Enduring (57 page)

“You’re not an old woman, yet,” Sharon says. “You haven’t shown a single sign of senility…except sometimes you repeat yourself.”

Latha laughs. “All good stories repeat themselves.”

“I don’t suppose I need to ask if there’s anything I can do for you.”

“Take care of yourself,” Latha advises her.

Vernon and Jelena, who have decided to live together against all odds, are building themselves an extravagant futuristic double-house on the heights west of Stay More. They relieve Latha of such practical details as a tombstone for Every. Doesn’t she want a double headstone with both their names on it? I reckon not, she says. Vernon wonders if she was angry at Grandpa about anything. Oh, no, she says, I loved everything about him and everything he did and everything he said. Jelena wonders if there might be a possibility that like Doc Swain, Every may have had another wife that he wanted to be buried beside him. Latha laughs, for the first time since the Church of Christ preacher told a mild funny at the funeral. “He never told me a word about it if he did,” Latha says. Jelena wonders if Latha has contemplated remarrying. Never, she says.

“Well, Gran,” Vernon asks, “don’t you want to lie beside Grandpa?”

“I expect there might come a time or two when I’ll want to go out to the cemetery on a full-moon night and lie down on the grass beside him, but I’ll never fall asleep.”

She has enough trouble, as it is, trying to sleep in their bed. She lies there listening to the night sounds of crickets, tree frogs, etc., and thinking that maybe the words of “Farther Along” may not be a false promise, because already there is one thing she has understood farther along: that the reason she was able to give up the sleeping pills that Doc Swain once prescribed for her was that Every, when he came back into her life, began his custom of brushing her hair for a good long while before bedtime, and although she had not realized it at the time, that was what helped her to sleep, especially on those nights when Every did not make her swoon. She has started brushing her own hair and trying to pretend it is him, but it’s just not the same thing, at all. Even closing her eyes doesn’t help. When she closes her eyes, what she sees is the boy riding his stickhorse on Christmas Day, and giving her and Rindy an imaginary ride behind him, all the way to imaginary Parthenon. Or years later when Every’s dad finds them at the snowed-in schoolhouse and gives them a ride in a real one-horse open sleigh, with she and Every snuggled beneath fur blankets.

The funeral feast has left behind so many leftovers that Latha doesn’t need to do any cooking for a couple of weeks. She is getting tired of fried chicken and cocoanut pie. But even after the leftovers are all gone, she can’t bring herself to do any cooking, except biscuits for the cats and the dog. Sometimes she eats a biscuit herself, not because she’s hungry but just to be sociable. Jelena brings her a casserole, and that lasts for another two weeks.

She opens and reads all the mail that has come, mostly sympathy cards bought at the supermarket, all with the same mournful message or some Christian theme on how blessed it is that Every has been called home to the arms of his Lord. There is a letter from Dawny. It has no return address, just a Boston postmark. He is sorry that he didn’t find out about the death in time to come home for the funeral, but he probably wouldn’t have been able to pay for an airline ticket anyhow. He wants Latha to know how much Every meant to him, “more of a personal hero than Ernie Pyle ever was. Although it was Dan who found me when I was lost, it was on Every’s shoulders that I rode my way home. His name has a habit of thrusting itself into my mind whenever my mind threatens to run away with me. Whenever I verge upon mindlessness, or helplessness, or intolerable loss or wanting, the very thought of those two words, ‘Every Dill,’ like a magic incantation, will bring me back from the brink, will find me, will find me.” Dawny does not say what he’s doing, what degree he’s pursuing at Harvard, in what subject, or when if ever he does plan to come home. She would send him the money for an airline ticket if she knew where to address it.

Though she can’t write to Dawny, she can write to Sharon, her favorite correspondent, who works in a Chicago hospital but is terribly homesick and says that writing to her grandmother is her only cure for it. When Latha mentions her problems with sleeping, Sharon answers that she reads herself to sleep each night, but she also sends Latha a large bottle of Dalmane sleeping pills, saying, “I know you well enough, Gran, to know that you’d never feel like taking more than one a night.” Latha appreciates the thought, and takes only one a night, although that is only a partial cure for her insomnia. She has virtually given up television, but she listens to classical music on her radio, which also helps. And she tries reading. She has read less than half of the eighty-nine diaries of the Woman Whom We Cannot Name, and she finds that reading them is too stimulating to make her drowsy, but if she rereads one of them, the same words all over again will put her to sleep, with the help of one of Sharon’s pills and something slow and dignified on the radio, particularly symphonies which have French horns in them. She has learned to identify all of the instruments of an orchestra, easier really than identifying wildflowers (and she knows them all, from
achillea
to
zizia
), and her favorite instrument is the French horn. She once learned that when people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have. The French horn says that best.

She remembers that when she and her roommate Jessica Toliver at the asylum used to try to imitate various instruments with their humming, Jessica was able to make a very poignant and yet majestic imitation of the French horn, so wistful and melancholy that it almost broke Latha’s heart. Latha wonders what has ever become of Jessica, and decides to try writing a letter to her in care of the state hospital in Little Rock. She writes that she hopes Jessica is all right. She tells Jessica that the name of the man who rescued Latha in the middle of the night was Every Dill, and she had eventually married him, and he has died just recently, and Latha has remembered how sad it was that Every had not been able to take Jessica too when they escaped, but she hopes that Jessica had been able to figure out that because of the perilous method of the escape it would not have been possible for Jessica to get down off the roof of E Ward. Is Jessica still in E Ward? More likely she’s gotten better and been transferred, possibly all the way up to B Ward? Or even gone back home to Lepanto? If she needs a home to go to, Latha would be delighted to have her come to Stay More, the most wonderful place on earth, and there is plenty of room in this dogtrot for another person, if she doesn’t mind cats or isn’t allergic to them or anything. There would be no one to stare at Jessica because she’s an albino, or, if anybody did stare, they wouldn’t think anything of it, because Stay More had always been a haven for oddlings and misfits and peculiar people. Looking forward to hearing from you. Love, Latha.

Two weeks later the unopened letter comes back to her, stamped “Addressee Deceased.” Latha meditates upon this fact, and wonders if Jessica’s death might count as the second in a string of three starting with Every. If it does count, then the third death is shortly forthcoming.

Chapter forty-five

L
atha had gone to school through the sixth grade with Wesley Stone but barely remembered him. His father had moved to Little Rock, where Wes finished his education and went to work and raised a family. Now that he has died, he wants to be buried in the Stay More cemetery. The remaining town fathers, such as they are, mainly Hank Ingledew, have already rejected the wish of several Stay Moronsin-exile in California who want their remains to come home. The unwritten rule is that if you disregarded the curse of Jacob Ingledew and went to California, the only way you can reverse the curse is by coming back home while you’re still alive, and Hank himself is one of the few who has done that. His son Vernon agrees with the policy, but it turns out that Wes Stone had already purchased and paid for a burial plot many years ago, in which his wife is already buried, so his daughter is given permission to bring the body back for burial. Latha needs another chance to wear the black dress she bought for Every’s funeral, so she decides to attend this one, not for that reason but because she doubts there will be much attendance otherwise. She needs her black umbrella too, because Nature has provided another downpour for a Stay Moron’s final ceremony. The daughter is there with her husband but hardly anyone else, until, from the woods, comes one of those oddlings that Latha had mentioned in her undelivered letter to Jessica: a man dressed as some kind of Indian, in a deerskin robe, sandals, leggings, breech clout, and carrying some spears, which he drops when he catches sight of the gathering and rushes toward it, crying “Daddy?!”

The man’s daughter says to him, “We tried and tried to find you. Nobody knows where you hang out. We searched and searched, and called and called, all over the mountains. It’s been months and months since you ever wrote to him!” His sister assails the poor faux-Indian so harshly that Latha’s eyes fill with sympathy. “We don’t have a preacher,” the daughter says to her brother, “so if there’s anything you’d like to say, you just better say it.” And when he cannot come up with something to say, she says “Brother dear,” the “dear” dripping raindrops and sarcasm, “if you aren’t going to say anything, just say so.”

“Farther along we’ll know all about it,” the fake Indian says, in a voice that is harsh from lack of practice, “farther along we’ll understand why.”

Latha and the few others present take this as a cue and turn it into the funeral song. The Bluff-Dweller, if that is what he is, has a dog at his feet, getting drenched, and the dog attempts to lift his voice in song too, one more oddling for this funeral tableau. The daughter tells her brother that dogs don’t belong at funerals.

He gives her a contemptuous glance and replies, “It’s over, isn’t it? Or were you about to say something?” She loses her disdain and bursts out sobbing, and has to bury her face in her brother’s deerskin. The others, including Latha, hasten to get out of the rain. She accepts a ride with Vernon and Jelena. In their postmortem discussion of the event, Latha learns that the man, Wesley Stone’s son Clifford, is indeed a dweller of the bluffs up on Ledbetter Mountain, near the glen of the waterfall, where he has established a home and a way of life in emulation of the Bluff-Dweller Indians who had lived there aeons ago. George Dinsmore has met him once and says they are third cousins. Day Whittacker, patrolling the forests, has met him a couple of times and seen him on several other occasions. He is harmless, although deadly accurate with his atlatl, a spear-thrower such as the Bluff-Dwellers used to kill game. It is doubtful that he is also emulating Dan Montross in his retreat from society. Jick Chism, manufacturer of Chism’s Dew and a key supplier of the diet for Vernon’s pigs, has told Vernon that the Bluff-Dweller is a steady customer, perhaps too steady.

That evening, around lightning bug time, Latha hears a commotion in her yard and investigating, sees that her cats and her dog have attacked the dog who had attempted to sing at the afternoon’s funeral, and the dog’s owner is helpless to shoo them away. “Hello,” he says to her, “it’s me.” She recognizes him and invites him to come in out of the dark. “I just wanted to borrow a lantern,” he declares. “If you have a spare lantern I could borrow, just overnight, to find my way home.” He explains that he had taken his sister and her husband up on the mountain to see his cavern, and had treated them to Chism’s Dew, and then escorted them back down to their car, at which point it was too dark, or he was too drunk, to find his way home.

“Why, I could just put you up in the other house,” she offers, indicating the second pen of the double-room dogtrot.

“Well, my dog doesn’t seem to get along very well with your cats and dog,” he points out.

She laughs. “Give them time,” she says. And then she asks, “Have you had your supper?”

“No, and my dog hasn’t had his.”

She laughs again, and invites him in. From the food safe she takes a package wrapped in oilcloth, unwraps it, and takes out several marrow bones. She laughs a third time at the look on the Bluff-Dweller’s face and says, “Oh, these aren’t for you, but for your dog.” She goes out into the breezeway again and flings the bones, one by one, out to the road to the exact vicinity of where the dog is hiding. She yells, “Cats, you listen to me! And you too, Galen! Y’all let that poor dog eat his supper, hear? Any of y’uns bother him won’t get breakfast in the morning!” Galen whimpers his assent, and the myriad cats meow theirs. She shuts the door, and bids the Bluff-Dweller sit at the table. She tells him, “You know, it’s traditional hereabouts to have a big dinner right after a funeral. That’s why I fried all this chicken, and my grandson brought over one of his prize hams cooked and ready to eat, and his friends baked all kinds of pies and cakes, but nobody showed up on account of that toad-strangling rainstorm. So just dig in and eat all you can. Here’s a glass of sweet milk.”

While he eats, he talks, asking her conversational questions. Did she know his father? She tells him she was several grades ahead of Wes at school, but knew him by sight. Then she throws the question back at him: Did he know his father? He chuckles and admits that they had lost touch. He has a second piece of lemon meringue pie on the grounds he hasn’t had pie for years, but declines coffee on the grounds he had to kick the coffee habit when he first went into seclusion. She asks him who, or what, is he hiding from? He doesn’t take long to answer, “Myself.” She lifts her eyebrows in sympathy but also in questioning. He says that he simply doesn’t get along very well with himself; in fact, they are hardly on speaking terms any longer. He stands up, thanks her for the excellent supper and asks again for the loan of a lantern. She offers him a bed in the other house. He asks if she has any booze on the premises, explaining that every night he uses it as sleeping medicine. In fact, she does have several bottles, as well as a stoneware demijohn of Chism’s Dew, but she doesn’t want to indulge his habit. From a cabinet she takes a lantern, filled with kerosene, and lights it for him. They exchange goodnights, and she hears him calling for his dog.