Enduring (40 page)

There were no child labor laws in those days, so anybody of any age could work in the cannon factory, and there were small children as well as octogenarians employed there. The person who sat up in the “attic” of the factory, taking fresh empty tin cans out of their boxes and placing them into the chute that lowered them to the women who peeled and packed the tomatoes, was a small boy, not yet five years old. It was a simple task which anyone could do, placing those tin cans into the shoot, but he was out of sight up there and few people saw him except when he took part of his earnings, twenty cents a day, to Latha’s store to buy some candy or soda pop. His name was Dawny, and supposedly he was the nephew of Rosie Murrison, who lived with her husband Frank just up the road a ways from the store. She also worked as a peeler/packer at the tomato trough, so it wasn’t exactly as if her nephew was unsupervised at that early age. But he pretty well came and went as he pleased, and as long as he kept putting the cans into the chute nobody ever paid him any mind. He spent all of his free time, Saturdays and Sundays, at Latha’s store. She gave him permission to play with her cats, and he was rarely seen without a cat in his arms. Sonora could not resist teasing him. “Dawny,” she would say, “do you aim to marry that pussy when you git growed up?”

Latha sometimes felt disconcerted because of the way Dawny stared at her, but then she noticed he stared at everyone else in the same way, as if he were trying to memorize what they looked like. There were other children his age around, Sammy Coe for instance, but he didn’t seem inclined to play with any of them. He wasn’t shy at all, but he’d much rather listen than talk, and when he wasn’t staring he was listening. And sometimes both.

When the tomato season had dwindled down to the point where they couldn’t keep the factory running, it was time once again for Sonora to go back to Little Rock, and once again she couldn’t bear to go, and thought that it would break her heart to be away from Hank for even a day. “Tell him that,” Latha suggested.

“The last time I tried to say ‘howdy’ to him,” Sonora said, “I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

“Write him a letter,” Latha suggested.

Sonora couldn’t just
give
him a letter; she had to wait until she got home to Little Rock and mail him one from a distance, hoping the distance would enable him to reply. She said everything she’d always wanted to say to his face. She told him that although she was only sixteen years old she already felt grown up and that she didn’t like any of the boys in Little Rock as much as she liked him and she thought it was a tragedy that he wasn’t able to speak to her but she understood how it was. She sincerely hoped that even though he couldn’t speak to her that he might be able to write to her. She signed it “Love, Sonora,” but thought that was too bold, and crossed out the “Love” and wrote over it, “Your friend.”

When the letter arrived in Stay More and Latha put it in Bevis Ingledew’s box, she was careful to watch when Hank came to get the mail and found a piece for himself, and when he read the return address on the envelope he began to turn so red that Latha was tempted to run and fetch Doc Swain. But he cooled off enough to go out on the porch and sit down and open the letter and read it, although his hands were shaking. He probably read it five or six times until his hands stopped shaking. Then he just sat there for a couple of hours thinking. Finally he came back into the store and said to Latha, “Ma’am, have you got something I could write a letter on?” Her heart leaped up, and she was happy to furnish him with a sheet of her best stationery, and an envelope. He had his own pencil, in preference to the fountain pen she offered him. She watched him as he sat down again on the porch, using one of the upturned empty nail kegs as a writing desk. He licked on the pencil and chewed on it. He took several deep breaths and hunched over his nail keg and set his pencil to the paper, and with a trembling hand managed to write, “Dear Sonora.” But that was as far as he got. He studied the sheet for a long time. He picked it up by a corner and gave it a little shake, as if a bunch of words might fall off of it, but there were no words other than those two. After several hours, Latha had to go out and inform Hank that she was about to close the post office for the day, so if he hoped to mail it he’d better do it. She went back inside and waited, and waited, but Hank never could finish his letter. He folded it, with just those words, “Dear Sonora,” and put it in the envelope and mailed it.

Sonora, as she related in a subsequent letter to Latha, was thrilled to pieces. She slept every night with Hank’s two-word letter under her pillow. She answered the letter by pouring out her heart to him, telling him how she liked Stay More so much better than Little Rock and how she wished she could live there all year around instead of just in the summertime. She even told him who her favorite film actors and actresses were. She hoped that when she came back to Stay More the following summer that she could go to the pitcher show in Jasper with Hank instead of with Junior Duckworth, who meant nothing to her although she’d seen several movies with him, mostly westerns. Maybe the movie Sonora would watch with Hank would be a romantic movie, and if so, they might find themselves holding hands.

Hank couldn’t imagine doing this, but he reckoned that if it was dark in that there theater over to Jasper he might be able to manage it in the dark, and he told her so. She was so excited with this letter that she wrote back telling him that if the movie were romantic enough and they held hands, it might develop that when he took her home afterwards they would want to sit in the porch swing together for a little while, and if they did that they might find themselves kissing. Hank memorized this letter on Latha’s porch, sitting in the same porch swing where it was destined to happen. As if he weren’t already on fire, Sonora’s next letter said that if they saw enough of those romantic pitcher shows and did enough of hand-holding, and sat in that porch swing afterwards doing enough of kissing, then they might want to sneak out to the barn and lie down together. Without asking Latha’s permission, Hank went out to her barn. It was occupied by Mathilda the cow, but Hank found a spot in the hay where he could imagine that he and Sonora might lie down together. So in effect John Henry “Hank” Ingledew lost his virginity by mail.

Thus it came to pass that when Sonora returned yet again to Stay More the following June to spend another summer with her Aunt Latha, she and Hank were already such old friends that they didn’t even bother with the preliminaries of going to the pitcher show and holding hands and kissing. As soon as it got dark on the first night Sonora was back in Stay More, they met in a thicket alongside Swains Creek, embraced, and made a love that eclipsed anything in the U.S. mails. Reality is capable of being superior to words, although it sometimes isn’t. They did it every chance they got, every place they could find that was private, and even once in a place that wasn’t private enough that little Dawny didn’t happen to stumble upon them and watch, entranced but secretly. He didn’t tell. Sonora had already told Latha, who was the only person who knew. Sonora assured Latha that they were “careful,” that they refrained from doing it certain days of the month. The first time Sonora had been obliged to put him off, she had mollified Hank by explaining how the cycles work, and he had obligingly stopped. “We can pet, though,” she told him, and although he didn’t know that word she showed him all the things it meant.

Latha thought it was not only just fine, but simply beautiful, that Sonora and Hank were giving each other such pleasure. Although Latha took delight in watching her cats mating, she had no desire to watch Hank and Sonora, because Sonora usually gave her good descriptions of the myriad ways that she and Hank took advantage of the fact that they had miraculously been created female and male.

The other males still competed for Sonora’s attention and favor, because they assumed that Hank was too shy toward females even to hold Sonora’s hand. There were more males in the courting pool now, because the
W.P.A.
, a government agency for relief of the Depression, had decided to build a bridge across Banty Creek, and they brought in a crew of young men, “furriners” from other parts of Newton County and even Madison County, to supplement a couple of local boys, Leo Dinsmore and Merle Kimber. Every evening along about the time of the first lightning bug, the
W.P.A
. boys would meet in front of Latha’s store and confront the local boys, ostensibly for the purpose of just goofing off and doing various stunts and tricks and fights, but in reality to show off for Sonora, or “Snory,” as everybody except Latha called her. Latha would keep the store open, in case anybody wanted to buy soda pop or candy, and the
W.P.A
. construction project for the bridge was a boon to her business. For a change, she was making a profit. Little Dawny, who wasn’t quite so little now that he was five-going-on-six, always sat on her porch to watch the shenanigans of the
W.P.A
. boys against the local boys. One time when Sonora didn’t realize Latha was watching or listening, Sonora clutched Dawny in his crotch and said, “My, Dawny, for such a little feller I bet you’ve got a big one!” Once again Latha told Sonora she shouldn’t tease the boy. When the fights were over and everyone had departed, Dawny stayed on the porch to listen to Latha tell ghost stories in the dark. She was surprised that her stories did not leave him afraid to go home by himself, but he had acquired a dog, or rather his uncle Frank Murrison had acquired a smelly old bird-dog named Gumper, who attached himself to Dawny, and somehow was not intimidated by the hordes of cats around Latha’s place, so that Gumper could accompany Dawny home even after the most horrendous ghost story.

Then Latha would be alone until whenever Sonora got home from wherever Hank had taken her. She enjoyed this solitude, as she had always preferred it to company, even the company of her own daughter, and she could easily sit on that porch until bedtime or Sonora’s return, whichever came first. The only problem was that all of those young men roistering in her yard would leave behind the heady scent of their masculine rut, which, along with the scents of all the mating insects and reptiles, would be too much for her, and she would find herself desperately yearning for some sexual pleasure of her own. Even the wonderful vicarious pleasure that she got from hearing Sonora describe her amorous adventures with Hank was not enough to palliate her pangs.

Chapter thirty-two

T
hus the following came to pass one summer Sunday morning, when, as she usually did, Latha went blackberry picking or fishing. She rose just before dawn, and after quickly tending her chores in the garden patch and feeding the chickens, she dug a bucket of redworms out of her compost pile and pulled her cane pole out from under the porch and took off up Banty Creek to one of her favorite deep holes, called “Old Bottomless,” in the deep forested timber. Along the way she passed within shouting distance of Dan’s place, and was feeling such new desire, greater than she’d ever felt on that trip from Tennessee, that she was tempted to see if she couldn’t get him away from his daughter. But she scoffed at herself for the notion, and went on to Ole Bottomless, where she baited her hook and began fishing, with immediate excellent luck: five crappie, three sunperch, two catfish, and a trout, which she strung on a stringer made by stripping a thin branch from a sapling with her jackknife, and then she left the stringer in the water to keep the fish alive as long as possible.

Sometime around eight o’clock she heard someone whistling and looked up to see a strange man coming down the stream, carrying a fine store-bought rod and reel and a tackle box, and followed by his mongrel dog, a black and tan.

He stopped whistling his tune when he caught sight of her. “Why, howdy do, ma’am,” he said. “I never seed a lady fishing alone afore.”

“Howdy do, sir,” she said quietly, thinking,
Fish in silence, get plenty; fish talking, don’t get any
.

The stranger, who was tall, tanned and strapping, pulled her stringer of fish out of the water and admired them. “My, my, what a purty mess of fish!” he said. “What you usin for bait?”

“Worms,” she said.

“Well now, that shore is one of the purtiest mess of fish ever I seed,” he said, putting her stringer back into the water. “All I got is spinners and flies, no live bait, but we’ll just see if them fishes is in the mood for teasin. I do hope you don’t keer, ma’am, if I just throw my line in there too.”

She shook her head. She didn’t mind. She’d already caught enough fish and had been on the verge of leaving anyhow. She could get up and go any minute, but something was holding her back.

The man lashed his rod and cast his lure way out to the far edge of Ole Bottomless and then slowly began retrieving it. He cast again, and then again. She studied him. He was not bad-looking at all, and perhaps close to her own age, which was thirty-eight. She could have told him that these Banty Creek fish did not seem to care for any bait but worms or grasshoppers or crawdad tails. After he had fished for a while without any luck she offered him a worm.

“Aw, heck, I aint never fished this creek afore,” he said, then cast the line again with the worm on the hook. After it sank, he turned his gaze to her. “You live roundabouts?”

She decided she had better not tell him the truth. She didn’t want him to know she was the postmistress of Stay More. She wasn’t sure of her motive, but she preferred to remain anonymous. So she told him she was from down towards Demijohn.

“Demijohn?” he said. “Well now, I caint say I know anybody from that part of the country, though I’ve been there a time or two. I’m from up beyond Spunkwater myself. You know where that’s at?”

“I’ve been there a time or two,” she said, truthfully.

“Dolph Rivett’s my name,” he offered.

A fib takes a breath. “Sue McComb’s mine,” she returned.

“Mighty pleased to meetcha, Miz McComb,” he said, and added, “It is ‘Miz,’ I reckon.”