She did not reach the end (or the beginning) of the long avenue of Lombardy poplars leading to the highway before she heard a shouting behind her. “Hey! Wait up!” and she turned to see Dan running toward her, hampered in his running by the weight of little Annie in his arms. But he caught up with her. Panting, he asked, “How come you’re taking off without me?”
She laughed. “I couldn’t wait to get away from that wretched place.”
He laughed. “Well, why should I want to stay there?”
“I thought you might need a place to stay.”
“Not that place.”
“Then let’s go.”
They reached the highway and turned westward. She had no idea just how to get home. She had no memory of the time her rescuer had stopped in Memphis to get coffee and consult his road maps, and thus she did not know that there is such a thing as a road map.
They walked until it was time for dinner (Latha was glad that that was what Dan called it too, not lunch), and stopped at a café in Dickson and had a square meal, which Latha insisted on paying for. When they resumed their journey, she offered to carry Annie for a while. Annie was no longer so shy toward Latha and even put her arms around Latha’s neck. “She knows how to walk,” Dan said, “but she’s not very fast.”
It took them three days to reach Memphis. At one point a traveling salesman gave them a ride for fifty miles. They spent the first night in a barn beside the road, but for the second and third nights Latha insisted that Dan allow her to pay to stay in inexpensive hotels, where they registered as Mr. and Mrs. John Jones. A hotelkeeper in one place told Latha that her daughter sure did look a whole lot like her, even though Annie’s hair was blonde. Dan and Latha were both too tired from walking to even think about getting amorous. But she woke the fourth morning to stare at him and to ask silently at what age did men lose their ability to have sex. He never flirted with her, not in that way, and she wondered if it was because little Annie was in the same room, although asleep.
She was thrilled when they walked over the pedestrian walkway of the Mississippi River bridge and found themselves in Arkansas. It was ugly flatland delta country, but just the thought of being in her home state made her optimistic that she might indeed someday see her hometown. Dan did not seem to care for the scenery, such as it was, and they couldn’t wait for their first sight of a hill, although it took them a couple more days to find one. At one of the cafés where they stopped to eat, there was a large map of Arkansas on the wall, and Latha was able to find Newton County and the Buffalo River and Swains Creek, although Stay More wasn’t indicated. For a moment she panicked with the thought that it was just a dreamland she had carried around in her screwy head, but she found Parthenon on the map and knew that Stay More was just down the road from there.
Since talking made them thirsty, they did not talk an awful lot during their long trek through Tennessee and Arkansas, but still they talked enough to tell each other practically their entire life’s stories…except for the parts that had been erased from her memory, and except for the parts that he could not bring himself to narrate because their earthy content would not have been polite. But Latha learned the whole story of how Annie’s mother, Dan’s truelove named Ammey, had died in childbirth and how Dan had fought and won a duel with Ammey’s husband, thereafter abducting Annie and absconding ahead of the law. And Dan learned the whole story of how Latha had been raped and impregnated with a daughter she’d had taken from her by her sister Mandy, and the subsequent committal to the lunatic asylum.
Latha was determined not to go through Little Rock on her return home, not because she was afraid of being caught (the statute of limitations had expired) but because she knew she wouldn’t be able to resist making an attempt to see Sonora, who was probably in the first or second grade of school now. Besides, according to that map she had seen, Little Rock was too much of a dip in the straight line between Memphis and Stay More, although there were no roads that approximated a straight line anywhere. They spent a night in Searcy and another night in Damascus, and had to stop for hours in Russellville to have their shoes re-soled and repaired, and at a small hotel in Clarksville, where they came as close as they ever would to having sex.
She woke before Dan or Annie, which was her custom, because she always slept in the nude and wanted to be dressed before they woke. The weather was getting hot now. In pulling the sheet down from her body, she exposed his, which was naked also. He was not only exposed but his penis was standing like a helmeted soldier at full attention. She could not take her eyes off it. She wondered what he was dreaming about. It more than dispelled whatever doubts she had had about fifty-year-old men. The very sight of it lubricated her vulva. She began to consider the possibility of kneeling over him, straddling him, and receiving that magnificent instrument into herself. Could she do it without waking him? But if she did it to the complete ascent of the mountain, and got over the mountain, she knew she would faint, and what would he think when he woke? It was a terrible temptation. She would have to be careful. Could she do it slowly enough, softly enough? She put one knee on the bed beside his hip, then swung her other knee over him and planted it beside the other hip. She had reached the point of no return, and was all ready to lower herself upon that luscious member, when a small voice said “Mama?” and she turned her head to see Annie standing there staring at her. Quickly she whipped the sheet up to cover Dan’s body, then she grabbed her dress off a chair and slipped it over her head.
“I was just getting up,” she said to Annie. “Are you ready for some breakfast?” Annie nodded. Latha’s voice had waked Dan, who sleepily lifted the sheet to peer at himself. “Could you throw me my pants?” Dan asked her.
Later, at breakfast, Latha said to him, “Did you know that Annie called me ‘Mama’?”
“Is that a fact?” Dan said. “Well, you’re probably the closest thing to a mother she’s ever had.”
They resumed their journey, with Latha full of frustration. A day’s hike through the beautiful Ozarks, which Dan greatly admired, got them as far as Fallsville, or Loafer’s Glory, a village Latha recognized because her mother had taken her there once as a child. There were Swains here and there all over the place, and Latha wondered if anyone might recognize her. Ike Sutherland, who ran the small establishment with a “Hotel” sign on the front of it, asked Dan if he was any kin to Jim Jones of Pettigrew, and Dan said, “I think we’re cousins, maybe.” The room was small, and Ike Sutherland had to squeeze in a cot for Annie. Latha was glad to be back among her own people but afraid someone might recognize her. So they did not go downstairs for supper; Dan brought it up to the room.
Conceivably they could reach Stay More in one more day if they got up at dawn. But one question nagged at Latha as she blew out the lamp and undressed for bed, and she got up her nerve to ask it, “Dan, do you think I’m easy on the eyes?” Those were not the words she meant to choose in order to find out what he thought of her, but they would have to do, and they were close to home. In the dark she could not see his face but she heard a sharp intake of his breath and then a long silence before he spoke.
He whispered, so as not to wake Annie. “Latha, do you remember the first thing I ever said to you?”
“Yes,” she said, keeping her own voice to a whisper, and the circumstances flooded back on her. “You said, ‘Beg pardon, ma’am, but I was wonderin could I git a drink of water fer my baby.’”
“Right,” he whispered, “but what I really wanted to say was, ‘Ma’am, you are the most resplendently beautiful creature I’ve ever laid eyes on. Will you marry me?’”
Latha covered her mouth to quieten her laugh. And then she whispered, “And why didn’t you say that?”
“Two reasons,” he whispered. “One, when my Ammey, Annie’s mother, was compelled to marry that bastard Walt Ailing, I took a solemn vow that I would never marry anyone else. And two, I’ve learned that beauty is a mirage which disappears when you contaminate it with your grubby finger
s.”
He left her to contemplate the meaning of that for a long time before she could go to sleep. Dan was a right peculiar fellow, and instead of getting to know him better, she felt that she was uncovering deeper mysteries which perhaps ought to be left alone.
Chapter twenty-eight
The next day they tried to find Stay More. She had never traveled this route before. For that matter she had never traveled any of the routes they’d taken from Tennessee but at least then they had a look at a map to guide them. Now Latha found herself on stretches of primitive road that wandered and meandered and forked, and more than once they took the wrong fork and had to backtrack, and more than once they had to search frantically for a habitation where they could stop and ask for directions. If they had attempted to reach Stay More from the north, or even from the east, Latha might have spotted a familiar landmark or two. But approaching it from the south was bewildering. At the hamlet of Hunton, they stopped to ask for directions and discovered they were at a dead end and would have to go back almost to Swain and take a different route. Dusk was settling in, and although Latha was determined to reach Stay More before nightfall, she finally had to concede that they were lost and had better look for a camping place. Latha spread her blanket under a giant ash tree, but thunder boomed and they smelled rain in the air and in the half-darkness searched for shelter, reaching a bluff overhang just in time before the cloudburst. They spent the night under the bluff. Fortunately Dan always carried some food in his rucksack, so they wouldn’t starve overnight. Every cloud has its silver lining and this one was that while they hadn’t reached Stay More, whenever they did reach it would be in full daylight so they could lay their eyes on it.
And even little Annie seemed to be enchanted when, sometime in the midmorning of the following day, they rounded the crest of a mountain and came in view of the village nestled between Swains Creek and Banty Creek. There were no church spires, but there was the bell-tower on the schoolhouse and the awesome bulk of the gristmill, as well as the two-storey house with verandah that had been built by Governor Jacob Ingledew and was later converted into a hotel. That was not Latha’s destination. She pointed at a house on the foot of a distant hillside, and told Dan that had been the Bourne place, where she’d been born and raised. Probably no one lived there, since her mother had died five years before. She told Dan that for his sake more than for hers they oughtn’t to be seen together by anyone in Stay More, but she would meet him at that Bourne house whenever he could get there. She said she would walk with him as far as the Duckworth place, the first fine house on the south road into town. At that point, she’d carry Annie the rest of the way to the Bourne place. He should give her a good head start.
Which is what she did. Let folks make of it what they would, assuming any of them recognized her. And few of them did. She waved, and taught Annie to wave, at anyone they passed. Oren Duckworth was the first to recognize her and call her by name, but she simply said, “Howdy, Oren,” and waved and kept walking. She was tempted to stop in at Doc Swain’s house and clinic and let him know that she had come home to stay, but she knew she’d have to visit with him for a long spell and was eager to get on. She also thought of stopping at Jerram’s General Store for some supplies and groceries but as she passed it she saw its name had been changed to Cluley’s and it was now closed, with a for sale sign in the window. She went on, waving at Abby Kimber and Rosie Murrison as she passed their houses, and then the Right Prong Road forked to the left and then forked left once again and she was practically in her own driveway. She could tell at once that the house was not inhabited and was neglected. “Annie, this is my house,” she said to the little girl, “but you can stay here as long as you like.”
The houses we grow up in shrink year by year. Latha could not remember the house being so small. There was a “4 Sail” sign in the window but judging from the dust on the porch floor no one had been to look at the house. Fortunately no one had been there to break any windows or otherwise damage the place. The door, like all Stay More doors, had no lock, so she went right in. There were signs of inhabitation by rodents: mice, rats, or squirrels, and the not too awfully unpleasant odor of their scat. She put Annie down, to stand on her own two feet, and Annie followed her into the kitchen, where the black iron cookstove was still in place with its flue attached to the chimney, and there was still a big iron skillet on top of it, with cupboards just as Fannie Swain Bourne had left them, filled with pots and pans, and drawers full of cutlery. It made Latha sad to see that nothing had been taken. Was it all so worthless? But it made her happy to realize that all they would need would be something to cook in the cookware.
She heard footsteps on the porch, and then a knock at the door. “Come on in, Stranger, and make yourself pleasant!” she called, thinking It’s all coming back to me.
He came in smiling and said, “Haven’t heard that old saying in a long time.”
“This place gives a new meaning to ‘humble home.’ But it’s just as it was when I left.”
There was even a broom and a mop in their usual place, and she got busy to “red up” the house. Dan brought in firewood. He drew a bucket of water from the well. He went to the place where the garden had been and discovered that there were still potatoes growing, and he grubbed up a mess of little new potatoes. And greens! Lamb’s quarter, dock, dandelion, mustard and turnip. She suddenly remembered where she had hidden her .22 rifle, and it was still there, and Dan took it (she could have done it herself) and went out and shot a couple of squirrels, skinned them, and put them in a stew pot with the new potatoes. She found enough flour to make biscuits, and some jars of canned fruit—peaches and apples and berries—to make a cobbler. They had a home-grown square meal for supper. Nothing except water to wash it down, but that well water was good-tasting and fine.
The beds upstairs had not been touched. They gave Annie the bed that had been Latha’s grandmother’s. Latha considered sharing her own bed with Dan but it was the special bed where she had lost her virginity, and she explained this to Dan, so he was happy to take the bedroom that had been her parents’, although he observed that it was going to seem strange to be sleeping alone after so many nights together on the road.
This arrangement got them through a couple of weeks. Latha wondered what Dan was going to do now. He showed no inclination to rush off, but she had been thinking that he had only wanted to see her safely home to Stay More before meandering onward to whatever his ultimate destination might be. She couldn’t come right out and ask him when he was going to leave, which would have been inhospitable, but she was curious about his plans. She did ask him what he thought of Stay More, and would never forget his answer. “It’s one of those places,” he said, “that when you see it you know you’ll never be able to forget it, so that even if you do leave it you’ll still inhabit it in your heart.” He said that it reminded him of all three of the towns where he had previously lived, in Connecticut, Vermont, and North Carolina. He said he’d been looking for a good place to raise Annie, and Stay More was as good as any he’d ever seen.
One of the first things that Latha did was to visit Doc Swain. “What in the world!” Doc exclaimed. “Strike me blind! You did it, didn’t you?” He embraced her. “I heard a rumor that somebody had seen you coming into town yesterday, but I couldn’t believe it.”
She had determined not to tell Doc Swain, or anybody, about Dan. Not that it would be unseemly to report that she’d been in a strange man’s company for a long trip from Tennessee, but it would be a kind of invasion of Dan’s privacy. If he wanted to be a hermit, she wasn’t going to give him any publicity. But she told Doc Swain a little of what had happened in Tennessee, of Rodney’s murder of Mrs. Cardwell, of her own decision to take her savings and come on back to Stay More. Then in return Doc gave her what little news there was of Stay More and Stay Morons, who weren’t quite as moronic as in the good old days. “Maybe this here so-called Depression has something to do with it,” Doc said. Emelda D
uckworth, who had married Bevis Ingledew, Raymond’s brother, had managed a little industry of her own, making cornhusk hillbilly dolls to sell to tourists and stores in the cities. John Ingledew, the banker and patriarch of the family, had died after the stock market crash. Bevis’ oldest son, John Henry, whom everyone called “Hank,” had run away from home to join the circus in Jasper, but had returned in the company of the perennial peddler Eli Willard, who had been coming to Stay More almost from its beginning, and who returned one last time, in order to die here, past his hundredth birthday. “When they got me to examine old Eli Willard,” Doc related, “I knew he was dead, but it looked as if he had been dead for many years.” They couldn’t bury him in the Stay More cemetery, which was reserved for Stay Morons, so after mortician E.H. Ingledew had carefully embalmed Eli, they interred him in a glass showcase inside the Ingledew General Store, where his presence was an attraction to people from all over the county and even tourists, and the money these people spent in the store helped Willis Ingledew survive the lean years of the Great Depression and even to buy an automobile, which was his undoing a short time previously on a sharp curve into Jasper. His niece Lola inherited the store, but so far had refused to set foot in it until somebody removed the glass showcase with the body of Eli Willard.
It would have made a good opportunity for Bob Cluley, who owned the other general store, to take business away from his lone competitor. But Cluley had already gone broke during the Depression, had taken to drink, and put the store up for sale.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 70
