Enduring

by Donald Harington

  But Latha knew one thing for sure: if you name a mullein stalk after somebody who is missing, or lost, or disappeared, or even dead, and then bend it down, that person will be found or will appear if the mullein stalk straightens up again.

  Those two mullein stalks she named after Viridis and Nail were beside a path that led to Latha’s bathing place. There was a small waterfall in a holler behind the house, not far from the vegetable garden where she worked every morning all summer, alone. Barb and Mandy refused to work outside the house, but Latha took responsibility for the garden, and every morning went out to chop and pull weeds and care for it. She would wear her sunbonnet for protection from the summer sun, but her dress would become soaked with sweat after a couple of hours, and she would go to that little waterfall, remove the dress and her underdrawers, and get all wet beneath that waterfall, using lye soap to get the dirt off. Her dog Rouser always went with her, and he would have barked if anybody had spied on her nakedness.

  Of course she never stood under the waterfall when she was having her monthlies. That was one common superstition that she subscribed to: It is practically suicide to bathe during your period, and she knew of at least two girls who had come down with paralysis or consumption for ignoring that fact.

  Each time she went to her bathing place she would say howdy to the two bent-down mullein stalks and to tell them how much she hoped they would straighten up. But the whole story of just what happened after those mullein stalks both got erections is so much at the heart of The Choiring of the Trees that it would not be fair for me to spoil it for you.

  As far as Enduring is concerned, let’s just say that Rindy finally did come home, and managed to finish school through the eighth grade, which was as far as it went, but she had become “citified” after her years in Little Rock, and the other kids did not like her, and of course Latha never was able to be her friend again.

  I asked Gran, “What happened to the playhouse?”

  “I reckon you could still find traces of it littering the ground beneath that big oak tree up on the hill, but I haven’t been up there for years, and I doubt if Rindy ever did go up there again herself. She ran away and got married to some fellow who lived in Pettigrew, and I never saw her again.”

  Then Gran became silent and I wondered if she were waiting for me to say something. So I told her how hard it would be for me to tell her life’s story leaving Nail and Viridis out of it.

  “Why do you have to leave them out?” she wanted to know.

  “Because you’ve already told all of it in The Choiring of the Trees, and I don’t want to spoil your story.”

  Gran smiled. “It was a thrilling story, and you don’t want to take the thrill out of it?”

  “I just don’t want to cool it off. I want people to read The Choiring of the Trees and feel the excitement for themselves.”

  Chapter thirteen

  The next time that the month of May rolled around, Latha did not, for the first time in years, leave a May basket hanging from the doorknob at Rindy Whitter’s house. In the Ozarks, May Day was a bigger observance than Valentine’s Day. For Valentine’s, the only thing that happened was that a feller would take his sweetheart to a big tree somewheres and at the height of her head he would carve with his Barlow knife two linked hearts with their initials inside of them. The trees around Stay More village were covered with hearts that somebody down through the ages had carved, but only one of them had Latha’s initials in it. Every had never asked for her permission but he had carved “E.D.” + “L.B.” on one of the trees, and she had put her head up against it and discovered that it was at exactly her height. How had he known that? He could have just guessed.

  But each May Day eve you were supposed to hang at least one May basket on the door of your friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, and you were supposed to do it secretly and then run away without being discovered except by the dog, who would always bark at you. The May basket was woven of wild iris or yucca leaves, buck brush or honey-suckle runners and then was filled with wildflowers: phlox of several colors, verbena, sweet William, spotted crane’s bill, baby blue iris and ferns. Latha and Rindy had always hung May baskets on one another’s doorknobs, but it wasn’t much of a secret because they could each guess that the other had done it, even if the dogs hadn’t barked at them. The year Rindy came back from Little Rock, Latha did not make a May basket. Her momma observed that she had not and said, “You could go leave one on the Ingledews’ door. Aint Raymond sweet on you?” Latha said maybe he was, but he didn’t make May baskets. May Day morning she discovered a fine May basket hanging on her door, and was abashed, because she hadn’t left one for Rindy, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that this basket didn’t look like any of the ones that Rindy had made over the years. Her mother winked at her and suggested that maybe Raymond had left it, and Latha could only reply that Raymond probably didn’t know how to weave wild iris and yucca leaves. Latha liked the fact that May baskets were supposed to be anonymous and therefore it was nice that she didn’t know who had put this one together. But the next time she saw Raymond, at the Coes’ play-party, she smiled real big at him, and he smiled back at her, but that didn’t mean anything.

  The play-party had the usual dances, and young folks from five or six miles away came to it, some on horseback or in wagons, but most afoot. The girls wore their best dresses and the boys wore their best duckins, or dungarees. Latha put some of the flowers from the May basket into her hair. The Coes’ cabin wasn’t big enough to hold the crowd, so the play-party was held in the yard, in the moonlight, which the Coes had calculated with their almanac. The Coes furnished cold meat sandwiches and real lemonade, although some of the boys brought Mason jars of Chism’s whiskey, which they passed around, and Latha even tried a taste, at the age of thirteen. They danced to “Skip to my Lou” and “Little Red Wagon” and “The Miller Boy,” but Raymond did not choose her as his partner. The girls he did choose weren’t nearly as pretty as she was, but they all had “reputations.” She danced to “Old Dan Tucker” with Every, but it didn’t involve any touching other than the palms of the hands overhead, and they kept changing partners constantly, so she wasn’t really with Every. But at one part of the dance they were close enough together so that he would say, “Them are nice flowers you got in yore hair.”

  She gave him a sidelong glance and said, “I wonder who picked them.”

  “I wonder,” was all he said, but for the rest of the evening she was convinced that he had been the creator of her May basket. The game-dances of the play-party were very strenuous, and often the couples had to take a rest, going off by themselves to sit on rocks or logs, or even, in some cases, going off into the woods. Latha noticed that Raymond seemed to have disappeared altogether. When she took her rest, Every came up and sat beside her, and she didn’t mind. But when he asked her if she’d care to go for a stroll in the woods, she had to remind him that they had both been forbidden, three years before, from associating with each other.

  “You think they’d shoot me if I was to walk you home?” he asked plaintively.

  When the play-party was all finished, late in the night, she let Every walk her home, since he was going in that direction anyway. And when they got to her house, she gave him a kiss goodnight.

  The next morning, she couldn’t help telling her mother that Every had been the only one at the play-party who showed any interest in her. Her mother reminded her yet again, as if she needed reminding, that she had better just forget ever having Every for a beau, for several reasons apart from the long-standing prohibition of her father: Every was her cousin, even if twice removed, and the Dills were the lowest of the low on the Stay More social ladder, such as it was, and the world is full of boys who are better-looking than Every.

  When Latha graduated from the eighth grade at the Stay More school, she decided that she would like to go to high school in Jasper if only she had a way to get there. In those days, very few students ever went to
high school. If you finished the eighth grade in your hometown, you were considered to have completed your education, and it was even possible to get a job as a schoolteacher—not very well-paying but still a job with only eight grades of schooling. Only privileged students attended high school, and “privilege” meant access to some sort of transportation to take you ten miles from your home to the Jasper school. It was much too far to walk. Every said he’d be glad to drive her but Every still had a year to finish in the Stay More school. He tried to get his dad’s permission to loan her the Dill’s horse, so she could ride the horse to school, but his dad thought that was a ridiculous request, even if it was nice of Every to think about it.

  Just a week before the fall semester would begin at the high school, Raymond Ingledew came to Latha’s house one afternoon, and said, “I aint got nothing better to do, and I’ve got a one-horse shay that would get us to Jasper and back, if you’d like for me to drive ye.”

  “But how would I get home?” she asked. “I mean, what would you do while school is in session? I mean, getting to Jasper is one thing, but waiting six or seven hours until school lets out is another.”

  “Why, I s’pose I could just go to the high school too, if they’d have me.”

  Her parents were overwhelmed by this generous offer, and although it was unheard of for a girl to ride off with a boy without a chaperone, Latha’s parents were so awed by Raymond’s social standing in Stay More that they assumed he was a decent gentleman.

  She stopped short of telling her daddy and momma that Raymond was “twitchet-struck,” that is, he couldn’t think of anything else but sex. She didn’t think she’d enjoy having a school-bus driver who’d be too busy trying to mislead her to keep the shay on the road. But how else would she get to Jasper? After all, Raymond was awfully good-looking, and she reckoned that part of the privilege of feeling grown up was feeling like you could ward off approaches if you had to. So she told him in advance that if he didn’t keep his hands to himself she would get out of the shay and walk.

  So they both enrolled at Jasper High School, a twenty-year-old freshman among fifteen-year-old freshmen (although Latha had not turned fourteen yet). Throughout the ninth grade and part of the tenth, he managed to transport her to high school and back without doing anything worse than filling her ear with some of the raunchiest stories you could ever imagine. Some of these stories actually got her very aroused, but she concealed this state of her emotions from Raymond.

  She enjoyed feeling grown up. Her sisters were gone; Barbara had fled to California with a traveling salesman; Mandy had married a boy from Parthenon named Vaughn Twichell and had moved with him to Little Rock. Latha had the bed all to herself, although occasionally in her dreams or even her conscious fantasies, Every joined her there. One time she felt so lustful that she allowed the image of Raymond to join her, but for all his talk of sex, in her fantasies he didn’t seem to be very good at it, and he got over the mountain long before she could.

  There are only so many raunchy stories in circulation, and eventually Raymond ran out of them. He tried to make up some, but he wasn’t very inventive or didn’t know how to tell a story he hadn’t heard before, so he just stopped telling them. They rode to and from Jasper in silence, or made some commentary on the weather, the school, the teachers, their classmates. Latha was very popular among her fellow students, and so was Raymond, despite his age. They were voted King and Queen of Hearts at the Valentine’s square dance, and were thus obliged to dance with each other, or, since square dances are communal, they served as each other’s partner, which he had neglected to do at that play-party. Everybody assumed they were sweethearts, although Raymond never lost a chance to flirt with any girl he chose, and in fact was rumored to have seduced several of them in the cloakroom, the janitor’s closet, and even an empty classroom, although never the same girl twice, which fact fed the belief that he and Latha were going steady. Latha had good reason to believe the rumors about him, because Raymond always gave a detailed account of his trysts to her, and she knew him well enough by now to be able to tell when he was just making something up. “Wow, I’m a-tellin ye,” he might say, “Clarabelle and me did it on the grass out behind the ball field, and I screwed that ole gal so hard she farted holes in the ground!”

  Latha might comment with something like, “But did she make it over the mountain?”

  “Now what does that mean?” he might wonder. And wonder he might.

  The time came, by and by, when she understood the source of his ignorance. In all of his raunchy stories, there had never been any mention of an orgasm by the female, and like ninety-nine percent of the males of his time and place, Raymond had no idea that females were capable of having an orgasm, let alone any idea of how one was accomplished.

  In the eleventh grade, one January afternoon on the way home from school in the one-horse shay, they ran into a sudden very heavy snowstorm, which, after another mile, became impassable. Raymond pulled the shay into a barn to get out of the storm, but the blizzard kept coming down with such force that they could not even try to walk to the farmhouse to seek food and a place to sleep. Raymond still had a sandwich in his lunchbox, and they shared that as their supper. It was obvious they were going to have to spend the night. The shay came equipped with a pair of thick woolen blankets, and Raymond rounded up a couple of horse blankets, but that was scarcely enough. If she hadn’t been so horribly cold she would never have dreamed—no, she had in fact already dreamed—of getting under the covers with Raymond. It did not require much persuasion on his part, and after an hour it was obvious that neither of them was sleepy. When Raymond began to fondle her, she reminded him of what she had said in the beginning when she agreed to let him drive her to school each day at Jasper. But her heart wasn’t in the scolding. In fact his touch served to warm her. Before she knew what she was doing, he had peeled away enough of her clothes and underclothes to be able to insert himself into her, and then he was on top of her thrusting away. She did not feel like farting holes in the ground, but in fact she began to enjoy it…just at the point where Raymond groaned and shook and panted “Ah, God!” several times and then rolled off her and lay still. Some time passed before he said, “Now wasn’t that a heap o’ fun?” She did not answer.

  Raymond took it into his head that his having made entrance once gave him the right to do it again whenever he took a notion, despite his failure to repeat the act with any of the several girls he had seduced at the high school. It became necessary for Latha to make clear to him that she was not going to be just a piece of flesh for him to masturbate with.. Most of the twelfth grade she spent meditating on the circumstance that most men and boys don’t expect their partners to have orgasms and thus they do nothing to promote them, not even trying to withhold their own rapid ascent of the mountain. She discussed this with some of her girlfriends who were having a party at one of the girl’s houses at Parthenon. None of them had any solution, except for one girl, who said “I reckon you just have to use your own hand,” and explained that if the boy was not on top but behind her, doggy-fashion, that would liberate her access to herself.

  At this party, among the games the girls played was what is called a “dumb supper.” They set the table as if expecting supper guests, but they don’t put out any food. The room is dark except for the light of one candle. The six girls each stand behind their chairs, and bow their heads, as if in prayer. Perhaps some of them are praying. They wait and wait. The idea is that if the magic (some would call it witchcraft) works, the apparition of the boy you would marry would appear and take his place at the table in the chair before you. A gust of wind blew into the room, not strong enough to blow out the candle, whose light revealed someone sitting in the chair Latha was holding. It was Every! She fainted as surely as if she’d gone over the mountain.

  When she was revived, with the help of smelling salts and cold compresses, one of the girls explained to her that it hadn’t been an apparition of Every, but Every himself
. The girls threw him out of the house, telling him he ought to be ashamed of himself. Boys weren’t supposed to know about the dumb supper, but somehow Every had found out, and had come on purpose. Latha didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for that.

  The night of her graduation from high school, Latha allowed Raymond to enter her from behind, and she used her hand to attempt to make possible her own ascent of the mountain, and got almost to the top, but not over.

  Once school was all over, Raymond made himself familiar at Latha’s house. He even helped Latha’s father with some of his farming chores, which greatly ingratiated him to the man. Raymond spent so much time courting Latha that everybody in Stay More took it for granted that they would soon wed. In any case, it appeared that they were engaged. Latha herself was resigned to the possible destiny of marriage to Raymond. Who else would she marry, if she was forbidden to marry Every? There had been a couple of boys in high school who were interested in her and often told her how “scrumptious” she looked, but neither of them had ever asked her for a date, probably because they assumed she belonged to Raymond. Everybody knew that Raymond was the banker’s son, and the other girls envied her the possibility that he would provide for her in a way nobody else could. She could escape from the poverty she’d known all her life. Raymond’s family were nice to her, and Raymond’s brothers, although afflicted with the traditional Ingledew woman-shyness, always managed to say something pleasant to her. Raymond’s momma and daddy were kind to her in ways that her own parents had never been. So what if he didn’t how to please a woman? He could give her children if she wanted them, and she had never heard of a woman who did not want children, so she figured she probably was destined to have at least one or two herself. Latha considered the possibility that she might “teach” Raymond to give a thought or two to her own sexual pleasure as well as his own. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he might, someday, with patience, take her up and over the mountain. She hardly ever saw Every Dill any more. He was working in his father’s wagon-making shop, but the coming of the automobile was making the wagon obsolete. Was Every obsolete as far as she was concerned? Thus it came to pass that eventually, when Raymond actually did propose to her, she turned him down the first two times, but, with prodding from her mother and Raymond’s family and in time her own sense of responsibility, she took a close look at the quarter-carat diamond ring he offered her, and, crossing her fingers except for the ring finger, allowed him to slip the ring onto it.