The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  The highest form of publicity was accidental. The incumbent governor, Shoat Bradfield, who didn’t need to run in the Republican Primary because the nomination was already assured him, was shown on the evening news in early June in an unguarded, candid rage, waving his arms and declaiming, with much profanity that the network bleeped out, that he had never heard of Vernon Ingledew and didn’t expect him to survive the Democratic primary but that if he did he’d get murdered by Bradfield in the election. If there was any person left in Arkansas who didn’t know who Vernon Ingledew was, that appearance by Shoat Bradfield soon straightened them out.

  The last week of the campaign, television commercial time was almost constantly devoted to the vicious battle between the Reverend Dixon and Barnas. Since Barnas could only attack the innuendo about Dixon, he made the most of that, with TV spots showing an old photo of the minister with his arms around several female members of his choir, and a voice-over asking, “Which of these young ladies was it?” Bo and Arch eventually decided that they’d rather, in the run-off, challenge the preacher instead of the state senator, so they leaked to the preacher’s men several tidbits about Barnas’s connections and his past, enough to provide the preacher with all the ammunition he needed in his attack ads. Whether this violated Harry Wolfe’s “deal” with Garth Rucker was immaterial. The preacher was able to capitalize upon it sufficiently to defame Barnas in television spots. By election-day morning, most of the newspaper editorials said that Vernon Ingledew was the “clear” choice.

  There was a big party planned at Ingledew Headquarters for election night. Monica made sure that there was plenty of food and drink, plenty of room for the crowd to spill out onto the sidewalks, plenty of room for the television cameras, and places of honor for the main participants: Vernon and Jelena and the Seven Samurai. As the returns began to come in and were chalked up on a board, Bo expansively draped his arm across Vernon’s shoulders and said, “This is the best part of politics. This is the game, watching the score. This is the most fun.” Vernon had butterflies, and couldn’t eat, but he tried to keep smiling and shaking hands with people (at least the men) who came to watch the board. Day and Diana were there, and Vernon preferred huddling with them.

  When the final chalk marks were made on the board, voters in the Primary had given Barnas 28.5 percent of the vote, just behind Reverend Dixon, who got 29 percent. Vernon got 31 percent, and the other three candidates split small pieces of the remaining 11.5 percent. Since all the Samurai had been rooting for Dixon to edge out Barnas, there was more cheering over that than over Vernon’s coming in first.

  Vernon got two letters in the next day’s mail; Bo intercepted both of them but shared their contents with his boss. One was from Barnas, congratulating him sarcastically, cursing him to high heaven for having leaked damaging information to Dixon, and vowing that not one of his 28.5 percent of voters would vote for Vernon in the run-off. “Does he want them all voting for Dixon?” Bo asked rhetorically.

  The other letter was from the Reverend Dixon, and said:

  I knew it would be you, all along. The gauntlet is laid down. I’m sure you’ve noticed I’ve refrained from maligning you thus far, apart from raising the mild question over the fitness of an ex-hippie pig farmer to move from an outlandish yurt into the governor’s mansion, but now that you and I are alone together in the ring, you may be assured that I’ll hammer you with everything I’ve got, particularly your rejection of Our Lord and Savior. Run scared, Mr. Ingledew.

  The evangelist’s second-place finish, ahead of Barnas, attracted large cash contributions from some of the other former candidates’ supporters, from the viewers of Dixon’s regular Sunday-morning television show, and from several Democratic loyalist sugar-daddies who were not above letting Hank Endicott know that they despised Vernon’s fanatical ideas. The huge influx of contributions filling Reverend Dixon’s coffers enabled him to fire several of his own campaign consultants and replace them with professionals who came as close as was humanly possible to matching the Seven Samurai. They attempted to hire Barnas’s oppo man, one Garth Rucker, but Rucker declared he’d already accepted an offer to be Harry Wolfe’s assistant. “I might learn something,” Hank Endicott quoted Rucker as saying. Bo reported to Vernon that Harry had revealed he’d been offered a substantial amount of money to “switch” to the Dixon team. Harry had declined, out of his sense of decency. Bo had made no attempt to raise Harry’s salary to match the exorbitant offer made by Dixon, but he had given him a token raise, and also authorized a trip Harry and Garth were making to Portland, Oregon, where, Harry was convinced, the long lost choir girl was living.

  Vernon perceived that John Colby Dixon bore two burning resentments: he fancied himself a learned man, certainly not a “high-brow” but a cultivated, educated, quick-witted sophisticate who was able to charm his vast television audiences in polished, perfect English with his wisdom about the Bible and the road to salvation, and therefore he bitterly envied Vernon’s supposed knowledge of any subject; and of course he coveted and resented Vernon’s Seven Samurai, any one of whom, even Cast Sherrill, was superior to his opposite number on Dixon’s team. In his first Sunday morning sermon following the Primary returns, Dixon made disparaging references to Bolin Pharis as “The Pharisee” and to Arch Schaffer as “The Archfiend,” to Lydia Caple as “The Uncapable” and to “Harry Wolfe” as “Old Harry,” a common Arkansas nickname for the Devil. He called Monica Breedlove “The Intern,” and Castor Sherrill “The Cast-Off,” and he probably had to tax his enlarged brain to come up with a designation for Carleton Drew as “The Cigarette,” a triple allusion to the fact that there was a brand of cigarettes called Carltons and to the fact that Drew smoked cigarettes and to Drew’s previous employers, the Washington tobacco lobby.

  Cigarettes were just about the only issue on which Vernon agreed with the evangelist, but while Vernon intended to make Arkansas the first tobacco-free state in the Union, Dixon only wanted to make sure that the state collected as much damages as it could from the tobacco companies. Dixon’s platform, as it was perceived by the public, was not notably challenging or even unusual. He was against crime. He supported the environment, welfare, term limits, health care, and most particularly the family and children. He opposed taxes and illegal drugs, as well as poverty and homelessness, and particularly the moral and ethical decline. His opposition to abortion was as equivocal as he could make it.

  But as far as the campaign was concerned, Dixon was indifferent to the issues, and appeared to want only to attack Vernon on every possible front. Toward the end of that sermon mocking the Seven Samurai and giving them nicknames, he suddenly declared, “I hereby challenge the infidel Vernon Ingledew to a debate!”

  Bo was opposed, and so was Arch. They knew that Dixon, with his enormous experience as a preacher, his smooth eloquence, evangelistic fervor, and dramatic delivery, would make Vernon at his best look dull and awkward, even if Vernon was considerably better-looking than Dixon, a gaunt, sharp-chiseled person with wire-rimmed spectacles and the look of an old-time country preacher. Lydia, however, believed that Vernon could “acquit himself handily,” and, if they avoided getting into personalities, could probably out-duel the preacher on the issues. The Seven Samurai (six rather; Harry was in Oregon) spent quite a lot of time with and without Vernon, trying to come up with a way that Vernon could refuse the debate without losing face. Every day that went by, the evangelist capitalized upon Vernon’s hesitation in accepting the challenge. “Have you left the state, Mr. Ingledew?” demanded his television spots and his newspaper ads. Vernon said to his team, “Come on, guys, let’s do it. I can handle him!” and he sounded so confident that Bo began to have lengthy talks with Dixon’s campaign manager, trying to agree on conditions, a format, and a location. Carleton Drew made sure that there would be major television coverage of the event. Finally it was agreed that the studios of KARK, the NBC affiliate, would be suitably furnished for the debate; and that Hank Endicott would serve as mo
derator. The Dixon campaign wanted Meredith Oakley, less liberal than Endicott, but the Ingledew campaign pointed out that she had already declared in favor of Dixon, and would thus be biased.

  “Gentlemen,” Endicott declared at the outset of the debate, like a referee instructing the boxers, “this is going to be a clean fight. No hitting below the belt. You will not, either of you, get into personalities, but confine yourselves to answering my questions about your intentions for bettering the state of Arkansas. All right, my first question: Do you support the death penalty? Reverend Dixon?”

  “Certainly. Where would Christianity be if Jesus had got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior?”

  The studio audience had a good laugh over this, and Vernon joined in.

  When his turn came to answer the question, Vernon said, “Does it make sense to hire murderers to kill defenseless victims on death row, in order to prove that hiring murderers to kill defenseless victims is morally wrong?”

  “But you are a godless man, Mr. Ingledew, totally ignorant of Christianity’s support of the death penalty.”

  “All early Christian writers who discussed capital punishment were absolutely opposed to it,” Vernon pointed out.

  “Early Christian writers?” said the evangelist. “Name one.”

  “Lactantius Firmianus of the late third and early fourth centuries. Better known as the ‘Christian Cicero.’ He wrote a fine book called Divinarum Institutionum Libri Septem, in which he said, ‘When God forbids us to kill, he not only prohibits the violence that is condemned by public laws, but he also forbids the violence that is deemed lawful by men. It is always unlawful to put to death a man, whom God willed to be a sacred creature.’”

  “Mr. Ingledew, you have no right to mention God, since you don’t believe in Him!”

  “I don’t believe in fairies. Am I forbidden to tell fairy-tales?”

  “Gentlemen—” Hank Endicott tried to intercede.

  “You’re out of your depth quoting some obscure ‘early Christian writer’ to me,” Reverend Dixon said. “You’re simply showing off your false wisdom. And you forget that that God whom you discredit has discredited your wisdom. ‘Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?’ First Corinthians, one and eighteen.”

  “That’s First Corinthians, one and twenty,” Vernon corrected him.

  “What?” The minister got very red in the face, and demanded of those present a copy of the Bible to prove himself right, but, discovering that the atheist Ingledew was correct, waved the Bible about and declaimed, “This is a sacred Book and that blasphemous smart-alecky heathen has no right even to mention it!”

  Hank Endicott’s next column said:

  It was my dubious honor to attempt to moderate a debate between a popular clergyman who kept losing control of his temper and a savvy layman who repeatedly demonstrated that he knew far more about Christianity than the pastor did.

  Other commentators were not as restrained; one columnist continued the boxing metaphor by saying “Ingledew laid him out with an uppercut in the first round.”

  Just how many thousands of votes that debate cost the Reverend Dixon couldn’t be calculated. But the minister’s behavior cost him considerable support, even among those minions of Senator Barnas who had been instructed to vote for Dixon. In an effort to counteract the effects of the debate, the minister made a number of television spots with his former enemy, James Barnas, in which they stressed the need for solidarity against the godless hippie hillbilly radical who was living out of wedlock with his own cousin. As the date of the run-off neared, these television spots grew increasingly virulent. Dixon seized upon a few of Vernon’s thirteen albatrosses, those that were already known, and paraded them in the public view, and this was why the polls, just a week before the run-off, showed the minister several points ahead of Vernon.

  Then Harry Wolfe and Garth Rucker returned from Oregon, bringing with them a young lady, a rather attractive and neatly dressed girl of twenty, who announced to the reporters and cameramen covering her arrival at the airport, “I am tired of being forced out of my dear sweet home state by that man. He can’t keep me away. No amount of money will keep me away. I’m back. I have some things to tell you.”

  Vernon Ingledew collected 53 percent of the vote in the runoff.

  Second part: Election

  Chapter eleven

  About the same time that Vernon and Bo were encountering those two dust devils on their hike around Stay More, I received an email message from a stranger, a cybernetic dust devil I couldn’t extirpate. On the average, I get about three emails from strangers each year, and on the average one of them will be a request from a teenager in Sweden who wants my autograph, another from a teenager in Arizona who has been assigned to do a theme on an American Author and wants me to supply her with my complete biography, and the third a fan letter from Wisconsin. The email that whirled into my computer may have been from Wisconsin or from Sri Lanka. In keeping with email etiquette, there was no salutation.

  From: Heartstays@aol.com

  To: dharingt@uark.edu

  Subject: your book

  Read your book. Wish I could say I enjoyed it but I found too much of it too painful, although I realize you wrote it trying to be funny. I notice it was published when I was only eight. I wish I had known about it before now, but our public library doesn’t have it. I found a copy of the paperback for fifty cents at a yard sale, almost as if I were fated to stumble upon it. The people having the yard sale I have known all my life and now they’re leaving town and I hate to see them go. After I read the book, all of one night, I asked the woman if she had read it before consigning it to her yard sale. Some years previously, she said. Did you realize that it is about us? I asked her. Well, she replied, maybe just a little. And it didn’t bother you? I wanted her to tell me. Well, maybe just a little, she said.

  One question I have for you, sir, is this: where did you get all your information? How much of it did you just “make up”? You have obviously mixed up real people and imaginary people all the way along, but my question is, if you’re still alive yourself after all these years, are those people you pretend to be real still alive?

  Juliana Nancy Waspe

  So much for my morning. I ought to have put off until the afternoon, when the day’s work was over, checking my email inbox, but the job of writing fiction, as I am careful to warn the students in Advanced Placement English at Fayetteville High School who each spring invite me to answer their questions about what it takes to be a writer, is the loneliest job on earth, and the Author is, unlike the Creator, fallible and subject to temptation. The urge for human contact is not always resistible.

  For all its disturbing flaws, this message from this Juliana person was compelling. I am always grieved by people who announce that they have read “your book,” as if I have written only one of them, as if that in itself, the writing of a book, is such a noteworthy thing that it is inconceivable there might be more than one. (In my case eleven.) And which of the eleven did she mean? The only clue was that she was eight when the book was published, and thus, assuming she was not merely ten or even twelve now, we could discount When Angels Rest and Butterfly Weed. If she meant Ekaterina she would be only fifteen now, but somehow she seemed older than that. So she could have been referring to any of the seven novels from The Cherry Pit, making her forty-three, to The Choiring of the Trees, making her seventeen. The latter was the least funny of my novels, so I scratched it. My principal clue in this little detective game was her claim, or her question to the seller of the paperback, that that book was about “us.” Was she perhaps a native of Stay More? Or of one of the lost cities of Arkansas described in my Let Us Build Us a City? That book was marketed as “nonfiction,” although I’d thought of it as a kind of nonfiction novel, but nowhere did Juliana use the word “novel” so quite possibly this was the book she meant. She was therefore twenty-four years old.

  With nothing better to do, since my morn
ing was shot anyhow, I replied at length to Ms Waspe (a name I’d never encountered in any of the places covered in that book, but of course it could have been a married name). I explained that all eleven of the lost “cities” of Arkansas are actual places, and that the names of the inhabitants therein that my wife Kim and I met and interviewed were actual names of real people, and that for the most part I stuck to the facts as revealed in the considerable research I’d done, but that I had indeed, as she surmised, invented several imaginary people and “mixed them up” with the real people, which I have always considered a sure-fire legitimate means of giving verisimilitude to a story.