Enduring Read online

  Enduring

  By the Author

  The Cherry Pit (1965)

  Lightning Bug (1970)

  Some Other Place. The Right Place. (1972)

  The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (1975)

  Let Us Build Us a City (1986)

  The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989)

  The Choiring of the Trees (1991)

  Ekaterina (1993)

  Butterfly Weed (1996)

  When Angels Rest (1998)

  Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain) (2002)

  With (2004)

  The Pitcher Shower (2005)

  Farther Along (2008)

  Enduring (2009)

  Donald Harington

  ENDURING

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2009 Donald Harington

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-119-6

  For Latha

  “In the next place, I attentively examined what I was and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.”

  Descartes, Discourse on Method, IV

  “Take the boy to you: he so troubles me,

  ’Tis past enduring.”

  Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale II, 1

  “All lovers live by longing, and endure:

  Summon a vision and declare it pure.”

  Roethke, “The Vigil”

  Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Chapter twenty-six

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Chapter thirty

  Chapter thirty-one

  Chapter thirty-two

  Chapter thirty-three

  Chapter thirty-four

  Chapter thirty-five

  Chapter thirty-six

  Chapter thirty-seven

  Chapter thirty-eight

  Chapter thirty-nine

  Chapter forty

  Chapter forty-one

  Chapter forty-two

  Chapter forty-three

  Chapter forty-four

  Chapter forty-five

  Chapter forty-six

  Chapter forty-seven

  Chapter forty-eight

  Chapter forty-nine

  Chapter fifty

  About the Author

  Chapter one

  My daddy died on a day in January so cold, colder than a banker’s heart, that he lay preserved from spoilage for nearly three weeks before he was discovered. It was his miserliness that saved his body: he’d had a habit every night before bedtime of turning off the furnace and keeping himself covered with several old quilts. So he hadn’t yet begun to stink of death when he was found. George Dinsmore, driving along the road a good ways down the mountain from Dad’s place, happened to look up and notice that no smoke was rising from the furnace’s flue pipe, and he drove up there to investigate. Nobody hereabouts locks their doors of a night, so George had no trouble getting into the house, where he found my daddy smiling real big but clearly of a bluish pallor that could mean only one thing: His old friend Hank Ingledew had taken leave of this life. George whipped out his cell phone and called the governor’s office in Little Rock to speak personally with the governor, my brother Vernon, and tell him that his father was no longer alive. And then, instead of phoning me, he drove on down to my house, in the heart of what’s left of the village, where I’d been living for several years with my husband Larry, to tell me face-to-face the solemn news. “Eighty-six is a good age to go,” George said. “I just hope I can last that long.”

  For the rest of the day I was busy making phone calls, keeping busy in order to keep from feeling guilt or shame because I hadn’t been to visit my daddy once in the three weeks he lay dead, or for that matter the three weeks before; I hadn’t seen him since Christmas, when Larry and I stopped by his house to give him his present (one more shirt) and listen to his same old poor excuse for not wanting to join us or anybody for Christmas dinner. I am the only one of his six kids still living in this town, so it behooved me to make the funeral arrangements and, once a date had been set, get in touch with my four sisters, scattered around the country, mostly California, and then to call my brother Vernon, Governor Ingledew, and let him know the date and time. I made a few more phone calls, to the few residents of the town and county who might be interested, and only after I had called everyone I could think of did I realize that I hadn’t called the most important resident, my grandmother, who was my daddy’s mother-in-law. Why hadn’t I called her first? Because it was no secret she’d never lost any love on her son-in-law? Because I was afraid she might even express gladness over his death? Because I didn’t want to bother her, to make her have to get up and answer the phone? Surely not because I had simply forgotten her? No, after discussing my negligence with Larry, I decided that I was simply reluctant to give Gran this memento mori. After all, she had held out for a hundred and six years and, although she had been known to declare that she would outlive us all, she didn’t need to let her thoughts dwell on the demise of the last Ingledew of his generation, and he the last male Ingledew except for his son Vernon. But when I phoned her she took the news well, without any great expression of either sorrow or elation. I offered to give her a ride to the cemetery. “Sharon,” she said, “I can walk.”

  Which she did, although it was a couple of miles, and still so cold she had to bundle up in her best coat and scarf. The funeral was fairly well attended. The newspapers had given the obituary unusual space, not because my daddy was important or even historic (he had installed the first television sets in the county) but because he was the father of the popular Democratic governor. During the Second World War, he had been an officer in the U.S. Navy, so there were mili
tary honors at his funeral, with a flag draped over the coffin, and some sailors firing off their rifles. Vernon was just a little late, riding up in a state trooper’s car. In front of everyone he gave me a hug, first, before he gave hugs to his other four sisters. We six children of the deceased huddled for a while to argue quietly, because Patricia, who had joined the Pentecostal church in Kansas City, had imported a minister from Harrison and had been up all night preparing the basic facts for the eulogy, and she wanted to be sure that we approved of the selections of scripture for him to read. Eva, the second oldest, had joined a Church of Scientology in Van Nuys, California, and said that since Daddy had already entered a new life, her creed didn’t believe in funerals, only in memorial services. Latha, the oldest of we sisters, named after our wise, ancient grandmother, and like her in many ways although she’d moved to San Francisco and married a Buddhist thirty years before, and was dressed all in white because the Buddhists believe the family should wear white to funerals, reminded us that Dad, like all the Ingledews of every generation running back as far as anyone knew, maybe even into the seventeenth century, did not believe in God, and therefore would not want a Christian service. June and Vernon and I nodded our heads in solemn agreement, and Vernon said, “But he didn’t believe in Siddhartha Gautama either.” Vernon, in his political, persuasive voice, suggested that we might as well let the Pentecostal preacher go ahead and deliver the eulogy, since Patricia had put so much trouble into it, and that he personally had no objection to the singing of the religious hymn, “Farther Along,” in fact it was to be expected, but that there should be no other religious ceremony at the graveside, no prayers, no preaching.

  So that was it. The Pentecostal minister unfolded some sheets of paper and read aloud the bare facts of Daddy’s life: John Henry Ingledew was born in 1920 in Stay More to Bevis Ingledew and Emelda Duckworth Ingledew; he was known to everyone as “Hank,” and attended the Stay More public school. At the age of twenty, he married Sonora Twichell and to them were born the following children, etc. His wife had preceded him to glory by forty-five years. He made no mention of Daddy’s running away from home at the age of ten to join the circus, or of his keeping company with the legendary peddler Eli Willard at the time of Willard’s death or of Willard’s gift to him of the magic chronometer wristwatch to keep for his son who had not yet been imagined, let alone conceived or born. Such fanciful facts of Daddy’s life, and there were dozens more—I wondered if Patricia had mentioned any of them to the preacher—seemed to belong to a time and a way of life that no longer existed in the modern world, and this preacher’s eulogy made Daddy appear dull and ordinary and safe. Finally the man folded up his sheets of paper, and looked at me and said, “Sisters, and Your Excellency, don’t mourn for your father. He has gone to a much better place. God has called him home.” He was about to go on, but I had raised my finger to my lips, and so had Vernon, and so had June. The preacher stared at us silently for a long moment before it dawned on him why we were shushing him. Then he looked pained, and was uncertain what to do next. There was a long silence. It was Gran who began singing first, but it took only the second syllable of “along” before most everybody else joined in, and sang that hymn which has been sung at so many funerals in this cemetery that it might as well stand as the civic anthem for the town, or what is left of it. There isn’t much room left in the little cemetery but I do believe that when my time comes there will be room for me near that double headstone of Daddy and Momma, and that if anyone at all is remaining, having not failed to heed the injunction to stay more, they will raise their voices in song to express the certainty that farther along we’ll know all about, farther along we’ll understand why.

  The funeral dinner was held at my place. Where else would have been suitable? Not everybody stayed for it, but those who did expected the traditional groaning board of potluck dishes, to which all of them had contributed something, at least bread or salad or pie, and there was plenty of fried chicken and of course the Ingledew ham that George still turned out at the plant down the valley. Extra card tables had been set up in the kitchen to accommodate all the food, and the main part of the house, which had once been the store and post office Latha Bourne Dill had run as storekeeper and postmistress, was still as much like the original as I could keep it, and contained for this occasion enough chairs to seat about half the guests; the others had to eat on the porch in the cold, sitting wherever they could find a spot or standing up. Every last one of them, before they left, felt obliged to give me a hug or at least shake my hand, and say what a good man Daddy had been, and how we would all miss him terribly.

  After all of them had gone, we children of the deceased sat around a while and visited for at least an hour before the governor had to get on back to the capital. Larry obligingly took the other four husbands into his study to watch a professional football game on TV. I was nervous, expecting that one or more of my siblings would take me to task for the fact that Daddy had remained dead without being discovered for three weeks, but nobody mentioned that, possibly because each of them also felt some guilt: Why hadn’t any of them called him? We did discuss our various reasons for not keeping in close touch with him. He wasn’t easy to chat with. Eva claimed that she couldn’t even understand him any more. “The older he got, the worse he started sounding like an old hillbilly, talking in that outmoded country-boy dialect that nobody speaks anymore. What are ‘lashins and lavins’? He’d say something like, ‘I just got lashins and lavins of time to beguile.’ What does that mean?” None of the other sisters knew; Vernon said he’d heard Daddy say something like that but wasn’t sure what it meant. I offered the opinion that possibly it was just his way of saying that he had a lot of time on his hands.

  Patricia raised the subject of how Daddy was found, with a big smile on his face, and each of us conjectured about the possible reasons for that. June, who was named after her mother Sonora but referred to as Sonora Junior, from which the “June” derived, said she was sure that Daddy in his last breath of life had caught sight of his long-departed wife waiting for him. Vernon scoffed. “Waiting where?” he said. “Heaven? No, and I’m not so sure he would have been happy to see her if he had.” Patricia said that of course it was commonly believed that in the last moment of existence one’s entire life flashes before one’s eyes, and maybe Daddy was amused, or at least pleased, to have that fast-forward—or fast-backward—look at his whole story. Eva insisted that the smile was proof of the Scientology belief that we enter a new life at death, and that Daddy was smiling at the prospect of his new life. Vernon told us about the Etruscan sarcophagi, on which sculptural images of the dead usually have big smiles on their faces. From my training as a nurse, I offered the opinion that the smile might just be a kind of reflex as rigor mortis sets in. In hospitals I had seen several people who died with smiles on their faces.

  “Did Daddy love us?” Patricia abruptly posed that rhetorical question, and each of us (Vernon had to leave) had a chance to offer variations on the opinion that although Daddy hadn’t been very good at expressing affection, he had treasured each and every one of us. When it was my turn to concur, Patricia said “But you were the last girl before Daddy finally got the boy that he always wanted, and I know for a fact, since I was the next-to-last, that Daddy didn’t like having so many girls, and he probably held it against us.” Latha agreed, pointing out that even though she was the oldest, he had made his dislike of females obvious long before I was born. But I had to point out, as they seemed to have forgotten, that all Ingledew men, through countless generations, were congenitally shy toward females, and it wasn’t that Daddy had actively disliked us, he was just uncomfortable in our presence. “Amen,” two of them chorused, and that was the end of our discussion of Daddy.

  There was one other topic of discussion, as long as all of us (except Vernon) were still together, and who knew when we would ever be together again with a chance to talk? What were we going to do with Gran? Most women not nearly her age
who aren’t dead are confined to bed in a nursing home. But Gran insisted on staying at the old dogtrot log cabin which her husband’s grandfather had built and where she had lived ever since the post office closed down and she left this house to me. Vernon had insisted on paying to make a number of improvements, “modernizations,” to the dogtrot, including plumbing, electricity, telephone, television, a fully equipped kitchen with refrigeration, garbage disposal, and even a handy microwave. Gran had resisted the idea of having a computer, not because she was afraid to learn how to use it but because she didn’t have room for it, and its printer and scanner, etc. She still raised chickens, for their eggs, and had only recently given up her latest cow (named Mathilda like all of the cows she’d ever had) because she couldn’t comfortably squat to milk her. Vernon had tried for years to persuade her to move into a very nice new “assisted living facility” in the county seat, Jasper (she hated the name nursing home because she had no use for nurses, except me, but me not as a nurse, just a friend and, as my sisters knew too well, a favorite granddaughter).