Enduring Read Free Page A

as if she could see all the way to the Bourne cabin, which no longer stood, but would not have been visible from the Dill dogtrot if it had, what with all the wilderness she had allowed to grow up around her. “I was three years old. I was walking down the main road of Stay More, holding the hand of my grandmother, who was giving me a guided tour of the little village or what was left of it.”
    I was more puzzled than annoyed, and wondered if indeed she was verging into Alzheimer’s. “No, Gran, that’s what I was just telling you. I want to know what your first memory is.”
    “That’s it,” she said. “One more thing that you and I have in common. The difference was that I walked you from south to north on the main road; my grandmother walked me from north to south, and the first building we came to was the same building which I was destined to take possession of eventually as my store and post office, your house now, where the tour I gave you as a child ended up. In the time of my grandmother, it was Jerram’s general store, one of four in the town, but I had never seen a store before and didn’t know what it was. ‘Is a store where you get stories?’ I asked Grandma, who was a great storyteller. She laughed, and said ‘Why no, but a right smart of stories sure do get told at stores.’ She didn’t take me into Jerram’s. She showed me each of the other buildings and told me what they were: two doctor’s offices, blacksmith shops, a dentist’s, and the gristmill. I had never seen any buildings other than our cabin and our barn and our outhouse. Seeing all these buildings so close together must have been like your first view of Chicago. I don’t remember what thoughts were running through my little head, but I must have been struck all of a heap at this display of metropolitan goings-on. We came to the biggest house in town, which was Ingledew’s hotel, that actually had a second story on top of the first! And across from it Ingledew’s big general store, also two stories.
    It was the last of all these buildings that she took me into, the first time I’d ever been inside a commercial establishment. She led me to the candy showcase and gave me a penny, which might have been all she had to her name, and told me to pick out one piece of candy. She had to leave me alone during the long, long time that it took me to make up my mind, trying to choose among the gum drops, chocolate bars, jelly squares, licorice sticks, mint kisses, cinnamon balls, caramels, cream wafers, marshmallow bananas, rock candy, bonbons, cracker jacks and I don’t know what. It seems hours went by, but my grandmother was lost in chitchat with some other ladies. Finally I picked an I-don’t-know-what, a chocolaty thing with nuts inside, and pointed to it, and Mr. Ingledew fetched it out of the case for me, and I handed over my penny. I had never tasted chocolate before, and I can remember it to this day. Then while I greedily consumed it I just wandered around the store, looking at all the stuff. They sold clothes and shoes and dry goods and hardware and all kinds of groceries. They even sold toys (play pretties we called them), among which were figures of small, pudgy people that were called, I would soon learn, babies, although I had never seen one before. I searched for Grandma to ask her to buy me one of the babies, and I found her among a group of women who were holding and admiring a real live baby. They let me get a close look at it, and even to touch it. It looked just like those figures of babies I had been admiring except that it moved and looked at you with real eyes. I asked my grandmother if babies came from stores. She laughed harder than when I’d asked about stories coming from stores. But she never did tell me where babies come from.”

    Little Latha would not hear an acceptable answer to that question for several more years. As she squeezed from infancy into childhood, she would keep asking that question, whenever