Enduring (52 page)

The sisters’ younger brother Willard, who had been named after Eli Willard, was one of two people (the other was Dawny, who eventually told Latha) who knew that Jerl Coe, the hero killed at Iwo Jima, had silently betrothed himself to Gypsy Dingletoon, the comely daughter of Stay More’s poorest family. Somehow Willard had obtained a mule for the Dingletoons, whose father had run away from responsibility in order to join the Army. It was this Gypsy that the local gang called the Allies planned to kidnap for immoral purposes and to prove their superiority to the Axis, but the plot was foiled by Dan, who gave the Allies a scare that kept them in line until they decided, in retaliation, to kidnap Gypsy’s mule instead, and to beat it to death, the principal culprit being the same Sog Alan who had broken Dawny’s arm.

When Miss Jerram, the schoolmistress, found out about this heinous act, she marched all the pupils up the mountainside to where the mule lay dead, and forced the Allies (including Sog, who was no longer her pupil but had once been) to dig a grave for the mule and conduct a funeral service for it, including the singing of “Farther Along.”

It was during the singing of this hymn that the first airplane ever seen in Stay More flew overhead. Latha heard the engine and stepped out of her store to scan the skies, and saw that the plane, with military insignia, was pulling another plane, engineless, which was eventually cut loose from its tow and allowed to glide all over creation until it came to a landing somewhere up on the mountain beyond Latha and Every’s new old home. Folks gathered at Every’s garage or at Latha’s store to discuss the event, the first time that most of them had seen or heard an airplane. Soon a bunch of Miss Jerram’s pupils came running down the road, searching for the glider’s landing place. A plume of smoke to the east aroused speculation that the glider had caught fire and burned.

Surely Dawny would want to publish an Extra over this happening, if it could be determined where the glider had landed. But when she asked him about it, he said he hadn’t seen any glider or any smoke. On Latha’s store porch, the gang called the Allies sat around for a while with the gang called the Axis and Latha was surprised to see them mingling in apparent harmony, where usually they’d be at each other’s throats. Kids were hard to understand. But in the days ahead, Dawny was conspicuous by his absence. He stopped coming to the store to do his little jobs that she paid him for, like sweeping the floor and dusting the merchandise. Some days she caught a glimpse of him running past her store toward his home. She also observed the older members of the Axis running that way too. One day she stopped Dawny and asked why he was in such a hurry to get home, and he said he wasn’t going home, but then he changed his tune and said yes he was going home because he had a lot of “stuff” to do. Something was fishy. Later that day two women who were mothers of Axis, Dulcie Coe and Bliss Dingletoon, came into the store and asked Latha if she’d heard anything about Selena Dinsmore, the mother of all the Dinsmore kids, who were supposedly very bad sick. Latha said she hadn’t heard a word and in fact had just seen Willard Dinsmore running up the road in the same direction Dawny was heading, followed by his sister Ella Jean. While they were talking, Selena Dinsmore herself came into the store.

Well, it turned out that a few nights previously Selena had cooked up a huge pot of greens to take to sick Bliss Dingletoon, while Bliss was cooking up a huge pot of pork and beans to take to sick Selena Dinsmore. Dulcie Coe said she had contributed enough blackberry cobbler “to feed an army.” The women were soon joined by Gladys Duckworth, whose daughter Rosa Faye had just been seen rushing in the direction the boys had fled, so the women decided to follow her, Latha closing the store. They followed Rosa Faye all the way up past Latha’s house and out an abandoned road to what had once been the Stapleton place, where they were stopped by a sentry, a soldier in uniform with a rifle. When they tried to tell him they were just following Gladys’ daughter Rosa Faye, he made them wait while he notified his superior, and then they were taken into the presence of other soldiers and of their children, Willard and Ella Jean Dinsmore, Joe Don and Gypsy Dingletoon, and Sammy Coe. Sammy’s mother, Dulcie Coe, exclaimed, “So this is where all my blackberry cobbler ended up!” A corporal told her it sure was good, and a sergeant said it was the best dessert he’d ever had the privilege of sinking his teeth into. The lieutenant in charge, McPherson, introduced himself and his men to the ladies and explained that they had been passengers on that glider and were discovered by the kids who called themselves Axis but were pledged to secrecy. They were awaiting orders to participate in a training exercise, which would involve a battalion of tanks on maneuvers. Latha said to the lieutenant, “Well, there’s no sense in you boys starving to death up here and making these kids into storytellers. Come on down to our fair hamlet and get you some decent food.” Since their presence was no longer a secret, they agreed. All of them walked down into the village, but Gypsy rode a handsome Army mule, who had flown in on that glider and who Gypsy had named Jarhead after her mule who had been murdered by the Allies. Dawny was beside himself with excitement. At Latha’s store she sold the soldiers smoking tobacco and cigarette papers, and at her post office she sold them postcards and v-mail stationery, and they sat around drinking soda pop from the cooler, eating candy bars and writing notes or letters to their distant mothers, wives or sweethearts. Dawny showed Lieutenant McPherson his newspaper office, where he planned to publish an Extra as soon as he got McPherson’s clearance. Then he gave him a tour of the village, or what was left of it, while the other soldiers ran down to Swains Creek for a swim, wade, and dive.

The soldiers in groups of three or four began to have their meals at the various mothers’ tables, and all of them participated in a community Pie Supper, where they bid on anonymous pies, and as it turned out McPherson got the pie of the Dinsmore twins, who were still in mourning for Billy Bob Ingledew, and the lieutenant tried his best to make them laugh while they were eating the pie. Dawny’s pie turned out to have been made by their sister Ella Jean, who was his own age and on whom he had a powerful crush. She apparently told Dawny she’d like to help him put out his newspaper, and from the next day onward,
The Stay Morning Star
had a staff of two, although sweet Ella Jean could not contribute to the next Extra, which was about the suicides of her sisters Jelena and Doris, who were twinned for a last time in their plunge from Leapin Rock, which sank Lieutenant McPherson into a deep gloom even though Ella Jean tried to explain to him how her sisters were grieving for the death of Billy Bob in Berlin. Latha knew that Leapin Rock had a long history of (and got its name from) the several folks down through the ages who had jumped off of it to escape this world. She had thought a time or two about availing of it herself if Every had not come back into her life. Stay More was still under a pall of sorrow when an Army major serving as referee for the war games arrived in town with a convoy of engineers who prepared the roads and built a pontoon bridge across Swains Creek, and shortly thereafter big armored tanks in all shapes and sizes came rolling their treads over the hills to the south. They bivouacked in the large fields below the Duckworth place that had once been an Osage Indian encampment. The major assured Latha and Every that no harm would come of the exercises, and the engineers intended to leave the village just as they had found it, if not better.

As far as Latha (with Every’s help) could gather, McPherson’s soldiers who had landed on the glider were meant to impersonate the enemy, the Japanese, and attempt to defend the village, the roads, and the countryside from the onslaught of the tanks. All of the weapons—cannons, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, rifles—were loaded with blanks, or rather with projectiles that would make plenty of noise when fired but leave only paint on the targets.

The population of Stay More doubled during the war games. Every’s talents as a mechanic were called upon to repair Jeeps, trucks, and even tanks. He and Lawlor were kept busy from sunup to sundown. Latha’s post office was so busy that she had to hire Lorraine Dinsmore to clerk in the store. Latha did not even mind the fact that many of the soldiers flirted with her; it made her feel younger, and she unashamedly found herself gazing in the mirror to see that she was still pretty enough to draw out such attention. Dawny’s newspaper, with Ella Jean’s help, doubled its circulation, especially after he started putting the soldiers’ names and hometowns in his stories. One afternoon, Latha caught sight of Dawny and Ella Jean kissing. It was going to be a nice summer all around. Latha and Every both made so much money that they were going to enjoy a happy retirement.

While they lasted, the war games were noisy and nerve-wracking. All the dogs of Stay More ran away from home. All the Stay Morons who were interested could watch the games and could not help listening to the games, but most of the spectators were the young folk of the town. There were rumors that some of the older girls, like Rosa Faye Duckworth and Betty June Alan, were not merely flirting with the soldiers.

Chapter forty-one

T
he war games came to an abrupt end. The army departed Stay More. But Lieutenant McPherson remained, to help Dawny during the special ceremony that was held beside the schoolhouse to award the Congressional Medal of Honor to Lawlor and Dulcie Coe in memory of their son Gerald, who had died at Iwo Jima. The ceremony, attended by Congressman J.W. Trimble, was the most elaborate event in the history of Stay More. Captain (formerly Lieutenant) McPherson sat with Dawny at the Press table, but was unable to persuade Dawny to bring out an Extra, or for that matter any further issues of
The Stay Morning Star
, which joined the mausoleum of America’s small newspapers. But he kept his little office in the side room of her store, not as a newspaper office but as a place to get away from his aunt and uncle. McPherson had given him an army-issue Underwood upright typewriter, and he taught himself how to hunt and peck, and years later he would write upon it a novel called
When Angels Rest
, which tells the whole story of that visit of the Army to Stay More.

But for most writing, Dawny had an Indian Chief writing tablet which he used to take notes when Latha took him to the Stay More cemetery, where she told him the histories of all the Stay Morons buried there as well as a few who were not Stay Morons, like Tennessee Tennison, a beautiful young girl that Doc Swain, when he was a young man teaching school at Parthenon, had fallen in love with but could not cure of the tuberculosis that carried her away. Everybody in Stay More had some secrets, and Latha told Dawny many of these without telling her own. Dawny years later would tell Tenny Tennison’s story and Doc Swain’s story in his novel,
Butterfly Weed
.

When the war was over, although the servicemen returned to Stay More, the population went on declining. Estalee Jerram the schoolteacher eloped to Wisconsin with a man who had been one of McPherson’s sergeants. Betty June Alan eloped to California with a soldier who had left her pregnant. Dan’s daughter Annie eloped with a man who had been the tank captain during the war games but he didn’t take her to California; the man, whose name was Burton Stoving, was an insurance excecutive in Little Rock. Art Dingletoon took his whole family to California in search of greener squatting places, and not long afterwards Willard Dinsmore went out there in search of Gypsy. Hank Ingledew had little trouble persuading Sonora that California was the Promised Land, which was very hard for Latha, who could hardly stand to lose her daughter once again, as well as her three grand-daughters. They had been keeping baby Jelena Ingledew after the suicides of her mothers (no one had been able to determine whether it was Doris or Jelena who had actually given birth to the child, and as for its name, some held that they had named the baby Jelena as a kind of Jelena Junior like Sonora’s third daughter, while others believed that Doris had named it that out of love for her sister) but when they decided to go to California, since they already had three daughters, they gave the baby Jelena to Hank’s brother Jackson for upbringing, and thus she remained a Stay Moron (and would come to be thought of by Latha almost as a favorite grandchild).

Hank and Sonora settled with their children in Anaheim, a city southeast of Los Angeles, where they discovered that most of their neighbors had also come from Arkansas. Eventually there were so many of them in Anaheim that they constituted a kind of Stay More-in-exile colony. Hank had a high-paying job as an electronics technician at a huge automated canning factory, and he also moonlighted as a repairman of television sets, and made so much money that Sonora wrote Latha to say they had moved into an opulent twelve-room “Spanish colonial” house. They were rolling in riches so much that Hank wasn’t even perturbed when their next baby was also a girl, Patricia. Sonora sent photographs of the girl to Latha. Her letters to Latha were long and rambling and not always happy. She spent too much time watching soap operas on television in the daytime and quiz shows at night. Her daughters were happy and Hank (who now preferred to be called John Henry) was rich and good-looking, but Sonora missed Stay More and had a feeling that the Stay Morons around her were no longer Stay Morons, not simply because they had not stayed more in Stay More but because California had taken away their integrity and sense of fun and their “sharp edges,” as Sonora put it. They were all kind of blurry.

Latha answered her daughter’s letters, with what little news there was to report: Junior Duckworth, who had once been Hank’s rival for Sonora’s affections, had moved to California, but she didn’t know where. So had Merle Kimber and the others who had built the
W.P.A
. bridge and fought for Sonora’s attention in the yard. There wasn’t much else to write about to Sonora except the changing of the seasons, but eventually Sonora wrote back to say that since California had no seasons it made her terribly homesick to hear about autumn and spring in the Ozarks. So Latha tried to tell her about the summer droughts and the spring floods, which were just as awful as ever. Sonora wrote to say that maybe out of boredom she had stopped wearing her diaphragm, and as a result was pregnant once more. As the pregnancy progressed, Sonora wrote to complain that she was losing her looks, getting fat, and her stomach was almost as extended as John Henry’s potbelly when in the fifth month he finally noticed it and wanted to know why she hadn’t been wearing her diaphragm and warning her that
this
baby had pretty damn well be a boy. Toward the end of her pregnancy Sonora told her mother that she was not only fat but gross and ugly and she suspected that John Henry was not being faithful to her. Anything that Latha could think to say to Sonora in response would have been meaningless. “Men are that way.” “Don’t blame yourself.” “Let’s hope that everything will be back to normal after the baby is born.” Sonora wrote to say that when she went into labor, Hank wasn’t even around but out somewhere fooling around with his girlfriend. When he finally showed up and found out that the baby was one more girl, he observed philosophically that it didn’t appear there were ever going to be any more Ingledews. She assured him that this one was the prettiest of them all. Latha felt such sympathy for Sonora that for the first time since she had bought the store from Bob Cluley she wasn’t able to open it. There wasn’t much business anyway, and the post office had been closed permanently since the war, so Latha simply left a large hand-lettered sign on the door saying
WE ARE NOT OPEN. IF YOU BADLY NEED SOMETHING, AND DONNY ISN’T HERE TO OPEN UP FOR YOU, COME TO THE DILL HOUSE
. Dawny made a point of being available in case anybody came to the store, but he later reported to her that no one had, except a couple of drummers. Latha stayed home until she was able to write some sort of letter to Sonora, with no advice or consolation but with reassurance that Latha loved her very much and was willing to do anything for her, short of coming to California. In the weed patch on the north side of the store there were a whole bunch of mulleins, and she went out and began to bend them down one by one, naming them Sonora, John Henry, Latha, Eva, June, Patricia, and, the new baby, Sharon [who was me]. Each morning she would go look at the bent-down mulleins, and each evening before closing the store (which had done no business) she would also have a word or two with the lame stalks of mullein. None of them responded. But one morning she saw that the stalk she had named John Henry was standing proud and tall and she could not believe it. Why would that one alone have risen? All day long she was in a quandary, and told Every about it at dinnertime, but he never had given much credence to her superstitions. But late in the afternoon, when she was sitting in her rocker on the porch, here came John Henry walking up the road!