Enduring Read online

  “Doesn’t she have anything wrong with her?” her namesake Latha wanted to know. My sister Latha herself was now sixty-six years old and was decrepit in ways her grandmother had never been. I said that physically Gran did not have a single complaint, although she had never permitted me to use my stethoscope on her, so I could only assume that her heart and lungs were as strong as they always seemed to be.

  “But mentally?” Eva said. “Isn’t she showing any signs of Alzheimer’s or just plain memory loss?”

  I said that I, in my fifty-fifth year, the youngest of the sisters, had worse problems with my mind than our grandmother did. Her only mental problem was that she still had not fully recovered from the loss of her long-time companion, a big shaggy dog named Xenophon, called simply “Fun” or sometimes “Funny,” who had simply disappeared some years before, at an age which in human years would have exceeded that of his mistress.

  “But doesn’t she still feed a bunch of cats?” Patricia wanted to know.

  “Dozens,” I said. Our grandmother had always had an over-population of felines on the premises, and had never thought of having them fixed by a vet.

  June wanted to know, “Hasn’t she ever even fallen down?”

  “Yes,” I had to admit. “Last summer she was out picking blackberries and tripped over an old barbed-wire fence—anybody would have tripped on it—and fell hard. She didn’t break anything, but her knee hit a rock and was cut open and skinned up, and she had to let me put three stitches in it. It was the only time she has ever allowed me to treat her.”

  “She’s been lucky,” Latha said. “But how long can that go on? How long can she endure? Living alone like that….”

  I pointed out that Vernon had had installed, against her wishes, something called “Lifeline,” a system of buttons in each of the rooms of her cabin, and all she had to do was push a button to summon aid…and also set off an alarm in my house and the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. And I still phoned her at least twice a week, not to check up on her but just to chat.

  “But,” Patricia said, “yesterday June and I tried to visit her, and we couldn’t even find her house! The road is all choked with trees and brambles, and George told us it isn’t possible to get a vehicle there. What if she needed to call for an ambulance, and it couldn’t reach her?”

  This question was addressed to all the sisters but Patricia stared at me as she asked it, so I felt obliged to reply, “She wants it that way. She wanted the road to disappear. The few of us who are her best friends know how to reach the cabin on foot. The rest of the world can go fuck itself, as she likes to say.”

  Patricia said. “She must get awfully lonely.”

  “Not at all,” I said, and named those best friends: myself, George, Bending Bear the Osage Indian, and Day and Diana Stoving-Whittacker. “Trust me, she is the most unlonely person I’ve ever known.”

  Eva asked, “What do you chat about? Does she ever talk to you about her life?”

  “Not unless I ask her something, and I don’t usually do that.”

  Latha said, “You know, just for the record, you ought to write down anything she tells you about her life. It would make a book.”

  The sisters eagerly nodded their heads in agreement, and Eva said, “I’ll bet there are all sorts of things that have happened to her in those hundred and six years that nobody knows about.”

  June said, “Mother once told me that when she was a young woman Gran was locked away for several years at the state hospital. That’s the nuthouse, right? What was she doing there? She’s one hundred percent sane. One hundred and ten percent.”

  Patricia said, “Ask her about the state hospital.”

  Eva said, “Ask her about those seven missing years after she escaped from the nuthouse before she showed up here again.”

  Latha said, “Ask her about everything.”

  “It will give me something to do,” I allowed.

  Chapter two

  My earliest memory, the first prosaic awareness of consciousness that manages to keep itself in the cluttered store of my head, is of walking at the age of three down the main road of Stay More, holding the hand of my grandmother, the heroine of this book, who was giving me a guided tour of the little village or what was left of it. I knew that my grandmother was important, not just because she owned the building called the store and P.O. where people had once got groceries and letters, but also because she seemed to know everything about anything and could tell me the story behind every building we passed. Although I had been born in California, I had no memory of that place, which, according to my grandmother, was under a curse placed upon it by my ancestor, Jacob Ingledew, the founder of Stay More, who lost his firstborn son in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of western pioneers.

  “That was my first memory, and you were in it,” I said to Gran one day in February, not long after Daddy’s funeral (his will had left all he had—the house—in equal shares to his six children, but although the house was listed with a real estate agent and for that matter is still listed, nobody has bought it). “Do you remember your first memory?” It was my way of prompting her into the beginning of the story of her life. I knew she had been born in Stay More, in a cabin on the east side of Ledbetter Mountain (my house is at the foot of the south side of the same mountain). I knew that her father, Saultus Bourne, was a poor farmer just barely raising enough to feed his family, and her mother, Fannie Swain Bourne, although descended from one of the original settlers of Stay More, had come from an even poorer family, and had given her daughter Latha only her good looks and her engaging smile (but, oddly, had not given these to her other two daughters, Latha’s sisters Barbara and Mandy).

  Gran smiled, as she often did, that Swain smile (she did not, to the best of my knowledge, wear dentures.) “My first memory, huh?” She stared out across the road as if she could see all the way to the Bourne cabin, which no longer stood, but would not have been visible from the Dill dogtrot if it had, what with all the wilderness she had allowed to grow up around her. “I was three years old. I was walking down the main road of Stay More, holding the hand of my grandmother, who was giving me a guided tour of the little village or what was left of it.”

  I was more puzzled than annoyed, and wondered if indeed she was verging into Alzheimer’s. “No, Gran, that’s what I was just telling you. I want to know what your first memory is.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “One more thing that you and I have in common. The difference was that I walked you from south to north on the main road; my grandmother walked me from north to south, and the first building we came to was the same building which I was destined to take possession of eventually as my store and post office, your house now, where the tour I gave you as a child ended up. In the time of my grandmother, it was Jerram’s general store, one of four in the town, but I had never seen a store before and didn’t know what it was. ‘Is a store where you get stories?’ I asked Grandma, who was a great storyteller. She laughed, and said ‘Why no, but a right smart of stories sure do get told at stores.’ She didn’t take me into Jerram’s. She showed me each of the other buildings and told me what they were: two doctor’s offices, blacksmith shops, a dentist’s, and the gristmill. I had never seen any buildings other than our cabin and our barn and our outhouse. Seeing all these buildings so close together must have been like your first view of Chicago. I don’t remember what thoughts were running through my little head, but I must have been struck all of a heap at this display of metropolitan goings-on. We came to the biggest house in town, which was Ingledew’s hotel, that actually had a second story on top of the first! And across from it Ingledew’s big general store, also two stories.

  It was the last of all these buildings that she took me into, the first time I’d ever been inside a commercial establishment. She led me to the candy showcase and gave me a penny, which might have been all she had to her name, and told me to pick out one piece of candy. She had to leave me alone during the long, long time that
it took me to make up my mind, trying to choose among the gum drops, chocolate bars, jelly squares, licorice sticks, mint kisses, cinnamon balls, caramels, cream wafers, marshmallow bananas, rock candy, bonbons, cracker jacks and I don’t know what. It seems hours went by, but my grandmother was lost in chitchat with some other ladies. Finally I picked an I-don’t-know-what, a chocolaty thing with nuts inside, and pointed to it, and Mr. Ingledew fetched it out of the case for me, and I handed over my penny. I had never tasted chocolate before, and I can remember it to this day. Then while I greedily consumed it I just wandered around the store, looking at all the stuff. They sold clothes and shoes and dry goods and hardware and all kinds of groceries. They even sold toys (play pretties we called them), among which were figures of small, pudgy people that were called, I would soon learn, babies, although I had never seen one before. I searched for Grandma to ask her to buy me one of the babies, and I found her among a group of women who were holding and admiring a real live baby. They let me get a close look at it, and even to touch it. It looked just like those figures of babies I had been admiring except that it moved and looked at you with real eyes. I asked my grandmother if babies came from stores. She laughed harder than when I’d asked about stories coming from stores. But she never did tell me where babies come from.”

  Little Latha would not hear an acceptable answer to that question for several more years. As she squeezed from infancy into childhood, she would keep asking that question, whenever she saw a baby or whenever a baby crossed her mind, even when her sisters Barb and Mandy allowed her eventually to hold one of those figures of babies that they had come into possession of, which they called a “dollbaby.” When she asked her sisters where babies come from, they said that this one had belonged to Eunice Whitter and before her to Violet Duckworth, and little Latha said yes but not a dollbaby, one of those babies that really cry and look alive. Barb, the older sister, said that babies come from under a gooseberry bush. There was only one gooseberry bush, out behind the cabin, and Latha explored it thoroughly and watched it for weeks and weeks without ever seeing any sign of a baby. Her sister Mandy agreed with her that that was a pretty dumb notion, and she knew for a fact that you could order babies from Sears Roebuck the same way you could order anything else. Latha waited until the next time a catalogue from Sears Roebuck arrived in the mail (the previous issue had been used up as toilet paper in the outhouse). She hunted and hunted through the pictures in it until finally, way off toward the end, she found two pages covered with babies! She showed it to Mandy but Mandy hadn’t learned to read yet so they had to take it to Barb. Barb read aloud but slowly the words about “double riveted patent joint hip and knees, fine bisque head, pasted wig, comes in three sizes,” and Barb said, “These here aint but dollbabies. There’s not no real baby. As usual, Mandy don’t know what she’s talkin about. Real babies are found under gooseberry bushes.” Latha waited as long as she could stand it, checking that gooseberry bush nearly every day, until finally she asked her mother why their gooseberry bush didn’t have any babies under it. Her mother laughed and said that must be some old wives’ tale.

  “But where did I come from, Momma?” Latha wanted to know. Her mother explained that she had been brought by a granny-woman, not Grandma Bourne, bless her heart, but a woman who lived way back up in the hills and had to be called whenever a baby was expected, and who brought the baby in her tote-sack. Some folks who had no modesty but had money could afford to call in Doc Swain or Doc Plowright, who brought the baby in their doctor bag, but most ordinary folks like us has to make do with the granny-woman, who’s just as good as them doctors anyhow and don’t embarrass the mother.

  “But where did the granny-woman get me?” Latha asked.

  Her mother said, “In the barn, of course.”

  Latha told her sisters what their mother had said. Barb allowed as how the barn might be more private and protected than the gooseberry bush. Mandy said that probably the baby came from Sears Roebuck anyhow but the postman couldn’t stuff it into the mailbox so he left it in the barn. The Bourne’s barn wasn’t much of a structure, just big enough for one cow and enough hay to feed her through the winter. Latha gave it a good looking-over, and found several places where hens had laid their eggs in the straw, and Latha gathered these up and took them to the kitchen. But there was one place where a hen had made a nest, with several eggs in it, which she was sitting on. The hen pecked Latha’s hand when she tried to reach under it to get the eggs, so Latha left those alone. Latha was watching closely on the day when the eggs hatched, and she studied all the baby chicks. She wondered if a woman would have to sit on a big egg in the barn for the baby to be born. Or did the granny-woman just find the baby in the hay and take it to the mother in the house? Latha spent a lot of time in the barn, and by and by their cat, Jasmine, gave birth to a litter of seven kittens, and Latha watched each one of them come out of the cat’s bottom. Latha was taken aback because it looked like Jasmine was doing her business, only making kittens instead of do-do. But it was unmistakable that both chicken babies and cat babies were born in the barn, so it stood to reason that people babies came from the barn too, and thus her mother had been correct.

  “We caint feed them kitties,” her mother announced, “so I reckon Paw had best put ’em in a tow sack and drown ’em.”

  Latha had to pester her sisters, her mother, her grandmother and finally her father to find out just what this meant and why it was necessary.

  “I’ll wait till they’re weaned afore I do it,” her father declared, and Latha had to pester her sisters, her mother, and her grandmother to find out what “weaned” meant. Granny Bourne explained that it’s bad luck to kill a cat, unless the cat is drowned in a running stream. Latha tried to puzzle out just what “luck” means, and how it is that if you do certain things a certain way it will affect the outcome of your life. She had serious dreams and some bad dreams trying to get it all straight. When the kittens were weaned but before her father could put them in a tow sack, Latha snatched the prettiest one and hid it in a dark corner of the hay in the barn where each day she took it something to eat. She gave it a name, Cutie-Pie Face. Its mother Jasmine found it and bit it on the back of the neck and tried to bring it back to the nest, and Latha tried to explain to Jasmine why she had to keep the kitten hidden. This went on for several days, Latha hiding the kitten up in a dark corner of the hayloft and Jasmine dragging it back down, until finally Jasmine just seemed to give up or maybe got it through her head that her other kitties had been drowned and Cutie-Pie Face was all she had left. So Jasmine took to sleeping up in the dark corner of the hayloft where Latha kept her kitten.

  If any more proof were needed that babies come from the barn, the day came when Mathilda, their cow, had her calf in the barn, and Latha spied from her hiding place while her daddy pulled the calf out of Mathilda. While she was convinced that babies did indeed come from the barn, she also had seen that they had come from inside their mother, even the eggs of the hen, and she did not understand what the granny-woman brought in her bag…unless the mother actually gave birth in the barn and then the granny-woman put the baby in a sack and took it to the house. That made sense. And it left only the question, how did the babies get inside of the mother in the first place? Did the mother have to eat something?

  The day finally came when Latha had to tell her mother that she knew she had been inside of her at one time but she would like to know how she got there. Her mother told her that she was much too young to think about such things, and she ought to think about something else.

  She had no trouble finding something else to think about anyhow. The world was full of wonders. She needed to know why the sun came up in the morning and where it went when it went down. She needed to find out why the sunlight would come through the window but not through the wall. She wondered what happened to the water in the damp clothes that she had to hang in the sunshine on washday, how the sun made them dry. And where did the water go? All on her own she figu
red out that the water which she drank came back out of her when she went to the outhouse. But what made it yellow and smelly? There were many yellow flowers which smelled nice, and she figured out that they were yellow and smelled nice in order to attract bees and other bugs, but that wasn’t why her pee was yellow and smelled not like flowers at all.

  She was full of questions. She had some trouble understanding the difference between “yesterday” and “tomorrow”, but she had “today” worked out. She understood the difference between morning and evening but had not quite worked out just why it had to be dark at night. She knew what caused it: The sun had disappeared. But was it so that you would go to sleep? Were all the other living things asleep? Did the trees sleep at night? She knew that sometimes the sun stopped shining not because it was night but because there were clouds covering it up and these clouds were full of water that sometimes but not often rained. She loved rain. She would have been just as happy if it rained all the time. But thinking about it, she realized that the reason she liked rain so much was that it was so different from the constant sun. Once she saw a great rainbow that filled the whole sky when the sun came out while it was raining. The colors dazzled her. She grasped that the sun was making the colors, but the colors couldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the rain, so the rain and the sun were not enemies but friends who helped each other. We appreciate the sun because it dries things after they’re wet, but we appreciate the rain because it keeps things from being so dry. Her daddy was always complaining about the lack of rain.