Enduring (63 page)

Thus it will come to pass that Latha, who has loomed so large at the entire center of this great story, will, like a great variety of other inhabitants in the history of this amazing town of Stay More, endure henceforward as what is to all intents and purposes a hermit—or rather a hermitess, the first of her gender. She will have earned that right. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses will not be able to find her. But four “suitors” will ply her with their attentions: old George Dinsmore, who will confess to her one day that the only reason he never remarried is that he didn’t think he’d ever meet her equal; George’s good friend Bending Bear the Osage, who will tell her, “I may never know if I’m an homosexual or not but I do know that homosexual men are usually the best of friends with women, and you are my best friend”; the abovementioned Conundrum, or simply Drum, who from the age of five onward will remind her greatly of Dawny; and one more “D”: the son of Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker, whose name is Daniel Donald Stoving-Whittacker. Danny will have grown up in Stay More, in the house built by his grandfather Daniel Lyam Montross (who was also his great-grandfather), but after college will have embarked upon an extended
wanderjahr
that will have taken him all over the world and will have provided enough material for a novel, but who will have returned in middle age to his hometown, Stay More, to live for the rest of his life, much of it spent in the company of the woman who had accompanied his grandfather on an exodus from Tennessee to Arkansas.

All four of these men (or rather three men and a boy) will be madly in love with the ancient Latha and will have prevented her from being a complete hermitess. If she will need anything done that she can’t do herself, one or more of them will do it. Her various appliances, like all appliances, will be prone to break-downs and built-in obsolescence, and even if the repairman’s truck could reach her house, which it could not for all the trees and undergrowth, the repairman could not as speedily and knowledgeably keep all of Latha’s equipment functioning.

We will be permitted a glimpse of a simple tableau or event which will not have occurred anywhere in the world before and will probably not ever happen anywhere again: the four men (or three men and a teenager) sitting with Latha around the four sides of a quilting frame suspended from the ceiling of the second of the two pens of her double-pen dogtrot house. They will be “piecing,” that is, cooperatively contributing their stitchery to the making of a patterned quilt, sometimes in a pattern like Nine Patch Lover’s Link or Star Flower or Flying Bird but more often in a random pattern known as “Crazy Quilt” or “Friendship Quilt,” the latter embroidered with golden stitches spelling out in script their full names: James George Dinsmore, Thomas Bending Bear, Daniel Donald Stoving-Whittacker, Conundrum Heartstays, and Latha Bourne Dill. Each of these people at their various residences will sleep at night beneath one or more of the quilts. They will give to John Henry “Hank” Ingledew the quilts he will have
been sleeping under back
when he will have died and started this story.

Quilting bees will have always been the prerogative of womenfolk, and thus Latha’s quilting bees with her four suitors will have been not only unheard-of but well-nigh unthinkable, especially in view of the fact that the four suitors will not get along very well with each other, except for George and Bending Bear. A conventional quilting bee of womenfolk will have usually been viewed as a gabfest, an occasion for gossip and chatter, but the Friendship Quilt will be pieced by a group of four men (or three geezers and a young man) who would just as soon have exchanged insults, because they will all be rivals for Latha’s affection, and only the advanced age of three of them will have prevented them from fighting exactly like the kids who competed for Sonora’s attention during lightning bug time in the summers of yore.

They will, however, have some sense of responsibility for discussing business matters, such as whether or not the next quilt will be crazy or geometric, whose turn it will be to sweep up the loose threads off the floor, whether or not Governor Ingledew should run for senator, and whether or not Larry Brace, who will have recently died, is entitled to burial in the Stay More cemetery with the native Stay Morons. The latter matter will be decided in the affirmative, and they will contribute a fine satin and linen quilt in a cockroach pattern for Larry to be buried in. His widow, Sharon, who will have been telling this whole story since page 1, will survive her husband for only a few years before the Bee will need to piece a special quilt in the pattern of this book, or rather in the pattern of a later book called
Rose of Sharon
, in which she will be buried beside Larry in the Stay More cemetery.

Which will leave an enormous problem furnishing the quilters with seemingly endless hours of debate while they will piece: if Sharon will have been telling this story, what will happen to this story after Sharon will have died?

Chapter fifty

L
atha will be so consumed with grief over the death of her favorite granddaughter that she will not even notice that Sharon’s narrative will have come to an end, although the life it will have sought to chronicle will not have. Latha will reflect that the worst thing about being a survivor is that one must be all alone in one’s memories of the departed. There will be no one else to share all of Latha’s recollections of what a wonderful person Sharon Ingledew Tate Brace was and how difficult it will be to miss her so miserably that life will seem scarcely worth enduring. Not even the devoted readers of
Rose of Sharon
, of which there will be several, will be able to fully identify with Latha’s sorrow. And she will be rather shocked to reflect that she is mourning Sharon more than she had Sharon’s mother, her own daughter Sonora, or for that matter her husband Every or anyone else who has predeceased her in Stay More. In time, as the funeral hymn “Farther Along” sung at all these funerals will have promised, Latha will come to realize that only the survivor will understand the depth of the loss, while only the lost will understand that they are not lost at all, but found. And she will remember what she herself had realized years before, that the secret of enduring is not to harden oneself against loss but to soften oneself in acceptance.

Softening herself, Latha will design the pattern, “Rose of Sharon” for the quilt which her suitor/quilters will stay up all night long finishing in time for the funeral, each of them not needing to be told how special Sharon was to Latha and how magnificent this particular quilt would have to be, with threads of gold and silver and titanium. It will be during that all-night quiltathon that they will discuss the solution to the problem of how this story can continue to be told although Sharon will no longer be alive to tell it. Latha herself will get credit for voicing the answer: that we have all of us become so familiar with Sharon’s narrative techniques throughout this enduring chronicle that we can each of us go on doing the telling ourselves. We can hear Sharon’s voice still speaking and telling. And since, as we already know or have guessed, this chronicle has no conclusion, the perpetual rights of storytelling may be allowed to devolve upon whoever may endure thus far through a reading of the book.

Once this solution is agreed upon among the quilters, old George Dinsmore, who first appeared as the “Baby Jim” of
Lightning Bug
who fell through the hole of the outhouse, prompting his mother to remark that it would be easier to have another one than to clean him up, and who will have all these years served as Vernon Ingledew’s right-hand-man, manager of the ham factory, and the only one of Latha’s quilters capable of sewing a respectable fan stitch of quarter rounds, will expire of natural causes at the age of eighty-six, which, he will have been
heard to comment back
, “is a good age to go.” His former boss, Vernon, retired for many years from the governor’s office and unsuccessful in his bid for senator, will be required to close down the Ingledew Ham Factory and to lay off with pensions its few remaining employees. The razorbacks who will not have already been converted into ham and bacon will be permitted to live and to return to the wilderness where Vernon had found them back in the twentieth century, and where they may still be found to this day.

Vernon will ask of his grandmother permission to take George’s place at the quilting frame, and will prove to be an intelligent and nimble stitcher, at least for a while, but will refuse to discuss politics and thus will seem unfriendly to the other quilters, who will suggest politely to His Former Excellency that he ought to stick to his laboratory, where, having discovered a cure for cancer early in this century, he will now be hard at work on curing the common cold. Vernon’s place at the quilting frame will remain vacant until eventually another old geezer will show up, a stranger, a retired professor from St. Louis who has brought a letter of introduction written by Dawny himself and wishes to do a 3
DTV
interview with Latha. She, having given no interviews for the previous two dozen years, will be at first be indisposed, but the professor’s possession of a letter from Dawny will almost win her over. She will introduce him to the other quilters, each in his turn, and the professor will look the men over and make an allusion to Penelope in Homer’s
Odyssey
, Odysseus’ forlorn wife pestered by suitors during his absence, she who relieved herself of their importunities by promising to choose among them as soon as she finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law (but each night unraveled what she had done during the day and thus put the suitors off until Odysseus’ return).

Upon revealing his name as Brian Walter, the suitors (not Penelope’s but Latha’s) will realize that it was he, along with his wife Lynnea, to whom Dawny had dedicated his noble novel
With
.

“Can you quilt?” she will ask Professor Walter.

“I can juggle,” he will assert, pantomiming the suspension of six balls in the air simultaneously. He will be as tall as Dawny and it will occur to Latha that having him here would be almost as good as having Dawny here, and in fact he contends that he loves her as much as Dawny ever did, or as much as any of these suitors do, a declaration which brings a loud protest from Ben, Dan and Drum.

She is charmed, and tells him to go right ahead and ask her anything he wants to ask. The first question, once he has turned on his senseo camera, will be, “How has Dawny changed over the decades you’ve known him?”

“He was just a little spadger, five going on six, when first I laid eyes on him,” Latha will say. “And the last time I got a chance to lay eyes on him, many years ago, he was white-haired and stooped and slow, but I could tell he was still the same tender sentimentalist he’d always been.”

Brian Walter will snatch the senseo out of the air in which it has been floating while recording in three dimensions with sound, smell and taste, and feeling the scene it perceives. He will make adjustments to it, explaining he wants to get more of the background, which includes the quilters busy at work, as well as an assortment of cats in various attitudes of languor, curiosity, contention, and self-washing. If Brian Walter will bother to ask, she will gladly identify the cats by name, pointing out that three of the males are named after three of the quilters: Ben, Dan, and Drum.

But instead he asks, “What is your favorite story about Dawny that has never made it into his books?” This last question she will be loath to answer, declaring that she will only answer it after Dawny is dead.

“But what if he survives you?” the professor will protest.

“He won’t,” she declares.

“Do you think the only reason you’re still alive at the age of one hundred and twenty-one is that Dawny has granted you immortality?”

Latha will not be able to prevent a scoff escaping her lips. “Didn’t you ever ask
him
that?” she will want to know.

“Several times,” Brian Walter will answer. “The best answer I ever recorded was, ‘I may have created her, but I am not in charge of her.’”

“Well-spoken,” Latha will say. “How would you feel if you knew someone was in charge of you?”

“Helpless,” he will admit. And his senseo will reverse its direction and record all the lineaments of his face.

“Turn that thing off,” Latha will request, “and let me show you how to quilt.”

For such an old coot, he will be a quick study, and will soon be stitching almost as well as the George whom he will have replaced. But he will keep his senseo running, hovering and snooping, this day and the next and the next, and before his stock of 3
DTV
tape is all used up, he will have enough footage to be edited into a respectable film, which will answer such tricky questions as “What have you learned about yourself in the last year that you couldn’t have learned in your first one hundred and twenty-one years?” and “What do you still feel passionate(ly) about?” and “How long do you intend to live?” and “What are your daily routines?”

Instead of requiring her to answer the last question, he suggests that he be allowed to leave in her presence a Questcamera, the sort of top-of-the-line free-floating senseo that can follow her around wherever she goes all day long from get-up to lie-down. He will show her how to turn it off during moments of privacy, such as using the toilet. She will not mind its watching her get dressed for the day. She will always dress slowly. One of the problems of living so long is that you outlive your clothing. Latha’s few favorite dresses will be worn out, threadbare, faded, but they will still fit, and she will go on wearing them until they disintegrate. In the kitchen she will pour herself a cup from the automatic self-cleaning coffeemaker that turns itself on at the same time each morning, brewing a Colombian roast from beans that came not from Colombia but some factory in Indiana. Her cereal will have already poured itself into a bowl and the fridge will have already poured milk over it and sliced a banana over it, so all she will have to do is sit and eat it, scanning the morning news on the readmaster. She will also eat one-quarter of a cantaloupe that the fridge will have sliced and placed into another bowl. The pet-feeder will have already measured out a morning ration for her cats and dogs, who will have finished eating long before she will have, and will be loafing in the shade of the trees and the dogtrot. Brian’s Questcamera will follow her out to her garden, where she will be seen mostly inspecting the work that will have already been done by her Gardenmaster, a robomachine which plants, cultivates, weeds, and harvests. Although she will occasionally miss the sweaty work of honest toil in the garden, she will realize that perhaps she is too old for it. The Questcamera and the Gardenmaster will not speak the same language and will not like each other and she will be relieved when they will go their separate ways.