Enduring (36 page)

It would have made a good opportunity for Bob Cluley, who owned the other general store, to take business away from his lone competitor. But Cluley had already gone broke during the Depression, had taken to drink, and put the store up for sale.

“How much does he want for it?” Latha asked Doc Swain.

“I believe he’s asking three thousand,” Doc Swain said.

“Maybe I could make a down payment on it,” Latha said.

“With what?” Doc asked.

“I’ve saved up all the salary I made for seven years, which wouldn’t be enough but it would cover a down payment.”

“You’ve never worked in a store,” Doc observed.

“I worked in a bank.”

So with some help from Doc Swain, whose patient Bob Cluley was, Latha arranged to buy the smaller of Stay More’s two general stores, which had most of its nonperishable stock still in place, and which occupied the large central room of a furnished house which had two bedrooms on either side and a kitchen in the rear, as well as a small barn for a cow, and a chicken coop. Before she returned to the Bourne place that evening, she loaded up a large paper sack with various canned goods and other groceries from her store. This reminded her of the time when she’d helped herself to a bag full of candy at the Ingledew store that had been confiscated by the Ike Whitter gang. Remembering this, she opened the candy case and gathered a generous sample for Annie.

“You don’t waste any time,” Dan observed, when she told him what she’d done.

The next day she took down the
FOR SALE
sign from the store, and replaced the “Cluley’s” with “Latha Bourne’s.” Among the business papers Bob Cluley had left behind were the names and addresses of wholesale grocers and suppliers in Harrison, Berryville and Fayetteville, and she wrote to each of these to ask them to have their drummers stop by on their next trip out this way.

The problem was that since Lola Ingledew, the postmistress, refused to set foot in her store and post office as long as the body of Eli Willard remained in the glass showcase, there was no mail service into or out of Stay More. Latha knew Lola fairly well, since she was Raymond’s older sister, and she went to the Ingledew Hotel across the road from the Ingledew Store and told Lola that she wanted to mail some letters and wondered how she could do it if Lola wouldn’t open the post office.

“They told me you was locked up down in the loonybin,” Lola said.

“Do I look loony to you?” Latha asked her.

“Hard to tell,” Lola said.

“Well, I’m here, and I’ve bought Bob Cluley’s store and you and me are going to be rivals, if you ever decide to set foot in your store again.”

“The hell you say,” Lola said, and that was the last time the two spinster storekeepers ever spoke to each other.

But Latha not only succeeded in setting up the general store, she also, again with the help of Doc Swain, applied for and was granted the postmastership, or postmistressship. Lola Ingledew never forgave her for that, and after the post office boxes had been moved from Lola’s store to Latha’s, Lola refused to set foot in Latha’s store and thus never had any further mail, although she eventually resumed setting foot in her own store, after some of her nephews moved the glass showcase with Eli Willard’s body to the old gristmill for storage. Lola’s loyal customers returned to her store also, but even some of these abandoned it after learning the post office had been moved to Latha’s store. Although Lola had hardly any business to speak of at her store, it wasn’t much better at Latha’s store, because the Depression was still going on, and most of Latha’s customers who couldn’t persuade her to give them credit could only barter with meat, eggs, and produce.

After moving into the house which contained her store, Latha offered to deed the Bourne place to Dan and Annie. Dan was very moved and grateful for the offer, but told her he would only stay there long enough to get his own house built. He found a piece of land not far away, on the road to Butterchurn Holler, secluded and private and apparently not owned by anyone, and there he built a house of his own design, using carpentry skills he’d learned years earlier and using the lathe in the abandoned Dill’s wagonmaking shop to turn the elaborate posts and newels in what has been called
retardataire
Gothicism or simply carpenter gothic: unlike any other house anywhere in the Ozarks, a bit frilly, thoroughly personal, an overblown fanciful playhouse for Annie, and one of the few houses in Stay More that was painted. The architecture of Stay More was in general of unpainted wood, either logs or board-and-batten or ramshackle clapboarding, and even Jacob Ingledew’s mansion which had had become the hotel and was now Lola’s house had never been painted but allowed to weather to a kind of tawny drab. Dan declined with thanks most of Latha’s efforts to help him, with either cash or groceries, but he consented to her offer to have the hardware drummer, who kept her store supplied with such things as tools and nails and wash pans and hinges and water buckets, to bring in a supply of house paint in a color of Dan’s choice, which was a sort of golden yellow or, as the label put it, “Arcadian Yellow.” Dan’s wonderful house was not visible from the road, so its yellowness was not noisy or even conspicuous but, like Dan himself, gentle and secluded, bright and shining.

And nothing of any consequence happened to Latha for several years. Compared with the madhouse and Lombardy Alley, it was all a peaceful routine. Some of Latha’s customers who had been allowed to pile up credit for their purchases skipped out on her and moved to California, but these losses did not put her in the red. An honest customer who also moved to California paid off his bill by delivering to Latha the family cow, which she kept in the little barn behind the store. She named her Mathilda, pastured her in the orchard on the hill, and milked her each day, making her own butter with a churn. Another honest customer paid off his bill by giving Latha four piglets, fat little Chester Whites, which she kept in a pigpen behind the store and fed with her table slops and surplus vegetables. Doc Plowright, the town’s other physician in competition with Doc Swain, decided to retire, and paid off his bill at Latha’s Store by giving her the use of his well-fertilized garden patch, which he was too old to plant each year. It was directly across the road from Latha’s store, so she didn’t have far to go in order to plant it and hoe it and weed it and harvest it. She had a vegetable garden that was the envy of several veteran gardeners of Stay More, and grew some magnificent cantaloupes.

Her salary as postmistress wasn’t very much, but it paid for her clothes, and she had some nice dresses and things, ordered from Sears Roebuck. She surprised herself by discovering how much she enjoyed chatting with customers of the store and the post office, after years of an almost hermit-like existence at Lombardy Alley.

One hot day in April, Ted Sizemore, who drove the pick-up truck that brought the mail each day from Harrison, told her that he had in the rear of his truck, protected beneath thick canvas, several blocks of ice. He showed it to her, and even chipped off a piece with his ice pick and gave it to her to sample. Ice in Stay More was unheard of except in the dead of winter. He explained that Latha could order it a block at a time, usually in twenty-five or fifty pound blocks, and it would allow an icebox for her kitchen as well as a cooler in the store for sody pop to sell to her customers, and the Coca-Cola company would gladly furnish her with a cooler if she notified the sody drummer next time he showed up. Which she did, and began the regular practice of stocking and selling cold drinks, an attraction which brought in many new customers, who liked to stand around, or sit around, and visit with each other while they sipped their sody pop. The abundant furniture on the store’s porch, which ran the whole length of the building, was constantly occupied.

Not everyone in Stay More was a customer, not by any means, because there were still a lot of people, mostly women, who were either loyal to Lola Ingledew or else they felt that the only thing good about Latha was that she furnished much cause for gossip. These were the women who started and fed the rumors that Latha must have been a prostitute in some big city to earn the money with which she had bought out Bob Cluley. There was talk that Latha practiced witchcraft. It was a secret to no one that Latha had spent several years in the insane asylum, and some women were simply afraid of her. And while no one had ever seen Latha and Dan together, there was much speculation that the mysterious hermit in the yellow house might be Latha’s secret boyfriend, who came to her only in the dead of night.

Dan and Annie came to her store in broad daylight not more than once a month, and Annie was always thrilled to see her, although Dan put a stop to Annie’s calling her “Mama,” which she had not done within earshot of any customers. Latha treated them just like any other customers, and always gave Annie a little paper poke filled with candy, expecting no payment for it, not because Dan had no money, which he didn’t, but because she had made it clear to him that her debt to him, for saving her life in Tennessee and escorting her home to Stay More, was such a great debt that it would cover whatever he might ever need from her store, and what he needed was usually trivial: a piece of rope, a few nails, some salt, a spool of thread, some matches, or a five-cent bottle of castor oil.

And in time he brought her things in payment for what little he’d acquired: a ham, some pork chops, a bushel of rye, some maple syrup, and he was always ready to do any odd jobs she needed done around the place. He never received any mail or sent any, except a few times when he ordered some books,
The Bobbsey Twins
and other children’s books for Annie, and for himself an unabridged dictionary and an anthology of Elizabethan poetry.

Chapter twenty-nine

A
picture of Latha’s daily life during these years ought to include not simply her easy chores as storekeeper and postmistress, her gardening and orchardkeeping and husbandry of her cow, hogs and chickens, but also her amusements, such as they were. One amusement was her superstitions, which had never left her during the asylum years or the years at Lombardy Alley but had scarcely ever had any chance to prove their efficacy. Not only had there been no mullein stalks to bend down, but there had been nothing lost (except her freedom) that she hoped to find. Now there was mullein all over the place, in fact too much of it, because when the cow ate it the milk would have a slight bitterness to it. But one handsome stalk of mullein on the north side of the house was out of reach of the cow, and Latha saw nothing wrong in bending it down to the ground and naming it Sonora and telling it that it would never straighten up until Latha could lay eyes on her daughter again. She never gave up her old beliefs, such as walking naked around the bedroom three times each morning to ward off neuralgia, and, if afflicted with hiccups, running around the house while holding her breath.

Her other amusement was her cats. Some people frame and hang the first dollar bill they earn in a new business. Latha’s store porch and the rail along it and various other perches around and within the store were decorated with the offspring of a cat that had been offered to Latha in barter by a poor farmwife who needed a bucket of lard. The cat was pregnant and soon there were kittens hither and yon, and before long the place was overrun with them, as if to make up for the dearth of felines at Latha’s two previous residences. Whenever Latha made biscuits for herself, she always tripled the recipe so the cats could have the leftovers, usually flavored with pan soppings from one meat or another. Her cats also wandered down to the creek and helped themselves to minnows and an occasional small fish, and of course there was not a mouse or rat to be seen anywhere near Latha’s general store.

Did she give names to all of those cats? Of course she did, and she never ran out of names, and never confused one cat with another. Sometimes she would name a tomcat after one of the men who had at one time or another made gestures, insinuations, or outright proposals, attempting to take Latha to bed. These included a variety of drummers and other traveling salesmen, the fellows who came to her store to take orders for her merchandise and, finding that she was alone, unwed, and highly desirable, made polished or crude attempts to seduce her. Also included was Oren Duckworth, who was Stay More’s leading citizen now that John Ingledew was dead, and wasn’t at all bad-looking but happened to be married with four sons, three of them adolescents. For two years after Latha opened her store he came regularly not just to pick up his mail but to linger after the other mail patrons had gone and to flirt with Latha. He stopped just short of coming right out and asking her if she’d care to sneak off to her bedroom with him. Finally, having heard some of the gossip that Latha may have raised the money to buy her store by working as a prostitute in some large city, Oren Duckworth came right out and asked her if she had a price, which insulted her, and ended her friendliness toward him. She remained friendly with two of Raymond’s bachelor brothers of whom she was fond: Tearle (“Tull”) Ingledew, who was the town drunk, and Stanfield Ingledew, who was so madly in love with Latha that even if he had not been afflicted with the legendary Ingledews’ woman-shyness would never have been able to summon the nerve to suggest dalliance. Tearle also suffered the Ingledew curse of gynophobia, but when he had enough Chism’s Dew under his belt he would engage her in a kind of gallant chitchat that was always conscious of their sex difference. Latha had numerous opportunities to witness the mating of her cats, although they preferred the privacy of being under the porch when they did it, and she could not help but notice that the male cat simply grasped his partner by the scruff of her neck with his teeth while he mounted her, and there were times she wished that either Stanfield or Tearle could get up enough nerve to do that. Once when Tearle was drunk, and would remember nothing of it the following day, he slipped his hand up her dress and briefly twiddled her gillyclicker, as they called it, enough to impart a heady fragrance to his fingertips but not to amount to a requisite act of foreplay. The closest she ever came to yielding to any of the various overtures was one time when Doc Colvin Swain, many years her senior, after giving her a regular annual physical and pronouncing her in excellent health, began to question her in a halting and roundabout manner as to whether or not her life had enough “satisfaction.” She admitted only that sometimes she had trouble falling asleep at night. He wrote her a prescription for that, and then he took a swig of some nerve-giving medicine and said to her, “By God, Latha, I may be gittin on in years, but I swear I can still coax a respectable stand out of the ole dingbat down here, so if there ever comes a time when you feel like you just got to have it, I’ll gladly be at your service.” But the effort of this announcement had cost him so much—he grew red as a beet in his hands as well as his face and had a terrible coughing fit—that she never got a chance to answer him, even if she had been able to. Later she thought of writing him a letter, or even leaving a perfumed note in his box at the post office, but that notion ended up filed away in her rich store of fantasies.