The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Just to test you,” Jelena said. “And you passed the test. Congratulations. I apologize, but this isn’t Ingledew Ham. It’s Petit Jean, a perfectly fine Arkansas brand but just nothing at all like ours.”

  “I flunked,” Carleton said morosely, and there was laughter.

  “Maybe they’ll serve Ingledew Ham with your eggs Benedict at breakfast,” Day said, “so you can see the difference.”

  Day got some polite laughs but also some quizzical looks: were they all going to be continuing this session through the night?

  In fact, any supper party (although Day hadn’t been to many in his life) has a magic moment when everybody has a sense of the affair having run its course and people begin to leave. That magic moment didn’t happen here. Day reflected that everyone knew that nothing really had been accomplished, and there was a reluctance to leave the matter unsettled. Jelena, having already served her great pies at tea time, served for late dessert a light but scrumptious lemon curd. Although she offered carafes of both regular and decaf coffee, many of them preferred to make further inroads on the bar. The atmosphere was genial; people had even forgiven Harry Wolfe his snooping, and nobody was even making allusions about Vernon’s resolute refusal, which was, Day could detect in his eyes and manner, losing its resolution. People got up and wandered around the house and into the kitchen and, in the case of the few smokers, like Cast and Harry (but not Jelena) outside into the yard. People paired off; it was more like a party than a meeting. Day overheard Bo and Jelena, both once long-ago valedictorians at Harrison High, reminiscing about certain teachers they’d had in common and the Key Club to which they’d both belonged.

  It dawned on Day for the first time that the median age of all these people was almost fifty. They weren’t young. Castor Sherrill was in his late twenties, Monica Breedlove in her late thirties, the rest of them either pushing fifty or pulling it. One of many things Vernon and Day had in common was that they lived with women older than themselves: Diana was three years older than Day, Jelena eight years older than Vernon. George Dinsmore was the “old man” at sixty-four. Vernon’s sister Sharon was a year older than he, and her husband Larry, the former college professor, was about the same age. Neither Sharon nor Larry had spoken up during the meeting, but they were doing a lot of socializing now that the meeting had changed to a party. Most everyone, Day reflected, had a sense of being what Jelena spoke of (or thought of) in her chapter as “almost suffocated with an unconscious nostalgia for a golden age they hadn’t even known and perhaps hadn’t even been told about but simply knew had once existed and now did not, not any more.”

  Speaking only for himself (and possibly for Diana) Day knew that the incidents and adventures he’d known as a young man, particularly those of Some Other Place. The Right Place., were experiences he could never hope to have again. As he had expressed it in his own contribution to that book, Diana’s and his exploration of ghost towns had led him to realize that, as he said, “Oh, this is a story of—you know it, don’t you?—a story not of ghost towns but of lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul, oh, this is not a story of actual places where actual people lived and dreamed and died but a story of lost lives and abandoned dreams and the dying of childhood, oh, a story of the great ghost villages of the mind.” Day knew that everyone at Vernon’s and Jelena’s house that night, even young Cast, had an aching sense of those lost places and a fear of never finding them, and a notion, even a conviction, that perhaps Vernon Ingledew could lead the recapturing of them.

  But the time came when they could no longer cling to each other and wait for Vernon to take the first step. It was almost eleven, and the Samurai realized they couldn’t hope to drive back to Fayetteville that night. Diana, bless her, was the first to offer an alternative when she suggested that they had two spare bedrooms. Sharon spoke up for the first time and said they had a convertible sofa in Larry’s study. Jelena pointed to her own sofa and said somebody could sleep on that and there’s a guestroom in the other bubble. The Samurai drew lots and everybody had a place to sleep.

  In this spirit of good feeling, as they were preparing to leave the Ingledew house and were putting on their coats, Lydia Caple got in a few last words on the purpose of the get-together. “Some of you may remember when Bill Clinton lost to that Republican jerk Frank White in 1980 and had to give up the Governor’s Mansion for a couple of years. For a while he thought his political career was over. He was really down. He was the youngest ‘former governor’ in American history. His staff was as frustrated and depressed as he was, and some of them were pissed off at him for letting them down. He could have quit. He could have devoted himself to the study of quantum mechanics and forgotten about politics. But he got his staff together, including Monica and me, and told us that we were going to mobilize the grassroots workers who had been lazy and apathetic in the election Clinton lost. We got thousands of volunteers, mostly energetic young people, and those workers, to use one of Monica’s favorite expressions, busted their ass. In all my years of campaigning, I’d never seen such spirit, such a sense of having a mission. And as you know, Clinton demolished White the next time around.”

  When she’d finished this story, she looked around to gauge the effect of her words on each of them, and then she took a deep breath and said, “I felt some of that same spirit in this house tonight. It’s the first time I felt it since then: that willingness and that readiness, to take it to the mountain, to move mountains.”

  “Even to fall off ’em,” Harry Wolfe said drunkenly.

  “If we fall,” Bo Pharis said, “we might discover there’s a thrill in free-falling.”

  “If we fall,” Arch Schaffer said, “we might discover that we can fly.”

  Diana and Day were going to accommodate Lydia and Arch for the night. Monica and Harry would stay with Sharon and Larry. Bo, Carleton and Cast were going to stay with Vernon and, as Day would later learn, stay up all night talking. As in Cincinnati, the talk would not have anything to do with politics but with their mutual interests in several areas of scientific and artistic inquiry. There was nothing Bo could say about politics to sway Vernon. But perhaps he wouldn’t need to.

  Vernon walked them to their cars with a high-powered flashlight. Along the way, they discovered that Jelena’s laundry was still hanging on the clothesline, and Day offered to help her take it down. Everyone pitched in and helped, unfastening from their clothespins all the garments and towels and linen. Fourteen people make quick work of such a thing. As Day was taking down a towel, Vernon gripped Day’s upper arm in a friendly gesture that he would eventually use on hundreds of voters, a gesture that could, from one point of view, resemble that of a man clutching at a tree branch to keep from falling off the mountain. “Well, Day,” he said quietly to his best friend, “I’ve never asked you this before. What would it do to your opinion of me if I changed my mind?”

  Day clapped him on the back. “It would just confirm what I’ve known all along.”

  Chapter six

  What a weird but fabulous room. The bed was the loveliest thing Lydia had ever seen or slept in, and there was an antique chifforobe for hanging up her clothes, as well as an antique wash-stand with basin and pitcher. There was a small desk, actually just a library table with a few books upon it that looked as if they hadn’t been opened for years. Hadn’t anybody else ever slept here in a long time? But there was fresh water in the pitcher! And the walls…my God, at first she thought it was strange wallpaper, but looking closer she saw that there was writing all over the walls: a kind of longhand such as was taught to schoolkids in the nineteenth century, covering all of the white plaster everywhere.

  They’d told her, as if to make her appreciate it, that this had been the study of Daniel Lyam Montross. She wasn’t sure who he’d been. Diana Stoving’s grandfather? She remembered seeing this house in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, which she’d read when she was in high school a long time ago, and she just vaguely
remembered what it had said about the man who’d built this house, some outsider who’d come into Stay More and mystified the locals because he was strange and kept to himself.

  Speaking of strangeness, she thought her host, Day Whittacker, was a rare bird. Well, he looked normal. In fact, he was good-looking in a rugged sort of way, but there was something in his eyes that made him seem…was possessed the word she wanted? Maybe weird was the word; weird like this room, and as she looked around her before putting out the light she wondered if maybe Day was the one who had done this room, even writing on the walls, thinking up all of those lists, nine items in each, under “Montross, His Becomings; Montross, His Leavings; Montross, His Namings; Montross, His Hummings; Montross, His Blessings; Montross, His Damnings.” She fell asleep, quickly and easily, and if her dreams were haunted at all she didn’t remember any of them in the morning. She would have only a slight hangover: she’d had too much of the Stolichnaya, but it was a fine vodka and everyone else had freely imbibed, except Monica, who’d stuck to drinking Coke. Lydia knew why Monica could have had something heavy but preferred Coke. Lydia wondered if she’d done the right thing in persuading Monica to come up here from Louisiana, leaving the house out in the country she’d worked so hard with her own hands to build, building it on the same ancestral spot where her family house had burned, taking her mother’s life with it. Monica had sworn off politics to go home and do that, build that house. Now Lydia felt she’d grievously misled the woman. We’ve all been grievously misled, she reflected. We’ve been had.

  The smell of coffee and frying bacon was coming upstairs. Lydia dressed in dark green slacks and top, different from what she’d worn yesterday, an outfit that looked a little more countryfied, as this house was such a modest place compared with that extravagant pair of globes that the Ingledews lived in. Before going downstairs she paused to examine the three books on the little library table: an old, ponderous unabridged dictionary, an anthology of Elizabethan poetry, and a Bible that must have been used by some early settler.

  At breakfast she asked Arch if he knew what time they’d be heading back to Fayetteville. She really liked Arch; all her many dealings with him, dating back to when she was just a cub reporter at the old Gazette and he was a patient teacher of the ways of the political world, and then in the Eighties when he had the best PR firm in Little Rock and could be counted on to furnish her with material for a column—all these dealings were up front, white and mellow, and he’d used his years of experience as chief of staff for Governor-then-Senator Bumpers to help her learn the ropes when she went to work for Clinton.

  “What’s the hurry, Lydia?” he said, smiling. “Now that we’ve finally found Stay More, we ought to stay more.” He smiled at Day and Diana. “But we don’t want to wear out our welcome.”

  Diana said, “Stay as long as you like. Please.” Lydia liked Diana. Unlike her husband she was real and all there.

  “Vernon called,” Day said. “He wants to offer you a tour of what’s left of the town.”

  She was glad she stayed more. After breakfast they drove into what once had been the center of the thriving village of Stay More but now contained only one old building, which she recognized from the Architecture book as the two-story verandahed house that Jacob Ingledew had built in 1868 after he returned home from his stint as Governor of Arkansas. It was a handsome old building and someone—probably Vernon—had put a good bit of money into fixing it up, so that it looked newer than it had when Governor Ingledew built it.

  “Who lives there now?” Lydia wanted to know.

  Day and Diana exchanged looks. Diana said, “The woman who restored the house. Vernon sold it to her. I don’t think we’ll see her and I don’t think we’ll be invited inside the house. She is a woman who…well, let’s simply call her Whom We Cannot Name.”

  Lydia laughed. She knew that woman from the architecture novel, Jacob Ingledew’s mysterious mistress who was a young Little Rock widow and had thrown a bouquet of flowers at his feet from the gallery of Old State House when he had stood bravely alone to vote against Secession at the outbreak of the War. She had later become social secretary for his wife Sarah and had accompanied them back home to Stay More, where she’d lived in this house the rest of her life, long after Jacob and Sarah had died. The reason this house had three doors—what that novelist had called ‘trigeminal’(but that reminded Lydia of her neuralgia)—was because the three of them had lived together in a kind of menage à trois for many years.

  Lydia said, “I assume that the Whom We Cannot Name who lives here now is not Vernon’s mistress?”

  Day and Diana laughed. Diana said, “Heaven’s no! Nor is it likely she would ever become his mistress.”

  “She’s old and ugly?” Lydia asked.

  “She’s quite attractive,” Diana said, “and she’s just a bit younger than Vernon and Day. But trust me, she won’t be getting involved with Vernon, although they’re great friends and chess partners.”

  “My, my,” Lydia remarked, “what mystery lurks behind the doors of Stay More.”

  Across the road from the Jacob Ingledew house, which had once served, after the death of the Woman Whom We Cannot Name the First, as the village’s only hotel, was all that remained of Stay More’s principal general store, which had once been an imposing edifice of three floors beneath a huge gable roof. All that was left now was the cement porch floor and the cement steps leading up to it.

  It was at this porch to the missing store that all the participants of yesterday’s meeting and supper party parked their cars and rejoined one another. She was glad to see her friends again. The morning was sunny and growing warmer although a March breeze kept it uncomfortably cool.

  Vernon and Jelena, with help from George Dinsmore (who was quickly becoming Lydia’s favorite), led them on a tour of the remains of the village, pointing out the locations of the two doctor’s offices, the old bank, the blacksmith shop, and the cavernous cellar hole of what had been the great gristmill. Throughout their tour they encountered immense wandering hogs, and Vernon or George introduced several of them by name, George explaining that each of the many Ingledew hogs, male or female, had been named after a celebrated Razorback athletic star.

  “Pat one if ye’d care to,” George suggested. “They don’t bite.” Lydia gave the mammoth hog named Burlsworth a tentative pat on his head, and he grunted and rolled his eyes at her.

  “If you let them run loose all over the place,” Lydia wondered, “don’t they ever get hit by cars?”

  “What cars?” George said. “Aint much traffic hereabouts. But if one of these here hogs ever met up with a car, the car would kindly go into the shop, not the hog.”

  Farther up the main road they came to the ruins of what had been the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, and across from it the smaller general store that had been the town’s last post office and the home of Latha Bourne Dill. It was now tastefully restored as the home of Sharon and Larry Brace. Sharon served coffee and homemade beignets, and the fourteen people sat or stood on the porch of the house/store the same way that people had congregated there in the old days when it had still been the town’s post office. Those who wanted were given a tour of the interior, to see how Sharon had restored the store part with its post office boxes, and Larry had converted a side-room into his book-lined study, where an IBM Selectric typewriter was looking like an antique alongside the latest computer, scanner and printer. Lydia felt a pang of envy, and told herself she’d retreat from the world too if she could live like this.

  Back on the porch, Vernon declared, “I’d like to say a word.” There was something about his tone that made everyone spontaneously sit down, either on the edge of the porch floor or in the assorted porch furniture, including a couple of nail kegs. Lydia sat in a captain’s chair. “This is an appropriate place for it,” Vernon said, and Lydia detected that she wasn’t the only one who had suspended breathing. “This was my grandmother’s store, as well as her house, and it’s the
coziest spot Stay More ever had. It’s steeped in human history. So I may as well give it a little more: I’ve decided to run for governor.”

  The first response came from George, who said, “Dad blast it all to ding dang hell!”

  “Pussy’s in the well,” rhymed Harry Wolfe. He hadn’t started drinking yet today; it was his usual manner.

  “Wow!” said Bo Pharis, and stood up to shake Vernon’s hand and clap him on the back. “Let the good times roll!”

  “Way to go!” said Arch.

  Day said to Jelena, “Sorry.”

  “He woke me with the news,” Jelena told Day. “About five o’clock. I was the first to know, at least. Unless he’d already told Bo.”

  Lydia said to Carleton Drew, “Let’s take a little hike,” and she led him out of earshot of the others. She and Carleton hadn’t had time to get acquainted or compare notes, and she wanted Carleton to know the chain of command. “Got your phone handy?” His cell phone was in Bo’s Nissan. He fetched it. She had her own in her purse. They agreed she would do the television stations and major newspapers; he would do the radio stations and the lesser newspapers. Not that she outranked him in the media department, but she had many more media contacts than he did, as she discovered when she put in her first call, to station KFSM in Fort Smith, a CBS affiliate, and was immediately connected to the station manager, with whom she’d once had lunch. They would send a crew right out, he said, and she gave directions, as best she could remember, on how to find Stay More.

  “We’d better get Ingledew’s permission,” Carleton suggested. “You know he has this thing about TV.”

  “Hold on,” she said to the phone and yelled at Vernon, “Hey! You got any objection to being on television?”

  “My personal antipathy toward television,” Vernon said, “doesn’t extend to others’ use of it in any form.”