Helen Hatton Laferty

Helen Hatton Laferty is remembered through her grave and through the losses that followed her death. Mother of Lenora Laferty and wife of Roy Laferty, she links Lenora’s orphanhood to Roy’s disappearance and to the unresolved questions that occupy Arvin Eugene Russell and Emma Russell.

Identity and Background

Helen’s grave marker gives her name as Helen Hatton Laferty and records the years 1926–1948. The marker lies flat in the cemetery, with a small winged, faceless angel carved at each of its upper corners. These details make the grave a concrete record of a life that the surviving characters otherwise encounter through memory, absence, and speculation.

Death and Its Immediate Aftermath

By 1963, Roy Laferty and Theodore Daniels had spent nearly fourteen years away from West Virginia after burying Helen and fleeing south. They traveled with a carnival and no longer bothered to change their names. The account establishes Helen’s death as the event after which the two men disappeared, though it does not, in these passages, recount the circumstances of her death.

Family and Unfulfilled Possibilities

Helen was Lenora’s mother, and her grave becomes the setting for Lenora’s thoughts about how the two girls’ orphanhood brought them together in Emma’s household. Lenora interprets their shared circumstances as if events had arranged their meeting; Arvin, who regards her as a sister, is uneasy when she speaks in those terms. The grave visit therefore reveals both Helen’s continuing place in Lenora’s life and the difference between Lenora’s sense of fate and Arvin’s discomfort with it.

Emma connects Helen’s absence to a separate, painful possibility. When Willard Russell’s gun is passed to Arvin, the sight of it recalls Emma’s son and a promise she had failed to keep. She wonders whether the family might still be alive if she had persuaded Willard to stay and marry Helen. The thought is a regret, not proof that such a marriage would have prevented later losses, but it shows how Helen’s life remains entangled with the Russell family’s history.

Memory and Narrative Significance

Helen’s death also shapes Arvin’s efforts to understand what happened to Roy and Theodore. He searches old newspaper accounts and the woods where Helen’s body was found, hoping for evidence that the two men had not simply vanished. His search yields only two spent shotgun shells and a gum wrapper. Helen is thus present less through remembered speech or action than through the unanswered questions clustered around her grave: what happened to her, what became of her husband, and how the past continues to govern the lives of the children left behind.