Enduring (16 page)

Latha might comment with something like, “But did she make it over the mountain?”

“Now what does that mean?” he might wonder. And wonder he might.

The time came, by and by, when she understood the source of his ignorance. In all of his raunchy stories, there had never been any mention of an orgasm by the female, and like ninety-nine percent of the males of his time and place, Raymond had no idea that females were capable of having an orgasm, let alone any idea of how one was accomplished.

In the eleventh grade, one January afternoon on the way home from school in the one-horse shay, they ran into a sudden very heavy snowstorm, which, after another mile, became impassable. Raymond pulled the shay into a barn to get out of the storm, but the blizzard kept coming down with such force that they could not even try to walk to the farmhouse to seek food and a place to sleep. Raymond still had a sandwich in his lunchbox, and they shared that as their supper. It was obvious they were going to have to spend the night. The shay came equipped with a pair of thick woolen blankets, and Raymond rounded up a couple of horse blankets, but that was scarcely enough. If she hadn’t been so horribly cold she would never have dreamed—no, she had in fact already dreamed—of getting under the covers with Raymond. It did not require much persuasion on his part, and after an hour it was obvious that neither of them was sleepy. When Raymond began to fondle her, she reminded him of what she had said in the beginning when she agreed to let him drive her to school each day at Jasper. But her heart wasn’t in the scolding. In fact his touch served to warm her. Before she knew what she was doing, he had peeled away enough of her clothes and underclothes to be able to insert himself into her, and then he was on top of her thrusting away. She did not feel like farting holes in the ground, but in fact she began to enjoy it…just at the point where Raymond groaned and shook and panted “Ah, God!” several times and then rolled off her and lay still. Some time passed before he said, “Now wasn’t that a heap o’ fun?” She did not answer.

Raymond took it into his head that his having made entrance once gave him the right to do it again whenever he took a notion, despite his failure to repeat the act with any of the several girls he had seduced at the high school. It became necessary for Latha to make clear to him that she was not going to be just a piece of flesh for him to masturbate with.. Most of the twelfth grade she spent meditating on the circumstance that most men and boys don’t expect their partners to have orgasms and thus they do nothing to promote them, not even trying to withhold their own rapid ascent of the mountain. She discussed this with some of her girlfriends who were having a party at one of the girl’s houses at Parthenon. None of them had any solution, except for one girl, who said “I reckon you just have to use your own hand,” and explained that if the boy was not on top but behind her, doggy-fashion, that would liberate her access to herself.

At this party, among the games the girls played was what is called a “dumb supper.” They set the table as if expecting supper guests, but they don’t put out any food. The room is dark except for the light of one candle. The six girls each stand behind their chairs, and bow their heads, as if in prayer. Perhaps some of them are praying. They wait and wait. The idea is that if the magic (some would call it witchcraft) works, the apparition of the boy you would marry would appear and take his place at the table in the chair before you. A gust of wind blew into the room, not strong enough to blow out the candle, whose light revealed someone sitting in the chair Latha was holding. It was Every! She fainted as surely as if she’d gone over the mountain.

When she was revived, with the help of smelling salts and cold compresses, one of the girls explained to her that it hadn’t been an apparition of Every, but Every himself. The girls threw him out of the house, telling him he ought to be ashamed of himself. Boys weren’t supposed to know about the dumb supper, but somehow Every had found out, and had come on purpose. Latha didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for that.

The night of her graduation from high school, Latha allowed Raymond to enter her from behind, and she used her hand to attempt to make possible her own ascent of the mountain, and got almost to the top, but not over.

Once school was all over, Raymond made himself familiar at Latha’s house. He even helped Latha’s father with some of his farming chores, which greatly ingratiated him to the man. Raymond spent so much time courting Latha that everybody in Stay More took it for granted that they would soon wed. In any case, it appeared that they were engaged. Latha herself was resigned to the possible destiny of marriage to Raymond. Who else would she marry, if she was forbidden to marry Every? There had been a couple of boys in high school who were interested in her and often told her how “scrumptious” she looked, but neither of them had ever asked her for a date, probably because they assumed she belonged to Raymond. Everybody knew that Raymond was the banker’s son, and the other girls envied her the possibility that he would provide for her in a way nobody else could. She could escape from the poverty she’d known all her life. Raymond’s family were nice to her, and Raymond’s brothers, although afflicted with the traditional Ingledew woman-shyness, always managed to say something pleasant to her. Raymond’s momma and daddy were kind to her in ways that her own parents had never been. So what if he didn’t how to please a woman? He could give her children if she wanted them, and she had never heard of a woman who did not want children, so she figured she probably was destined to have at least one or two herself. Latha considered the possibility that she might “teach” Raymond to give a thought or two to her own sexual pleasure as well as his own. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he might, someday, with patience, take her up and over the mountain. She hardly ever saw Every Dill any more. He was working in his father’s wagon-making shop, but the coming of the automobile was making the wagon obsolete. Was Every obsolete as far as she was concerned? Thus it came to pass that eventually, when Raymond actually did propose to her, she turned him down the first two times, but, with prodding from her mother and Raymond’s family and in time her own sense of responsibility, she took a close look at the quarter-carat diamond ring he offered her, and, crossing her fingers except for the ring finger, allowed him to slip the ring onto it.

The problem, though, was that Raymond was not monogamous by nature. Despite his presumed betrothal to Latha, he remained a wolf. He might be Stay More’s most eligible and desirable bachelor, but he could not resist any opportunity to chase skirts. Every, who had done so many favors for Latha over the years, now showed up to do another one: he told Latha who and when and where Raymond was still philandering. “You’re just jealous,” Latha said to Every, but she couldn’t help listening to the details. Every never lost a chance to finger Raymond’s affairs, until Latha began to suspect that Every was just making it all up. But one night when Raymond was supposed to be with her and wasn’t, Every came and got her and took her hand and led her through the village to the gristmill, where, atop some bags of cornmeal, Raymond was humping Wanda Dinsmore up to the point where he began his “Ah, God!” exclamations.

Instead of confronting Raymond on the spot, she drew Every out into the tall grasses of the gristmill’s meadow and said to him, “If they can do it, so can we!” and she lay down with him right then and there and hoisted her dress and spread her legs. Just before she reached the mountaintop and started over, and her mind went blank and blissful, she caught sight of Raymond and Wanda standing on the edge of the mill’s porch, watching them.

When consciousness returned, it was Wanda, not Every nor Raymond, who was fanning her and applying a rag soaked in cool creek water to her brow. “Heavens to betsy,” Wanda said, “I do believe you passed out and missed all the excitement.”

Then Wanda told her what had happened. Apparently Raymond’s double standard had torn him up. He pulled Every up off of Latha and shoved him away, then threw a punch that missed Every and sailed over his shoulder. Every came back with a fist that practically broke Raymond’s jaw. Raymond managed to get a lick or two into Every’s stomach, but Every connected with lefts and rights and uppercuts, and pretty soon Raymond was on the ground, bleeding and moaning. “Boy howdy,” Wanda said, “them fellers was so busy clobberin one another they never noticed you weren’t watchin.” Raymond managed to get to his feet and take one more swing at Every, which missed. Then he began running as fast as his legs would carry him, with Every hot on his heels.

Chapter fourteen

A
ccording to the way the story was told for years, Raymond ran all the way to Jasper, where he enlisted in the Army. The entire World had been at war for some time, and in that year, 1917, the United States had joined the fracas and was actively recruiting servicemen. The same dramatic version of the story also would have us believe that Raymond’s five brothers ganged up on Every Dill and forced him to go to Jasper and enlist in the Army also.

Whatever the truth, the two boys were soon fighting together in France, in the same outfit, the same platoon. They were the only two Stay Morons actually to serve in the First World War. Their homesickness as well as their sense of being outsiders among a bunch of soldiers from exotic places like Brooklyn and Boston and Baltimore made them cling to each other, and they became best friends as well as comrades-in-arms. Eventually Every apologized for having driven Raymond into the rash act of enlisting, and Raymond apologized to Every because his five brothers had forced Every to enlist also.

Latha continued to wear Raymond’s ring, for the reason that it was the only jewelry she had ever owned and it twinkled in the sunlight and Raymond’s father, John Ingledew, who owned the Stay More bank, gave Latha a job as teller in the bank, her first true employment. Even if the salary was nothing to speak of, it helped her put food on the table for her parents and grandmother. Both Every and Raymond wrote letters to her. Raymond still considered Latha to be engaged to marry him. Every of course knew she was engaged to Raymond and, as he had told her before leaving Stay More to enlist, “I’m gonna go over there and protect him for you.” Raymond’s letters contained descriptions of the little white house they would share some day, with a white picket fence around it, and a pack of dogs, and a flower garden for her to work in, but mostly the subject of his letters conjectured what they would do together in their nice feather bed, where he would “pound it into her.”

Every was promoted to sergeant, whereas Raymond was promoted only to corporal, a fact which Every wrote to her, saying, “Tole Raymond that when I get to be general I’ll make him a colonel if he’ll let me have you; he said he’d think about it.” Although Every was clearly a brave, fearless soldier, and she had not forgotten the fact that he had taken her over the mountain more than once whereas Raymond didn’t know how, Latha found herself, during their long absence, letting her heart grow fonder of Raymond. We depend on our mind’s eye for our judgments, and in her mind, not having seen either of the boys for a long time, Raymond was the more gallant and certainly the more handsome. She was polite in her replies to Every’s letters, but signed them “your friend,” whereas she signed her letters to Raymond “with love.”

If Every was hurt by this difference, he didn’t show it. “Today they pinned the Craw de Gur on me—that’s one of the medals the Frenchies give out—the only decoration Ray’s got is the Dose of Clap—the Frenchies give that one out too.” And when people coming to the bank asked her, “Heard lately from yore sweetheart?” it wasn’t Every they were referring to. She answered one of Every’s letters by telling him that he could do himself and her a big favor if he stopped thinking of her as a possible girlfriend.

The local newspaper, the
Jasper Disaster
, carried little news from the front, but Latha eagerly read it all, trying to track the armies that were engaged in such gruesome combat in places like Ypres and Reims. The Germans were dying like flies, but they were also slaughtering lots of British and a considerable number of Americans. There was growing belief that the war might soon be over.

Then Latha stopped receiving letters from either Raymond or Every. Weeks went by. She continued to write her letters to both, but received no answer. Finally, she had a brief letter from Every, who was in a field hospital near the Somme. He had been shot in the legs by machine gun fire, but was expected to be able to walk again, by and by. He said he would probably have to face court-martial for striking an officer, but he hoped as soon as the war was over he could come back to Stay More and tell Latha everything that had happened. He was very sorry to have to tell her now that her fiancé was missing in action. Latha turned immediately to her boss, John Ingledew, and asked him if he had heard anything about Raymond being missing. “No official word,” John Ingledew said. “Not yet nohow.”

But gossip soon spread that poor Latha’s intended was either killed or captured by the Germans. She was showered with sympathy. People even brought food for her, as you do after a funeral. Some of the girls her own age, whom she had scarcely known during her years at the Stay More school, began to congregate in the bank’s lobby and, whenever there were no customers to distract her, chatted with her in the most friendly, warm, and kindhearted manner. She made more friends than she’d ever had in school, even the high school in Jasper. They invited her to parties at their homes, but whenever there was a play-party with boys participating, they expected her to sit demurely by herself and not participate in the games that involved dancing and holding hands.

Everybody took it for granted that she was waiting for Raymond and they assumed that if she said her prayers at night (she didn’t), she was praying for the safe return of her fiancé. As the months went by, and a new year came, Latha was thought of as “the girl who waits.” As beautiful as she was, she could have taken her pick among the eligible bachelors who’d had the sense not to join the Army, but it was commonly believed that the dreamy look she had in her eyes meant that she was still somehow communicating with Raymond. The war in Europe was over and the Ingledews had not received any official word regarding Raymond.