own, her very own, and her father couldn’t drown it. She called it Melody as just a name that popped out of the air, and Rindy said she’d never heard that name before. But Melody and Florrie got along just fine together, without either of them looking down on the other or feeling higher and mightier. Rindy did feel higher and mightier herself because Sandy Claws had come to her house and not to Latha’s. Latha said she would’ve had to be there at Rindy’s house to see the feller with her own eyes in order to believe that there was such a feller. It sure sounded to her that Sandy Claws was just some play-like ghost that the grown-ups had made up to fool the kids with. Rindy and Latha argued a lot about this subject, which gave them a lot to talk about.