The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Thus, when a day after the paper appeared, Dawny was found unconscious in the newspaper office with a broken arm, a blackened eye and other bruises, it wasn’t hard for Latha to guess who the culprits were.

  Chapter forty

  Doc Swain patched Dawny up but the boy had to wear a plaster cast on his arm for nearly two months. Fortunately it was his left arm, not the arm that held the hand that held his tools for writing the newspaper and doing his duties around the store, although Latha offered him a vacation until the cast came off.

  She was indignant to discover that Dawny’s aunt and uncle, with whom he lived, were not indignant over the episode of the brutality committed upon Dawny. Even Sonora, who had always been teasing toward Dawny if not openly disparaging, thought it was a terrible deed that should not go unpunished, and she urged her father, who was perfectly capable of it, to demolish the Allied ringleaders, especially Sog Alan, who kept on flirting with Sonora even though she was married and the mother of two children and expecting a third.

  Jim John Whitter was the baby brother of Latha’s erstwhile friend Dorinda Whitter, from the poor family of Whitters who had already produced one thug in the oldest son Ike, who had been lynched. Of the three ringleaders, only Larry Duckworth was from a halfway respectable family, since his father had owned the canning factory, but Larry had a mean streak in him. As for the Alans, Sog’s sister Betty June was just a few instances away from becoming the town hussy, and the parents were not among Latha’s friends or favorite customers. She knew them well enough that they recognized her when she knocked on their door and asked, “Did you know that your son broke Dawny’s arm?”

  “Dawny who?” said Mrs. Alan, but Sog himself came up behind her and said to Latha, “What business of your’n is it?”

  “I’d like to break your face,” she said to him. “What did you do it with?”

  “My ball bat,” Sog said. “He tattled on us in that there newspaper of his’n.”

  Latha addressed his mother. “The boy, who’s not half the size of your son, has to wear a plaster cast. Do you plan to punish your son?”

  “What business of your’n is it?” the mother said.

  From that day forward, Latha refused to sell anything to Sog. If he needed a bag of Bull Durham and some papers to roll himself a cigarette, he’d have to walk to Parthenon to buy them. Latha couldn’t understand why Every didn’t simply give the scalawag a sound beating. Every said it wasn’t really any of their business.

  Except for that, Every was a perfect husband, once he started using the Lava to clean the grease off. He did all the chores around the house without being asked, let alone nagged. He kept the water bucket filled and on Saturday nights he filled the washtub with a mixture of cold well water and steaming hot water off the stove. He went out of his way to gather wildflowers to make into bouquets for her. Night after night he would massage her tired feet, and each night at bedtime he would lovingly brush her hair. He had overcome his habit of saying grace before each meal, so she didn’t mind that he still read the Bible regularly. Sometimes on Sunday mornings he seemed restless at about the time he would have been giving a sermon; it reminded her of an amputee who still feels twitchings in a missing arm. It had taken her a while to convince him that there was nothing sinful about sleeping in the nude on a hot summer’s night, so they both slept in the raw, and in time she stopped having sexual dreams because she didn’t need them.

  One by one, all the loafers who had once congregated on Latha’s store porch shifted their venue to the shade trees at Every’s garage where, she learned, he fixed not only vehicles but also hearts and souls, freely dispensing the sort of wisdom that a modern day counselor would be paid outrageous amounts for. Everybody loved him, and even women (no, especially women, now that most of the younger menfolk were overseas fighting the War) were known to bring their personal problems to Every for his sage advice. He told Latha that at that Lipscomb Bible College in Tennessee he had taken courses in counseling and psychology, and all he was doing was putting it to good use. It gave him something to think about while his hands were busy tinkering with the cars; he made an analogy to the barber who listens to his customer’s woes while he cuts hair.

  For only one reason, Latha was glad to see the loafers vacate the store porch in favor of Every’s garage: they still bought their plugs of Brown’s Mule and twists of Days Work at her store, but they chewed the stuff at Every’s, and spat the stuff at Every’s, and she was no longer required to mop the porch floor at the end of each day, although most of the spitters had been accurate enough to clear the edge of the porch. Inside the store was posted a sign, KINDLY DO NOT EXPECTORATE UPON THE FLOOR, but she was not convinced that all the Stay Morons had the word in their vocabularies. Someone had expectorated at the sign.

  When Every wasn’t tied up with a customer, or whenever he could turn a job over to his assistant Lawlor Coe, he would step next door into the old Dill dogtrot house, built by his grandfather and still sturdy and tight after years of desertion, and in the course of time he prepared the dogtrot, his boyhood home, to become a residence for Latha and himself. It was spacious enough, two large rooms that also contained attics and spare spaces, not unlike the old New England colonial home that was divided into hall and parlor, the latter for living and meeting and sometimes sleeping, the former for sleeping and cooking and eating. And the two halves were separated by an open-air porch, the so-called dogtrot which, in this case, would become a cat-trot. Latha and Every had nothing against dogs, and would eventually acquire one, but when they first moved into their new old home, the many cats came with Latha, and not only filled the cat-trot between the two halves but also could be seen festooning the roof.

  Latha offered her previous house to Sonora, who had been living with her babies at Bevis Ingledew’s, Hank’s parents’ place. But since Dawny had taken over one room for his newspaper office, and the store took up most of the building, there really wasn’t enough room, so Sonora remained with her in-laws, although she visited Latha practically every day with her babies, who, as soon as they were old enough to know what “Gran” meant, doted on Latha. The third child was also a girl, which elicited a one word v-mail letter from Hank, wherever his ship was, the word identical to ship but with a t instead of a p. Sonora was running out of names for the girls, so she simply called the new baby after herself.

  Editor Dawny saw nothing wrong with a third girl, and ran a front-page headlined story in The Stay Morning Star on the birth of Sonora, Jr., as he called her. That cheered up Sonora, Sr. considerably. The “Junior” was destined to stick and become eventually June, which was what everybody has called her all her life. Dawny had wanted to bring out an “Extra” to announce the birth of Junior, but his “Extras” were becoming commonplace and were in danger of not being extra any more. He had already run an Extra for the death on Iwo Jima of his friend Gerald Coe, one of the three triplet sons of Lawlor. Gerald (who was of course pronounced “Jerl” so he rhymed with his brothers Earl and Burl) had died a hero and would later receive posthumously the Congressional Medal of Honor in the biggest ceremony ever held in Stay More. And then Dawny had run an Extra for the death of President Roosevelt, the news of which reached Stay More by means of a radio, Stay More’s first, which Latha ordered from Sears Roebuck and operated on battery power. Although the radio would become in the years ahead a wonderful source of news, music, storytelling, sports and every conceivable contact with the outside world, Latha would always associate it with the sad tidings of the President’s death. She would also associate it with the unquestionable fact that people in other parts of America did not talk English the same way we did. Their accents were sharper, more precise. They did not take any of the shortcuts of speech that we do, like dropping the unnecessary “g” at the end of participles. Some of the doctors at the state asylum had talked like that, but Latha had thought it was because they were snobs. Every, whose career as a preacher had taken him as far north as Michigan and Ohio, assured Lat
ha that most people up north sounded that way, in what was commonly called a Yankee accent to distinguish it from an Ozark accent. Latha was afraid that the radio might make it contagious. But her radio was good for business at the store: as soon as the Stay Morons found out about it, they all had to come to the store to hear for themselves, and eventually they became addicted to their favorite programs, like Fibber McGee and Molly, Let’s Pretend, and Meet Corliss Archer. They always felt obliged to buy something after listening to Latha’s radio, but she was sure she could detect a gradual change in the way they talked after listening to Yankees.

  The radio reported that the war in Germany was practically finished, and a surrender was expected any day now. The war in the Pacific dragged on. Latha cursed the radio the day it reported that Dawny’s hero Ernie Pyle, the great war correspondent, had been killed by Japanese sniper fire. She didn’t know how to break the news to Dawny, and when she did he was devastated. He roused himself to publish an Extra, but that edition of his paper didn’t sell, because most Stay Morons didn’t know who Ernie Pyle was.

  Just two days after that, word came that Berlin had fallen, but in the siege Billy Bob Ingledew, Hank’s kid brother, was killed. That sad news affected not only the Ingledew clan but also the large family of Dinsmores, whose twin sisters, Jelena and Doris (their full names were Jelena Cloris and Helena Doris, but this confused their mother when she was yelling at them) were so inseparable that when Billy Bob had courted one of them, he had to court the other one at the same time, and, since he had never been able to determine which of the two sisters he liked most, he had married both of them, and in time had impregnated both of them, and erected a house, if it may be called that, for the five of them to live in. Then he was drafted into the service and killed at the gate to Hitler’s bunker.

  The sisters’ younger brother Willard, who had been named after Eli Willard, was one of two people (the other was Dawny, who eventually told Latha) who knew that Jerl Coe, the hero killed at Iwo Jima, had silently betrothed himself to Gypsy Dingletoon, the comely daughter of Stay More’s poorest family. Somehow Willard had obtained a mule for the Dingletoons, whose father had run away from responsibility in order to join the Army. It was this Gypsy that the local gang called the Allies planned to kidnap for immoral purposes and to prove their superiority to the Axis, but the plot was foiled by Dan, who gave the Allies a scare that kept them in line until they decided, in retaliation, to kidnap Gypsy’s mule instead, and to beat it to death, the principal culprit being the same Sog Alan who had broken Dawny’s arm.

  When Miss Jerram, the schoolmistress, found out about this heinous act, she marched all the pupils up the mountainside to where the mule lay dead, and forced the Allies (including Sog, who was no longer her pupil but had once been) to dig a grave for the mule and conduct a funeral service for it, including the singing of “Farther Along.”

  It was during the singing of this hymn that the first airplane ever seen in Stay More flew overhead. Latha heard the engine and stepped out of her store to scan the skies, and saw that the plane, with military insignia, was pulling another plane, engineless, which was eventually cut loose from its tow and allowed to glide all over creation until it came to a landing somewhere up on the mountain beyond Latha and Every’s new old home. Folks gathered at Every’s garage or at Latha’s store to discuss the event, the first time that most of them had seen or heard an airplane. Soon a bunch of Miss Jerram’s pupils came running down the road, searching for the glider’s landing place. A plume of smoke to the east aroused speculation that the glider had caught fire and burned.

  Surely Dawny would want to publish an Extra over this happening, if it could be determined where the glider had landed. But when she asked him about it, he said he hadn’t seen any glider or any smoke. On Latha’s store porch, the gang called the Allies sat around for a while with the gang called the Axis and Latha was surprised to see them mingling in apparent harmony, where usually they’d be at each other’s throats. Kids were hard to understand. But in the days ahead, Dawny was conspicuous by his absence. He stopped coming to the store to do his little jobs that she paid him for, like sweeping the floor and dusting the merchandise. Some days she caught a glimpse of him running past her store toward his home. She also observed the older members of the Axis running that way too. One day she stopped Dawny and asked why he was in such a hurry to get home, and he said he wasn’t going home, but then he changed his tune and said yes he was going home because he had a lot of “stuff” to do. Something was fishy. Later that day two women who were mothers of Axis, Dulcie Coe and Bliss Dingletoon, came into the store and asked Latha if she’d heard anything about Selena Dinsmore, the mother of all the Dinsmore kids, who were supposedly very bad sick. Latha said she hadn’t heard a word and in fact had just seen Willard Dinsmore running up the road in the same direction Dawny was heading, followed by his sister Ella Jean. While they were talking, Selena Dinsmore herself came into the store.

  Well, it turned out that a few nights previously Selena had cooked up a huge pot of greens to take to sick Bliss Dingletoon, while Bliss was cooking up a huge pot of pork and beans to take to sick Selena Dinsmore. Dulcie Coe said she had contributed enough blackberry cobbler “to feed an army.” The women were soon joined by Gladys Duckworth, whose daughter Rosa Faye had just been seen rushing in the direction the boys had fled, so the women decided to follow her, Latha closing the store. They followed Rosa Faye all the way up past Latha’s house and out an abandoned road to what had once been the Stapleton place, where they were stopped by a sentry, a soldier in uniform with a rifle. When they tried to tell him they were just following Gladys’ daughter Rosa Faye, he made them wait while he notified his superior, and then they were taken into the presence of other soldiers and of their children, Willard and Ella Jean Dinsmore, Joe Don and Gypsy Dingletoon, and Sammy Coe. Sammy’s mother, Dulcie Coe, exclaimed, “So this is where all my blackberry cobbler ended up!” A corporal told her it sure was good, and a sergeant said it was the best dessert he’d ever had the privilege of sinking his teeth into. The lieutenant in charge, McPherson, introduced himself and his men to the ladies and explained that they had been passengers on that glider and were discovered by the kids who called themselves Axis but were pledged to secrecy. They were awaiting orders to participate in a training exercise, which would involve a battalion of tanks on maneuvers. Latha said to the lieutenant, “Well, there’s no sense in you boys starving to death up here and making these kids into storytellers. Come on down to our fair hamlet and get you some decent food.” Since their presence was no longer a secret, they agreed. All of them walked down into the village, but Gypsy rode a handsome Army mule, who had flown in on that glider and who Gypsy had named Jarhead after her mule who had been murdered by the Allies. Dawny was beside himself with excitement. At Latha’s store she sold the soldiers smoking tobacco and cigarette papers, and at her post office she sold them postcards and v-mail stationery, and they sat around drinking soda pop from the cooler, eating candy bars and writing notes or letters to their distant mothers, wives or sweethearts. Dawny showed Lieutenant McPherson his newspaper office, where he planned to publish an Extra as soon as he got McPherson’s clearance. Then he gave him a tour of the village, or what was left of it, while the other soldiers ran down to Swains Creek for a swim, wade, and dive.

  The soldiers in groups of three or four began to have their meals at the various mothers’ tables, and all of them participated in a community Pie Supper, where they bid on anonymous pies, and as it turned out McPherson got the pie of the Dinsmore twins, who were still in mourning for Billy Bob Ingledew, and the lieutenant tried his best to make them laugh while they were eating the pie. Dawny’s pie turned out to have been made by their sister Ella Jean, who was his own age and on whom he had a powerful crush. She apparently told Dawny she’d like to help him put out his newspaper, and from the next day onward, The Stay Morning Star had a staff of two, although sweet Ella Jean could not contribute to the next Extra, w
hich was about the suicides of her sisters Jelena and Doris, who were twinned for a last time in their plunge from Leapin Rock, which sank Lieutenant McPherson into a deep gloom even though Ella Jean tried to explain to him how her sisters were grieving for the death of Billy Bob in Berlin. Latha knew that Leapin Rock had a long history of (and got its name from) the several folks down through the ages who had jumped off of it to escape this world. She had thought a time or two about availing of it herself if Every had not come back into her life. Stay More was still under a pall of sorrow when an Army major serving as referee for the war games arrived in town with a convoy of engineers who prepared the roads and built a pontoon bridge across Swains Creek, and shortly thereafter big armored tanks in all shapes and sizes came rolling their treads over the hills to the south. They bivouacked in the large fields below the Duckworth place that had once been an Osage Indian encampment. The major assured Latha and Every that no harm would come of the exercises, and the engineers intended to leave the village just as they had found it, if not better.

  As far as Latha (with Every’s help) could gather, McPherson’s soldiers who had landed on the glider were meant to impersonate the enemy, the Japanese, and attempt to defend the village, the roads, and the countryside from the onslaught of the tanks. All of the weapons—cannons, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, rifles—were loaded with blanks, or rather with projectiles that would make plenty of noise when fired but leave only paint on the targets.

  The population of Stay More doubled during the war games. Every’s talents as a mechanic were called upon to repair Jeeps, trucks, and even tanks. He and Lawlor were kept busy from sunup to sundown. Latha’s post office was so busy that she had to hire Lorraine Dinsmore to clerk in the store. Latha did not even mind the fact that many of the soldiers flirted with her; it made her feel younger, and she unashamedly found herself gazing in the mirror to see that she was still pretty enough to draw out such attention. Dawny’s newspaper, with Ella Jean’s help, doubled its circulation, especially after he started putting the soldiers’ names and hometowns in his stories. One afternoon, Latha caught sight of Dawny and Ella Jean kissing. It was going to be a nice summer all around. Latha and Every both made so much money that they were going to enjoy a happy retirement.