The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Like what?” the Allies demanded, but none of the Axis could answer them.

  Mare was moved as close to tears of frustration as I’d ever seen him, and I ached to reply on his behalf, on all our behalves, but I realized that I myself didn’t have much enthusiasm for politics. I sat there wondering if Ernie Pyle had ever been required to cover a town hall beat or do any kind of political reporting. He’d been a copyreader and a telegraph editor for the Washington Daily News before he’d started writing a regular column on aviation, the first ever. I wished that an airplane would fly over Stay More sometime, but I’d never seen one.

  Willard Dinsmore tried to come to Mare’s rescue, to mine, to ours. “We could help some of the unfortunates.”

  “Like who?” the Allies demanded.

  “Let’s us start with the Dingletoons,” Willard proposed.

  Chapter three

  When the large family of Dingletoons first came to Stay More and simply took over an abandoned farmstead in a remote and rocky corner of Butterchurn Holler during an autumn early in the war, their reputation preceded them: they were known to have a habit of simply helping themselves to unoccupied real estate without paying rent or making any gesture of acquiring legal tenancy or ownership. They weren’t sharecroppers. E.H. Ingledew, our town’s retired dentist and mortician, who nominally owned the Stay More land they began to squat on, called them “the Starlings” out of his unwillingness to call them Dingletoons, a supposed corruption of his own family name, and because the starling is a bird who’ll move into and take over a woodpecker’s nest. After the woodpecker has gone to all that trouble to hack out the cavity and build a nest in it and call it home, it comes home one morning to find a bunch of starlings have usurped the place.

  Supposedly Ace and Bliss Dingletoon had moved their seven children into the crude cabin of rounded logs—not one of the original old-time hewn-log cabins carefully crafted in the last century but one built hastily during the homesteader boom before the First World War and gradually rotting ever since—and had been subsisting there for quite some months before the owner, Ingledew, found out about it and rather halfheartedly accosted the father, Ace Dingletoon, and asked if he intended to pay any rent on the place. Ace tried to tell E.H. a story about how he’d run into an old lady one time who told him that she’d known Ace’s grandfather, who had actually been one of the Ingledews, but the grandfather had been a kind of outcast who couldn’t read nor write nor even pronounce the name correctly. “Mought we not even be cousins therefore?” Ace had said to E.H. Ingledew.

  “Hell,” E.H. had observed correctly, “everbody in this here county is cousins anyhow.”

  “If I was to learn my kids how to say our name correctly, so’s it’s Ingledew ’stead of Dingletoon, would ye be willin to let us keep on a-tendin this old run-down godforsaken place?”

  “Stranger,” E.H. had replied, “ever fool knows you folks is always on the lookout for a empty place to move into, and if this aint the beatenest gimmick ever I heared to git yoreselfs another’n!”

  The Ingledews had at least collected some token rent from the previous occupants for the forty acres of barely workable land. But Ace and Bliss Dingletoon could pay no rent; they had seven children and one mule and not much else. They had never owned land or property, had never paid rent to use a dwelling, had never cropped on shares or in any manner recognized that the land they used belonged to somebody else. Just where they came from originally was obscure. Just where they were going eventually was equally obscure. Only one thing was known for sure: they wouldn’t stay long in any place.

  They were here today and gone tomorrow. They moved out as easily as they moved in. They were even known to catch wind that a family was planning to move out, whereupon they were ready to move into the house before the chimney was cool. Ace Dingletoon would check to see if the barbed wire fences were all in place and then turn his mule out to pasture, uncoop the chickens and give them free run of the yard, then check the corncrib and hayloft to see if anything had been left behind that could be fed to some stock. The oldest boy, Joe Don Dingletoon, would be sent to search the smokehouse and other outbuildings, if any; one time Joe Don had even found a good chunk of meat still hanging in the smokehouse. The girl Gypsy would be sent to see if there were any edible potatoes in the garden patch and to dig them up. Her little brothers Billy and Taylor, barely old enough to heft and tote a full pail, would be sent to fetch sufficient water from the well or spring or creek so that the mother, Bliss, could commence redding up the house.

  If there wasn’t enough left behind on the place to make a meal, the kids would go off into the woods and set rabbit traps, or down to the creek to noodle fish. The whole family was trained to know what to do as soon as they moved in. Even the dogs would take off for the tall timber and have a coon or possum or mess of squirrels treed in time for supper. Their first evening in a new home was always marked by a groaning table at suppertime.

  Once they had taken possession of a place, it was pretty hard to remove them without the help of the sheriff. They would get their crops planted as soon as the season allowed, so that they could claim nobody had any right to evict them until the crops were harvested. Or, if the season wasn’t right for that excuse, Bliss Dingletoon could claim to be imminently expecting, which she usually was, anyhow. One time they’d even painted all the kid’s faces with pokeberry juice so it would appear they had the smallpox and Ace Dingletoon had said to the landlord, “How can you talk about rent at a time like this?”

  But if worse came to worst, and the landlord was insistent, and Sheriff Cheatham arrived, the Dingletoons were trained to move out just as efficiently as they had moved in. Legend grew up around their habits of departure, and the loafers at the country stores amused themselves by building upon the legend. When the moving day appeared inevitable, even before Sheriff Cheatham had turned his Ford into the yard, Ace would simply blow a horn and the kids, the dogs, the mule, the cow, would all come a-running. One fellow claimed the Dingletoons kept all of their belongings tied together with a rope so that if the moment of their eviction came, they simply pulled it all together into the wagon. Another said that even the chickens were trained to lie down in a row with their feet sticking up so Gypsy could tie them.

  The Dingletoons wouldn’t allow their kids to go to school, in order to minimize public awareness of their existence and illegal tenancy. In their wanderings from place to place, the Dingletoon children had not only been denied any schooling but also had never been allowed to form any friendships with other children. They never left the premises except to go fishing, hunting, or, the way that Gypsy Dingletoon and Ella Jean Dinsmore discovered each other and became friends, bathing. Halfway between the place the Dingletoons were squatting on and the Dinsmore place was a spot on Banty Creek where Ella Jean liked to sneak away for a regular soak, weather permitting, and that’s how she came across Gypsy one evening. I’ll say more about this in a moment, but the point is that I hadn’t yet met any of the Dingletoon kids that summer, although Ella Jean and her brother Willard knew them.

  E.H. Ingledew periodically sent Ace a bill for the rent, not much, but more than Ace had ever seen in cash money in his life, and E.H. periodically wrote “Overdue” on it, and indicated by how many months it was overdue, and then how many years it was overdue. Finally the accumulated rent was up in the hundreds, and E.H. decided he’d better make an attempt to collect. Braving the ferocious snarls of the Dingletoon dogs, he hiked into their (or rather his) yard.

  “I’m afeared I’m a-gorn to have to ast ye to git gone,” E.H. told Ace.

  “Aw shee-ut,” Ace protested. “Iffen I was to git off this place, ye’d never be able to find nobody else to rent it to.”

  E.H. thought that over a minute before saying, “Wal, I’d as soon rent it for nothin to nobody as rent it for nothin to somebody.”

  “I hate to tell ye this, sir, but I think my old womarn’s adyin.”

  E.H., being only a retired de
ntist and mortician, not a doctor, decided to take a look at her anyway, and although Bliss Dingletoon had jumped into bed for the occasion and was doing her best to look pale and peaked, she didn’t look like a likely candidate for burial. “You folks’ll all live to the crack of doom,” E.H. declared, “but it won’t be on my proppity. Sherf Frank Cheatham will be here bright and early in the mornin to make shore you’uns aint left a trace behind.”

  But when Sheriff Cheatham did take the trouble to drive all the way out from Jasper to help E.H. execute the eviction, he discovered that Ace Dingletoon had not performed the customary ritual of blowing his horn to round up the kids and the stock and pulling that legendary rope that would load all his possessions into the wagon. The stock, the kids, the possessions were still there. Bliss was still in her kitchen. But Ace had departed.

  In an act of either desperation or courage, depending on whose opinion one heard, Ace had joined the service. As I reported it in a small news item in The Stay Morning Star, “Mr. Ace T. Dingletoon, 34, joined the army this week. This now makes nine Stay More men who are among Our Boys Overseas. Not many of them have left behind a family the size of his, though. We hope they are okay.”

  They were okay, for a while. E.H. Ingledew couldn’t very easily evict a woman with seven kids whose husband was in the service. “Hail far, Each,” his brother Bevis said to him, “that wouldn’t be patriotic.” And Bevis’s wife Emelda even insisted on E.H. leaving a sack of flour and a turn of meal where the Dingletoons could find it (to offer such to them would be an insult; charity was totally unacceptable). Joe Don Dingletoon was old enough and strong enough to assume his father’s chores, which had been rather lackadaisical to begin with. Since they had had no income in the first place, nor any money anywhere around the house, Ace’s absence didn’t have any effect whatever on their cash flow situation. Of course they missed him, and the fact that he was illiterate meant that he couldn’t write letters home from the war, but for that matter Bliss couldn’t have read them if he had. Gypsy, now fourteen, had taught herself to read with the help of an old blueback speller that somebody had left behind in one of the houses they’d temporarily occupied, her main motive being to learn how to decipher the walls: the walls of that house, like the walls of all the houses they had lived in, had been papered with newspapers, magazines, and pages from Sears Roebuck catalogs. Such wallpaper served also as a primitive but helpful insulation in cold winter. Gypsy wanted to be able to read the comics, and she graduated from those to the feature stories, and from those to the news, and before long she was reading the lavish descriptions in the Sears catalog pages of all the clothes that she would never be able to have. Joe Don, two years older than Gypsy, could not help observing his sister standing for what seemed like hours facing the walls. She was peculiar sometimes, he thought. One day he was finally moved to ask her, “What ye up to, Sis?” and she answered, “Readin,” and offered to teach him how.

  So she introduced him to that forbidden knowledge he’d never had before. She did not tell him that she’d recently started doing something that had also been forbidden: consorting with a neighbor, a nice girl named Ella Jean Dinsmore. It was June, and the creek was warm enough to use in place of the old tin tub for a bath. Girls somehow need to bathe more often than boys, and a galvanized tub doesn’t allow a real soak. With a creek of running water you can do all kinds of things.

  Shortly before Gypsy Dingletoon discovered Ella Jean bathing in the creek, I had myself discovered Ella Jean bathing. I’d had a crush on her since the second grade, but she never spoke to me, probably because I’d never been able to get up my nerve and speak to her. One June evening after supper I was hiking along the banks of Banty Creek hunting for things to shoot with my slingshot, just getting target practice by popping dragonflies and wasps. I was real good with that slingshot. Well, there is a spot on that creek, a very secluded spot just down the hill a ways from the Dinsmore shack, where there is this sort of depression in the rock of the creekbed, some call it a “hog scald” because that’s what it was used for: filled with red-hot rocks and steaming, it’d scour the bristles off a slaughtered hog. But in summertime when there wasn’t any butchering, it made a fine bathtub. At least Ella Jean thought so.

  Among all the things that were hard to come by during the war—sugar, elastic, gas, tin, chewing gum, coffee, and so on—one of the most precious was soap. Of course the womenfolk still rendered hog lard and ashes into a kind of crude lye soap that was okay, but not really suitable for sudsing and lathering and bathing. Latha Bourne could no longer stock the good store-boughten soaps—Ivory, Life-buoy, Lava, not to mention Cashmere Bouquet—which were scarce as hen’s teeth. And even if she had, the Dinsmores couldn’t have afforded to buy a bar. But Ella Jean, doing some housework that summer for Drussie Ingledew, who still lived in the old house that had once been Stay More’s hotel, found in the drawer of a washstand an overlooked cake of Palmolive. She hid it in her sunbonnet and took it home with her, never telling anybody about it. Twice a month she would permit herself the luxury of going down to that hog-scald depression in the rocks of that secret cove of Banty Creek, stripping naked, getting wet, running that cake of Palmolive over her body, over her swelling young breasts, ever so lightly, just enough of it to swab her skin and to fill the twilight air with the unique scent of that brand of soap, which my nostrils could detect from the distance of some thirty yards away in my hiding-place. What the madeleine was to Proust, that Palmolive was to me. The scent of Palmolive would always say to me: summertime; it would say: gloaming; it would say: creekwater; it would say: clean; it would say: fresh; it would say: Ella Jean.

  Gentle Reader, you are saying to yourself, That Donny sure is a little snoop, a regular voyeur! But I wasn’t really trying to spy on people; it just happened in the course of events. For instance, I just stumbled upon Ella Jean, and I was so surprised to come across her that I wouldn’t have known what to say. I certainly didn’t want to say, “Hi there, Ella Jean, how’s the water?” so I had to conceal myself. Before you judge me too quickly, consider how you are concealing yourself: I shall never see you. You have the privilege of watching all of this, including my most private thoughts and deeds, without ever being seen or heard.

  I’m not sure Ella Jean would have minded if she’d known I was spying on her. I’d often wondered: those big families living crowded together in those cabins and shacks, did they ever have any privacy? Ella Jean and Gypsy were ripe candidates for friendship because their families were equally impoverished. The Dinsmores may have been even worse off because there were more of them and there hadn’t been any father around since Jake Dinsmore had gone out to California during the Depression to seek his fortune, promising to send for his family after he got rich, but he had never again been heard from, and Selena had been trying to raise all those thirteen kids by herself in a shack of only two rooms. The house I lived in was neither a cabin nor a shack, and I was the only child in it. I could not imagine what it would be like to go to the outhouse with a brother or sister or one of both or six of both, nor could I imagine having to share not only the bathtub but the bathwater with a bunch of siblings. Ella Jean may have felt some need for privacy, now that her breasts were a-budding, and that’s why she preferred the seclusion of that spot on Banty Creek for her baths. I had never seen bare breasts before. Not a girl’s. I knew what they were. Of course I knew what they were for. Not mine. Mine were just a decoration on my chest, like medals, and nobody cared whether they were showing or not. But a girl’s were supposed to be in hiding, as you are hiding. If you were revealed, it would thrill me, as I was thrilled by the revealing of Ella Jean.

  Every evening after supper thereafter, I stole away to the same spot, hoping for another glimpse of her, or even for the faintest whiff of that breathtaking Palmolive, but I discovered she didn’t want to use the precious soap more than twice a month. When she would not show up, I would roll up my trousers and wade out into the hog scald to the same spot she had occup
ied and stir the water with my hands, as if trying to stir up a hint of that scent of Palmolive. Once, doing this, I looked up to see her coming down through the forest path that led to her house. She didn’t see me, and I got out of there and concealed myself in a dense clump of brush where I could—and did—enjoy nearly a whole half hour of watching her take a bath. It was toward the end of this half hour that Gypsy Dingletoon appeared. Ella Jean did not betray any modesty in the presence of the stranger-girl. They exchanged howdies. From my concealment, I could barely hear their voices as they timidly and warily made known to each other their habitations, their full names, their ages, Gypsy two years older than Ella Jean but that difference not enough to keep them from intuiting, as only girls can grasp through mysterious feeling, that they had enough reasons to like each other to the point of trying to become friends.

  At length, Ella Jean held up the white bar of Palmolive and said, “Lookee at what I’ve got.” By this point, Gypsy had hiked the hem of her dress and waded out into the water, so that Ella Jean could hold the bar of Palmolive right up to Gypsy’s nose.

  Gypsy took a good sniff and said, “My! You must have a lot of money!”

  “Aw, I’m pore as Job’s turkey,” Ella Jean said. “I found this some’ers, and sort of stole it. Do you want to try it out? I don’t keer if you was to use it a bit.”

  Gypsy needed no urging. She simply pulled her dress up over her head, wadded it into a heap, and gave it a toss that landed it on the bank of the creek. It was her only garment. She could have made use of a brassiere, but she’d probably never seen one. If the sight of Ella Jean’s little welts excited me, I don’t know you well enough yet to tell you what the exposure of Gypsy’s bubbies did to me. Also, she had hips, which Ella Jean didn’t. She carefully accepted the precious bar of soap from Ella Jean, and with her other hand cupped and splashed water over her front and shoulders and face, and then ever so lightly applied the bar of Palmolive, whose fragrance, rising from both their bodies in aromatic concert with the smell of the creekwater and its traces of fish and of the evening air and its traces of all summer’s growing things, transported me out of the dull life in which I was usually imprisoned. I sighed so loudly it was a wonder they didn’t hear me.