The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Sharon moves into the building that had been Latha’s home and store and post office. She can’t afford to fix it up, so it remains essentially as Latha had left it, although Sharon converts the tier of post office boxes into a headboard for the bed. Her brother Vernon insists that she allow him to have a telephone installed, and thus Sharon and Latha can chat with each other daily when they don’t have a chance to walk the quarter-mile that separates their dwellings. For a long time Sharon’s mail consists entirely, apart from the phone bill, of long romantic letters from Larry, the boyfriend she has abandoned. He writes most of his letters when he has had an unknown number of drinks. She never answers them. Eventually he simply shows up in Stay More and moves into the Jacob Ingledew house. On the one occasion that Sharon will allow him to sit on her porch and talk to her, he tells her that he intends to do a study of the poems of Daniel Lyam Montross. He also asks her if she has anything good for getting rid of cockroaches. “Don’t leave anything out that they might want to eat,” she says. “Don’t spill any food on the floor.”

  One night after bedtime Latha hears gunfire, which wakens her. She listens to it and determines it is coming from the center of town, near Sharon, whom she telephones for reassurance. Sharon says it’s just Larry, drunk and shooting at cockroaches with his revolver. “Does he hit any?” Latha wonders. Sharon laughs and says she wouldn’t know because she never visits Larry.

  Night after night Latha is wakened from sleep by the distant popping of Larry’s revolver. She is of a mind to have a talk with him herself, but doesn’t want to risk getting shot. “Vernon has offered to evict him if only I tell him to,” Sharon says in a phone call. “Vernon really hates what he’s doing to that house, letting it go to ruin and shooting it full of holes. No, Gran, I never worry that he might shoot me, because I never go near the house. He only shoots late at night, when he’s blotto, I guess, and maybe his demons are pursuing him. Yes, maybe he’s shooting at his demons….” Stay More has been such a peaceful place lately, and Latha’s dog Fun is also disturbed by the sound of the gunfire, and sets up a howl which further ruptures the peace.

  One evening Sharon calls to say that she has received a letter from Larry that has taken her breath away, a long, rambling love letter, but so eloquent and moving that Sharon has been tempted to answer it, but doesn’t know where to “mail” the answer. Latha suggests that she might simply put it in his mailbox. Sharon calls again later to say that she has indeed put the letter in Larry’s box, and has noticed that the path to his house is strewn with cockroaches. She had accidentally stepped on one. As soon as she had reached her home and had picked up the phone to call Latha, she heard again the firing of Larry’s revolver. Can you hear that?” she asks her grandmother. So what else is new? Latha says. Then they both hear a scream of pain, followed by the beginning of a thunderstorm. The sky flashes. The thunder booms. Has Larry been hit by lightning? They both wonder. But the storm is still raging when they both return to sleep. The following night there is no sound of gunfire. Nor the night after that. They both remark upon this during one of their nightly telephone talks, but neither of them is concerned; they are both happy that the gunfire has ceased. The next time they talk, Sharon tells her that she thinks Larry is just sulking and giving her the silent treatment. “My letter probably angered him, he doesn’t want to be nagged, he doesn’t need me commenting upon his drinking habits. He probably thought my letter sounded like a bribe: I would talk to him if he stopped drinking. But maybe he has gone back to work on his book about Daniel Lyam Montross, and has sobered up enough to write it. At least I haven’t heard him shooting off his pistol for several days now.” Sharon says that she will wait until the end of the week and if she still hasn’t had an answer to her letter to Larry, she will write him another one. “And listen, Gran, one other thing. I think I do have a roach problem. I saw another one. It was climbing on my mantel, and fell off, or jumped off. I tried to mash it underfoot, but those things can really scoot, you know? It ran up under my bed. I tried to find some bug spray, but I don’t have any. All I could find was hair spray. I don’t know if that worked or not, but I didn’t see it again.

  “Don’t laugh. Anyway, after I sprayed the hair spray, I poured myself a drink, to calm my nerves. A hard drink. It’s the first one I’ve had since the last time he was over here. Do you want to come over this afternoon and have a gin-and-tonic with me?”

  Latha wears a new springtime dress she has ordered from Sears. It has been a while since she’s had a gin-and-tonic, and she has forgotten how appropriate they are to the weather, to the warmth, to the world. But one is all she wants, or can handle, although Sharon has three of them, and Latha is a bit concerned, although the drinking doesn’t affect Sharon’s speech. They talk about gardening. Latha has taught Sharon how to raise a vegetable garden, and Sharon is still in need of much advice, now that seedtime is here.

  A couple of evenings later, Latha has made herself a gin and tonic and is sitting in the dogtrot breezeway of her house to enjoy it, when she hears a sound she hasn’t heard for a long, long time: the bell of the Stay More schoolhouse is ringing. She has rung it herself on occasion, but not for quite some time. The schoolhouse has been closed (although not locked) for many years. There are two distinct notes when the clapper of the bell strikes either side of the bell: a ding and a dong, or, more properly speaking, a boom and a bang, or, no, it isn’t that good a bell, a clunk and a clank. But it is booming. It goes on and on. She puts on her shoes and takes a flashlight and calls up her dog Fun and heads for the schoolhouse. Eventually she hears the sounds of various vehicles converging upon the village. By the time she reaches the schoolhouse, the ringing has stopped and she sees a bunch of vehicles parked at the Ingledew house whose lone resident is Larry. She recognizes George Dinsmore, Vernon’s foreman, who is driving his Mercedes, stopping in front of the house while a group of men load a body into it. Her heart skips a few beats. She walks faster, and catches up with a sheriff’s deputy who is trying to direct traffic. She asks him, “What’s going on?” The man tells her that the feller who was living in the house, the “Professor,” as some folks call him, had shot himself in the foot and was being taken to Harrison to the hospital.

  Later that night Sharon phones her from the hospital, where Larry is in the I.C.U. Latha’s unpleasant memory of Clifford’s stay in the same unit is still too fresh in her mind. It seems, Sharon declares, that Larry, drunk to begin with, had shot himself in the foot while trying to shoot cockroaches, and then, unable to move or summon help, had further continued drinking to ease the pain, and had gone into a coma. “While you and I were enjoying our gins and tonics the other day, poor Larry lay unconscious on his sofa because I had stubbornly refused to visit him.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Latha tells her. And then she asks, “How did you discover him?”

  “You aren’t going to believe this, Gran,” Sharon says, “and I’m not sure I believe it myself, but I was just sitting on my porch early this evening. Yes, I’d had a couple of drinks, but I wasn’t tipsy and I certainly wasn’t hallucinating. Suddenly a white mouse appeared in my front path and behind it were hundreds of cockroaches forming themselves into a big arrow pointing toward Larry’s house. Don’t scoff, Gran. I’m not making this up. They were not only forming that arrow, but also spelling out in big letters, H E L P. I swear, I’m as sober as I’ve ever been. The mouse and the roaches all started moving in the direction of the arrow, toward Larry’s house, so I got up and followed, and that’s how I found him. He was unresponsive and I knew he needed lots of help right away, so that’s why I rang the school bell. I should’ve just phoned 911 and got an ambulance, but I was panicky. His foot looks awful. The doctors are saying that they might have to amputate it. They still haven’t got him out of the coma. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Latha remembers Clifford’s coma, and how she had pled with the French horn to get him out of it, and how it had worked, so she is not at all skeptical of Larry’s
chances for survival, nor even of Sharon’s bizarre tale about the cockroaches. A day later Sharon phones to say they’ve taken Larry by helicopter to a hospital in Little Rock. A week later Vernon phones to tell her that he is about to fetch Sharon from the airport in Harrison, on her return from Little Rock, where Larry is awake and recuperating, albeit minus one foot.

  If ever anyone, including you, has any occasion to doubt Sharon’s story of how she had been summoned to rescue Larry, it is eventually cleared up. Latha does not need to suspend her disbelief but is more charmed than surprised when one day she receives in the mail from the publisher a copy of a book called The Cockroaches of Stay More, which tells in hard print the same story, even with a picture of the arrow the cockroaches formed. She thinks that the book is very funny, but she is uneasy that the author has concocted it out of the happenings of this actual place and the doings of these actual people and insects and animals, living and dead. Is there no clear line between observation and imagination? Is good humor an excuse for defamation? She knows what Dawny’s answer to that question might be: you can’t be defamed if you aren’t famous.

  She does not show the book to Sharon and Larry. Upon Larry’s return from Little Rock, wearing a prosthesis in place of his riddled foot and walking with crutches that would be replaced by a cane, Sharon permits him to move in with her. He has agreed to lay off the hard stuff, which he was weaned from in the hospital and rehab. They convert the side room, which had been for the storage of bags of feed when Latha had her store there, and was later the bedroom for Sonora and later still was Dawny’s room until he went away to college, into a study for Larry, where he successfully completes Dreaming of the Future: the Life and Work of Daniel Lyam Montross. The book will be published eventually by a university press, and a copy given to Latha, who will be pleased to find her name in the acknowledgments, along with Dawny’s, whose Some Other Place. The Right Place. was a principal source of information. The book is dedicated to Sharon.

  Chapter forty-eight

  It is her one vanity: sometimes, probably not more often than twice a year, upon arising from her naked sleep she stands naked in front of a full-length mirror and studies herself. Of course there are wrinkles, and slackness of flesh, and the sinews that hold aloft her breasts have given up. Her posture is still very good, very erect; there is no beginning of the hump-back or stoop-shoulders that most old women have. Her hair is pure white, but she refuses to have it curled, although Sharon has offered to drive her to a beauty parlor in Harrison. She thinks “beauty parlor” is not only a joke but an oxymoron. She smiles, and yet the mirror does not smile back at her. She needs to see her teeth, to count them, to wonder if it’s time to have them cleaned. She knows, though, that they’re hers and all there, and straight, without any chips or crags. She may be a crone but she’s not a hag. She pops a peppermint into her mouth.

  She grants that she is slow. Her stride is no longer broad, and it takes her a while to bend over. But what’s the hurry? Time is something she has plenty of, and will always have in abundance. One of the good things about growing old is that her idle thoughts are no longer consumed with sexual fantasies, although sometimes, out of nostalgia, she will have a vision of one of those old fantasies. One of her original reasons for keeping so many cats, as Dawny has observed, is that she enjoys the sensuous spectacle of their coupling, an entertainment which still draws her casual attention, and she has never considered having any of the females spayed. She should’ve had Xenophon fixed, but the dog was so sweet and innocent-looking that she didn’t think he’d have any urges. She knew better after he found some stray bitch and impregnated her, but even after she’d had him fixed, the stray had kept coming around, and had birthed her litter of five right out back atop the compost pile. The newborn pups had not been afraid of her multitude of cats, and they all live in frolic-some affinity. She has not troubled herself to give them individual names, as she has named her cats; she assumes they name themselves in whatever language they speak to one another and to their father, who just makes a kind of howl-bark which sounds like he’s trying to disgorge something from his throat. “Fun,” she never tires of saying to him, “what are we going to do with you?”

  One bright warm day she is sitting in her living room reading one of Dawny’s novels, when her rocking chair begins to move ever so slightly across the floor, which is a sure sign that company is coming. At breakfast the coffeepot had rattled on the stove, which is another certain portent of the advent of company. So she is not surprised when she hears a barking, and then a response from a different dog, and then it seems all the dogs are barking, but from a distance. When they come back in view, she steps out into the breezeway to see why they aren’t attacking the man who is with them, and who has stopped to stare at her house. “Xenophon!” she calls to her dog, addressing him formally as she does only when he has done something wrong. “What in tarnation is all this commotion?” Then she addresses the man in the road. “Why, howdy, there,” she says to him.

  “Hello, ma’am,” the man answers, but no, it isn’t a man’s voice. It is a girl’s. Latha studies her. She is wearing an old felt hat such as the menfolk have always worn, and a man’s chambray work shirt and khaki trousers. She is barefoot, though, and girls her age don’t usually go barefooted nowadays. “You’re a gal,” Latha says. “For a minute I thought you were a man, dressed like that. Come on up here where I can get a good look at you.”

  The girl approaches, and at her heels she has her own dog, a small snow-white mongrel. Latha is sure she has seen that dog somewhere, but she can’t remember where. The dog reminds her of Rouser, the old dog of her childhood. But the girl doesn’t remind her of anyone. She is a very pretty girl despite the man’s old clothing she’s wearing.