Enduring (56 page)

Latha watched Vernon grow, which was considerably faster than watching grass grow or watching paint dry, and infinitely more interesting. He spent all his weekends walking in the woods, and often would report to his grandmother things that he had seen: ruined houses or cabins or barns, stone fences, barbed wire embedded in tree trunks, evidence of habitation, and she would attempt to tell him who had lived there and why they had failed or died or moved to California. When he was sixteen, he discovered the abandoned yellow house of Dan, and his grave on the hillside behind it. Exploring the interior of the house, he found a good fiddle and attempted to play it but made only screeching noises. Upstairs he found a feather mattress, and lay down on it; he had never lain on a feather mattress before and was surprised at how comfortable it was, so comfortable that he fell asleep and slept for several hours. When he got up he went into the other of the two bedrooms of the house and was startled to discover an old glass showcase containing the body of an old, old man. He told Latha about this and asked if she possibly knew who the old man was, or had been. “You’d better ask your father about him,” Latha suggested.

The next time she sees Vernon, he is wearing on his wrist an expensive gold chronometer watch, which his father had buried in the back yard and had been keeping for him until he was old enough to appreciate it. Vernon tells his grandmother that the watch is magic. “Make it do a trick,” she suggests. It doesn’t do any tricks, he says, and what it does only he can tell. It keeps perfect time, but if he blinks his eyes, months or even years can pass. The watch has “told” him how to capture a wild razorback hog and he blinks his eyes and finds one up on Ledbetter Mountain and captures it and brings it home and breeds it to three Poland China gilts. Vernon blinks his eyes and possesses twenty-six piglets. He fattens them, feeding them not the corn which their mothers eat but the diet of the wild razorback: acorn mast and wild fruits, all they can eat. Luther Chism’s nephew, Jick, who is still distilling Chism’s Dew up on the mountain, gives Vernon the corn mash that is used in the distillation process, and he feeds this too to his piglets, who are kept constantly happy by the residue of alcohol in the mash. In hot weather, when most pigs suffer, Vernon regularly showers down his pigs with cold water from a hose. Vernon blinks his eyes, and the gilts are old enough to go into heat, so he breeds them to their father, producing pigs that are even more razorback than themselves. Normally, wild razorback sows farrow only four to six piglets, but Vernon’s hogs have become so contented and domesticated that they farrow eight to twelve piglets each.

From his great-great-aunt Drussie Ingledew, Vernon gets a secret family recipe for curing ham. He hires George Dinsmore, who as “Baby Jim” was the youngest of Serena Dinsmore’s huge brood, to help him slaughter the hogs by a painless method, which he keeps secret even from Latha. He keeps everything in the process a secret, especially the smoking, which uses the burning of cobs and husks of a certain wild weed. He gives Latha and Every the very first finished ham from his production, and they are overwhelmed by its flavor, texture, sweetness and taste. It melts in their mouths, and they finish the whole ham in no time, at breakfast, dinner and supper, and then Every offers to buy another one from Vernon, but Vernon will never charge them for it. He will blink his eyes and discover that Ingledew Ham is famous all over the place, and the demand for it so great that George and Vernon have to hire some help to start a mail-order business.

For a while there it seems that Stay More is in complete decline, with everybody moving out, and Latha has even boarded up the windows of her old store, but now Ingledew Ham is becoming an industry. And then people begin moving in…or at least two people, young folks who take over the yellow house that was Dan’s.

Chapter forty-four

V
ernon knows their names, but he’s not telling, not even to Latha. He tells her that they are not hippies, as the young folks re-inhabiting the Ozarks in all directions are called (a family of them have taken over the old Chism place up on the mountain and can sometimes be seen walking barefoot past Latha’s house with their long hair and outlandish clothes). The young couple who have moved into Dan’s house have a good reason for being there, but that’s all Vernon can say about them. The young man is just about Vernon’s own age, the first coeval male friend he’s had in a life surrounded by females. The young woman seems to be a few years older than the man, and when Latha meets her she is struck by the resemblance to the previous female occupant of that yellow house, Dan’s daughter Annie. Vernon doesn’t have to tell Latha the girl’s name; on her own, Latha guesses that she might be Diana Stoving, Annie’s daughter, who had lived in Stay More for a short time as a small child when Dan had taken her. Latha hopes that the couple will not be recognized by that villainous state police corporal Sog Alan, who had killed Dan and who regularly patrols all the roads. It is a custom of Ozark folk from time immemorial to wave at anyone who passes, neighbor or stranger, friend or foe, but Latha and Every never wave at Sog Alan, nor does he wave at them. Only the thought that Every would miss her chicken and dumplings if she went to prison has prevented her from shooting Sog Alan, at least twice, in the back.

Vernon uses his pick-up truck to help his young friend, whose name is Day Whittacker, move the glass showcase containing the body of Eli Willard out of the yellow house and back to its original location, the abandoned Ingledew store, where it will remain for several more years. In death as in life, the old peddler is a peregrinator. Latha offers to tell Vernon’s friends the story of the old man’s travels, and in the process she tells them also about another traveler, Dan, but learns that they know more about Dan than she does: they know where he was born, in Connecticut, where he taught school, in Vermont, and where he lived in North Carolina before he met Latha. Since she has already suspected that the girl is Dan’s granddaughter, that might explain the girl’s taking up residence in Dan’s house, but what about the boy? It soon becomes apparent that the girl is pregnant, and therefore the boy must be responsible for that.

Jelena Ingledew Duckworth, Vernon’s cousin, complains to Latha that she is trapped in a loveless marriage. The chores of a chicken farmer’s wife are endlessly uninteresting. She has borne two children, both sons, to Mark Duckworth and with his permission has had herself sterilized. She has been so despondent that once, when Vernon was fourteen, she had walked up the mountain to Leapin Rock and stood on the edge of it, looking down, and would probably have jumped except that, providentially, Vernon had found her there and stopped her and talked her out of it. In gratitude she had given him some of her books, and told him how to find or order books for himself, and they had started a kind of book-group-of-two, never before known in Stay More. If a man is so congenitally shy of women that he can’t bring himself to look at them, he can at least look at a book held between them. Vernon will never go to college, but Jelena will be his college. Such an academic situation leads naturally to the realization that all learning is but a sublimation of the sexual impulse, and if one allows it to lim rather than sublim, then it becomes a real delight. Vernon and Jelena have become lovers. Hearing it from Jelena, Latha is reminded of how Sonora as a teenager would describe her meetings with Hank, so passionate, adventurous, and amorous that Latha is glad that this time she has Every to drag to bed at other than bedtimes. But their meetings—Vernon’s and Jelena’s—are too good to last: they are found out by Jelena’s husband Mark, who puts a stop to it, threatening Vernon with his life. Soon everybody in Stay More (there are only twenty-one people this year) knows about the affair. His sisters [not me] tell him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, and Hank says to him, “You’re too old for me to cut off your tallywhacker, but I got a good mind to do it anyhow.” It is at this juncture of his college experience that Vernon joins a new fraternity-of-two with Day Whittacker, also nineteen, and they share their boundless curiosity about life and nature, and begin a friendship that will last all their lives. They not only explore the woods and fields and streams together, but they also begin poking around in the various abandoned houses, finding bits and pieces of Stay More’s history, archaeological as well as anthropological and sociological. Vernon copies into a leather-bound journal the various writings that Dan had left on the walls of the rooms in his yellow house. Vernon’s obsession with Stay More replaces (or sublimates) his obsession with Jelena. In the attic of his grandparents Bevis and Emelda Ingledew’s house, he finds a box of dozens of photographs, taken early in the century by Eli Willard, and showing just about everybody who lived in Stay More when its population was over four hundred. In the attic of the old hotel that had been built originally as Jacob Ingledew’s house, Vernon finds the unfinished but nearly complete manuscript of
The Memoirs of Former Arkansas Governor Jacob Ingledew
. He also finds there, in a trunk containing women’s old clothing, concealed beneath the clothing, eighty-nine small journals, which turn out to be diaries, a daily record of the existence of the woman who had been the social secretary to the governor’s wife. Latha practically begs Vernon to let her borrow the diaries and read them, which keeps her busy for a long, long time. She learns what came as a great surprise: the woman was not simply the friend and social secretary of the governor’s wife but also Jacob Ingledew’s lover and therefore is referred to as The Woman Whom We Cannot Name. The two of them had conspired so that Jacob’s wife Sarah not only did not know of their affair, but also invited the Woman to come back to Stay More with them after the governor’s term was finished and spend the rest of her days in that house. Latha will be able, farther along, to point this out to Vernon when he himself will take a mistress while running for governor, not that the reminder will stop him but only confirm his (and her) deeply developed belief that everything works in cycles and seasons and synchronicities.

Latha discovers that this attitude had already been explored by Oriental philosophers who refer to it as The Way, or Tao. One Christmas, Vernon gives her a pretty book called
Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu, which scares her at first, and puzzles her at second, and surprises her at third. She tries to get Every to read it too, saying, “You ought to see what this guy and Jesus have in common.” But the Bible remains the only book that Every has ever read, and still reads. She doesn’t hold it against him, but in becoming aware of what he’s missing she becomes aware of what she’s been missing too, and she remembers that huge library of Richard Cardwell at Lombardy Alley in Tennessee, where she’d read volumes for want of anything better to do. She realizes now she has nothing better to do. She fixes good meals for Every and herself. She feeds her cats and the dog Galen, and in winter gives hay to Mathilda, whom she milks each evening. She keeps the house clean, and she writes letters to those granddaughters who have moved away, and to Dawny, who is in graduate school at Harvard. Hank has installed, refusing any payment, a television set with a booster, and an antenna on the roof that will pick up Springfield, Missouri and Little Rock and sometimes Memphis, and Every enjoys watching ball games and they both watch quiz shows and sometimes a movie, but Latha hates commercials, their monotony, inanity, and loudness. She would rather take the Tao, or Way, or Path, that leads back into her mind and meanders through cycles and seasons and synchronicities, and is hers alone, because she can’t even describe it to Every, let alone take him along with her on her journey. But with suggestions from Jelena and Vernon, and for that matter Diana and Day also, she discovers many journeys that are not into her mind but the minds of other imaginative people who have written books. Every doesn’t mind; he surprises her on her birthday with a tall bookcase he has built himself, out of walnut. It doesn’t take her long to fill it. Every remarks, “It’ll take you all your life to read all of them.”

She smiles. “No, but when I’ve finished I can always read them all over again.”

She is aware of getting old. Her joints aren’t as flexible as they once were; when she squats to milk Mathilda she can hear creaks that she had once thought emanated from Mathilda’s bones but now recognizes as her own. Her raven hair has started graying up. She can find lines in her face that aren’t just from smiling and squinting in the sunlight. Her skin isn’t as smooth as it used to be. Sometimes she has an ache or disorder that she would have taken to Doc Swain if he were still alive, but isn’t worth going all the way to Harrison for. To say that she “misses” Doc Swain, or that she misses Dan or Sonora or anyone else who is “gone” would be to ignore her independence, which is able to endure in the absence of the “missed.” What are others for but to give us something, if only their presence, that we cannot create for ourselves? The secret of enduring is not to harden oneself against loss but to soften oneself in acceptance. Year by year, one of Latha’s favorite cats uses up its ninth life, and she gives it a proper burial, humming “Farther Along” without words that would have meant nothing to the cat. In the meadow out behind the dogtrot is a whole cemetery of cats. It is not the realization that she can always get another cat that keeps her from “missing” a dead one, but rather a sense of gratitude for the years the cat was permitted to endure. The tears we shed in loss are for ourselves. The tears we shed in joy are for all humankind.
I am a pithy old woman
.

Every dies.

All the grandchildren come back to Stay More but only stay long enough for the service and to assure themselves that Latha is all right. Sharon is the first to arrive and the last to leave. Sharon is the only questioner whose “How did it happen?” Latha can answer. I don’t know if I ever told you, Latha tells her, and maybe I shouldn’t tell anyone this, but every time we made love and I reached a climax, I fainted, I mean, I just passed plumb out. The last time we made love Every passed out too. Of course I didn’t know it because I was out, but when I came to, there he was, beneath me, with no inclination to return my adoring gaze. Some years back, Doc Swain had told him he had arrhythmia, which is—but they’ve taught you that in nursing school, haven’t they? His ticker just stopped ticking. All things started have to stop. I’m just a pithy old woman.”