Enduring (46 page)

“Not in this position,” he said.

“You want to get on top?” she said.

No, he said they couldn’t allow themselves to get carried away because in the sight of God they had no sanction. They would have to wait until holy matrimony had been performed. She wanted to know when he was going to propose to her, but he said he wasn’t sure of her answer. She said she would say yes, but only on one condition, that he come down off his religious high horse long enough to make love to her.

“Why is that so important to you, Latha? Eighteen years ago I had to take it from you; now you’re practically begging me for it. Are you trying to get me to prove that I can still do it?”

“Maybe I am,” she said.

“Well, then, I give you my word I can. Just as soon as I get that ring on your finger I’ll prove it to you.”

“How do you know you can? If you haven’t done it in eighteen years.”

“Not eighteen,” he said. “Fourteen.”

“Oh,” she said. “Who was that?”

“You,” he said.

Chapter thirty-six

H
e told her the whole story, or as much of it as he could remember, sitting there on her porch with a slab of beef she had draped over his black eye, which was almost comical in contrast to the heroism of the story, beginning with his breaking out of Fort Leavenworth military prison, stealing a car, driving it to Little Rock and locating the lunatic asylum, where he attempted to find out which of the seven austere brick blocks, each five floors in height and some of them with barred windows, contained Latha Bourne. At the reception desk for visitors he was turned away on the grounds that he was not a close relative, and that Latha Bourne was in E Ward where there would likely not be any communication even if he were allowed to see her, which he was not, and when he inquired how long she’d have to be there he was told that if he were a member of the immediate family he could make an appointment to discuss the case with one of the doctors, but he was not. He wandered around the stark buildings, trying to determine which one was E Ward. It was March twenty-third, almost Sonora’s fourth birthday, but he did not know that, as he did not know he had fathered a child by Latha. The spring day was warm and the windows of E Ward were open even if they were barred. From some of the windows women looked down at him and called down to him, either pleas for help or the most profane obscenities. He came to one window where the occupant was not speaking to him but was completely silent, an albino with white hair and pink eyes. He called up to her, asking if she knew Latha Bourne, but she just stuck her tongue out at him.

Up until this point he had only wanted to see Latha, hoping to find that she was alive and well, well enough perhaps to smile at him, sane enough to hear him tell her that he was going to wait for her to get well, however long it took. But now his bitter disappointment over not being able to see her at all gave him the sudden determination to get her out of there. He did not even consider that there was anything wrong with abducting her away from those foul hags who inhabited the place. But even given his talent for having broken out of a prison, he was at a loss for a means of freeing her. There’s a big difference between breaking out of a place and breaking into a place to free somebody else.

He drove to a hardware store and spent fifteen of his sixty-five dollars on some tools and rope, which he stashed in the trunk of his car. He parked on the edge of Fair Park, which contained not only the asylum but also an amusement park, where he whiled away the night, especially on the Ferris Wheel, from the top of which he could look out over the treetops and study the roof of E Ward.

At a quarter past one, long after the amusement park had shut down, he went back to his car to get his tools and rope, then crossed the grounds of the asylum, keeping to the shadows of the trees although there was no one in sight. He approached E Ward from the corner nearest the trees. He stood at that corner for a moment, listening, then he looped the rope over his shoulder and stuffed the pockets of his suit with his tools, and reached out and took hold of the drainpipe, a thick galvanized tin tube running up to the roof. He began to climb. At the third-floor level he paused and studied the bars on the windows. The ends of the bars were embedded in mortar; he did not have the tools to cut them or bend them. He had a file, but that would take too long. He continued climbing, past the fourth floor, past the fifth. The height did not dizzy him, but he was a little nervous about the drainpipe pulling loose from the mortar. It was an old building. He arrived at the roof and clung to its gutter; he kicked out with all his might and managed to swing one leg up and hook his heel on the rim of the gutter. Then he pulled himself up. He stood up on the sloping roof and climbed it, climbed over a gable and down to a vent on the other side of it, a louvered triangle. He took a screwdriver out of his pocket and pried around the crevices. He discovered there were three bolts in the vent—bolted on the outside, naturally, to keep anyone inside from tampering with them. He took a wrench from his pocket and removed them. Then he inserted the wedge end of his nail puller into the crack and forced the vent out. He laid it carefully on the roof, along with his coil of rope. Then feet-first he let himself down through the vent until his feet touched solid floor. From another pocket he took a candle and lighted it and discovered he was in a small attic. He crawled across the floor and located the hatch. It was latched—and probably locked—from below. But the hinges and screws were on this side. He removed them. The hatch dropped down and swung from the padlock on the underside. He slowly peered below. It was the end of a corridor; there was no ladder; it was a good twelve feet to the floor. He lowered himself to his full length, hanging on by his hands on the hatch, then he let go and dropped, flexing his knees to cushion his drop; even so the corridor rang out with the crash of his feet on the wooden floor. He waited, listening, for several minutes until he was convinced that nobody was coming to investigate the noise. He explored the corridor. Apparently all the rooms on this floor were storerooms. He went to the stairs and descended to the fourth floor. The rooms on this floor had names on them: “Hydrotherapy,” “Electroshock Therapy,” “x Ray.” He continued on down to the third floor. He was almost spotted by the night attendant, a big woman sitting at a desk. He retreated, back up to the fourth floor and along its length to another stairway. He went down this stairway to the third floor again, but the door at the foot of the stairway was locked. Yet once again, however, the attachments were on the side opposite that to which patients would have access. He took his screwdriver and removed the whole lock from the door. Then he found himself in a dimly lit corridor of many rooms. Each door had a nameplate with two names on it. “Ella Mae Henderson and Mrs. Ruby Bridges.” “Mrs. Marianne Templeton and Mrs. Dorothy Grace.” “Agnes Colton and Huberta Read.” “Mrs. Velma Lucaster and Georgene Masters.” “Jessica Tolliver and Latha Bourne.”

One more locked door, with a barred window set in it, and he had no tools for this one. His first impulse was to knock gently and see if Latha would open it from the inside, but he realized that this door would lock from the outside. And who would have the key? Why, that big woman down at the end of the corridor, of course. He moved quietly along the corridor, still firm in his resolve not to have any contact with anybody, but determined to club her over the head from behind if necessary. It was not necessary. The woman was asleep. He could hear her snores before he saw her. Her chin was embedded deeply into her chest as she sat in heavy slumber with her hands folded over her stomach. Under her right elbow he saw a ring of keys attached to her belt by a leather thong. He congratulated himself on having had the foresight to include a pair of shears in his purchase at the hardware store. He stole up to her and snipped the leather thong and grabbed the keys and stole away, without causing any irregularity in her heavy snoring. He returned to Latha’s room and tried many keys until he found the one that fit. He unlocked the door and opened it.
Now
, he thought. There were two cots, and that albino girl was asleep in one of them. Latha was asleep in the other. He closed the door behind him. He moved to Latha’s cot and knelt down beside it. Maybe, he said to himself, maybe I ought to just try and pick her up and carry her instead of waking her up. But he knew he would not be able to get the dead weight of her out of there. He would need some cooperation from her.

Gently he shook her shoulder and began whispering in her ear, “Latha, honey, it’s me. I’ve come to take you home. Wake up, sweetheart, and let’s get on back home.”

Instantly she was awake, and in her eyes was that look he had so often seen: that big-eyed look that was not astonishment nor startlement but a kind of hesitant surprise as if she were just waiting to see what the world was going to do to her, knowing it was going to do something and even wanting it to do something, and watching big-eyed to see what it would be.

Latha, on her porch among the lightning bugs, listening to her hero tell this story, realized,
This is where I came in
. She knew and remembered most of the rest of it now; how her friend Jessica Toliver had awakened too. How Every had tried to find a dress to put on Latha to cover her nakedness, and had settled for a blanket. How Jessica had asked him to take her too. How he had refused. Remembering this, Latha found herself wondering what might ever have become of Jessica. If the roommate who had replaced Latha couldn’t hum, it must have been awfully bleak and lonely for her.

Latha remembered all the things that this man had done to get her out of the asylum, down off the roof and into his car, she remembered the way he had covered all his tracks, although at the time she hadn’t understood what he was doing. At the time she had no idea who he was, and she was still incapable of speech except for the spontaneous utterance of “Free” when the car was finally on the road.

The road came back to her, how they had made their way across Arkansas to Memphis and on toward Nashville. She remembered being aware that they were not going in the direction of Stay More and now Every explained that he knew Stay More would be the first place the authorities would think to look for a woman escaped from the asylum and a man escaped from a military prison. He had considered taking her to a big city where no one knew either of them, perhaps even New York, but by the time he reached Nashville he was out of gas and nearly out of money and Nashville struck him as a big enough town to hide in, so he had checked into that cheap hotel and got himself a job washing dishes at a nearby café which allowed him to start bringing her some fine eats, and one evening he even took her to the pitcher show, the first one she’d ever seen. But he was still worried that the only word she could say was “free,” and he wondered if she would ever be able to talk to him. Although they slept together, and he was very desirous of her, as he put it, he decided that he should make no effort to have sex with her until she got better.

“Now this is the part that’s hardest for me to tell,” Every said. “Do you remember what you done early one morning to wake me up?”

She remembered, but it hadn’t been done to wake him up. Nodding her head, she smiled and said, “I meant it as a gift for you rescuing me. I didn’t know who you were. I didn’t know you were Every.”

“But had you ever done that for any other man?”

She shook her head.

“You did it like you’d had a lot of experience,” he said.

“Friends of mine at the asylum used to talk about it. They had different names for it. I used to try to imagine what it would feel like. But I had never done it before. Or since.”

“What’s the next thing you remember after that?”

“It got hard again, and you put it inside me. No, I was on top, and I kissed you a lot.”

“And—?”

“That’s all I remember.”

“You don’t remember passing out? You don’t remember going into a coma?”

She shook her head. She was not going to tell him that going over the mountain usually threw her into a faint.

He described in detail how she had swooned, and all the things he had tried to revive her, and how panicky he had become, thinking he’d killed her, She showed no signs of life, although he had the presence of mind to feel for her pulse, which was racing wildly. He thought maybe the best thing would be to fetch a doctor but if he did that they might hospitalize her and find out who she was. He was in such an agony of distress that he began looking wildly around the room, as if he could find some talisman to restore her. He felt so helpless that he was unconsciously searching for something outside himself, just as the drowning man looks for a board to clutch. By some accident of destiny, his glance fell upon the Gideon Bible on the bedstand. He picked it up, this drowning man’s board, and on the very first page he saw written,
For Help in a Time of Need, Read: James
1:6, 7;
Psalm
91;
Ephesians
vi: 10–18, etc. He found every one, and read them aloud, but it wasn’t much help. He was left, however, with a strong suspicion that God had something to do with this, and the only thing that would help would be to take the case directly to Him.

The problem was that Every had never been religious. For that matter Stay More was not a religious town. All the Ingledews had been atheists. There was no church as such in Stay More. Latha’s mother had sometimes gone to church with relatives in Demijohn. Every’s folks had been Baptists and had prayed and read the Bible but never gone to church, because there wasn’t one. The chaplain at Fort Leavenworth had told Every practically the whole life story of Jesus, without results.

But Every was desperate to try anything that might revive Latha. He knelt on the floor beside the bed and clasped his hands and lifted his voice loudly heavenward, at first asking God if He could hear him okay, but retracting that on the grounds that asking it might mean that he didn’t believe God could hear him and he
knew
God could hear him so he hoped God would listen careful while he begged to recover Latha from her swoon. He asked loudly, “Lord, what do I have to
do
for You to get her out of that trance?”