Butterfly Weed by Donald Harington Read Free Book Online

bank had lain empty for over a decade; and its wooden timbers, encased within the rustic stonemasonry, were beginning to decay. The wooden door at the side facing my window had rotted and fallen, but it was only after several days of glancing at the bank that I noticed I could see through the open door to the window on the other side of the interior, and through that window I could discern the front porch of Latha Bourne’s general store, where that woman, whom you have called the demigoddess of your world of Stay More, was often sitting.
    It is funny how we all have the habit of not noticing what is visible beyond the immediate vista, how, for example, you can look through that window yonder and see nothing but a bunch of nondescript houses across the way from this nursing home, and you wouldn’t even notice, until I call it to your attention, that the towers of Old Main at the University are rising up in the distance. See? Had you noticed before? Well, I was a little embarrassed at myself, that there had been so many hours, so many days, when I just lay on that bed in that room with nothing to do but stare at the blank stone wall of that bank building without even noticing that I could see through the wall, or rather through that fallen door and the window on the other side, and catch a clear glimpse of people on the porch of Latha’s store over two hundred yards away, including Latha herself.
    Shall I describe her for you? You, of all people, who have, by your own declared intention, granted her eternal life? The Latha I first saw was the Latha who existed in the year before you were even born, and whom you never knew. The Latha you fell madly in love with at the age of five-going-on-six was perhaps beginning to discover a gray hair or two in her dark hair, and perhaps was even beginning to thicken at the middle, or to develop wrinkles here and there, or maybe even a skin spot or two, and of course if she already had any of this six years before, I couldn’t have detected it from a distance. All I could tell, from that distance, was that she was most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. And I was overwhelmed with desire for her, to the extent that she became my reason for wanting to recuperate and get out of that bed and go meet her.
    Did you know that Doc himself was in love with her? Alas, the story I’m going to keep on telling you as long as you come back to hear it does not really involve Latha Bourne. I wish I could tell you a story about how I finally got out of my bed and went over and met her and we became lovers and lived happily ever after, or at least spent a wild night together. Could you accept that? No, nor could you accept the story of how Doc finally persuaded her to become his lover. Because you are “saving” her for Every Dill. As perhaps she was unknowingly saving herself. So she is not going to be the heroine of this narrative. She is incidental to it, and indeed during the time of which I shall be mainly speaking, she did not live in Stay More at all, but was in a kind of exile, either at the state hospital for the insane in Little Rock or, after Every Dill kidnapped her from that awful place and she subsequently was parted from her rescuer, in Tennessee, trying to find her way home but not succeeding until…but that is another story which you must tell us yourself one of these days, perhaps when you have no other stories to tell or you cannot do a fair job of telling whatever story you’re trying to tell.
    Anyway, from my window I could not only see through that bank building and catch a glimpse of Latha in her rocker on the porch of her store but also, at least once a day, Doc Swain himself sitting beside her, talking with her. As I’ll probably have to show you, it was an unrequited love he had for her, or maybe even an unexpressed love.
    You’ll have to decide for yourself, when I’m all done telling my story, whether or not Doc Swain even understood what love is. And making that