Midsummer Dream

By Martha Duffy

LIGHTNING BUG by Donald Harington. 212 pages. Lawrence/Delacorte. $5.95.

The screen door pushed outward in a slow swing, the spring on the screen door stretching vibrantly, a plangent twang, WRIRRRAANG, which, more than any other sound, more than all those overworked katydids, crickets, tree frogs, etc., seems to evoke the heart of summer . . .

The screen door wrirrraangs at the post office-general store run by Miss Latha Bourne in Stay More, a community of 113 souls deep in the Ozark Mountains. It also opens on a tall tale that is a love story as well, told by a young man who is reconstructing the events of a summer he once spent totally in Latha's thrall. He was five years old at the time.

Latha is a handsome woman of 38, waiting with the guile and patience of Penelope for her fractious true love, a hillbilly hell raiser named Every Dill. Many years before, Every had not only raped and robbed her but rescued her from a mental hospital into which her mean big-city sister had placed her when she was entirely sane. Latha does not lack for more manageable suitors--the town drunk, an amorous farmer, the enraptured child. But she waits, more or less chastely, for Every to return. Eventually he does so, a reformed man turned revival preacher.

They find their old passion still alive, but time has altered their outlooks. Latha, earthy and somewhat affronted by the sudden inclusion of God in her plans, insists on making love before marriage; Every, the onetime rapist, now understandably wants to clear things with the Almighty. Using a pinch of horse sense and an ecclesiastical sophistry, they manage to work things out.

Lightning Bug is a modest but totally satisfying novel. Like the little boy Donny, the author spent his childhood summers in the Ozarks, and to him the men of Stay More are still gods. In his private time capsule, the arrival of the mail and the ice peddler or--evil day --the revenuer become the rituals of an obscure epoch. Like the late James Agee, he reveres the most ordinary aspects" of the lives of unexceptional people, and with lyrical comedy and irony, he makes his joy infectious.

. Martha Duffy

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