Enduring

by Donald Harington

  All of this took more than a minute. At one point she turned to see Sonora standing beside her behind the post office boxes. “I’m sorry, hon,” Latha said, “but it’s against the postal laws for anybody to be back here except U.S. postal employees.”

  “So employ me,” Sonora said.

  “You’d have to be eighteen,” Latha said. “I’ll just be another minute. Help yourself to some soda pop.”

  Sonora went and helped herself to an Orange Crush, the first of several hundred cold drinks that she would consume that summer. When Latha was finished with the mail and rejoined her, Sonora asked, “How come that photo of you and me has Ma cut off of it?”

  Latha laughed, but nervously. She should have taken the photo down before Sonora came. “Well, for one thing, your mother isn’t as sightly as you and me.”

  Sonora laughed. “Aint that the truth!” But then she asked, “What’s the other thing?” When Latha was slow to answer, she prompted, “You and Ma never got along very well, did you?”

  “Not really,” Latha admitted. “She was much closer to her other sister, your Aunt Barb.”

  “Will you show me the house where you girls lived?”

  “It’s hardly fit to be seen,” Latha said, thinking of what it looked like when she’d stayed there with Dan and Annie. “But I intend to show you everything in Stay More.”

  And before the summer was over, Latha had actually shown her daughter everything that was worth seeing in Stay More, and then some. Latha sat with her at one of the desks in the schoolhouse, and told her about the time that the teacher wouldn’t let her go to the outhouse and she’d peed on the floor and when the other students laughed, a boy by the name of Every Dill had jumped on the teacher’s desk and used it as a perch to pee on the floor too. Sonora thought that was hilarious, but she asked, “Whatever became of Every Dill?” and Latha had to say she had no idea. Of course Latha pronounced this as “idee” like everyone else, including Sonora’s mother, and Sonora herself began excluding a syllable from her pronunciation of the word. The more Sonora came in contact with the Stay Morons, the more she changed her flat, drawly Southern accent into the lilting twang of the mountaineer. Sonora declared that she dearly wished she could just stay and go to this schoolhouse.

  “Do you not like West Side?” Latha asked.

  “As schools go, it’s okay, I guess,” Sonora said, “but I’m the only Fannie Mae in the whole school, and the other kids never let me forget it.’

  “You can forget it while you’re here,” Latha said.

  Sonora’s face lit up. “Then what would you call me?”

  “When you were just a baby, right after you were born, these sweet little noises you made were like songs, so I told Mandy she should call you ‘Sonora.’”

  “That’s what that man—Annie’s father, is Dan his name?—that’s what he called me.”

  “Fannie Mae was your grandmother’s name, and while the name fit her just fine, it doesn’t fit you at all. Dan and I think of you as ‘Sonora.’”

  “Why don’t you marry Dan?”

  “You’d have to get him to tell you that. It’s complicated, but I’ve been a spinster so long, I wouldn’t know how to be a wife.”

  “You’re still beautiful,” Sonora declared.

  “And so are you,” Latha told her.

  Whenever Sonora heard a local word or expression and didn’t know its meaning—“lally-gaggin,” “fotch-on,” “dauncy,” “blackguard,” “whipstitch,” “airish,” Sonora would simply ask Latha and Latha would explain it. “What’s a ‘double-cousin’?” she would ask, and Latha would say “Oh, that just happens when two brothers marry two sisters and have children, who are double cousins.”

  “I don’t have any cousins,” Sonora declared. “Do I?”

  “Not unless your Aunt Barb has some kids we don’t know about. But those would just be first cousins, or ‘own cousins.’ You’ve got cousins all over Stay More, second, third and last cousins.”

  Sonora took pride in this knowledge of her kinship, and Latha wondered why Mandy had never bothered to explain her lineage to her. Sometimes when someone came into the store to buy something, Sonora would whisper to Latha, “What kin am I to her?” and Latha would do some mental figuring and whisper back to her, “Your grandma was a Swain and a third cousin of her grandfather, so that would make you fourth cousins twice removed.” Such information could keep Sonora happy for an entire day.

  But Sonora possessed the quality that permitted all Stay Morons not only to endure their days but to enjoy them: the ability to do nothing without feeling guilty about it. Sonora could sit on the store porch and watch the birds and cats and clouds for hours on end, and never become bored or restless. Of course there was a certain period of the day, late afternoon usually, when the store porch’s loafers and whittlers and prattlers congregated to spin their yarns and make their jests, and their language wasn’t always “fitten” for a female’s ears, so Sonora would be obliged to go elsewhere, usually to her room, where she could still hear them through the screen door, and managed to assimilate a vocabulary of bawdy lore that shocked even her Aunt Latha.

  “But it’s so funny!” Sonora protested, when Latha told her that she might be too young to be hearing such things. Actually, Latha herself had often overheard, through the store’s screen door, almost the entire repertoire of tales, and was able to explain to Sonora some of the terms she didn’t know, like “diddling” and “twitchet,” the latter sounding so much like Sonora’s family name, Twichell, that she complained to Latha, “I can’t be stuck with that name all my life.”

  “You don’t have to,” Latha told her. “When you marry, you can take your husband’s name. Meanwhile, you could take mine and your mother’s maiden name, which is Bourne.”

  Thereafter, whenever she was in Stay More, she was Sonora Bourne.

  Not all the tales told on the porch were bawdy. Sometimes, when wives or girlfriends were present, the men (and the women too) told old folk stories that could trace their origins back to Elizabethan England. Today we have television. Back then they had tale-telling. Latha herself was a great teller of tales, especially ghost stories, many of which she told exclusively for Sonora’s benefit when others weren’t around. Some of those were so scary that Sonora would become afraid of going to the outhouse by herself in the dark, even with a lantern, and she would have to get Latha to go with her. The outhouse was a two-holer, like most, so they could take care of their business together.

  Did the eligible boys of Stay More ever notice Sonora? Oh, they certainly did, and they did everything they could to attract her attention. Just as some animals do, they fought each other in hopes that the victor of the fight might gain her favor. Summer evenings, along about lightning bug time, they would clobber one another all over the landscape. Or, if they were alone, they would do acrobatics, hang by their knees from tree limbs, jump out of trees, do cartwheels and somersaults and headstands. Doc Swain was kept busy patching them up on the mornings after such demonstrations of their bravura. Some of the loafers on the store porch made wagers over which one of the boys might finally capture Sonora’s interest. In fact, almost from the beginning (love at first sight and all that) she had been powerfully drawn to John Henry “Hank” Ingledew, the oldest of the four sons of Bevis and Emelda Duckworth Ingledew. He was a couple of years older than Sonora, but that made him even more attractive. All Ingledew men are exceptionally handsome, but they are also, unfortunately, plagued with the legendary inability to even look at females, let alone speak to them. Although the object of her affections was not able to look at her or speak to her, he was able to win all of the fights in her honor, and to perform stunts that would have put other boys in the hospital.

  “Aunt Latha,” Sonora whined, “how can I possibly get Hank Ingledew to say ‘hello’ to me?”

  “Hon, let me tell you something about the Ingledews…” she began, and related the whole long embarrassing history of Ingledew woman-shyness,
extending back to Jacob Ingledew, the founder of the town, who did manage to marry because his bride bribed him with a pone of corn, an old Indian custom. Latha explained what “congenital” means; it has nothing to do directly with genitals, but means a condition you’re born with and can’t do anything about, and the Ingledews’ woman-shyness was thoroughly congenital. It was widely known that Hank’s father, Bevis Ingledew, had never once spoken to Hank’s mother, but possibly had stumbled upon some means of proposing to her telepathically.

  “Do you mean,” Sonora asked, “that if I went up and tapped Hank on the shoulder and said, ‘Hi, I’m Sonora Bourne,’ he wouldn’t even be able to say ‘howdy’ to me?”

  “Try it,” Latha suggested. “He would blush and hang his head and shuffle his feet and run away.”

  One day toward the end of the summer, when she could bear it no longer, Sonora accosted Hank and said, “Hi, I’m Sonora Bourne.”

  Hank Ingledew blushed and hung his head and shuffled his feet and ran away.

  Chapter thirty-one

  Poor Daddy. Such a man should never have been tormented with five daughters, and while he did his level best to adjust to the situation, I know that Gran could never quite forgive him for not being an ideal father, although most of his daughters, especially me, managed to chalk his remoteness up to his temperament, not his gynophobia toward his own offspring.

  The problem with wonderful summers is that like everything else they have to come to an end. When August rolled around and it was time for Sonora to go back to Little Rock, she was distraught for a whole week in anticipation of it, and even considered eloping with Junior Duckworth, Oren’s boy, but her heart remained the property of Hank Ingledew, who had bested Junior in a number of contests, and the female never chooses the vanquished male in any species. Latha had some talks with her, mainly trying to persuade her to be better behaved when she got back to Little Rock, so that Mandy and Vaughn would consider letting her come back to Stay More the following summer. But Sonora, who was quick on the trigger, countered that the reason she’d been allowed to come to Stay More this summer was that she was driving her mother crazy, so, in order to guarantee that she could come to Stay More next summer, she intended to do everything she could to annoy, harass and upset Mandy and Vaughn Twichell. Latha found it hard to argue with this logic.

  In September she received a letter from Mandy which said, “I thought you were going to learn Fannie Mae to mind her Ps and her Qs, but ever since she got back home she’s been worse than ever. Also, she talks like a hillbilly.” So did you until the city ruined you, Latha wanted to write back to her but instead simply said she knew that the girl was at heart very good, and had behaved herself in exemplary fashion during her stay with Latha. In October another letter came from Mandy, saying that “Fannie Mae is going around telling people her name is really Sonora Bourne. Now I wonder who put that notion into her stupid head.” In February Mandy wrote to say that Latha and Fannie Mae both might as well forget whatever notions they’d had of Fannie Mae coming back again to Stay More. But in April, Mandy sent a frantic letter saying she was at her wits’ end and had been driven to drink. “She’s sixteen and I’ve got a good mind just to kick her out, but what would the neighbors think?” In May Mandy wrote, “I won’t live through the summer if that girl doesn’t get out of here. Do you reckon you can do a better job of watching out for her than you did last summer?”

  So Sonora was able to come back, after all. It was the summer that Oren Duckworth converted an old barn into a canning factory, which provided employment for a lot of Stay Morons who were hard-hit by the ongoing Depression. He took the steam engine out of the old mill, abandoned for many years, and rigged it up with a system of conveyor belts that led from the cleaning trough, where the women prepared the vegetables—green snap beans in June and fat ripe tomatoes in July and August—and put them into tin cans, which were sealed and carried into wire bails and thence to a cooker. So the operation supplied money for the farmers who grew the snaps, as the beans were called, and ’maters, as the tomatoes were called, and more money for the hired hands who picked the snaps and ’maters, money for the women and men who worked in the Cannon Fact’ry, as it was called, and money for Oren Duckworth, who could buy himself a fine Chevy coupe with a rumble seat, which his son Junior would borrow on occasions to take Sonora for a spin into Jasper to see the pitcher show. Sonora would much rather have gone with Hank Ingledew, except for two little problems: one, he had no car, and two, he had no ability to speak to her. At least Sonora’s trips to the movies with Junior Duckworth were in a sense chaperoned by the presence of another couple, usually one of Sonora’s friends and Oren’s brother Chester. Even if Junior had been able to get Sonora alone, he would not have been able to take possession of her virginity or her heart, both of which were locked away in safekeeping for the eventual use of Hank Ingledew.

  Sonora beseeched Latha to help her come up with some way of snagging (and eventually shagging) Hank Ingledew. Latha, who knew the whole history of Stay More as well as anyone, told Sonora the story of how Sarah Swain, the oldest of the fourteen children of Lizzie Swain, the first white woman in Stay More, had shown up at Jacob Ingledew’s cabin with a pone of corn which she thrust into his hands. Jacob had only himself to blame for having once told the Swain children of the Indians who had inhabited Stay More before the Ingledews came. One peculiar but time-honored custom of the Indians was that a brave did not propose to a maiden but the other way around: the maiden would signify her desire to wed a brave by giving him a cake of cornbread.

  It was worth a shot. Latha showed Sonora how to make cornbread (Mandy had never bothered to teach her) and Sonora took it to the house of Bevis and Emelda Ingledew, and asked for Hank, and as soon as Hank appeared, although he couldn’t bear to lift his eyes and look at her, she thrust the cornbread into his hands just as Sarah Swain had thrust it into Jacob Ingledew’s hands. But it is doubtful that anybody had ever told Hank about his great-great-grandfather, let alone about the Indian customs, so he didn’t know what to make of it, nor could he even bring himself to say “Thank you.” He disappeared. Possibly he took the pone of corn off to the kitchen to ask his mother what to do with it, and possibly she said, “Eat it, silly,” and possibly he ate it, but Sonora was left standing on the stoop for a good long while before she gave up and went on home.

  “I’m so sorry for you,” was all Latha could say when Sonora told her.

  Latha considered that an old Indian custom simply wouldn’t work any longer in this day and age, so she told Sonora about several of the customs of white people, such as wearing a love charm, mixing a love potion or other forms of conjuring. She could sneak a drop of her menstrual fluid into Hank’s soda pop (liquor is preferred but it wasn’t known that Hank touched the hard stuff yet), or she could soak her fingernail clippings in liquor for twenty-four hours before spiking his pop with it. Latha knew several old-time, sure-fire recipes for concocting love potions out of yarrow, dodder, and ginseng, and she could have shown her daughter how to mix up a draught of any of these.

  “But your problem,” Latha told her, “is not to cast a love spell on Hank, because he’s obviously already madly in love with you.”

  In the lore of Ozark love charms, potions, and spells, there was nothing specific for how to cure the condition of a boy who was already very much in love with you but simply couldn’t look you in the eye or speak. Sonora tried wearing on a string around her neck a cherry pit carved with the letters “HI” for Hank Ingledew and stuffed with royal jelly, the private nutriment of the queen bee. I don’t like to dwell on how many times my mother got stung in the process of acquiring this ingredient, but it wasn’t easy. She wore that charm, if that is what it was, all summer long. When the tomato crop came in, both Sonora and Hank went to work in the cannon factory, to earn some spending money as well as to be near each other all day even if he couldn’t look at her or speak to her. These tomatoes, so unlike the bland stuff that is raised and
sold today, were descendants of the legendary Stay More “love apple,” as it was called, which possessed certifiable aphrodisiac qualities, and while the power was diminished, it was still strong enough to make Sonora and Hank lust for each other, and Sonora’s lust was intensified by the sight of the crotch of his overalls, which became bulgy whenever he was in her presence. But the summer passed without any consummation of their relationship, although once the backs of their hands happened to brush together, which threw them both over the mountain, and they had to go home and change clothes.

  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?”