The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Willard begrudged the dogs their share. After all, he said to himself at the age of three, observing the speed and ferocity of the dogs, a dog is capable of foraging for wild game or even tame sheep, but a three-year-old kid can’t forage for anything except poke salat. It wasn’t fair that the dogs got all that good cornbread. So Willard, whose chore was to throw the cornbread to the dogs and be rewarded by the entertainment of watching them leap in the air for it and swallow it in one gobble before landing, began covertly eating one piece for each piece he threw to the dogs. This almost cured the hunger that had ravaged his body since the day he was weaned.

  But Selena, whose absentmindedness was the only reason she’d been so late in weaning him, began to wonder why the dogs continued to fidget and whine around the back stoop after they supposedly had been fed. “Willard, did ye feed them dawgs?” she would ask him, and “Yes’m” he would reply, and this went on for a long time before she decided to check up on him and see if he was really feeding them, and thus she discovered that he was bolting a chaunk of bread for every chaunk he tossed to the dogs. She not only took a switch to his little hide, but made him sleep with the dogs (the boys’ bed was becoming too crowded anyway, with Hubert, Tommy, and Vann getting bigger). The dogs were smart enough to know that Willard had been pilfering their cornbread ration, but, being dogs, they could just silently begrudge his sleeping with them. Willard, hearing the growls during the night, thought the dogs were complaining about his theft, and he was slow in realizing the growls came from his own stomach.

  The chore of feeding the dogs was taken from him and given to one of his sisters, and Willard was appointed to the job of hoeing the corn and potatoes, although he was scarcely big enough to hold a hoe: the hoe-handle was simply too long for him. Jake Dinsmore suspected unknown pests were grubbing some of the potatoes and getting into the corn and gnawing bites out of the ears, until he caught Willard eating a raw potato. Willard was relieved of this duty and exempted from any chores involving foodstuffs. They made the mistake of not thinking of milk as a foodstuff, and allowed Willard to start milking Rosemary, the cow. Willard hid a gourd dipper in a hollow tree near the milking spot, and thus managed to assuage his hunger and his thirst. Rosemary was a free-ranging cow, not limited to the pasture but allowed to roam the woods, and on her wanderings she discovered Jake’s still and helped herself to the still-beer until she could hardly stagger home. Nor could she stand still while Willard milked her, so that he had the awfullest time trying to fill the pail, and Selena Dinsmore suspicioned that he had been drinking from it, her notion confirmed when he began tottering, reeling, and slurring his words. He was never allowed to go near Rosemary again.

  That early experience with an altered state of consciousness may have been part of the reason that Willard began to think too deeply and freshly about the meaning of life, and to reach the conclusion that each of us has a position in the scheme of things, and each of us has a destiny. He never came to doubt free will, because he was never deprived entirely of the opportunity to exercise his, but he began to believe that he was foredestined for something, he knew not what, but something, perhaps something important or at least worthwhile enough to make life worth enduring.

  Willard did not fully grasp that life is hard. But he knew it had to be taken, withstood, and survived. Born with the birth of the national Depression, he never had a chance to discover that there had been better times. He took it for granted that everybody’s breakfast consisted of soakies: crumbs of biscuit crusts sopped in coffee and milk. And that a great feast was when you could get your beans flavored by a piece of sowbelly. It was not the quality of the fare that was lacking, just the quantity of it. Willard could never get enough to eat. He was always hungry. His many brothers and sisters never seemed to suffer the way he did. Other kids at school didn’t suffer the way he did. I certainly didn’t, because I could go for days without a hunger pang. School dinners seemed sufficient for all but Willard. His older sisters Doris and Jelena, the twins, had the responsibility of packing and toting the school dinner, a galvanized tin pail holding sufficient cornbread and roasting ears and sometimes possum or rabbit meat or at least hard-boiled eggs, and Willard got the same share as his other brothers and sisters, but it was never enough, and that was why, once, in the fourth grade when he couldn’t stand it, he noticed that Miss Jerram’s dinner pail had in it two sandwiches, one of them made with real bacon, so…. But once again he was found out in his attempts to still his hunger, and when Miss Jerram asked him why he was eating her sandwich, he could only reply, “I figgered ye didn’t have need of the both of ’em.” She said he ought to have asked her first. He replied, “You’re kinder hard to ask.” She made him write on the board a hundred times, “I will always ask before eating somebody’s dinner.”

  He had never eaten anybody’s dinner since then. Nor their breakfast or supper. But he had gone to great lengths to fend for himself. He ate anything he could find that didn’t exactly belong to somebody else. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he had learned how to cook, but like everybody else in the Ozarks, he felt that cooking was something that women and girls did. Men and boys didn’t cook. So Willard had to search and forage, and to eat his scroungings raw. But after all, most fruit and many vegetables are meant to be eaten raw anyway.

  The remarkable thing about Willard Dinsmore, it almost goes without saying, is that somehow he managed, despite stuffing himself at every opportunity, to remain so skinny. Older people made jokes about it that filtered down to us, and the Allies used the jokes as taunts: not only the usual similes such as calling him skinny as a rail or a snake or a skeleton, but more extravagant likenings to the leg of a milking stool or the shadow of a hair and, now that the scarcity of elastic in the war required any of us who wore underclothes to use garments with drawstrings that were usually tied in a bow, “Willard has to double-knot his underpants to keep ’em from slippin off.”

  Maybe it was sheer metabolism that kept him thin. He worked hard, he played hard, he fought hard in the battles and games against the Allies, and he thought hard. I never saw Willard with an empty mind. He was always thinking about something. If I had known him better, I would have yielded to my constant impulse to ask him, “What are you thinking about?” But the only one who knew him well enough to ask such a personal question was Mare.

  Although Willard was Mare’s lieutenant in all the activities of the Axis, and the two spent many of their idle hours together (to the extent that Willard was ever idle: even when he and Mare went fishing, rather than recline on the creek bank with his hat pulled down over his face waiting for a bob of the cork that never came, he was constantly in motion, whipping his cane pole as if it were a fancy rod), Mare never confessed to Willard, as Gypsy confessed to Ella Jean, that he and Gypsy had become lovers and tacitly betrothed. Thus, when Mare was called up into the service and made into a marine (I liked that alliteration and even used it in the Star: “Mare the Marine”), Willard went on dreaming about Gypsy without any notion that such dreams were betrayals of his best friend. Not just involuntary night dreams but daydreams too. You could glance at Willard whenever Gypsy was around, on the ball field or in the trenches of warfare, and you could tell just by imagining what he was thinking that he was deeply taken with her.

  Just in time for the cane harvest, when all of Stay More’s sugar cane would be collected and ground into sorghum molasses (we’d been doing this for years before the sugar shortage of the war), Willard got Gypsy a mule…or rather, he procured one for the Dingletoons to use. Nobody—except me, of course—knew exactly how he did it. He didn’t steal it, I can tell you, and of course he couldn’t have afforded to have bought it. He didn’t exactly borrow it, either. One morning the Dingletoons woke up and found a mule tethered to a tree beside the shed that passed for their barn. Bliss Dingletoon insisted that Joe Don and Gypsy canvas the town to ask if anybody was missing a mule. Nobody was. Somebody suggested to Joe Don that the Allies had proposed stealing ole Dan’s
mule to give to the Dingletoons, and Joe Don, not knowing any better, actually went to ole Dan’s yellow house and asked the hermit if he was missing a mule. All of us were awestruck with admiration for Joe Don that he had bravely done that, and even after we’d tried to explain to Joe Don that ole Dan never had nothing to do with nobody, and that the Allies were investigating the possibility that he was a German spy, Joe Don was not fazed or even impressed. “He didn’t try to bite my head off,” Joe Don declared. “He gave me a real cigarette—well, he’d rolled it hisself but it was real tobacco and real cigarette papers. We had us a good little talk.”

  Our mouths collectively gaped open and we insisted that Joe Don tell us everything that ole Dan had said.

  Dan’s yellow house was up above the road that goes to Butterchurn Holler, the same road the Dingletoons’ place was on. So they were neighbors, almost, out there in the wildest part of town—well, not jungle-wild, but lush with growth, big trees with vines hanging from them and dense thickets of brush and all manner of wildflower and weed and bush: shady places further shadowed by the mountains. It wasn’t exactly spooky up in there, but whenever I was out on my rounds, delivering the Star or collecting news, it always gave me the fantods to hike along the Butterchurn Holler road.

  “Well sir now,” Joe Don related, relishing the expectant reverence in our attitude toward him, “he jist ast me was I fixin to go to school now that time a books was nigh. And I ’lowed as how I’d never been to school afore but was hankerin to.” Without going into a detailed family history, Joe Don had explained to ole Dan that the Dingletoons had never “held still long enough” for any of them to go to school, but now that they seemed to be pretty well settled in Stay More, they were giving serious thought to it, even though Joe Don was unsettled by the idea, and worried about the competition.

  “He tole me that when he’d been my age, he’d been a schoolmaster hisself, off up in a place called Vermont, and he tole me the story of that.” So already Joe Don was raking up information about the strange old man that we didn’t know. He hadn’t been a bank embezzler or a doctor or an escaped convict but just a schoolteacher! But starting at the age of sixteen? “Seventeen,” Joe Don said. “And he hadn’t never even finished school hisself. But it seems like this place where he was, Five Corners, was kind of hard up for schoolteachers. And in that day and age, he didn’t need a license or nothin to teach.”

  Anyhow, Joe Don said, the point of all this was to reassure Joe Don that he wouldn’t have any trouble with school, as long as he could do what ole Dan had done: always stay a lesson ahead of everybody else. Joe Don grew musing and repeated this as if he’d have his mother make him a needlepoint of it to hang up as a personal motto: Stay a lesson ahead of everybody else.

  We were eager to know if Joe Don had caught a glimpse of the hermit’s legendary daughter.

  Joe Don’s eyes bulged. “Boy howdy, aint she a looker? I mean, did ye ever see such a scrumdoodle?”

  We were obliged to confess that none of us had ever got a close look at her.

  “Didn’t she never go to the school or nowheres?” Joe Don wanted to know. We shook our heads solemnly. “Well, heck, maybe there wasn’t no need? Him bein a schoolteacher hisself?” He thought for a long moment, and added, “Or maybe she was just too shy and afraid of folks?” Joe Don told us her name was Annie but said that Annie hadn’t been able to say a word to Joe Don.

  When school resumed, the Dingletoon kids were there, all four of them. Joe Don was good enough at reading, and at sums, which he’d mastered on his own, to be placed into the seventh grade despite never having been to school before. Miss Jerram didn’t want to make such a big boy sit at desks with little kids. As long as Joe Don followed that new motto, and stayed a lesson ahead of everybody else, he deserved to sit with Willard at the seventh grade desk on the Axis side. And Miss Jerram figured that since his sister Gypsy was two years behind him in age, she should be two years behind in school, so she was placed in the fifth grade, my grade, but to my great disappointment she wasn’t assigned to my desk but to that of Sammy Coe, my only coeval and rival.

  The fall term passed quickly. I continued to publish The Stay Morning Star without fail every week, with news taken from the newsreels at the Buffalo and from whatever was worth reporting around Stay More. Paris was liberated, and Miss Jerram explained to us that it wasn’t Paris, Arkansas, but a big city Overseas, the capital of France. The Allies thought they had liberated downtown Stay More but they were mistaken; with the help of potato grenades, the Axis drove them out of the three foxholes they’d captured. The U.S. Army invaded German soil for the first time. The Allies reported that they’d discovered a nocturnal visitor to ole Dan’s yellow house: none other than Doc Swain himself. Was Doc Swain also a German spy? The Axis tried to tell the Allies that they were full of beans, that possibly Doc Swain was visiting ole Dan either out of friendship or in order to fix something that was wrong with him. I did not report any of this in the Star. The Japanese (the real ones, not those among us Axis) had begun using suicide pilots, called kamikazes, at the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines, and Boden Whitter of Stay More, 19, a sailor on one of the ships hit by a kamikaze in that battle, was killed. Miss Jerram excused from school for two days his kid sister, Tildy Whitter, and his kid brother, Jim John. Jim John declared, looking at me, “I’m gonna kill all you dirty Japs.” Even though he was a member of the filthy Allies, we felt very sorry for him, and with Miss Jerram’s help the Axis made a card of sympathy lavishly inscribed with sentiments of sorrow and left it in the Whitter’s post office box. A few days later Stay More had a pie supper, a fund-raising auction of girls’ and women’s pies and their companionship during the eating of them, to raise money for a War Memorial in Boden Whitter’s memory, and I reported all the bids and the resulting visits in the Star. I lost fifty cents on a pie that I was certain had been baked by Ella Jean but had actually been made by Rosa Faye Duckworth, an Ally, and I could hardly speak to her—not that I would have been able to speak to Ella Jean either.

  In one issue of the Star I gave the front page to the reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and wrote an editorial, “He’s One of Us,” about the man newly elected to be his vice president, Harry S Truman, who came from a place up in Missouri not too far from the Ozarks and therefore we ought to be proud of Senator Truman, even if he wasn’t much to look at. The Allies reported that Doc Swain was often a visitor to ole Dan’s house, and that Doc wasn’t treating ole Dan for anything. The two men were just seen sitting together on the porch in the autumn chill talking to each other. On the front page of another issue of the Star, first asking myself, “What would Ernie Pyle have done?,” I ran a story under the headline, ALLIES STAKEOUT INNOCENT HERMIT UNDER SUSPICION AS NAZI SPY. And I named names. Willard himself was not happy with that, since I’d violated the policy that we never tell any adults about our activities. I protested that I hadn’t told any adults. “Your newspaper tells everbody, don’t it?” he pointed out, rightly. What was worse, three of those names I’d named ganged up on me and beat me up, breaking my arm. But I discovered you. I made true friends with you, Gentle Reader.

  Joe Don reported to us about another visit he’d had with the hermit. This time ole Dan had offered him not only a cigarette but a glass of homemade dandelion wine. “Mighty fine stuff,” Joe Don boasted. He said that he and ole Dan had enjoyed a good laugh together over the idea that the Allies were reconnoitering ole Dan under suspicion of being a German spy. Ole Dan had often seen some kids sneaking around his property, but just figured they were either nosy or they were trying to get a look at Annie, “Who doesn’t like to be seen,” ole Dan said. Joe Don had explained to ole Dan how all the kids of Stay More were divided into the two camps, Allies and Axis. “Heck, I’m a Nazi myself!” Joe Don had told the hermit. And ole Dan had given him the Nazi salute and said “Sieg, Heil!” and Joe Don had returned the salute and said “Sieg, Heil, mein Führer!” and the two had nearly died laughing.

 
; “But then,” Joe Don related, “but then he also says, ‘Was man nicht kann meiden, muss man willig leiden,’ and I says I’m sorry but I don’t know that’un, and he said it in English, ‘What one cannot avoid must be borne without complaint.’”

  We stared at Joe Don. We stared at each other. We waited to see who would be the first to comment. It was Willard. “Maybe he really is a German.”

  “He was born in a place called Connecticut,” Joe Don said. “Is that in Germany?”

  “Connecticut’s part of America somewheres,” I informed them. “Maybe ole Dan just learnt the German language. Maybe his grandmother was German, or somebody.”

  “I got to remind you,” Willard said to Joe Don, “we’uns has taken a solemn vow, Allies and Axis both, never to tell the grown-ups what we’re doing. You shouldn’t ort to’ve told ole Dan you was a Nazi.”

  One day while my arm was healing in its cast, autographed by everybody including you, Latha told me I had a letter. In the tier of glass-fronted post office boxes inside her store/post office, she had reserved a box for The Stay Morning Star, but there was rarely anything in it, never a letter. But now there was a piece of what Latha explained was called V-mail, thin blue paper folded into its own envelope. It was from Mare Coe. He enclosed twelve three-cent stamps. The letter said: “Dear Donny, Here’s 12 stamps so you can send me a prescription to the newspaper. I sure do miss Stay More and everbody and even you, ha ha. They have sensors for the mail that black things out, so I can’t tell you where I am, or why, or what happens or anything. But I’m a ‘leatherneck’ now and I’m supposed to shoot the ‘enemy’ any day now. Say hi to everbody for me. Your pal, Gerald.”