Enduring
Authors: Donald Harington
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
M
y 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 military 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.
