The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  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.

  Latha discovers that this attitude had already been explored by Oriental philosophers who refer to it as The Way, or Tao. One Christmas, Vernon gives her a pretty book called Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, which scares her at first, and puzzles her at second, and surprises her at third. She tries to get Every to read it too, saying, “You ought to see what this guy and Jesus have in common.” But the Bible remains the only book that Every has ever read, and still reads. She doesn’t hold it against him, but in becoming aware of what he’s missing she becomes aware of what she’s been missing too, and she remembers that huge library of Richard Cardwell at Lombardy Alley in Tennessee, where she’d read volumes for want of anything better to do. She realizes now she has nothing better to do. She fixes good meals for Every and herself. She feeds her cats and the dog Galen, and in winter gives hay to Mathilda, whom she milks each evening. She keeps the house clean, and she writes letters to those granddaughters who have moved away, and to Dawny, who is in graduate school at Harvard. Hank has installed, refusing any payment, a television set with a booster, and an antenna on the roof that will pick up Springfield, Missouri and Little Rock and sometimes Memphis, and Every enjoys watching ball games and they both watch quiz shows and sometimes a movie, but Latha hates commercials, their monotony, inanity, and loudness. She would rather take the Tao, or Way, or Path, that leads back into her mind and meanders through cycles and seasons and synchronicities, and is hers alone, because she can’t even describe it to Every, let alone take him along with her on her journey. But with suggestions from Jelena and Vernon, and for that matter Diana and Day also, she discovers many journeys that are not into her mind but the minds of other imaginative people who have written books. Every doesn’t mind; he surprises her on her birthday with a tall bookcase he has built himself, out of walnut. It doesn’t take her long to fill it. Every remarks, “It’ll take you all your life to read all of them.”

  She smiles. “No, but when I’ve finished I can always read
them all over again.”

  She is aware of getting old. Her joints aren’t as flexible as they once were; when she squats to milk Mathilda she can hear creaks that she had once thought emanated from Mathilda’s bones but now recognizes as her own. Her raven hair has started graying up. She can find lines in her face that aren’t just from smiling and squinting in the sunlight. Her skin isn’t as smooth as it used to be. Sometimes she has an ache or disorder that she would have taken to Doc Swain if he were still alive, but isn’t worth going all the way to Harrison for. To say that she “misses” Doc Swain, or that she misses Dan or Sonora or anyone else who is “gone” would be to ignore her independence, which is able to endure in the absence of the “missed.” What are others for but to give us something, if only their presence, that we cannot create for ourselves? The secret of enduring is not to harden oneself against loss but to soften oneself in acceptance. Year by year, one of Latha’s favorite cats uses up its ninth life, and she gives it a proper burial, humming “Farther Along” without words that would have meant nothing to the cat. In the meadow out behind the dogtrot is a whole cemetery of cats. It is not the realization that she can always get another cat that keeps her from “missing” a dead one, but rather a sense of gratitude for the years the cat was permitted to endure. The tears we shed in loss are for ourselves. The tears we shed in joy are for all humankind. I am a pithy old woman.

  Every dies.

  All the grandchildren come back to Stay More but only stay long enough for the service and to assure themselves that Latha is all right. Sharon is the first to arrive and the last to leave. Sharon is the only questioner whose “How did it happen?” Latha can answer. I don’t know if I ever told you, Latha tells her, and maybe I shouldn’t tell anyone this, but every time we made love and I reached a climax, I fainted, I mean, I just passed plumb out. The last time we made love Every passed out too. Of course I didn’t know it because I was out, but when I came to, there he was, beneath me, with no inclination to return my adoring gaze. Some years back, Doc Swain had told him he had arrhythmia, which is—but they’ve taught you that in nursing school, haven’t they? His ticker just stopped ticking. All things started have to stop. I’m just a pithy old woman.”

  “You’re not an old woman, yet,” Sharon says. “You haven’t shown a single sign of senility…except sometimes you repeat yourself.”

  Latha laughs. “All good stories repeat themselves.”

  “I don’t suppose I need to ask if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  “Take care of yourself,” Latha advises her.

  Vernon and Jelena, who have decided to live together against all odds, are building themselves an extravagant futuristic double-house on the heights west of Stay More. They relieve Latha of such practical details as a tombstone for Every. Doesn’t she want a double headstone with both their names on it? I reckon not, she says. Vernon wonders if she was angry at Grandpa about anything. Oh, no, she says, I loved everything about him and everything he did and everything he said. Jelena wonders if there might be a possibility that like Doc Swain, Every may have had another wife that he wanted to be buried beside him. Latha laughs, for the first time since the Church of Christ preacher told a mild funny at the funeral. “He never told me a word about it if he did,” Latha says. Jelena wonders if Latha has contemplated remarrying. Never, she says.

  “Well, Gran,” Vernon asks, “don’t you want to lie beside Grandpa?”

  “I expect there might come a time or two when I’ll want to go out to the cemetery on a full-moon night and lie down on the grass beside him, but I’ll never fall asleep.”

  She has enough trouble, as it is, trying to sleep in their bed. She lies there listening to the night sounds of crickets, tree frogs, etc., and thinking that maybe the words of “Farther Along” may not be a false promise, because already there is one thing she has understood farther along: that the reason she was able to give up the sleeping pills that Doc Swain once prescribed for her was that Every, when he came back into her life, began his custom of brushing her hair for a good long while before bedtime, and although she had not realized it at the time, that was what helped her to sleep, especially on those nights when Every did not make her swoon. She has started brushing her own hair and trying to pretend it is him, but it’s just not the same thing, at all. Even closing her eyes doesn’t help. When she closes her eyes, what she sees is the boy riding his stickhorse on Christmas Day, and giving her and Rindy an imaginary ride behind him, all the way to imaginary Parthenon. Or years later when Every’s dad finds them at the snowed-in schoolhouse and gives them a ride in a real one-horse open sleigh, with she and Every snuggled beneath fur blankets.

  The funeral feast has left behind so many leftovers that Latha doesn’t need to do any cooking for a couple of weeks. She is getting tired of fried chicken and cocoanut pie. But even after the leftovers are all gone, she can’t bring herself to do any cooking, except biscuits for the cats and the dog. Sometimes she eats a biscuit herself, not because she’s hungry but just to be sociable. Jelena brings her a casserole, and that lasts for another two weeks.

  She opens and reads all the mail that has come, mostly sympathy cards bought at the supermarket, all with the same mournful message or some Christian theme on how blessed it is that Every has been called home to the arms of his Lord. There is a letter from Dawny. It has no return address, just a Boston postmark. He is sorry that he didn’t find out about the death in time to come home for the funeral, but he probably wouldn’t have been able to pay for an airline ticket anyhow. He wants Latha to know how much Every meant to him, “more of a personal hero than Ernie Pyle ever was. Although it was Dan who found me when I was lost, it was on Every’s shoulders that I rode my way home. His name has a habit of thrusting itself into my mind whenever my mind threatens to run away with me. Whenever I verge upon mindlessness, or helplessness, or intolerable loss or wanting, the very thought of those two words, ‘Every Dill,’ like a magic incantation, will bring me back from the brink, will find me, will find me.” Dawny does not say what he’s doing, what degree he’s pursuing at Harvard, in what subject, or when if ever he does plan to come home. She would send him the money for an airline ticket if she knew where to address it.

  Though she can’t write to Dawny, she can write to Sharon, her favorite correspondent, who works in a Chicago hospital but is terribly homesick and says that writing to her grandmother is her only cure for it. When Latha mentions her problems with sleeping, Sharon answers that she reads herself to sleep each night, but she also sends Latha a large bottle of Dalmane sleeping pills, saying, “I know you well enough, Gran, to know that you’d never feel like taking more than one a night.” Latha appreciates the thought, and takes only one a night, although that is only a partial cure for her insomnia. She has virtually given up television, but she listens to classical music on her radio, which also helps. And she tries reading. She has read less than half of the eighty-nine diaries of the Woman Whom We Cannot Name, and she finds that reading them is too stimulating to make her drowsy, but if she rereads one of them, the same words all over again will put her to sleep, with the help of one of Sharon’s pills and something slow and dignified on the radio, particularly symphonies which have French horns in them. She has learned to identify all of the instruments of an orchestra, easier really than identifying wildflowers (and she knows them all, from achillea to zizia), and her favorite instrument is the French horn. She once learned that when people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have. The French horn says that best.

  She remembers that when she and her roommate Jessica Toliver at the asylum used to try to imitate various instruments with their humming, Jessica was able to make a very poignant and yet majestic imitation of the French horn, so wistful and melancholy that it almost broke Latha’s heart. Latha wonders what has ever become of Jessica, and decides to try writing a letter to her in care of the state hospital in Little Rock. She writes that she hope
s Jessica is all right. She tells Jessica that the name of the man who rescued Latha in the middle of the night was Every Dill, and she had eventually married him, and he has died just recently, and Latha has remembered how sad it was that Every had not been able to take Jessica too when they escaped, but she hopes that Jessica had been able to figure out that because of the perilous method of the escape it would not have been possible for Jessica to get down off the roof of E Ward. Is Jessica still in E Ward? More likely she’s gotten better and been transferred, possibly all the way up to B Ward? Or even gone back home to Lepanto? If she needs a home to go to, Latha would be delighted to have her come to Stay More, the most wonderful place on earth, and there is plenty of room in this dogtrot for another person, if she doesn’t mind cats or isn’t allergic to them or anything. There would be no one to stare at Jessica because she’s an albino, or, if anybody did stare, they wouldn’t think anything of it, because Stay More had always been a haven for oddlings and misfits and peculiar people. Looking forward to hearing from you. Love, Latha.

  Two weeks later the unopened letter comes back to her, stamped “Addressee Deceased.” Latha meditates upon this fact, and wonders if Jessica’s death might count as the second in a string of three starting with Every. If it does count, then the third death is shortly forthcoming.

  Chapter forty-five

  Latha had gone to school through the sixth grade with Wesley Stone but barely remembered him. His father had moved to Little Rock, where Wes finished his education and went to work and raised a family. Now that he has died, he wants to be buried in the Stay More cemetery. The remaining town fathers, such as they are, mainly Hank Ingledew, have already rejected the wish of several Stay Moronsin-exile in California who want their remains to come home. The unwritten rule is that if you disregarded the curse of Jacob Ingledew and went to California, the only way you can reverse the curse is by coming back home while you’re still alive, and Hank himself is one of the few who has done that. His son Vernon agrees with the policy, but it turns out that Wes Stone had already purchased and paid for a burial plot many years ago, in which his wife is already buried, so his daughter is given permission to bring the body back for burial. Latha needs another chance to wear the black dress she bought for Every’s funeral, so she decides to attend this one, not for that reason but because she doubts there will be much attendance otherwise. She needs her black umbrella too, because Nature has provided another downpour for a Stay Moron’s final ceremony. The daughter is there with her husband but hardly anyone else, until, from the woods, comes one of those oddlings that Latha had mentioned in her undelivered letter to Jessica: a man dressed as some kind of Indian, in a deerskin robe, sandals, leggings, breech clout, and carrying some spears, which he drops when he catches sight of the gathering and rushes toward it, crying “Daddy?!”