The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  The problem was solved when the next day at school, Every brought from home another one of the tiny bags, with a string attached. He made a little ceremony out of tying string around her neck and Miss Ricebird complimented him for his thoughtfulness. For years afterward, however, Latha couldn’t even think of Every without remembering the stink of asafœtida. And that night her sisters refused to sleep with her as long as she was wearing the thing, so she had to take it off. Rouser was also very repelled by it, and he refused to follow her to school each day for as long as she was wearing it.

  The only thing good to come of the whole asafœtida business was that she made a point to learn how to spell the stuff, and it so happened that during the regular Friday afternoon spelling bees, the word came up and no one else knew how to spell it except Latha.

  Even after the sicknesses had cleared up and no one wore asafœtida any more, Latha had made up her mind that she didn’t want to share a desk with Every. She tried to decide which would be better: to study and work real hard so that she could get promoted to a grade ahead of him, or to pretend to be dumb so that she would fall a grade behind him. The former might have been more natural for her, but the latter seemed easier, so one day in their playhouse she told Rindy of her plan and wondered how Rindy had managed to stay in the first grade. Rindy was smart. She wasn’t a genius like Every but she had a good head between her shoulders. “It’s simple,” Rindy declared. “I just don’t give a damn.”

  For an entire week, Latha tried not to give a damn, but she just couldn’t do it. Miss Ricebird didn’t have a dunce’s stool in the corner the way Mr. McWhorter had (or rather she converted that piece of furniture to a pedestal for the water bucket) but she had a bench down front that she called The Laggard’s Bench, where stupid students were required to sit and read McGuffey under her supervision. Latha tried each day to do something, or to fail to do something, that would earn her a seat on The Laggard’s Bench, but she never could.

  So finally she just gave in and decided the only way to escape Every would be to be promoted ahead of him. She took a copy of McGuffey home with her and practically memorized it. She spent so much of the playhouse time doing arithmetic and practicing her script writing skills that Rindy complained of being lonely and neglected.

  But it worked, and Latha skipped the fourth grade entirely and found herself in the fifth, no longer a deskmate of Every’s but reassigned to sit with a much better-looking boy named Raymond Ingledew, who was the son of John Ingledew, Stay More’s banker and most prominent citizen. Raymond was not only much better-looking (“cuter” was the word they used) than Every but also he was a good bit older. Latha never did find out exactly how old he was but she learned he had been held back in the fifth grade for five years, so it wasn’t too hard to guess that he might already be a teenager. When Latha told her mother who her new deskmate was, her mother nearly swooned. “Why!” her mother exclaimed and then amplified that. “Why, as I live and breathe! You lucky gal. Just to think, that a Bourne gal would ever get that close to a Ingledew. I’m so proud of ye!”

  Latha wanted to protest that she hadn’t done anything to accomplish anything prideworthy, other than to get herself promoted to the fifth grade. “He’s a good bit older’n me,” she observed.

  “That’s the least of yore problems,” Grandma Bourne said. “Aint you never heard about the Ingledew woman-shyness? It’s in their blood. Since time out of mind, every Ingledew man has been unable to speak to a female.”

  Latha wanted to ask how they had managed to court and marry and procreate, if that were true, but she never asked questions of anyone any more, not even her dear Granny. “He spoke to me,” Latha declared.

  “HE DID?” her mother and grandmother said in unison. “What did he say?”

  “He told me a riddle,” she said, “but I didn’t get it. ‘Do you know why they cut down that big walnut tree beside the creek?’ I said no I didn’t. ‘Because it was showing its nuts to the womenfolk.’ Then he laughed so hard that Miss Blankinship—that’s our teacher this year—made him write on the blackboard three hundred times, ‘I will not laugh.’ But I don’t see what was so funny.”

  “It aint very nice,” her mother said. “In fact, it’s nasty.”

  Each day Raymond Ingledew had a new riddle or a joke to tell her, but he was careful to cover his mouth with his hand after telling it so that Miss Blankinship wouldn’t hear his laughter. He used a lot of words she had not heard before, and she wrote these down in her notebook so that she could later show them to Rindy to see if she knew what they meant. All of the words, like “nuts,” which she learned meant the testicles, had something to do with a boy’s or a girl’s sexual parts, or with the many ways that these parts could be brought together.

  One day instead of a new joke Raymond simply gave her a piece of a page from his Indian-head notebook, on which he had written, “Have you ever done it?”

  She honestly didn’t know what he meant, but being unable to ask questions, she simply drew a circle around “it” and wrote a question mark beside it. Writing question marks wasn’t the same as asking questions, was it?

  He looked at her as if she didn’t know nothing, then he formed the thumb and forefinger of one hand into a circle, into which he poked the forefinger of his other hand and moved it in and out. His blushing gave away the possible meaning of the gesture, but she shrugged her shoulders and looked at him as if he didn’t know nothing. So he whispered in her ear, “Diddling,” and when she did not respond to that, he tried, “Lallygaggin,” which she had heard but didn’t know the meaning of. He tried “Pussywhippin.” She had heard Rindy say that “pussy” was one of the words for one’s private parts, so she could honestly shake her head; no one had ever whipped her pussy. “No?” he said. “You aint never done the dirty deed?”

  “Raymond!” Miss Blankinship hollered. “What are you’uns chatting about?”

  Raymond left her alone for the rest of the day. At the playhouse she told Rindy what he had said and showed her what he had done with his thumb and forefingers. They both discussed why the act was called “the dirty deed.” Rindy said maybe because you have to lie down on the ground to do it and you can get dirty. Latha wondered if it meant because the deed was wicked.

  Whatever it meant, it was all that Raymond Ingledew ever thought about. Latha could see why he had stayed in the fifth grade for five years. He didn’t like to open his McGuffey’s Fifth Reader, and when he did she saw that he had penciled private parts onto all the pictures of people. The men and boys had huge penises and she wondered to what extent the pictures might be self-portraits. Several times when Raymond was squirming around in his seat she looked down and noticed there was a large bulge in his britches, nothing gigantic like the pictures he drew, but still substantial.

  Latha was saved from whatever ultimate mischief he had in mind (maybe he was going to put his hand up her dress) when the boy and girl sitting behind them (Arlis Fancher and Sadie Swain) were horsing around with each other and making a lot of moans and grunts and pants and finally Sadie gasped and cried out and Raymond turned to look and said “She’s coming over the mountain!” and the one who was really coming was Miss Blankinship, who came as fast as she could and grabbed Arlis and Sadie by their ears and dragged them out the door.

  When she came back, a good bit later, she addressed the class, saying, “I can see that this co-ed seating arrangement is a mistake. Henceforward, we shall revert to separate sexual seating. You may sit with anyone you wish so long as that person’s sex is the same as yours.” There was a mad scramble to claim new desk partners, but Rindy managed to claim the right to sit with Latha, even though they were now grades apart. After school, Miss Blankinship called Latha and Rindy up to her desk and suggested that since they were best friends and of the same age, perhaps Latha would be willing to “toot” her. Without asking any questions it took Latha a while to discover what a “tooter” does, but thereafter for several years she did her best to toot Rindy
, until Rindy was practically caught up with her.

  But first she wanted to discuss with Rindy in their playhouse the incident which had led up to the new policy of seating. It was a trade-off: Latha would toot Rindy in matters of the primers and geography. Rindy would toot Latha in matters such as the behavior of Arlis and Sadie which led up to the incident.

  “They was making out, no question,” Rindy said. “They was feelin each other up, and it got out of hand.” For some reason, Rindy thought that pun was hilarious and was consumed with giggles.

  “I was sitting right in front of her,” Latha observed, “and it sounded like he was hurting her.”

  “Aw, naw, she just shouted when she came over the mountain. Lots of girls do. Don’t you?”

  “I guess not,” Latha said, although she still didn’t know what “came” means or what it had to do with mountains. She knew the song “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes,” but this was not around the mountain but over it. She said, “Leastways, I’ve never made a noise like Sadie made, as if a snake was biting her.”

  “Don’t you make any kind of noise when you come?” Rindy asked. “Myself, I just sort of bawl like a calf calling for its mother.” To demonstrate, Rindy closed her eyes and bawled like a calf calling for its mother. Latha duplicated the sound exactly, and both girls laughed uproariously.

  “Ooh!” Rindy said, “This shore is putting me in the mood for the real thing.” She grabbed the pillow off their pallet and pressed it against her groin and began grinding against it. Before long she was making the same moans and pants and grunts that Sadie Swain had been making, and then finally she bawled like a calf calling for its mother. Her face was sweaty. When she got her breath back, she confessed that she had never actually done it, no, not the dirty deed itself, with a boy, but she was keeping her eyes open for the opportunity. “Have you?” she asked Latha, and when Latha shook her head, Rindy handed her the pillow and said, “Your turn.” Latha wasn’t sure just what to do. “Lie down on the pallet if you want,” Rindy suggested. “Just press that piller against yourself and play like it’s some cute boy’s bottom with his pecker sticking into you.” Latha lay on the pallet and spread her legs and pressed the pillow against her private parts, which felt very good, although she didn’t want to pretend it was some boy’s pecker sticking into her.

  “Faster,” Rindy urged. “Harder.”

  Latha could have understood why Rindy had liked it so much, although she didn’t think she was going to bawl like a calf. She was going to do something, she knew, but she didn’t know what it was. Maybe she would moo like a cow calling for its calf. Maybe she would squeal like a pig, or bray like a mule. But right now, as the pillow moved faster and faster and she thrust her hips to meet it, she felt like she was about to scream.

  Then she wasn’t sure where she was. It took her a moment to recognize the interior of their playhouse. Another moment to remember why she was holding the pillow between her legs. There was a wet rag spread across her brow, and Rindy was fanning her and looking into her eyes as if searching for signs of life. Rindy said, “Heavens to betsy, Latha! You swooned. Fainted dead away. Give me a skeer. I thought you might’ve died.”

  Gradually Latha remembered what she had been doing. She felt so wonderful. “Did I bawl?” she asked, although she was not supposed to ever again ask anybody anything.

  “Naw, you jist sort of made this funny noise deep in your throat and then you plumb passed out.”

  Chapter eight

  We take for granted the world we see every day. Latha was ten years old, going on eleven, before it finally dawned on her that the rest of the world didn’t look like Stay More. Miss Blankinship (the only one of her several teachers who lasted more than one year) got ahold of a geography textbook, and passed it around for all to look at, and there were pictures from far off lands, and pictures of American cities, and the pyramids of Egypt, and the Grand Canyon and wheatfields in Kansas, the like of which she had never imagined. They were actual photographs, too, or else she would have believed some artist had just dreamed up the pictures. She stayed after school for a week in order to study all the pictures in that book, and Rindy was upset that she didn’t show up at the playhouse. She tried to explain to Rindy her fascination for those marvelous places that were so much unlike Stay More. Rindy couldn’t understand. Even harder for Rindy to understand was Latha’s declaration that Stay More must be the most beautiful place in all creation, compared with all those other places, and here all along we had been taking it for granted.

  Rindy looked at her as if she had gone off. Latha tried to convince her that here she had been spending all her born days living in the wonderfullest place on earth without knowing it.

  “What’s so wonderful about it?” Rindy wanted to know.

  Latha took her out of the ramshackle playhouse and gestured at the green mountains surrounding them and the blue mountains beyond, the view of the fields, and in the distance the pasture where the Chisms kept their sheep, and down in the valley the cluster of buildings that made up the town. It was a fairyland. “You aint never really got a good look at it all,” Latha told her.

  Again Rindy looked at her as if she were out of her skull and asked, “Have you been coming over the mountain by yourself a lot lately?”

  Latha blushed, but shook her head. She knew that the act was just a make-believe for actually doing it with a boy, and although it explained what her sisters sometimes did in bed at night to themselves, and was considered naughty if not wicked, it was not something you should do whenever you felt like it, even if it did take you out of yourself for a little while and make you feel just fine. Since that first time in the playhouse, she had done it just a few times by herself, and that had nothing whatever to do with her discovery that the world was full of marvelous places but Stay More was the best of them all. She doubted she would ever see the pyramids of Egypt, and although the wheatfields of Kansas weren’t very far away she didn’t need to actually go there in order to believe that one little wheatfield in Stay More was just as good. She tried to explain to Rindy what “familiar” means and how it is comfortable and easy and a part of yourself. She tried to get Rindy to see the difference between what is strange and unfamiliar and exciting, and what may be ordinary and commonplace but is lovely and dear and cozy. But Rindy just couldn’t seem to get it.

  Latha gave up trying to convince Rindy that Stay More was the best place in the world, and tried instead to explain her theory to Miss Blankinship. One day she stayed after school to look at the geography textbook again and she asked her teacher, “Ma’am, have you ever been to ary of these here places?” Miss Blankinship said why yes, in fact she had been to St. Louis one time, and she showed Latha the picture in the book of St. Louis, a mighty big town. “How is it better than Stay More?” Latha asked. Miss Blankinship scoffed, and said that there wasn’t any comparison because St. Louis had all kinds of stores that Stay More didn’t, and tall buildings, as you can see, and big bridges over the Mississippi river. And trains ran through it to all the corners of the country. Since Newton County was the only one of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties without a single mile of railroad track, even if Latha had been to the part of Newton County where a track might have been laid if they had one, which she hadn’t, she couldn’t imagine what a train was. Miss Blankinship flipped through the textbook until she found a picture of a train station in Baltimore with trains in it, and explained how they worked and how many hundreds of people can ride on one of them.

  “So St. Louis isn’t any better than Stay More,” Latha observed. “It’s just a lot bigger.”

  “Well, I reckon you have a point there,” Miss Blankinship said. “Leastways, I’d much prefer living in Stay More than in St. Louis.”

  Miss Blankinship was the smartest person Latha had ever known, although she hadn’t been smart enough to realize that she had assigned Latha to the sixth grade, two years ahead of where she was supposed to be. She never took anythin
g for granted again, and thus she didn’t take for granted the privilege of being two years ahead, or the privilege of going to school each day, or the privilege of just being alive. Things weren’t going well at home: her father couldn’t sell his corn or his tomatoes and the weevils had got what little cotton he planted, and there just wasn’t any money to be had. They were hardly eating. The stuff canned in Mason jars was all gone. The shelves were lined with empty jars. Even poor Rouser’s ribs were showing, and he would wolf down any stale biscuit thrown his way. But few stale biscuits got thrown. Latha and her sisters were lucky if their dinner bucket for school contained a small potato, boiled in the skin, and two or three black walnuts from the tree in the front yard. At dinner time at school, the Bourne sisters would take their nuts to the water pump, which had a concrete base, and crack them open with a rock and pick out what little nutmeat was inside. When no one was looking, Every would give Latha a piece of cornbread, or sometimes a cookie. Grateful and hungry as she was, she couldn’t help imagining that these gifts reeked of asafœtida. Usually she gave the cornbread or cookie to Rindy, who was starving too.

  One time Miss Blankinship brought to school a pasteboard box, and opened it and distributed to each of the pupils a small sample tube of Colgate toothpaste. “This is toothpaste,” she announced. “It is for the purpose of brushing your teeth. The manufacturer has been kind enough to give us a goodly supply of samples.”

  No one had ever seen toothpaste before. Everybody brushed their teeth with just a willow twig. So it was with great curiosity that all watched as Miss Blankinship demonstrated how to unscrew the cap on a tube and then squeeze the tube slightly so that a whitish stuff came oozing out. Miss Blankinship told them to take it home with them, show it to their parents, suggest their parents could buy a tube at Ingledew’s Store, and maybe even a toothbrush to go with it, and be sure to brush each night before bedtime and ideally after each meal. But none of those Colgate tubes got as far as home. It was quickly discovered the whitish stuff had a pleasant mint flavor, and everybody ate all of their Colgate as soon as they got out of the schoolhouse.