Enduring (55 page)

I do remember the way we Ingledew children, and Jelena too, took over Doc Swain’s clinic for the purpose of playing. By the time I was six I was usually the “nurse,” prophetic of my later career, and a year later when Vernon was six he finally agreed to be the doctor himself. In those days there weren’t any women doctors, or, if there were, we’d never heard of them. Vernon would put on one of Doc Swain’s white smocks with the sleeves rolled up, and we put a stethoscope around his neck and a round reflex mirror on his forehead. I wore one of the nurse’s caps that Rowena had left behind. Eva served as the receptionist, and the other girls were patients. Of course Vernon had been to the doctor himself often enough, with mumps and measles etc., to know how a good doctor deports himself, and he gave a fine performance, putting the stethoscope to our chests and listening to our heartbeats. Cousin Jelena’s breasts at the age of fourteen were already pretty well developed, and it thrilled her when Vernon’s hand put the stethoscope on her breast.

“What’s your complaint?” the six-year-old boy said to her in as deep a voice as he could manage. I think that must have been the first time Vernon had ever spoken to her.

“I’m going to have a baby,” she told him.

“Hmm,” he said, and gave her a bottle of yellow pills. These were actually Doc Swain’s bottles that Gran had emptied of their contents and refilled with candy. “Well now,” Vernon said, “take two of these a day, and come back if it doesn’t go away.”

We all laughed uproariously, which embarrassed him. As his nurse, I said to him, “You’re s’posed to examine her. She’s s’posed to get on that table and have you take a look at her.” Jelena was nervous but also excited at the idea, and she climbed onto the examination table and raised her skirt and removed her panties and put her feet in the stirrups. Vernon came and took a quick look, but wouldn’t come close.

“Nothing wrong with you,” he declared, “’ceptin they cut off yore tallywhacker fer bein bad.” I thought we would all die from laughter. Vernon threw off his smock and stethoscope and marched out, saying, “I don’t want to play dumb games.” And he never again joined us in Doc Swain’s clinic. But Gran assured us that there wasn’t any law against female physicians, and no reason why one of us couldn’t be the doctor, so Jelena assumed that role, and went on treating her cousins for impetigo, whooping cough, rickets, chicken pox, and the common cold, until she had cured all of the diseases known to us, and then we had to ask Gran to tell us what were the diseases we didn’t know about.

Latha told us girls that Shakespeare had said there were a thousand diseases that we are heir to, and she knew less than a hundred of them, but she told us about arthritis and rheumatism and meningitis and polio and lockjaw and pneumonia and tuberculosis (which had carried off Doc’s Tenny) and hepatitis and ptomaine and shingles and leukemia and epilepsy and asthma and gangrene and diabetes and the worst of them all, cancer. A few of us had heard that word and knew that it was something dreadful. Latha couldn’t tell us how you get cancer or what causes it, just that it can show up in any part of the body, and there’s hardly anything that can be done for it, so Doc Jelena would just have to try to keep the patient as free from pain as possible, and comfortable until death finally took over. It troubled Latha to be telling these things to us, and she finally told us the old proverb that an ailing woman lives forever, and tried to explain what that meant: as long as we have something to complain about, we can keep complaining forever. “Try to imagine a world in which nobody ever got sick,” she said to us. We wondered if Gran herself ever got sick, because if she did she kept it to herself, although she had been to see Doc Swain a number of times for various aches and pains, trials and tribulations, worries and vexations.
I hurt, therefore I am
.

The idea of cancer actually scared us so much that we finally gave up playing doctor and left Doc Swain’s clinic to the mice and spiders and cockroaches. On any given day we’d much rather go up the road to Latha’s dogtrot to play with her cats or her dog Galen, or to have Latha tell us stories. Daddy had opened a
TV
store in Jasper and we had a good
TV
in our house, but we still had yet to get reception good enough to show shows, and thus Gran’s stories remained a principal source of entertainment.

The years went by and Latha seemed to lose track of them. She considered the possibility that any period of dramatic events, such as the deaths of Dan, Doc Swain, and Piney, would naturally be followed by a fallow period during which nothing ever happened. If the “rule of three” always worked, then there must be a “rule of seven” during which years would elapse without any happenings worth remembering, and she told me that she could not distinguish between my fourth year and my eleventh year. She had photographs of all of us that she sometimes looked at, and she had a newspaper clipping from the
Jasper Disaster
, to the effect that Miss Haskins, the English teacher at Jasper High, was pleased to have in her class a senior, Latha Ingledew, who was not only the daughter of a former pupil of hers, Sonora Dill, but also the granddaughter of another pupil, Latha Bourne, thus there were three generations of girls who were scolded if they ever said or wrote “aint.” But Latha neglected to pencil a date on the clipping and thus she could never remember just which year it was.

As if to wipe away the inconsequential sevenfold years, something huge and horrible happened the year I was eleven and Vernon was ten: Latha had one of her daily visits from her daughter, who reported that Hank had just taken her to Harrison to see a doctor, who reported that she had cancer of the breast. “And, Mom, it’s spread!” Sonora wailed.

Latha didn’t understand. “Do you mean the children have caught it?”

No, she meant that it had—the doctor used the word “metastasized”—to other parts of her body, and couldn’t be cured. All he could do, and Latha reflected upon the irony of her prescription to Doc Jelena, was to give her injections to keep her as free from pain as possible and comfortable until death finally took over. Hank had been shown how to prepare a syringe of morphine and inject it, but his hands trembled so much that she had tried to do it herself, without success. Latha offered to do it, then told Every she might not see him again for a while, and she moved into the hilltop house of Hank and Sonora and shared a bedroom with Vernon, and gave Sonora the morphine whenever she needed it. Vernon was an exceptionally bright ten year old but he couldn’t understand what was happening to his mother. It had been just a year earlier that he had been evicted from her bed after spending the first nine years of his life sleeping with her. Latha considered but rejected the idea of offering to let him sleep with her. But each day she had to try to prepare him in advance for the inevitable, and when they sang “Farther Along” at Sonora’s funeral, Latha tried to explain to him what the words meant, but he refused to believe that farther along he would ever understand it, and for that matter Latha doubted if she would understand it herself. Her wracking grief was mingled with intense regret that Doc Swain had not been alive to catch the cancer early enough to do something about it.

The rain that fell during Sonora’s funeral made the rainfalls of Dan’s and Doc’s and Piney’s funerals seem like light sprinklings. Both Swains Creek and Banty Creek began to overflow their banks before the funeral was over. The water swirled up as high as the porch of the old Ingledew store and over the porch of the old gristmill, whose timbers began to creak ominously. Hank was not too submerged in his grief to realize that the old mill, which had been built by his great-grandfather Isaac, was doomed, and he told his brother they had better try to remove the glass showcase containing the body of that old Connecticut peddler, whatever his name was, and load it into a pickup truck and get it the hell out of there, which they managed to do just in the nick of time: with a thunderous roar the old mill collapsed and was swept away down the creek. They transported the showcase to higher ground, to the abandoned yellow house of the old near-hermit Dan, where they left it in an upstairs bedroom, and then returned to the village and with the help of Every and Hank’s uncles they used sledgehammers to demolish the old abandoned bank building and stack its stones against the side of the road as a kind of dike to keep the swollen creek from washing away the road.

Every and Latha needed a long time to recover from their daughter’s death. “We don’t need two more such events to make a total of three,” Latha said to him. “Hers is three all by itself.” And she was not just saying that. There were no significant events of any sort, unless you count the fact that cousin Jelena graduated from Jasper High as valedictorian, and could probably have won a college scholarship if she had applied for one, but after the death of Vernon’s mother, she was old enough and smart enough to realize that it had been foolish of her to plan, all her life, to marry Vernon Ingledew when he grew up. When he grew up, she would be twenty-six, at least, past marriageable age, and besides he was her first cousin, and nowadays first cousins did not marry, and even if they could marry, she had never been able to get him to notice her, except for that one time when they had played “doctor.” At Sonora’s funeral, when Jelena had tried to embrace him and say something comforting to him, he did not seem to be aware of her existence. So she apparently decided that if she couldn’t be Vernon’s wife she would become his stepmother. Some months after Sonora’s funeral, Hank told Latha that Jelena had come to him and proposed. Hank had told her that he was her uncle and couldn’t marry her. “Vernon needs a mother,” Jelena insisted, and kept after Hank about it, until finally Hank had said, “Tell you the honest truth, Jelena, nothing against you personal, but I don’t honestly believe that Vernon would want to be your child.”

So Jelena gave up on the idea and eventually married Mark Duckworth, grandson of Oren who had operated the canning factory. Their wedding, in the Stay More schoolhouse, might almost have constituted a second happening in the sequence of three, except that such sequences are always of awful things, if not calamities, and it would be years before Jelena would learn how calamitous marriage to Mark Duckworth was. Latha ordered a suit and tie from Sears Roebuck for Vernon to wear, his first. As Uncle Jackson was leading Jelena down the aisle, she paused and bent down and whispered something in Vernon’s ear. He looked at her strangely and shook his head and whispered something back to her. At the wedding feast, Latha asked Vernon what Jelena had said to him and what he had answered. Jelena had said, “I was going to wait and marry you when you grew up. Will you marry me when you grow up? If you say ‘yes,’ I’ll call off this wedding.” He’d thought she might be teasing him, but after realizing she was serious, he had shaken his head and declared, “I will never marry.” Latha told him that he might be wrong about that. He shook his head for his grandmother too, and repeated himself, “I won’t.”

But others got married. June, who tried unsuccessfully to restore her original name, which was Sonora, not Junior, after her mother’s death, married her high school sweetheart, who worked in a Harrison hardware store. Patricia saved up her allowance until she had enough to move to Kansas City, where she married a pharmaceutical salesman. Latha’s favorite of the granddaughters, Sharon, or Little Sis as everyone called her, including her father, came to Latha privately seeking advice on whether or not she should elope with her boyfriend, Junior Stapleton, since there was no chance she would get permission from Hank, who thought that Junior was an all-around scamp. (I must be forgiven for talking about myself as if I’m just a character in a book, but after all, that’s what I am.) For several reasons Latha had loved Li’l Sis more than her other granddaughters (without letting any of them know it, of course, except Li’l Sis herself): partly out of compassion and empathy, remembering her own relationship with her older sisters and also observing how the others, including Sharon’s father, treated her as redundant or surplus; partly because Sharon was the one daughter who most resembled Sonora, in appearance as well as personality; and mainly because Sharon was the most likely to come to Latha for advice, for comfort, for companionship. Latha had met Junior Stapleton several times and knew his family well, and didn’t have a very high opinion of him or them, but she thought it might not be a bad idea for Sharon to get away from home and develop some independence from her sisters. She was only sixteen, and hadn’t finished high school and Junior didn’t intend to hang around for her to finish Jasper High but she could finish up at Harrison High, where Jelena had gone. Junior was twelve years older than Li’l Sis, and already the manager of a supermarket, so she would be well taken care of. Latha observed, “If you marry him, then your monogram will be SIS.” Li’l Sis hadn’t thought of that. So they ran off to Chicago and got married.

Back Home In Harrison, They Settled Into Married Life In A Nice Little House. Junior Was Not Willing To Visit Stay More As Often As Sharon Wished, So Sharon Got Herself A Driver’s License And Began To Drive To Stay More At Least Once A Week, Not To Visit Her Father Or Remaining Sisters, But To Visit Latha, Who Continued To Offer Plenty Of Advice, Comfort, And Companionship. Junior Lost His Job And They Lived On Unemployment Until He Got A Lesser Job As Assistant Manager Of Another Supermarket. In Time, During One Of Sharon’s Visits, Latha Couldn’t Help Noticing Some Bruises Around The Girl’s Face, Which Sharon Claimed Were The Result Of Falling Out Of The Bathtub. But Latha Was Able, Gently [Thanks, Gran], To Get The Girl To Confess That Her Husband Had Been Regularly Slapping, Punching, And Mauling Her. Latha Advised Her To Move Out And Come Back To Stay More, Which She Did, But Junior Considered Her To Be Still Married To Him, Which Gave Him The Right To Batter Her. Only After He Had Broken Her Arm And Left Her Jaw Needing To Be Wired Did Her Father Hank At Long Last Pay Some Attention To Her, Accosting Junior And, In Sharon’s Words, “Beating The Living Shit Out Of Him,” Leaving Him In The Hospital, From Which He Never Returned To Stay More. After Her Own Injuries Had Healed, She Ran Away To Chicago, Partly To Escape The Chance Of Ever Meeting Junior Again, Partly In The Desire To See If There Weren’t Some Good Men In This World, And She Worked As A Waitress To Put Herself Through Nursing School At Northwestern, Where She Met [But I’ve Been Interrupted By The Author, Who Promises Me That If I’ll Be Good, And Finish Telling Latha’s Story, He Will Give Me A Novel Of My Own One Day.]