Enduring (17 page)

On slow days at the bank, when there were few customers and few of her new girlfriends to chat with, Latha would sit at a chair behind the counter and read a book. Her boss, John Ingledew, told her he didn’t think that looked proper for a bank teller to be doing, but he reckoned there probably wasn’t anything better to do except count the money. She would count the money for half an hour and then read for several hours. She usually had her dinner while doing this. Mr. Ingledew always went home for dinner, and he always said to her, with a wink in his voice if not his eye, “Watch out for robbers.”

One day during dinnertime she heard a commotion in the road—the sound of a horse galloping down the main street—and then she saw it come to a stop outside the bank’s big window. The rider jumped off and came limping into the bank. He was wearing a soldier’s uniform, with the chevrons of a sergeant on the sleeve. With his doughboy hat cocked down over his face, she did not recognize him at first. He thrust a folded note at her and her hands trembled as she unfolded and read it:

THIS IS A STICK-UP. FORGIT THE MUNNY. BUT HAND OVER YOURSELF.
ALL
OF IT. P.S. I LOVE YOU MOAR THAN ENYTHANG IN THE HOLE WIDE WURL.

She looked up, and recognized his grin before she recognized the face: the old familiar, half-bashful, half-mischievous expansion of the mouth with just a thin line of the white teeth showing. She almost exclaimed his name but instead wadded up the note and flung it at him, saying, “You gave me a bad scare. I ought to get the sheriff on you.”

He held up his hands as if she were pointing a gun at him, and said, “Aw, please, Latha, the only crime I’ve done was borry a horse from a feller without him knowin it, so’s I could come and see ye.”

They exchanged words. She made it clear that he was not the one she wanted to see, and that in fact she didn’t want to see him at all. He said he had some information she might like to hear. He was going to go say howdy to his mom and dad and then he’d come and talk to her.

When the bank closed at four, Willis Ingledew the storekeeper told his brother John that Every Dill was back in town, and the two men stalked off up the road toward the Dill place. Latha followed. She did not want to be seen, so she cut through the woods and eavesdropped from the side of the house. Old Billy Dill and his ugly wife and son were sitting together in the dogtrot. They exchanged howdies politely but then John Ingledew angrily demanded to know what Every was doing there.

“Wal,” Billy said, “I caint see none too good ’thout my specs but looks to me lak he’s jest lollygaggin thar and airin his heels.”

“I got a idee,” said Willis, “he’s maybe sniffin around after a sartin gal, and me’n John are wonderin if he aint completely disremembered that that gal belongs to John’s boy.”

They argued the matter of whether Latha could belong to someone who is dead. They argued the matter of whether Raymond actually could be dead. The Ingledews wanted Every to get out of town and have nothing further to do with Latha. There were seven Ingledew brothers and they would provide an escort party to see that he left town if he did not leave of his own volition before noon of the following day.

“Well, I’ll tell ye, sir,” Every said. “As far as getting out of town’s concerned, I got to go back in the morning anyhow. As far as seein that girl’s concerned, hell and high water aint gonna stop me. But I’ll tell ye why I got to go back in the morning. I got to face court-martial. Want to know why they’re court-martialin me? Cause I knocked a lieutenant flat on his ass. Want to know why I knocked him flat on his ass? Cause he wouldn’t let me crawl fifty feet through the woods to untie Raymond from a tree. Want to know why he wouldn’t let me? Cause the Germans had tied Raymond to that tree for a decoy, to ambush us. Want to know what Raymond said to me after I’d knocked down that lieutenant and went to him anyway and tried to untie him? Said to me, ‘Get away from here, you fool!’ Want to know what I said back to him? Said back to him, ‘Naw, Ray, I done writ yore sweetheart and tole her I’d fine you by and by and git you out alive or else die tryin.’ Want to know what he said to me then?” Every’s voice choked. But he cleared his throat and continued in a fierce, quivering tone. “Said to me, ‘Ev,’ said to me, ‘Ev, no sense in both us getting kilt. Clear the hell out a here while ye kin! It’s a trap!’ But I started untying him anyhow, and I said to him, ‘I don’t see no trap. Reckon if it’s a trap, they aint about to settle for just me. They’re waitin to git a few more before opening up.’ But just then I s’pose they got tired of waitin and figgered I was all they’d ever git. They opened up. See these here red scars on my laigs? Them’s machine gun bullets. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t no more of stood up and finished untying him than I could of took off and flew. And him screamin at me, ‘Ev, you fool, clear the hell out a here!’ So I did. My boys were brave enough to come down and open fire on that machine-gun nest long enough for me to drag myself out of there.”

There was a long silence. Eventually John Ingledew asked in a quiet voice, “Was Raymond hit? Did they hit him?”

“I don’t know,” Every said. “Some a that spray that cut me down might’ve hit him, but then on the other hand maybe that tree he was tied to was shieldin him. I don’t know. The next thing I knew a couple a my boys had tuck me under the arms and dragged me clean outa there afore I could take a good look back. Then that lieutenant I’d clobbered came up mad as a rattlesnake and kicked me in the face. I woke up in a field hospital.”

Latha, listening, was touched by the tale of Every’s bravery. Although she was distressed to learn how the Germans had used Raymond by tying him to that tree, she began to realize there was still a slim chance that he might have survived the machine gun fire and was still alive in a hospital somewhere. This is the reason that, on the way home, she selected a tall mullein stalk and named it Raymond and told it she hoped he would still be alive somewhere, and then bent the mullein down to the ground.

She returned home, did her chores, had supper after taking some supper to her ailing father in his bed, then waited long into the evening to see if Every would dare show up. Sitting on the porch she heard the call of the whippoorwill, coming from the woodlot. That had once been the sound that Every had made to let her know that he was in the vicinity.

Then he appeared. She recognized his shape in the dark. “Go away,” she said.

“Got to tell you something first, Latha. Want to tell you about ole Ray. He was a real brave boy, lots more of a man than me. I want to tell you what he done.”

But she told him that she’d already heard his story as he told it in the dogtrot of his house. “Too bad you couldn’t have got him out as easily as you got him in,” she said.

“You still blaming me for that?” he asked, hurt.

“I’ll forever blame you for that,” she said.

“But listen, Latha, he’s
not
coming back,” Every said, then he tried to get her to agree to at least not marry nobody else until he could get this court-martial business finished and done with and could get some word to her.

She said the only word she wanted was official word from the government that Raymond is dead and buried.

“You might never get that,” Every said. “Then what?”

“Then I’ll wait.”

“You might wait forever.”

“Then I’ll wait forever.”

He reached out to embrace her, perhaps to kiss her, but a lantern flared up and Tearle Ingledew, Raymond’s brother, pointed his shotgun at Every and swore, and then the air was filled with cusswords from each of Raymond’s four other brothers, each of them armed with weapons pointed at Every’s head or heart. Every challenged them to lay down their arms and take him on man for man. A distant shot was fired, and the lantern went out. In the darkness a fracas broke out, joined by Every’s buddy since childhood, Lawlor Coe, and then by Every’s father, old Billy Dill. But Latha’s own father, Saultus Bourne, joined the Ingledews, so the fight was unequal, five against three. While much mayhem ensued, the Ingledew forces were victorious and Every was forced to leave. He hollered for Latha to come with him, and when she would not, he begged her to wait for him. “You’ll never come back,” Tearle Ingledew snarled at him. “If you come back, it’ll be to git yoreself measured for a coffin.”

Latha did not watch Every run out of sight. It is very bad luck to watch someone go all the way out of sight. It means they might die.

But the time would come when she wished she had watched him go out of sight. Each day she checked the bent-down mullein stalk but it never straightened. The frost came and killed it, but the next summer she named another mullein stalk after Raymond and bent it down. While she was at it, she decided to name another mullein stalk after Every and bend it down too. Another winter came and killed both of them.

Old Billy Dill, the wagonmaker who was Every’s father, had a stroke and died, and Latha went to his funeral, although nobody else showed up for it. She wept during the funeral from the memory of the time Every’s father had taken them for a sleigh ride in the snow. One day when Lawlor Coe came into the bank, she asked him if he had heard anything from Every, but he had not. She said she wondered what the punishment for a court-martial was. They didn’t execute you, did they? No, Lawlor said, but they probably sent him off to the prison at Fort Leavenworth for a few years.

That summer she again named mullein stalks for Raymond and for Every, but she lost interest in the project, or forgot about it, and did not regularly check the two stalks to see if either of them had straightened up. Her dear grandmother, Granny Bourne, died. There was more work for Latha to do around the house, to make up for it. She was tempted to quit her job at the bank, but her mother argued that they needed the money. Her mother also wondered if none of the bank’s customers were eligible bachelors who might like to step out with Latha. Latha was in fact more beautiful than ever, having lost all of her childhood appearance, and she always spent extra time with her jet-black hair, putting it up into a chignon, which was the fashion of those times. But all of the eligible bachelors of Stay More assumed she would wait forever for Raymond. Whenever a tourist or a stranger came into the bank and tried to flirt with her, John Ingledew put a quick stop to it. She had great difficulty managing her sexual longing. Fantasy was not enough.

One morning as she was walking to work, it occurred to her to take a look at her mullein stalks. There was some talk among her unmarried girlfriends that some of them had used, in addition to cucumbers, okra, squash and other phallic vegetables, the flowery spike of the mullein. It was said to be sticky, which had a positive effect, depending on your point of view. But one friend of Latha’s had made love to a mullein without noticing that there was a bee in it, and she was internally infernally stung. Latha herself didn’t want to mess with a plant that had such clear magic properties as locating people who are lost.

But here on this summer morning she couldn’t help noticing that her mullein stalks were different. The one she’d named for Raymond was still flat on the ground and infested with ants. The one she’d named for Every had straightened up. Almost angrily, she grabbed it and bent it down again, but it sprang right back up! This spooked her and she looked all around, as if she might find Every lurking anywhere. She knew that if he were in fact back in town, one of the Ingledews would have spotted him and spread the word, and there would be a lynching party waiting for him. Although she was not kindly disposed toward Every and his stubborn intentions toward her, she didn’t want to see him lynched. The day passed without any sign of him. If any man came into the bank, her heart jumped a beat, but none of the men was Every.

Chapter fifteen

I
t was not until the approach of twilight, after she’d gone home and had supper and done her evening chores, including the slopping of the hogs, that he came out of the woods while she was pouring slop into the hogs’ trough. She dropped the bucket, and watched it roll away down the hill.

“No, now,” she said, as if to the bucket. “Go away. You will be killed.”

“He hasn’t come back, has he?” he said. “I told you he wasn’t coming back. He won’t ever come back.”

“How did you get out?” she asked. “They told me you were locked up in that Army prison.”

“I broke out. I had to talk to you, Latha. I had to tell you that I could stand being locked in there for two more years if you would just tell me that you will wait for me.”

“I won’t tell you that.”

“Who are you going to marry, then? Has somebody spoken for you?”

“No.”

“Raymond’s never coming back, I told you, I
know
. Believe me, he’s dead.”

She knew that. She didn’t want to tell Every that the mullein stalk she had bent down for Raymond long ago had never straightened up again. “All right,” she said, “but I can’t marry you, Every.”

“Why not, Latha? What’s wrong with me?”

“They wouldn’t let me marry you. Not just the Ingledews. There’s nobody in this town who would let me marry you.”

“We could run away.”

“I don’t want to run away. Stay More’s my home.”

They continued arguing for some time, but it was no use. Finally Every pounded his fist upon the rail of the hog pen and said “All right, goddammit! Looks like there’s nothing I can do, is there?”

“No.”

“All right, Latha. Goodbye, then, I’m going. Tell Mom and Dad I said hello. Tell ’em I’m all right. Tell ’em I’ll be back one day. Tell ’em to keep their chins up.”

“Your dad’s dead, Every. He died last winter.”

“Naw!” he said. “Please don’t say that’s true! What’d he die of?”

“Stroke, I guess,” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing I did, Every. I went to his funeral. I don’t know why, but I went. Nobody else did. Just me and your mother.”

This news enraged him. He pounded the fence rail with his fist so hard he broke the rail. All she could do was wait and see if his fury would burn itself out. In time, he just hung his head, and for a moment, she wanted to reach out and touch him. More than that, she wanted to make love to him once more, but even if she could have allowed herself to do that, it was not the right time of the month for her, and she knew it, and even if despite this danger she could persuade herself to do it, it would make it all the harder for him to leave, and for her to let him go. So she could not touch him. She could not allow him to touch her. A touch would have ruined it all.