The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  In May, Latha got a long letter from Mandy, the gist of which was that Mandy and Vaughn were worried that Fannie Mae was causing a lot of problems. She was doing poorly in school and was in trouble for talking back to her teachers. The parents of some of her friends had forbidden the friends to associate with Fannie Mae any further. Worse, Fannie Mae was insolent to her own parents, and uncooperative to boot. In short, she was driving Mandy crazy. Mandy was afraid she might have to have herself committed to the same nuthouse where Latha had lived. The thought had crossed Mandy’s mind, and she had discussed it considerably with Vaughn, that for the sake of their sanity or at least peace of mind they ought to ship Fannie Mae off to Stay More for the duration of the summer. How did Latha feel about that? Could Latha swear a solemn oath that she would never, ever tell Fannie Mae that she was Fannie Mae’s mother? That would be a horrible thing to do. Cross her heart and hope to die? If Latha was agreeable to this, and able to afford the cost of feeding and keeping Fannie Mae, then they would put her on a bus which made only one transfer at Harrison and would deliver her and her suitcase to Jasper. Did Latha know anybody with a car who could fetch Fannie Mae from Jasper?

  Patrons of the post office or store that particular day even asked Latha why she was smiling so much. Had the government given her a raise? Had they located Raymond Ingledew at last? Had she fallen in love with somebody?

  It was indeed the happiest she could remember having been since the hogs ate her baby brother, as the expression goes. She tried but failed to remember a day when she’d been happier. She felt an enormous sense of justification for her belief that if you can wait long enough, something good is bound to happen. After writing a short reply to Mandy, giving her oath that she would never breathe a word to the girl about her true parentage, and promising to do whatever she could to help the girl get “in line,” Latha got busy fixing up the side room, the room on the east side of the store (her own bedroom was on the west side) into a neat, tidy, cozy bedroom for Sonora. She even went out and picked an armload of black-eyed susans and put them in a vase on Sonora’s dresser, then laughed at herself because the flowers would be long wilted before Sonora arrived. But she let them wilt.

  It was mid-June before the schools let out and Sonora was finally shipped off to Stay More. Latha arranged for Ted, the mail carrier and iceman, to bring Sonora from Jasper. Latha had spent every free moment giving the house and store a thorough dusting and washing and polishing, and she killed one of her fattest hens to make chicken and dumplings, with a selection of desserts including a vinegar pie, which remained her favorite, a lemon meringue pie, and a chocolate cake.

  Latha could not sleep at all the night that Sonora’s bus was on its way from Little Rock, and for the first time in memory she did not work in her garden at dawn but went straight to her bathing spot in Swain’s Creek to have a bath, and then dressed in her best gingham dress. Her cats too seemed to be excited, as if they knew company was coming, and they spent a lot of time washing themselves and each other.

  Ted and his mail truck were always punctual, arriving between 10:00 and 10:15 A.M., but on this day of days he didn’t come until 10:35, and the mail patrons were almost as anxious as Latha. “Had a flat,” he said. The first passenger out of the truck’s cab was Tearle Ingledew, who had probably been on an overnight bender in Jasper. Ted usually had a passenger or two, and the second passenger was a gorgeous redhead teenager whose name was Sonora Bourne, a.k.a. Fannie Mae Twichell. Latha was waiting for her at the top of the steps and they had such an embrace that Latha felt obliged to explain to the others, “My dear niece, come to stay with me.” Then she said to Sonora, “Am I tickled pink to see you!”

  Sonora laughed and said, “I’m tickled all colors of the rainbow.”

  Ted gave Latha Sonora’s suitcase. Tearle Ingledew said, “Young lady, you be a good girl now and don’t do nothing that I wouldn’t do,” and he patted her on the shoulder.

  Latha escorted Sonora down the length of the porch to the door which led to her room, and opened the screen door on its noisy spring. “Here you are,” she said. “Just make yourself right at home. I’ve got to help the driver sort the mail but it won’t take me a minute.’

  Sonora was visibly impressed with the neat, tidy, cozy room. Latha returned to the post office to unlock the two bags of mail with her mail keys, and sort the contents of one of them to return to Ted, who would deliver it onward to the hamlets of Demijohn, Hunton, and Spunkwater. Ted hoisted two twenty-five pound blocks of ice with his tongs and put them in the pop cooler. Then Latha quickly sorted the mail for the Stay More boxes, moving so fast she misplaced a couple of items and got complaints from the mail patrons who discovered somebody else’s mail in their boxes.

  All of this took more than a minute. At one point she turned to see Sonora standing beside her behind the post office boxes. “I’m sorry, hon,” Latha said, “but it’s against the postal laws for anybody to be back here except U.S. postal employees.”

  “So employ me,” Sonora said.

  “You’d have to be eighteen,” Latha said. “I’ll just be another minute. Help yourself to some soda pop.”

  Sonora went and helped herself to an Orange Crush, the first of several hundred cold drinks that she would consume that summer. When Latha was finished with the mail and rejoined her, Sonora asked, “How come that photo of you and me has Ma cut off of it?”

  Latha laughed, but nervously. She should have taken the photo down before Sonora came. “Well, for one thing, your mother isn’t as sightly as you and me.”

  Sonora laughed. “Aint that the truth!” But then she asked, “What’s the other thing?” When Latha was slow to answer, she prompted, “You and Ma never got along very well, did you?”

  “Not really,” Latha admitted. “She was much closer to her other sister, your Aunt Barb.”

  “Will you show me the house where you girls lived?”

  “It’s hardly fit to be seen,” Latha said, thinking of what it looked like when she’d stayed there with Dan and Annie. “But I intend to show you everything in Stay More.”

  And before the summer was over, Latha had actually shown her daughter everything that was worth seeing in Stay More, and then some. Latha sat with her at one of the desks in the schoolhouse, and told her about the time that the teacher wouldn’t let her go to the outhouse and she’d peed on the floor and when the other students laughed, a boy by the name of Every Dill had jumped on the teacher’s desk and used it as a perch to pee on the floor too. Sonora thought that was hilarious, but she asked, “Whatever became of Every Dill?” and Latha had to say she had no idea. Of course Latha pronounced this as “idee” like everyone else, including Sonora’s mother, and Sonora herself began excluding a syllable from her pronunciation of the word. The more Sonora came in contact with the Stay Morons, the more she changed her flat, drawly Southern accent into the lilting twang of the mountaineer. Sonora declared that she dearly wished she could just stay and go to this schoolhouse.

  “Do you not like West Side?” Latha asked.

  “As schools go, it’s okay, I guess,” Sonora said, “but I’m the only Fannie Mae in the whole school, and the other kids never let me forget it.’

  “You can forget it while you’re here,” Latha said.

  Sonora’s face lit up. “Then what would you call me?”

  “When you were just a baby, right after you were born, these sweet little noises you made were like songs, so I told Mandy she should call you ‘Sonora.’”

  “That’s what that man—Annie’s father, is Dan his name?—that’s what he called me.”

  “Fannie Mae was your grandmother’s name, and while the name fit her just fine, it doesn’t fit you at all. Dan and I think of you as ‘Sonora.’”

  “Why don’t you marry Dan?”

  “You’d have to get him to tell you that. It’s complicated, but I’ve been a spinster so long, I wouldn’t know how to be a wife.”

  “You’re still beautiful,” Sono
ra declared.

  “And so are you,” Latha told her.

  Whenever Sonora heard a local word or expression and didn’t know its meaning—“lally-gaggin,” “fotch-on,” “dauncy,” “blackguard,” “whipstitch,” “airish,” Sonora would simply ask Latha and Latha would explain it. “What’s a ‘double-cousin’?” she would ask, and Latha would say “Oh, that just happens when two brothers marry two sisters and have children, who are double cousins.”

  “I don’t have any cousins,” Sonora declared. “Do I?”

  “Not unless your Aunt Barb has some kids we don’t know about. But those would just be first cousins, or ‘own cousins.’ You’ve got cousins all over Stay More, second, third and last cousins.”

  Sonora took pride in this knowledge of her kinship, and Latha wondered why Mandy had never bothered to explain her lineage to her. Sometimes when someone came into the store to buy something, Sonora would whisper to Latha, “What kin am I to her?” and Latha would do some mental figuring and whisper back to her, “Your grandma was a Swain and a third cousin of her grandfather, so that would make you fourth cousins twice removed.” Such information could keep Sonora happy for an entire day.

  But Sonora possessed the quality that permitted all Stay Morons not only to endure their days but to enjoy them: the ability to do nothing without feeling guilty about it. Sonora could sit on the store porch and watch the birds and cats and clouds for hours on end, and never become bored or restless. Of course there was a certain period of the day, late afternoon usually, when the store porch’s loafers and whittlers and prattlers congregated to spin their yarns and make their jests, and their language wasn’t always “fitten” for a female’s ears, so Sonora would be obliged to go elsewhere, usually to her room, where she could still hear them through the screen door, and managed to assimilate a vocabulary of bawdy lore that shocked even her Aunt Latha.

  “But it’s so funny!” Sonora protested, when Latha told her that she might be too young to be hearing such things. Actually, Latha herself had often overheard, through the store’s screen door, almost the entire repertoire of tales, and was able to explain to Sonora some of the terms she didn’t know, like “diddling” and “twitchet,” the latter sounding so much like Sonora’s family name, Twichell, that she complained to Latha, “I can’t be stuck with that name all my life.”

  “You don’t have to,” Latha told her. “When you marry, you can take your husband’s name. Meanwhile, you could take mine and your mother’s maiden name, which is Bourne.”

  Thereafter, whenever she was in Stay More, she was Sonora Bourne.

  Not all the tales told on the porch were bawdy. Sometimes, when wives or girlfriends were present, the men (and the women too) told old folk stories that could trace their origins back to Elizabethan England. Today we have television. Back then they had tale-telling. Latha herself was a great teller of tales, especially ghost stories, many of which she told exclusively for Sonora’s benefit when others weren’t around. Some of those were so scary that Sonora would become afraid of going to the outhouse by herself in the dark, even with a lantern, and she would have to get Latha to go with her. The outhouse was a two-holer, like most, so they could take care of their business together.

  Did the eligible boys of Stay More ever notice Sonora? Oh, they certainly did, and they did everything they could to attract her attention. Just as some animals do, they fought each other in hopes that the victor of the fight might gain her favor. Summer evenings, along about lightning bug time, they would clobber one another all over the landscape. Or, if they were alone, they would do acrobatics, hang by their knees from tree limbs, jump out of trees, do cartwheels and somersaults and headstands. Doc Swain was kept busy patching them up on the mornings after such demonstrations of their bravura. Some of the loafers on the store porch made wagers over which one of the boys might finally capture Sonora’s interest. In fact, almost from the beginning (love at first sight and all that) she had been powerfully drawn to John Henry “Hank” Ingledew, the oldest of the four sons of Bevis and Emelda Duckworth Ingledew. He was a couple of years older than Sonora, but that made him even more attractive. All Ingledew men are exceptionally handsome, but they are also, unfortunately, plagued with the legendary inability to even look at females, let alone speak to them. Although the object of her affections was not able to look at her or speak to her, he was able to win all of the fights in her honor, and to perform stunts that would have put other boys in the hospital.

  “Aunt Latha,” Sonora whined, “how can I possibly get Hank Ingledew to say ‘hello’ to me?”

  “Hon, let me tell you something about the Ingledews…” she began, and related the whole long embarrassing history of Ingledew woman-shyness, extending back to Jacob Ingledew, the founder of the town, who did manage to marry because his bride bribed him with a pone of corn, an old Indian custom. Latha explained what “congenital” means; it has nothing to do directly with genitals, but means a condition you’re born with and can’t do anything about, and the Ingledews’ woman-shyness was thoroughly congenital. It was widely known that Hank’s father, Bevis Ingledew, had never once spoken to Hank’s mother, but possibly had stumbled upon some means of proposing to her telepathically.

  “Do you mean,” Sonora asked, “that if I went up and tapped Hank on the shoulder and said, ‘Hi, I’m Sonora Bourne,’ he wouldn’t even be able to say ‘howdy’ to me?”

  “Try it,” Latha suggested. “He would blush and hang his head and shuffle his feet and run away.”

  One day toward the end of the summer, when she could bear it no longer, Sonora accosted Hank and said, “Hi, I’m Sonora Bourne.”

  Hank Ingledew blushed and hung his head and shuffled his feet and ran away.

  Chapter thirty-one

  Poor Daddy. Such a man should never have been tormented with five daughters, and while he did his level best to adjust to the situation, I know that Gran could never quite forgive him for not being an ideal father, although most of his daughters, especially me, managed to chalk his remoteness up to his temperament, not his gynophobia toward his own offspring.

  The problem with wonderful summers is that like everything else they have to come to an end. When August rolled around and it was time for Sonora to go back to Little Rock, she was distraught for a whole week in anticipation of it, and even considered eloping with Junior Duckworth, Oren’s boy, but her heart remained the property of Hank Ingledew, who had bested Junior in a number of contests, and the female never chooses the vanquished male in any species. Latha had some talks with her, mainly trying to persuade her to be better behaved when she got back to Little Rock, so that Mandy and Vaughn would consider letting her come back to Stay More the following summer. But Sonora, who was quick on the trigger, countered that the reason she’d been allowed to come to Stay More this summer was that she was driving her mother crazy, so, in order to guarantee that she could come to Stay More next summer, she intended to do everything she could to annoy, harass and upset Mandy and Vaughn Twichell. Latha found it hard to argue with this logic.

  In September she received a letter from Mandy which said, “I thought you were going to learn Fannie Mae to mind her Ps and her Qs, but ever since she got back home she’s been worse than ever. Also, she talks like a hillbilly.” So did you until the city ruined you, Latha wanted to write back to her but instead simply said she knew that the girl was at heart very good, and had behaved herself in exemplary fashion during her stay with Latha. In October another letter came from Mandy, saying that “Fannie Mae is going around telling people her name is really Sonora Bourne. Now I wonder who put that notion into her stupid head.” In February Mandy wrote to say that Latha and Fannie Mae both might as well forget whatever notions they’d had of Fannie Mae coming back again to Stay More. But in April, Mandy sent a frantic letter saying she was at her wits’ end and had been driven to drink. “She’s sixteen and I’ve got a good mind just to kick her out, but what would the neighbors think?” In May Mandy wrote,
“I won’t live through the summer if that girl doesn’t get out of here. Do you reckon you can do a better job of watching out for her than you did last summer?”

  So Sonora was able to come back, after all. It was the summer that Oren Duckworth converted an old barn into a canning factory, which provided employment for a lot of Stay Morons who were hard-hit by the ongoing Depression. He took the steam engine out of the old mill, abandoned for many years, and rigged it up with a system of conveyor belts that led from the cleaning trough, where the women prepared the vegetables—green snap beans in June and fat ripe tomatoes in July and August—and put them into tin cans, which were sealed and carried into wire bails and thence to a cooker. So the operation supplied money for the farmers who grew the snaps, as the beans were called, and ’maters, as the tomatoes were called, and more money for the hired hands who picked the snaps and ’maters, money for the women and men who worked in the Cannon Fact’ry, as it was called, and money for Oren Duckworth, who could buy himself a fine Chevy coupe with a rumble seat, which his son Junior would borrow on occasions to take Sonora for a spin into Jasper to see the pitcher show. Sonora would much rather have gone with Hank Ingledew, except for two little problems: one, he had no car, and two, he had no ability to speak to her. At least Sonora’s trips to the movies with Junior Duckworth were in a sense chaperoned by the presence of another couple, usually one of Sonora’s friends and Oren’s brother Chester. Even if Junior had been able to get Sonora alone, he would not have been able to take possession of her virginity or her heart, both of which were locked away in safekeeping for the eventual use of Hank Ingledew.

  Sonora beseeched Latha to help her come up with some way of snagging (and eventually shagging) Hank Ingledew. Latha, who knew the whole history of Stay More as well as anyone, told Sonora the story of how Sarah Swain, the oldest of the fourteen children of Lizzie Swain, the first white woman in Stay More, had shown up at Jacob Ingledew’s cabin with a pone of corn which she thrust into his hands. Jacob had only himself to blame for having once told the Swain children of the Indians who had inhabited Stay More before the Ingledews came. One peculiar but time-honored custom of the Indians was that a brave did not propose to a maiden but the other way around: the maiden would signify her desire to wed a brave by giving him a cake of cornbread.