Enduring (51 page)

When the canning factory closed, Latha offered Dawny an after-school job as her janitor, stockboy and general factotum. He was getting to be a big boy at eleven, and he saved the tiny salary Latha gave him until he had two dollars to order a “hectograph,” or gelatin board for spirit duplication, the remote ancestor of the copying machine, and with this he established a newspaper, which he chose to call
The Stay Morning Star
, a weekly of local news, such as it was: who was visiting whom on Sunday afternoons, which servicemen came home on furlough, and what the scores were of the baseball games between Allies and Axis. Latha was proud of Dawny for his little newspaper, and gave him the use of the side room that had been Sonora’s for his newspaper office. She also ran ads for her store in each issue, which cost her twenty-five cents per page and helped Dawny purchase his newsprint, which was getting in short supply because of the war.

Dawny’s personal hero since the beginning of the war was Ernie Pyle, who was a war correspondent, nationally syndicated, whose column appeared regularly in the “real” newspaper, the
Jasper Disaster
. Latha sold that paper in her store; it cost five cents but she refused to take Dawny’s copy out of his salary. Dawny always turned first to Ernie Pyle’s column and sometimes asked Latha if there was a word he didn’t understand, which wasn’t too often.

Dawny explained to Latha that he wanted his newspaper to be impartial, a fancy word in his expanding vocabulary, and Latha admired him for that (both his vocabulary and his impartiality). One day somebody threw a rock through the window of Dawny’s newspaper office, with a note tied to it. It was a small pane of glass and Dawny offered to pay her to have it replaced. “One of the Allies must’ve tossed it,” he said, and showed her the note, which said “Name eny names and your dead.” Latha suggested showing it to Miss Jerram to see if she could recognize the handwriting, but Dawny explained that the Allies and the Axis agreed on one thing very strongly: they would not involve any grown-ups in their activities, a circumstance which Dawny was violating by explaining the circumstance to Latha. Latha always read every word in
The Stay Morning Star
, not just because she was proud of Dawny but because it was a fairly reliable source of information and even gossip about all her neighbors. There was only one time Dawny made an error, not intentionally. Each week’s newspaper had a page listing of who had been visiting whom. It was a custom on Sunday afternoons for people to honor the Lord’s Day of Rest by visiting with their friends, and Latha admired Dawny’s diligence in asking everybody who they had been visiting with the previous Sunday, and reporting it in his newspaper. But he reported that a certain man had visited a certain young woman whose husband was overseas in the Army; the man had told Dawny, “She’s jist my little niece, you know.” But Dawny’s reporting of that fact created a scandal, and when Dawny revealed his hurt and puzzlement to Latha, she tried to explain to him, “He’s not really her uncle. They’re not even any kin to each other, which is unusual for any two people in this town.”

Just as a big newspaper which appears to support the Democrats might actually back a Republican candidate, it was hard for Dawny, being a member of the Axis, to maintain complete impartiality toward the Allies. One front-page story was headlined,
ALLIES STAKEOUT INNOCENT HERMIT UNDER SUSPICION AS NAZI SPY
. The story reported that the Allies were convinced that Dan, being a “furriner,” was possibly a German and therefore likely a Nazi who was spying on his American neighbors. It struck Latha as simply one more in a long list of possible “explanations” of Dan, no more creditable than the idea he was a gangster in hiding. This time, as Dawny explained to her, he was inspired by the example of Ernie Pyle to name actual names, and he named the three ringleaders of the Allies, Sugrue “Sog” Alan, Larry Duckworth, and Jim John Whitter.

Thus, when a day after the paper appeared, Dawny was found unconscious in the newspaper office with a broken arm, a blackened eye and other bruises, it wasn’t hard for Latha to guess who the culprits were.

Chapter forty

D
oc Swain patched Dawny up but the boy had to wear a plaster cast on his arm for nearly two months. Fortunately it was his left arm, not the arm that held the hand that held his tools for writing the newspaper and doing his duties around the store, although Latha offered him a vacation until the cast came off.

She was indignant to discover that Dawny’s aunt and uncle, with whom he lived, were not indignant over the episode of the brutality committed upon Dawny. Even Sonora, who had always been teasing toward Dawny if not openly disparaging, thought it was a terrible deed that should not go unpunished, and she urged her father, who was perfectly capable of it, to demolish the Allied ringleaders, especially Sog Alan, who kept on flirting with Sonora even though she was married and the mother of two children and expecting a third.

Jim John Whitter was the baby brother of Latha’s erstwhile friend Dorinda Whitter, from the poor family of Whitters who had already produced one thug in the oldest son Ike, who had been lynched. Of the three ringleaders, only Larry Duckworth was from a halfway respectable family, since his father had owned the canning factory, but Larry had a mean streak in him. As for the Alans, Sog’s sister Betty June was just a few instances away from becoming the town hussy, and the parents were not among Latha’s friends or favorite customers. She knew them well enough that they recognized her when she knocked on their door and asked, “Did you know that your son broke Dawny’s arm?”

“Dawny who?” said Mrs. Alan, but Sog himself came up behind her and said to Latha, “What business of your’n is it?”

“I’d like to break your face,” she said to him. “What did you do it with?”

“My ball bat,” Sog said. “He tattled on us in that there newspaper of his’n.”

Latha addressed his mother. “The boy, who’s not half the size of your son, has to wear a plaster cast. Do you plan to punish your son?”

“What business of your’n is it?” the mother said.

From that day forward, Latha refused to sell anything to Sog. If he needed a bag of Bull Durham and some papers to roll himself a cigarette, he’d have to walk to Parthenon to buy them. Latha couldn’t understand why Every didn’t simply give the scalawag a sound beating. Every said it wasn’t really any of their business.

Except for that, Every was a perfect husband, once he started using the Lava to clean the grease off. He did all the chores around the house without being asked, let alone nagged. He kept the water bucket filled and on Saturday nights he filled the washtub with a mixture of cold well water and steaming hot water off the stove. He went out of his way to gather wildflowers to make into bouquets for her. Night after night he would massage her tired feet, and each night at bedtime he would lovingly brush her hair. He had overcome his habit of saying grace before each meal, so she didn’t mind that he still read the Bible regularly. Sometimes on Sunday mornings he seemed restless at about the time he would have been giving a sermon; it reminded her of an amputee who still feels twitchings in a missing arm. It had taken her a while to convince him that there was nothing sinful about sleeping in the nude on a hot summer’s night, so they both slept in the raw, and in time she stopped having sexual dreams because she didn’t need them.

One by one, all the loafers who had once congregated on Latha’s store porch shifted their venue to the shade trees at Every’s garage where, she learned, he fixed not only vehicles but also hearts and souls, freely dispensing the sort of wisdom that a modern day counselor would be paid outrageous amounts for. Everybody loved him, and even women (no,
especially
women, now that most of the younger menfolk were overseas fighting the War) were known to bring their personal problems to Every for his sage advice. He told Latha that at that Lipscomb Bible College in Tennessee he had taken courses in counseling and psychology, and all he was doing was putting it to good use. It gave him something to think about while his hands were busy tinkering with the cars; he made an analogy to the barber who listens to his customer’s woes while he cuts hair.

For only one reason, Latha was glad to see the loafers vacate the store porch in favor of Every’s garage: they still bought their plugs of Brown’s Mule and twists of Days Work at her store, but they chewed the stuff at Every’s, and spat the stuff at Every’s, and she was no longer required to mop the porch floor at the end of each day, although most of the spitters had been accurate enough to clear the edge of the porch. Inside the store was posted a sign,
KINDLY DO NOT EXPECTORATE UPON THE FLOOR
, but she was not convinced that all the Stay Morons had the word in their vocabularies. Someone had expectorated at the sign.

When Every wasn’t tied up with a customer, or whenever he could turn a job over to his assistant Lawlor Coe, he would step next door into the old Dill dogtrot house, built by his grandfather and still sturdy and tight after years of desertion, and in the course of time he prepared the dogtrot, his boyhood home, to become a residence for Latha and himself. It was spacious enough, two large rooms that also contained attics and spare spaces, not unlike the old New England colonial home that was divided into hall and parlor, the latter for living and meeting and sometimes sleeping, the former for sleeping and cooking and eating. And the two halves were separated by an open-air porch, the so-called dogtrot which, in this case, would become a cat-trot. Latha and Every had nothing against dogs, and would eventually acquire one, but when they first moved into their new old home, the many cats came with Latha, and not only filled the cat-trot between the two halves but also could be seen festooning the roof.

Latha offered her previous house to Sonora, who had been living with her babies at Bevis Ingledew’s, Hank’s parents’ place. But since Dawny had taken over one room for his newspaper office, and the store took up most of the building, there really wasn’t enough room, so Sonora remained with her in-laws, although she visited Latha practically every day with her babies, who, as soon as they were old enough to know what “Gran” meant, doted on Latha. The third child was also a girl, which elicited a one word v-mail letter from Hank, wherever his ship was, the word identical to ship but with a
t
instead of a
p
. Sonora was running out of names for the girls, so she simply called the new baby after herself.

Editor Dawny saw nothing wrong with a third girl, and ran a front-page headlined story in
The Stay Morning Star
on the birth of Sonora, Jr., as he called her. That cheered up Sonora, Sr. considerably. The “Junior” was destined to stick and become eventually June, which was what everybody has called her all her life. Dawny had wanted to bring out an “Extra” to announce the birth of Junior, but his “Extras” were becoming commonplace and were in danger of not being extra any more. He had already run an Extra for the death on Iwo Jima of his friend Gerald Coe, one of the three triplet sons of Lawlor. Gerald (who was of course pronounced “Jerl” so he rhymed with his brothers Earl and Burl) had died a hero and would later receive posthumously the Congressional Medal of Honor in the biggest ceremony ever held in Stay More. And then Dawny had run an Extra for the death of President Roosevelt, the news of which reached Stay More by means of a radio, Stay More’s first, which Latha ordered from Sears Roebuck and operated on battery power. Although the radio would become in the years ahead a wonderful source of news, music, storytelling, sports and every conceivable contact with the outside world, Latha would always associate it with the sad tidings of the President’s death. She would also associate it with the unquestionable fact that people in other parts of America did not talk English the same way we did. Their accents were sharper, more precise. They did not take any of the shortcuts of speech that we do, like dropping the unnecessary “g” at the end of participles. Some of the doctors at the state asylum had talked like that, but Latha had thought it was because they were snobs. Every, whose career as a preacher had taken him as far north as Michigan and Ohio, assured Latha that most people up north sounded that way, in what was commonly called a Yankee accent to distinguish it from an Ozark accent. Latha was afraid that the radio might make it contagious. But her radio was good for business at the store: as soon as the Stay Morons found out about it, they all had to come to the store to hear for themselves, and eventually they became addicted to their favorite programs, like
Fibber McGee and Molly, Let’s Pretend
, and
Meet Corliss Archer
. They always felt obliged to buy something after listening to Latha’s radio, but she was sure she could detect a gradual change in the way they talked after listening to Yankees.

The radio reported that the war in Germany was practically finished, and a surrender was expected any day now. The war in the Pacific dragged on. Latha cursed the radio the day it reported that Dawny’s hero Ernie Pyle, the great war correspondent, had been killed by Japanese sniper fire. She didn’t know how to break the news to Dawny, and when she did he was devastated. He roused himself to publish an Extra, but that edition of his paper didn’t sell, because most Stay Morons didn’t know who Ernie Pyle was.

Just two days after that, word came that Berlin had fallen, but in the siege Billy Bob Ingledew, Hank’s kid brother, was killed. That sad news affected not only the Ingledew clan but also the large family of Dinsmores, whose twin sisters, Jelena and Doris (their full names were Jelena Cloris and Helena Doris, but this confused their mother when she was yelling at them) were so inseparable that when Billy Bob had courted one of them, he had to court the other one at the same time, and, since he had never been able to determine which of the two sisters he liked most, he had married both of them, and in time had impregnated both of them, and erected a house, if it may be called that, for the five of them to live in. Then he was drafted into the service and killed at the gate to Hitler’s bunker.