The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Kie was a learned feller and he wanted to name the baby something with “vin” in it, not for wine but from the Latin vincere for conquer, because Kie hoped that the boy would grow up and become a doctor who could conquer all the ills that the flesh is heir to, maybe even cancer and consumption and the common cold. So Kie wanted to name him Vincent, but Alonzo thought that was too Frenchified and he suggested instead they name him Irvin, but Kie thought that sounded Jewish so he proposed Melvin, but Alonzo thought that was rather unmanly and timid, so he opined they might try out Alvin, but Kie said, “Aw hell, ’Lonzo, that’s even less manly than Melvin.” So they considered Marvin and Kelvin and Gavin and a bunch of others, and finally Alonzo said, “Wal, Hoss, let’s us jist name the boy Steven,” and Kie agreed that was a right manly name, and he dipped his goose feather into ink and wrote it out on the birth certificate, and they studied it and admired it for a while and even called the baby that name a few times, but it suddenly dawned on Kie Raney that the name didn’t really have a “vin” in it unless they had misspelled it, and somehow changing it to “Stevin” didn’t look right. “Shit,” Alonzo said, “we may as well change it to Spavin.” But Hoss Raney knew that “spavin” was a hock-joint disease in horses, and he wasn’t about to afflict the boy with a horse ailment for a name.

  They got to babbling, and tried Tomvin and Dickvin and Harvin and Carvin, and Halvin and Gilvin and Colvin, and Alonzo snapped his fingers and said, “That’un’ll do her! Colvin.” Little did either of them know that Colvin is a perfectly good Teutonic name, meaning “black-haired friend,” appropriate since the baby had inherited not his father’s golden hair but his mother’s raven hair.

  I like to think that Alonzo instinctively selected Colvin because it had a certain Ozarkian ring to it, a country sound; it seemed appropriate for a black-haired country doctor who would be a friend to everyone and would conquer, if not the common cold and cancer, at least consumption.

  They never gave him a real middle name, only an initial, “U.” That wasn’t too uncommon in those days, that a feller would have a middle initial that didn’t mean anything, it was just for looks. Harry S Truman for one. Another example is…

  Hark! You can’t hear him, but that old fool out in the hall is yelling, “About that time, six white horses flew over.” He’s been at it for the past hour, and it’s a wonder he hasn’t wakened poor Mary Celestia from her nap. Surely you can hear the sound of his voice even if you can’t hear the words? Well sir, it’s been hard enough for me to remember Alonzo Swain’s story and get it straight and try to rehearse it to you, without listening to him and that blather insinuating that I might as well have flying horses in my story! Have I told you a single blessed thing yet that was impossible, like flying horses? There may be some aspects of Alonzo Swain’s story that really stretch the blanket, but there isn’t anything inconceivable about it, now is there?

  Maybe I need Herb or Ernie around to annotate for me. You know how Herbert Halpert, the great academic folklorist and my dear friend, took the trouble to write commentaries on each of the tales and stories in my collections, all of ’em except Sticks in the Knapsack, for which Ernest Baughman supplied the notes, and Hot Springs and Hell, which I annotated myself, because it aint nothing but a joke book, and Pissing in the Snow, which Frank Hoffman annotated because he’s a specialist in dirty tales. But the main purpose of all those notes is to show that likely the story I’m relating, even though I’m telling it exactly as I heard it in the back brush, is just a rehash of some ancient tale that goes all the way back to Chaucer or Boccaccio or even the Bible. Hell, them academic annotators has even got a thing called the Motif Index and another thing called the Aarne-Thompson Index, and they can probably take any story you tell ’em, even if you think you’re a-making it up, and scribble all over it their numbers, like Motif D 420.1.6.7., and Incident VIII in Type 1542, which shows that there aint no such thing as an original story.

  So I’d hate to see what the academic annotators would do with Alonzo Swain’s story. They’d probably all shake their heads and say, “About that time, six white horses flew over,” and then they’d say, “This comes out of Hesiod. Or Pindar. Or Homer hisself.”

  I’m tired, and I’m gonna let you go.

  Chapter three

  Oh, I just switched you on. It’s good to see a welcome face again. I’ve discovered a new power lately, although it could just be a sign I’m dying. You know the excruciatingly commonplace observation that when you die your whole life story flashes before your eyes? Well, I don’t know about that, leastways nothing like that has ever happened to me. But here’s what really is happening to me: whenever I don’t like who I’m looking at, I just close my eyes and then reopen them, and it’s like flicking a switch—I get rid of whoever was here. Works, like a charm. Just now I switched you on, after switching off the most obnoxious preacher I hope I ever have to meet. Mary Celestia and I are visited, biweekly on the average, by one or another of the local ministers, Pentecostal Holiness and Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Testicles and Whoever, all shapes and sizes. I don’t suppose anybody at the desk gives them any information about us, letting them know that Mary is a retired full professor of English and Folklore at the University, and I aint so dumb myself even if I look like a bald-headed old citereen in the last throes of Alzheimer’s. A few of these preachers are friendly and almost respectful, but most of ’em patronize us and talk down to us like we were helpless babies. “Have y’all finished your lunchie?” this feller who was just in here asks us. Lunchie, for God’s own sweet sakes! Nearly as bad as the nurse who brings us our brekkie. Or the goddamn attendant who has to come in and change my di-dee because the other attendant who was supposed to bring my bedpan didn’t get here in time and I had to take a shit. Anyhow, this preacher was one of the worst. He sways back and forth in front of Mary and waves his arms in her face because she’s blind, and he hollers at me because I’m a little hard of hearing. “Did y’all have somebodee read the Bible to y’all this weekie? Did y’all get a nice big bitey of the Holy Wordie?” Ooh, lawsy mercy ’pon my soul!

  But as I say, I’ve discovered that I can just shut my eyes and make ’em go away. The trouble is, I can’t have any more control over who I’ll see when I reopen my eyes than I could control my bladder or my bowels. Just now I reopened my eyes and there you were, and I’m mighty glad to see you, but this morning I shut my eyes to get rid of Dr. Bittner—remind me sometime to tell you about him, he works over at City Hospital and comes around once a month to check up on us—I closed him out of my consciousness and when I reopened my eyes, flicked that switch, it wasn’t him I was looking at, nor you, but Colvin Swain! I swear. “Lord love a duck, Col!” I exclaimed. “I heared tell you had up and died back around the late fifties, wasn’t it? Some old boy told me you’d got hit by lightnin.”

  He smiled his benevolent reassuring smile that was always so good for making his patients feel like they didn’t have any cause at all for feeling bad, and he said, “Wal, Vance, I reckon that’s true enough, as far as it goes. But jist recollect what I told you about how I learnt to cure folks in their dreams. And ask yoreself if you’re not jist dreaming.”

  But I knew I was wide awake, and he was just a-sitting there right where you are, plain as you are…unless I’m only dreaming you too, and only you can decide that for yourself. But if you know that you are really there beside my bed and I’m really here, then you’ll just have to believe that he was there too. “Mary Celestia, sweetheart!” I called to her. “Don’t you see this doctor feller here?” And then I remembered that she is blind.

  What’s that, Mary? Oh, yes. But this isn’t the doctor, and I wasn’t calling to you again, I was just quoting to him the way I called you this morning. This is my good friend the novelist.

  Mary just said she wanted to remind me what she answered this morning, that of course she couldn’t see the man, but she could hear him, and he sure did sound like Doc Swain!

  So maybe both o
f us are in our second childhoods and we deserve to be spoken to like babies.

  Babies. How does one properly speak to a baby? Which brings us right back to our story, next installment of it, because I have to ask you now to picture a cave-house on a mountainside near Spunkwater, Arkansas, oh about 1886 or so, and a middle-aged bachelor ex-school-teacher turned self-styled physician and medical preceptor, name of Kie Raney, trying to talk to this baby named Colvin Swain.

  If Colvin had grown up in a “normal” household with a “normal” family, especially a mother and all, or even one brother or sister, he would have been nicknamed something like Butch or Spike or Pug, or leastways maybe Collie. But Kie Raney never called him anything but Colvin, always sticking that “vin” on the end of it as if to remind ’em both that he was going to conquer. Sometimes just for emphasis Kie might use his middle initial too, and call him Colvin U, but maybe that sounded like he was saying, “Colvin, you” and as far as Colvin knew he never had a last name. He grew up without a mother and without a last name. Alonzo didn’t want him to use the name Swain and Kie didn’t think it would be right to use the name Raney, since he wasn’t really Kie’s son, just his foster son, so as far as he was concerned his name was just Colvin U, with that middle initial able to stand for anything his fancy might dream up, like Ulysses or Usher or Unthank, although his favorite was Underwood, because that was usually where he was.

  From the earliest time that Colvin seemed to be paying attention, maybe around half a year old, Kie always addressed him just as he would an adult, never talking any kind of baby talk to him, and never talking down to him. “Colvin,” he would say, “it would appear that you have done gone and taken a shit on yore blanket and I am a-gorn have to clean it up and git ye a fresh ’un.” Or he would say something like, “Wal, Colvin, don’t ye reckon thet thar bite of oatmeal would sit better on yore stomach than it would on top of yore haid and all over yore face?” He’d sound just like a doctor discussing a patient’s problems, and later, when Colvin would overhear his foster father talking to various patients of his in the same mild, polite tone, he probably understood that that was the way a feller ought to talk to anybody, and that was the beginning of the calm, soothing way of speaking that grown-up Colvin Swain would have with his own patients.

  Not even in their games would Kie use anything approximating baby talk or child talk. From earliest memory, Colvin’s favorite amusement was to be bounced on Kie’s knees in that popular little surprise sport called “Ride a little horsie down to town. Whoa, little horsie, don’t fall down.” Only Kie didn’t say it that way; he would call the imaginary animal “a stout steed” or “a prancing stallion” or “a plunging mustang” or “a trotting colt” or “a winged palomino” even if the meter wasn’t trochaic and thus the horse’s bounce was out of rhythm.

  Being bounced on Kie’s knee, by the way, was all the holding and cuddling that little Colvin needed, that he might’ve got from a mother if he’d had one. He didn’t need more of it. But Kie would hold and cuddle him if he hurt himself or was afraid of something.

  Kie was a talented guitarist and a pretty good singer of old songs, and he sang for his foster son every ballad, ancient and modern, which concerned horses.

  Later when Colvin had outgrown the knee-horsie, or rather graduated to being able to ride Kie’s back as Kie got on all fours to become the horse, Kie taught him to recite such things as “Ride a cock horse to Banbury town,” and such old rhymes as:

  One white foot, buy a horse;

  Two white feet, try a horse;

  Three white feet, look well about him;

  Four white feet, do without him.

  …Or the Ozarkian variant on this last: “Four white feet an’ a white nose, / Take off his hide an’ throw him to the crows.” And later, such things as: “Dear to me is my bonny white steed; / Oft has he helped me at pinch of need.” And even these lines from Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis”:

  Round-hoof’d, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,

  Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,

  High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,

  Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:

  Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,

  Save a proud rider on so proud a back.

  And later still, Kie taught him Latin: Tum bene fortis equus reserato carcere currit, Cum quos prœtereat, quosque sequatur, habet, which is from Ovid’s Art of Love and means: “The valiant horse races best, at the barrier’s fall, when he has others to follow and o’erpass,” or, to translate it into the way folks would talk in those parts, “A good horse runs better if he’s got other horses to beat out.” But by that time, Colvin was too old to ride the playlike horse of Kie or even the various broomstick horses that he outgrew one by one. He was ready for his own real horse. When a Spunkwater mule skinner named Felix Amidon got blinded by his own daddy for fooling around with the daddy’s kept woman, Kie went to him and treated him with a combination of large doses of thiamine and the singing of a special magic song in countertenor, which restored his eyesight, and Felix Amidon paid Kie for this cure with a broomtail Indian pony, which Kie presented to Colvin, who named the pony Pegasus but called him Ole Peg. I doubt if Kie ever told him the old tale of how Pegasus sprang from Medusa’s neck when her head was cut off, but possibly he did tell him about how the nine Muses took care of Pegasus and maybe even how Bellerophon tamed him and rode him off to fight the Chimera.

  What the knife Prince had been to his daddy at that age and later, the pony Pegasus became for Colvin. He took to riding it all over creation, especially westward to Stay More, which somehow seemed more like a hometown to him than Spunkwater did. Even though he didn’t know it, Stay More was a-swarming with his own kinfolks. He had first cousins and last cousins all over the place. He liked to tie Pegasus at the porch of Isaac Ingledew’s gristmill and sit on the edge of the mill porch with all the other loafers of Stay More. Because his hair was black and his features favored the McKinstry side of his family, nobody suspected that he was another son of Alonzo Swain, who had his doctor’s office on Stay More’s Main Street and sometimes came to the mill to loaf around. Colvin had learned to call him “Uncle ’Lonzo,” because that is what Alonzo had requested that Kie tell the boy he was: not his father, but his uncle. If any of the Stay More boys his own age asked him who he was or where he was from, he would just say he was Colvin and he lived in a cave-house over toward Spunkwater with Doc Kie Raney. He never told anybody that he was Doc Raney’s son. We don’t even know if he believed that himself, but leastways he never gave out that he was Doc Raney’s son; he just said he lived with him, in a cave-house. The other boys were curious to know about that cave-house, what it looked like, how it was built (or rather how the boards and windows and door covered the mouth of the cave to form one wall of a dwelling whose other walls were the natural stone of the cave), and how it felt to live inside of it. When Colvin explained how cool it was in hottest summer and how warm it was in coldest winter, the boys went home to their parents and demanded to know why everybody didn’t live in caves. Most of the parents could only reply, “Beats me,” or, “I don’t have the first idee,” or, “You’ve got me there, boy.”

  One day Colvin noticed that the Stay More boys were missing. He waited around the mill porch for them to show up, but they never did. He went over to the Ingledew Store to see if they might be there, but they weren’t. So he went back to the mill and waited some more, until somebody asked him, “How come ye aint in school?” Now the only school he’d ever heard tell of was once when Kie Raney had showed him a school of fish in the creek. So he figured that the other boys were all off a-fishing somewheres. He got back on Ole Peg and rode up and down Banty Creek a ways without finding any boys fishing, so then he rode up and down Swains Creek a ways, and it just so happened that when he come to the Stay More schoolhouse, the boys was all outdoors for recess, and there was a bunch of girls too! Colvin had
hardly ever seen a girl. Riding Pegasus all over the countryside, he had sometimes spied a girl standing on the porch of a house or maybe even working in the garden, but he’d never seen one up close. He wanted to talk to one of them, to see if they sounded like human beings.

  Colvin got down from his pony and stood there admiring the girls, and admiring the schoolhouse, a handsome structure with a little bell-tower cupola on top of it, and big glass windows, and a couple of twin doors—“bigeminal,” as you say. Colvin went up to one of the boys and asked, “What are y’all up to?” The boy replied, “We’re a-playing Dare Base.” Colvin watched them run around for a while, and then the bell up on the roof went BOMB-DOOM one time, and all the kids quit running around and went into the building, the girls through one door, the boys through the other, with Colvin joining the latter. He found a seat at a desk in the back and sat there watching as a old feller got up and took a piece of white chalk and used it to make some letters on the wall, which was painted black. The letters said GEOGRAPHY, LESSON 6, and STATE CAPITALS, and then the feller turned around and said, “All righty, what’s the state capital of Arkansas?” and some girl held up her hand and the feller said, “You, Sarey,” and the girl said, “Little Rock, Teacher!” And the man said, “Keerect. Missoury?” and somebody said “Jeff City, Teacher.” This went on for some time, with the feller naming all the neighboring states, but then he began to name far-off places, and when he named Virginia nobody knew its capital, except Colvin, who did as he had observed the others doing and held up his hand.

  “You thar,” the teacher-feller pointed at him. “I don’t believe I recollect yore name.”

  “Colvin, Teacher” he said. “Richmond.”

  “Colvin Richmond, huh? I don’t know any Richmonds hereabouts. Are you new to this country?”

  “Nossir, I meant Richmond is the capital of Virginia.”