Enduring Read Free

just to chat.
    “But,” Patricia said, “yesterday June and I tried to visit her, and we couldn’t even find her house! The road is all choked with trees and brambles, and George told us it isn’t possible to get a vehicle there. What if she needed to call for an ambulance, and it couldn’t reach her?”
    This question was addressed to all the sisters but Patricia stared at me as she asked it, so I felt obliged to reply, “She wants it that way. She wanted the road to disappear. The few of us who are her best friends know how to reach the cabin on foot. The rest of the world can go fuck itself, as she likes to say.”
    Patricia said. “She must get awfully lonely.”
    “Not at all,” I said, and named those best friends: myself, George, Bending Bear the Osage Indian, and Day and Diana Stoving-Whittacker. “Trust me, she is the most un lonely person I’ve ever known.”
    Eva asked, “What do you chat about? Does she ever talk to you about her life?”
    “Not unless I ask her something, and I don’t usually do that.”
    Latha said, “You know, just for the record, you ought to write down anything she tells you about her life. It would make a book.”
    The sisters eagerly nodded their heads in agreement, and Eva said, “I’ll bet there are all sorts of things that have happened to her in those hundred and six years that nobody knows about.”
    June said, “Mother once told me that when she was a young woman Gran was locked away for several years at the state hospital. That’s the nuthouse, right? What was she doing there? She’s one hundred percent sane. One hundred and ten percent.”
    Patricia said, “Ask her about the state hospital.”
    Eva said, “Ask her about those seven missing years after she escaped from the nuthouse before she showed up here again.”
    Latha said, “Ask her about everything.”
    “It will give me something to do,” I allowed.

Chapter two

    M y earliest memory, the first prosaic awareness of consciousness that manages to keep itself in the cluttered store of my head, is of walking at the age of three down the main road of Stay More, holding the hand of my grandmother, the heroine of this book, who was giving me a guided tour of the little village or what was left of it. I knew that my grandmother was important, not just because she owned the building called the store and P.O. where people had once got groceries and letters, but also because she seemed to know everything about anything and could tell me the story behind every building we passed. Although I had been born in California, I had no memory of that place, which, according to my grandmother, was under a curse placed upon it by my ancestor, Jacob Ingledew, the founder of Stay More, who lost his firstborn son in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of western pioneers.
    “That was my first memory, and you were in it,” I said to Gran one day in February, not long after Daddy’s funeral (his will had left all he had—the house—in equal shares to his six children, but although the house was listed with a real estate agent and for that matter is still listed, nobody has bought it). “Do you remember your first memory?” It was my way of prompting her into the beginning of the story of her life. I knew she had been born in Stay More, in a cabin on the east side of Ledbetter Mountain (my house is at the foot of the south side of the same mountain). I knew that her father, Saultus Bourne, was a poor farmer just barely raising enough to feed his family, and her mother, Fannie Swain Bourne, although descended from one of the original settlers of Stay More, had come from an even poorer family, and had given her daughter Latha only her good looks and her engaging smile (but, oddly, had not given these to her other two daughters, Latha’s sisters Barbara and Mandy).
    Gran smiled, as she often did, that Swain smile (she did not, to the best of my knowledge, wear dentures.) “My first memory, huh?” She stared out across the road