Enduring (4 page)

Latha wasn’t able to let it go, but in due time she grew tired of studying bugs attached to each other who didn’t go anywhere, and so she began to study, at night, before they made her go off to bed, the tiny creatures that flew around in the night air and twinkled with light. For a long time Latha thought they were miniature people or fairies, although she didn’t know that word yet. Grandma Bourne said they were called lightning bugs, and they sure were pretty. “Purty as you,” Grandma Bourne observed, “and you’re the purtiest Bourne ever they was.” Grandma also explained how lightning bugs are signs: when they fly close to the ground it means there’s a big rain a-coming; when they fly high up in the air, it means we can expect a long drought. Latha was fascinated by the idea that there were signs in the world which would tell you if something would happen, and she pestered her grandmother to tell her all the signs she knew, such as rain is good for funerals but terrible for weddings. Grandma said, “Happy is the bride that the sun shines on; Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on. If the dog Rouser starts eating grass, it means it will rain; if Jasmine sneezes, it will rain.” Latha kept a close watch, but Rouser never ate grass, and Jasmine never sneezed, and nobody had a funeral, and the lightning bugs flew high in the air.

Latha was more interested in why they flashed their lights. One time Mandy and Barb caught a bunch of lightning bugs and put them in a glass jar, where Latha could study them. None of them were attached to each other, or showed any inclination for becoming joined. Latha asked her sisters why they flashed their lights. Mandy said, “Well, silly, it’s cause they have to see where they’re a-going in the dark!” Latha wondered why they didn’t just wait until daylight. Barb said that lightning bugs were like the stars in the sky: what’s the purpose of stars other than to make the sky pretty to look at? When Latha asked Grandma Bourne why the lightning bugs light up, Grandma just said, “Well, wouldn’t you, if you could?” So Latha didn’t bother to ask the question of her mother or father.

She was about ready to give up asking questions anyhow. But there was one other question she wanted to know the answer to, which also involved a kind of joining. “How come,” she asked Mandy, “roosters jump on the backs of the hens and whack and smack ’em like they do?” Mandy said she reckoned it was because the rooster’s job is to keep order amongst the flock and he was punishing the hens. But why was he punishing them? Latha wanted to know. Barb offered the opinion that the hens was just too gabby, a-clucking and a-cackling all over the place, and the rooster was just trying to get them to shut up. That answer didn’t satisfy Latha completely but she was forced to live with it for a while. But then one day a strange dog wandered into their yard and their dog Rouser barked at it and then went out and sniffed its bottom and pretty soon climbed up on its back just like those roosters climbed the hens, and tried to poke his pee-pee into the dog’s bottom. Somebody—not Mandy or Barb but probably Grandma Bourne—had long ago answered Latha’s question about that thing that Rouser had between his legs, which he peed out of, and is therefore called simply a pee-pee. Neither Latha nor her sisters nor her grandmother nor her mother had a thing like that, although it was thought that possibly her father did. The purpose of it, as any fool could plainly see, was just to make water in such a way that it didn’t splash on your leg. But now was Rouser making water inside of the other dog? It was certainly baffling. And it didn’t take long for Latha to realize that maybe the two dogs were joined together in the same way that the bugs were and also, briefly, the rooster and the hens. Probably the lightning bugs too, although you couldn’t see them in the dark. It took a while for the dogs to finish whatever they were doing. Maybe, Latha wondered without voicing her theory to her sisters, Rouser was squirting some eggs into the other dog which would turn into babies! Latha smiled real big with the realization that she was finally beginning to understand the mystery of life. Apart from solving the mystery of why the wind blows, it was her first answer to the big question,
How do things get to be the way they are
?

She had been taking Rouser for granted. He was just a dog, a good old dog, and friendly; when she was younger, whenever he was sprawled on the porch he had let her sit on his head as a cushion. He was supposedly helpful around the place, and he barked to let them know that somebody was coming, if somebody ever did. Sometimes, especially after rain, he smelled bad. And he spent an awful lot of time, especially when it was hot, just sleeping. But now he was real busy, pumping his bottom against that strange dog’s bottom and filling her up with eggs. Latha had other questions, for instance, how did Rouser know to tell the difference between pee and eggs, to squirt the right one? She didn’t ask these questions of anyone, convinced now that the others simply didn’t understand the mystery of life the way it was revealed to her. She knew that in time she would learn the answers on her own. From that day forward, she never asked anyone a question ever again.

Chapter three

W
henever she heard a new word she either learned what it meant by figuring it out on her own, without troubling to ask anyone, or she simply never thought about it. She heard frequent talk about a “drought” and managed in time to decide that it meant the fact that months and months had passed without any rainfall. She also heard the word “automobile” but was never able to determine what it meant and decided she didn’t need to add it to her vocabulary. She even heard her Grandma Bourne say the word “vocabulary,” but didn’t bother to ask her what it meant because she had decided not to ask, and therefore she didn’t think about it anymore.

She heard the word “neighbor” several times eventually and was able to figure out that a neighbor is somebody who lives on the other side of the fence. There was a family whose names were Whitter living nearest them, in a cabin bigger but not much better, just over the hill to the east, down in a holler up against the side of Ledbetter Mountain. The biggest and oldest, therefore the father, was named Simon Whitter and he was a friend of Latha’s daddy Saultus Bourne, possibly even the only friend Saultus had, as he didn’t care for friendships, a word that had taken Latha a long time to puzzle out, because her sisters weren’t her friends, just her acquaintances, a word that Grandma Bourne had explained to her without being asked, meaning somebody you know and might even hug but don’t particularly think the world of. Saultus’ three daughters were all females, that is, they wore dresses and sometimes had to listen to their father complaining, “I sure do wush I had me a stout boy or two ‘stead of all you gals.” Simon Whitter had lots and lots of boys, who wore pants and went around spitting all the time and used words which Latha was able to determine were not nice. Barb said they were cuss words. Latha tried one of the words on her mother once and her mother took a bar of soap and jammed it into Latha’s mouth and made Latha chew and lick on it, so Latha never used that word again. But the Whitter boys said them all the time and nobody stuck soap in their mouths.

It wasn’t too far to walk to get from the Bourne place to the Whitter place…and Latha had learned that “place” meant not just anywhere, not just where you live, but every bit of land you have and everything on it. Her daddy had pointed out to her the row of cedar trees which marked the line where the Bourne place stopped and the Whitter place began. Latha had been taken by her mother and father to visit the Whitter place, and her mother had told her and her sisters that they were never allowed to go there without having a grown-up along. The Whitter boys did not cuss very much when grown-ups were around, although two of the Whitter boys were pretty well grown-up already, and one of them, named Ike, was almost thirty which made him an old man. The Whitter house was bigger than the Bourne house, but not much. There was a sleeping loft where the boys slept, four to one bed and three to the other. There were only two girls, one about the same size as Latha, named Rindy, who slept in a trundle bed kept beneath her parent’s bed, and a full-grown older girl who slept in a shed behind the kitchen. In the Bourne’s small sleeping loft, the three sisters slept in one bed and Grandma Bourne slept in the other. Although the Whitter boys tried not to cuss while the Bourne girls were visiting, they did plenty of spitting, and they also said peculiar things like “How’d ye like to git some?” or “I’d shore like to jump yore bones” or “Let’s me and you git off,” or “Aint it about time for the dirty deed?” Latha might have wanted to ask her sisters what these words meant, but she no longer asked questions.

The oldest Whitter boy, Ike, a full-grown man with big muscles and an ugly face, didn’t say such things. He told Latha that she was the purtiest creature he’d ever laid eyes on, and he was just going to wait until she got growed up and take her for his bride. He snarled his words whenever he talked, and his mouth was full of chewing tobacco, and she wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. It seemed he’d said he planned to take her for a ride.

One of the other Whitter boys (there were so many she didn’t know his name; he was the one who’d spoken of “the dirty deed”) whispered into her ear, saying he’d give her a penny if she would let him get down on the ground and look up her dress. She had the wisdom to collect the penny in advance. He later demanded it back because “I never saw nothing.” But she kept the penny, although a long time went by before she got a chance to spend it. She hoped her grandmother might take her for another walk into the village, but she didn’t. That piece of candy she’d once eaten had become only a distant memory; she couldn’t recall the taste of chocolate, only the feeling that it was wonderful in her mouth. One day she looked into the mirror and decided that she was big enough, old enough, to go into the village all by herself and buy some candy with her penny. So that afternoon she just took off, telling no one that she was going. Rouser followed her. It wasn’t all that far, less than a mile. She could have stopped at Jerram’s store and spent her penny there, but she was determined to return to the big Ingledew General Store. A woman coming out of Doc Swain’s clinic said to her, “Aint you awful little to be out all by yourself?” but she shook her head and went on. As she approached the Ingledew store, she saw sitting on its porch Ike Whitter and two other men, with rifles in their laps and six-shooters in their belts. They were eating sourdeens. They had opened many cans of sourdeens, and were stuffing themselves.

“Wal howdy now, little miss chickabiddy,” Ike said to her, and then he said to the other men, “This here little darling’s gon marry me soon’s she’s big enough to put out.” The other men made comments about her prettiness. Ike Whitter offered her a sourdeen, on top of a sody cracker. She had never had sourdeens or sody crackers. The sourdeen looked like a little fish and was salty but she kind of liked it. Ike said to her, “Where’s your maw or paw? What’re ye doin out here all by yoreself?”

She opened her fist to reveal the penny in her palm. She thought for a moment of telling him she’d got the penny from one of his kid brothers. And even of telling what it was payment for. But she decided to simply say, “I’ve got a penny to get me some candy.”

“Why, sweetheart, you just march right on in there and help yoreself to all the candy you can grab. Heck, git yoreself a paper poke and fill it up to the brim. This here’s
my
store now.”

She didn’t understand how Ike Whitter could have taken possession of the Ingledew’s store, but she was thrilled at the idea of not having to choose among the countless different kinds of candy. She could have one of each! So she went into the store and made a beeline for the candy counter. She did not see Mr. Ingledew anywhere so she decided he must have sold his store to Ike Whitter. The paper pokes were stacked in three different sizes. She had never had a paper poke of her own before. She picked the middle size and began to drop into it a gum drop, a chocolate bar, a jelly square, a licorice stick, a mint kiss, a cinnamon ball, a caramel, a cream wafer, a marshmallow banana, a rock candy, a bonbon, a cracker jack and an I-don’t-know-what. In fact, there were several different I-don’t-know-whats, so she took one of each. And while she was doing this, it suddenly occurred to her that she ought not be selfish; she ought to get some candy for both of her sisters. So she started over again, picking one of each for Mandy, and then one of each for Barb. The paper poke was getting heavy.

She heard the sound of gunfire, and suddenly there was a crash and one of the store’s big windows was shattered. Two more crashes and two more windows were smashed and splinters of glass flew over her head. Was somebody shooting at her? Maybe Ike had played a trick on her and didn’t really own the store, and the Ingledews were firing at her for stealing the candy? But then Ike Whitter and the other two men came into the store. Ike yelled at her, “Babydoll, you’d best get down on the floor and stay down!” Then the three men started firing their rifles and six-shooters out through the three front doors of the store. She lay on her tummy on the hard floor and watched and listened. “Got two of the bastards!” Ike said. “Let’s kill ’em all!” The gunfire went on and on. Things over her head and around her were punctured with bullets. They would never stop. Every window in the store was busted out by bullets. Latha knew that if one of those bullets hit her, she would be dead. There would be no more. Of anything. She would bleed all over and then could never watch the sun come up in the morning ever again. The thought made her begin to cry. She did not cry very often, and then only after she had been hurt bad, and she had not been hurt now. Nobody could hear her crying because of all the noise the gunfire made, which went on and on and on, until she wanted to stop crying and start screaming.

The rear door of the store opened and in walked the biggest man that Latha had ever seen. He was old enough to be Latha’s granddaddy, but he was a giant, bigger than a house. He saw her and moved his finger to his lips to tell her to shush. She didn’t know whether he just meant for her to stop crying, or he meant for her to be quiet so the shooting men wouldn’t see him. She guessed the latter, because very quietly he sneaked up behind the shooting man in the farthest doorway and whopped him on top of his head with his fist then broke both his arms then hit him so hard in the stomach he doubled over then picked him up by the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants and flung him right out through the doorway, so that he flew over the porch and crashed into the dirt road and just lay there crumpled, maybe dead. Then the huge old man moved to the other doorway, the nearest one, and did the same things to the other shooting man and flung him like a dishrag into the road. Ike Whitter, who was shooting in the main doorway, turned around and saw the big man and said “Lord god amighty, Coon Ingledew, you done went and knocked hell out of both of ’em!” He raised his rifle to shoot, but the big old man knocked it out of his hands, then whopped him on top of his head the same way he’d done the other two, broke his arms, hit him terribly in the stomach, then picked him up and tossed him right out through the doorway into the road, where he lay crumpled up and unmoving beside the other two men. All the gunfire had ceased. Then the big old man came to Latha, lifted her up, and led her out through the rear of the store toward the gristmill. “You’d best take off for home,” he said to her. “You don’t want to hang around and watch them fellers get lynched.”