The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Stay More in the heat and drought of July was still a luxuriant garden, nearly swallowed up in dense and unrestrained plant life; the contrast with the city they’d just left a few hours before was fantastic. The only vehicle in town was the Pierce-Arrow, parked in the shade of a giant maple tree beside the former hotel, and that made it seem as if they were escaping not just from the city but from time, back into the thirties. On the long porch of the house, whose frilly roof sheltered them from the late afternoon sun, sat three people, the Woman and Juliana in rocking chairs and Bending Bear in the porch swing.

  Was it just Bo’s imagination, or were each of them dressed as they would have seventy years before? At least Bending Bear wasn’t wearing one of his loud Hawaiian shirts but a collarless broadcloth dress shirt, and his chauffeur’s cap had been replaced with a straw sombrero. The women were wearing calico cotton dresses such as Bo had seen in old pictures of country folk. With the pointer Threasher sprawled out on the porch floor, the scene was a tableau of yesteryear.

  Cast used the car phone to ask his girlfriend to come and pick him up, and Bo reflected that the technology of the car phone was out of keeping with this setting. It was hard, though, to step out of the Jaguar’s air-conditioning into the heat.

  There were other chairs, including another rocker, lined along the porch, and they could sit in these, after exchanging greetings. “Too hot for the wigwam?” Bo asked Juliana.

  That radiant smile. “I don’t think the original Stay Morons spent much time in their wigwams on days like this,” she said.

  The Woman observed that they ought to be inside enjoying the air conditioning but nobody anywhere sits on their porches any more. If you have a porch, why not use it?

  Bending Bear remarked that when Threasher wasn’t able to move because of the heat, he couldn’t move either. He was fanning himself with an old-fashioned funeral-parlor fan. Where had he got that?

  They all sat on the porch and watched the world fail to go by. Eventually Cast’s girlfriend arrived, and Cast introduced her to Bo, although he’d already met her, briefly, at the turtle feast. Sheila Kimber was a very pretty young lady whose people went way back in the history in Stay More. You could tell by the way that she and Cast looked at each other that they were fast becoming a number. Before leaving with her, Cast asked Bo when and where they should meet the following day, for the return to Fayetteville, and Bo said they ought to meet right here around two o’clock or whenever lunch was finished.

  When Cast and Sheila were gone, Juliana said, “So you’re spending the night?”

  “If I can find a place to crash,” Bo said.

  “Oh, I’m sure Jelena would love to have you!” she said.

  Did he blush? Bo abruptly had a disquieting thought: Juliana and Jelena had become friends, and were comparing notes on both Vernon and Bo. Well, actually, he told her, he was thinking of doing something he hadn’t done since he was a kid: worm-fishing by lantern-light for catfish.

  “Down at my creek?” Juliana asked, smiling, always smiling.

  “Your creek?” Bo said. “I didn’t realize you owned it.”

  “Osages own nothing, I’ve told you that,” she said. “But Guckah Wazhingah—Swan Creek—is a major source of our food supply, including those turtles.”

  He said that unless he was mistaken it wasn’t Swan Creek but Swains Creek, named after the family of Swains who were early settlers.

  The Woman spoke up. “Wazhingah means any kind of bird, and Juliana’s home in Oklahoma is on Bird Creek.”

  They made chitchat about Oklahoma and birds and creeks and turtles and worm-fishing by lantern light for catfish. The subject of birds tempted him into relating the morning’s battle between the albatross and the foo bird, but he decided to put politics out of his mind. Eventually Bo stole a glance at his watch and announced that he supposed he ought to at least give Jelena a ring and get himself invited to her place.

  “She’s not at home,” Juliana said. “She’s having supper with Diana and Day.”

  How could Juliana know that unless they were becoming friends? Bo was only mildly disappointed to learn Jelena wasn’t at home. He could catch her later. He was really more interested in talking with Juliana, for now. But he needed to get her away from the Woman and from Bending Bear. Half of that problem was solved when the Woman excused herself to go inside and start supper, first inviting Bo to dine with them if he wanted (and where else would he get a bite?). The other half was solved shortly thereafter when Ben announced that it was just too damned hot for him and he was going inside to his room to cool off before supper.

  So they were alone. Bo discovered he could tell her privately what he couldn’t tell the others, the battle of the albatross and the foo bird, which greatly amused her as well as made her admire his swordsmanship, as Cast had called it. His summary finished, he remarked that somehow that all seemed as if it had happened in another decade in another continent to another person.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Bo,” she said.

  “So,” he said. “Where were we? I was about to ask you, what do you think of your cousin Vernon?”

  The radiant smile became more effulgent. “He’s the most charming man I’ve ever met.”

  “In utter darkness how could you tell?”

  She laughed. “Just his voice. But I saw him in daylight too. I have laid eyes on him. After you left. Before he left. He had George land the helicopter near the wigwam the other morning. George kept the rotor running and Vernon kept his head down so it wouldn’t get chopped off or that’s the way it looked but actually he was keeping his head down so that he wouldn’t have to look at me because he still couldn’t stand to see me. They were on their way to Pine Bluff and he wanted to say goodbye and tell me that he was so glad that I hadn’t murdered him, and he hoped I would stay here forever. And then he kissed me and took off.”

  “Forever?” Bo said. “Kissed you? Wow.”

  “He had kissed me before, in the dark, in the wigwam.”

  “And that’s all he did? He didn’t suggest that you and he re-enact the first meeting of Jacob Ingledew and Kushi?”

  “He didn’t bathe beforehand in three waters, in rainwater, in creekwater, in springwater.” Juliana laughed.

  Bo laughed with her. In Jacob’s memoirs, as well as in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, the Indian Fanshaw, after finally persuading the reluctant Jacob to accept his offer of his wife, explains to Jacob that Indians can’t tolerate the smell of white people and therefore Jacob should first wash in three waters, rainwater, creekwater and springwater, and then, instead of putting his buckskins back on, arrive naked at the wigwam. “If I bathed in three waters, could I come to the wigwam tonight?” Bo boldly asked her.

  She stopped laughing, and stared at him as if she were trying to decide. She asked, “You wouldn’t rather stay with Jelena?”

  Bo lied. “You are much more desirable.”

  They reparteed. Juliana wondered aloud why Bo wanted her if he had been so intent on getting her and Vernon together. Bo countered that since Vernon wasn’t here, and alluring Juliana was all alone, Bo would be a fool not to avail himself of the opportunity. Juliana said that sounded like an excellent excuse for availing himself of Jelena. They bantered with each other over this topic until the Woman returned to the porch to announce that supper was ready. After an excellent dinner of kuchmachi—a Georgian dish combining chicken giblets and walnuts—served with a surprising bottle of Pouilly Fuissé, Bo and Juliana returned to the porch while Ben remained with the Woman, who wanted to continue a conversation they’d started about Maria Tallchief, the Osage ballerina, another cousin of theirs.

  Bo remarked that Ben and the Woman seemed to enjoy each other’s company, and Juliana said they spent all their time together, now that George was gone. “You know, of course, that Ben’s crush on George is nearly as strong as my crush on Vernon,” Juliana said. “But quite possibly neither of us will ever accomplish our desires.”

&nb
sp; Bo scoffed. “Oh, if you want Vernon, I’m sure you’ll get him sooner or later. But Ben—for heaven’s sake, George Dinsmore is old enough to be his father!” Bo remembered his own first impression of George in Cincinnati as a somewhat uncouth and tough but kindly hillbilly, and he could not imagine why a refined person like Bending Bear would have fallen for him.

  Juliana explained to Bo that Ben was what was called a berdache, that is, a person of two spirits: a woman actually, but a woman who appears to be a man. A berdache is not exactly a homosexual, not in the conventional sense. Bo observed that they must be as rare as turtle dogs. Turtle dogs are not rare, at all, Juliana said. And she explained that Bending Bear was more of a cousin than Vernon was; they were both descended from Saucy Chief, the last of the Heart Stays chiefs. Bo could not come right out and ask her how much she was worth, but he gathered, from what they discussed that evening on that porch, that her Osage great-grandfather, a son of Saucy Chief, had wisely invested his share of the oil rights, had taken it out of the stock market before the crash, and had built it into a tidy fortune which she’d inherited when her father and mother were killed in an automobile accident at the time she was fourteen. Bo learned another thing Vernon and Juliana had in common besides their descent from Jacob Ingledew and their great wealth: neither had been to college. Or rather Juliana had spent only a semester at Stanford before being overcome with homesickness. Bo wanted to ask her about the history of her love life, but the best he could do was to ask, “Have you been in love, before Vernon?”

  Her laughter must have made Ben and the Woman, inside the house, think that Bo was telling his favorite jokes. “Do you think I’m in love with Vernon?” she asked him.

  “It’s written all over you,” he declared.

  As the evening settled in and the air darkened and cooled a bit, Juliana told Bo the short history of her love life, beginning not with the loss of her virginity at fifteen (she hadn’t loved the guy, an Indian classmate) but with her first true love, a white guy she’d known in her last semester of high school. She had dropped out of Stanford to go home to him, only to find he’d already married somebody else. She hadn’t dated anyone else for years after that, and then had an affair with a married man.

  This was in Pawhuska? Bo wanted to know. Juliana said, Oh no, she’d grown up in Tulsa, gone to school there, thought of it as home, returned to it. Spending most of her life there until, visiting the Gilcrease Institute one day and seeing all the Indian art there, she had suddenly become interested in her heritage. She had never been to Pawhuska before then. But she became obsessed with the Heart Stays People, and wanted to track down whatever she could find about them, and, finding nothing except the approximate location of their final encampment up Bird Creek a few miles from Pawhuska, she had bought the land and commissioned a Tulsa architect, a disciple of Frank Gehry, to erect a great manor house done in the fashion of the conjoined reed-thatch wigwams of the Osages. She had devoted her life for the past six years to learning the Osage language and culture. She had no social life in Pawhuska, although for a time she had been an habitué of a Main Street dive called The Phoenix Lounge, had met a very few men who appealed to her and whom she’d taken home with her, purely for sexual purposes. “You could say I was a bad girl, for a while,” she declared.

  “What did those guys think when they saw your fabulous mansion?” Bo was curious to know.

  “Either that I was some kind of screwball, because of the architectural design of it, or that I was, as one of them put it, ‘rolling in it.’ I didn’t care what they thought. I fucked them and forgot them.”

  It was the first time Bo had heard her use a dirty word. He found it both shocking and endearing. More to the point, he began to hope that her experience with casual sex might make her willing to accept him into the wigwam that night.

  The lightning bugs had come out. He knew of course why the male lightning bug flies around flashing his illuminated advertisement, and why he searches constantly for a flash coming in response from a female waiting in the bushes. It was too dark now for him to see Juliana’s face. But he could see Jelena’s. Jelena had a charming habit of winking at Bo. He supposed she winked at Vernon too, and, for that matter, at Uncle George and everybody else. But he had only seen her winking at him, and he had even winked at her in response. There wasn’t anything necessarily sexual about the wink, it was just sort of conspiratorial, or not even that, just friendly, just her way of saying, “You and I are in this together, this situation, this moment, this life.” Now in his mind’s eye he saw Jelena winking at him, and it was disconcerting.

  “How did you know Jelena was having supper with Day and Diana?” he asked. “Are you becoming friends with her?”

  “Oh, no!” Juliana said. “But they invited me too, and told me she was coming. I simply told them I had other plans. I’m not ready to sit at the table with Jelena. I’m not ready to pretend to be her friend.”

  “I suppose I should call her,” Bo reflected out loud. But he made no move to fetch his car phone. Moments, and lightning bugs, drifted by. Then he said, “I keep thinking perhaps instead I should take those three baths…. But where would I find springwater?”

  “If you wanted springwater,” Juliana said, “the same spring in which Jacob washed is still there. You would have more trouble finding rainwater. Nobody has a rain barrel any more. And even if they did, I’m told it hasn’t rained since early June. But really you wouldn’t need all that washing. Maybe a quick dip in the creek would do.”

  “And you could join me for that!” he suggested.

  “Bo,” she said. “You should know a couple of things. First, Fanshaw was putting one over on Jacob when he made him wash in three waters. It has been a joke among the Osage ever since. We don’t think you stink. Jacob didn’t need those three baths. And second, I really do think you ought to phone and see if Jelena is home yet. If she isn’t, then…well, then I have no choice but to invite you to the wigwam.”

  Chapter fourteen

  Really she was glad Vernon was gone for several reasons. He was removed from the temptation of that Indian woman. He was off somewhere in some godforsaken south Arkansas town throwing one of his campaign parties and giving one of his eloquent speeches and shaking hands with everybody (at least with all the men) and maybe enjoying himself for a change. When he was just sitting in his study totally immersed in his books she never could tell if he was having fun or not. It is difficult to live for thirty years with a companion who doesn’t reveal whatever delight he receives from life.

  While he was gone, she didn’t have to do anything to delight him: she didn’t have to prepare his meals, she didn’t have to listen to his philosophical rants, and she didn’t have to adjust her sexual responses to match his. She didn’t have to adjust anything. She could do whatever she liked. Or if she chose, she could do nothing at all.

  When Vernon had first left her to hit the campaign trail, she had gone to Harrison and purchased a television set, a small one, the smallest she could find, but a good one, which she kept hidden in the food pantry covered with a dishtowel whenever Vernon was at home. As soon as George’s helicopter lifted Vernon off the premises, she got out the TV, plugged it in, and watched talk shows. She even watched a few soap operas, ashamed of herself but helplessly trapped in their stories.

  She openly smoked cigarettes while watching television. Maybe she smoked too much; when Vernon was around, she could get by with sneaking maybe one or at most two cigarettes a day; when he was gone, she’d smoke almost a pack. She might have smoked more than that, but the cat Vernon didn’t like smoke and avoided her when she was smoking, and she really enjoyed having him (the cat) around. When Vernon was here, Vernon the cat was strictly a yard cat; when Vernon was gone, he became a house cat, and sat in her lap whenever she wasn’t smoking. When Vernon the man was here, she kept hidden her Bible and her journal, and got them out only when she knew he was taking his six-mile hike or was at the ham plant. Now she could indulge her
desire to write in her journal long letters to her grandchildren, whom she had never seen and whose names she had to invent: Jacob and Sarah and Isaac and Salina and John and Sirena, all names of her Ingledew ancestors. Beautiful kids.

  Vernon had wanted her to get a dog, just as protection during his absences. Just as a sentry, Vernon had called it. You know, a watchdog to bark if anybody tried to approach the house. But she didn’t want a dog. There was no telling how Vernon the cat might take to the idea of a canine on the premises. He might run away from home. She had never had a dog, and while there were some things she wasn’t too old to try for the first time, dog-ownership wasn’t one of them.

  Her diet went to hell. Since she didn’t have to prepare meals, she could eat Skippy peanut butter for lunch and a bowl of popcorn for supper, and plenty of Lady Godiva chocolate for dessert, and that was that. It was a shame not to be eating all those wonderful vegetables that her garden was producing, and which Bo had helped her nurture—beans and squash and peppers and eggplant and all—and they’d have gone to rot if she couldn’t find someone to give them to. For a while she’d given them to the Woman Whom We Cannot Name—hell, Jelena could damn well name her and did: Ekaterina—but then those Indians moved in with Ekaterina and Vernon started taking a too-deep interest in the Indian girl, and Jelena could not stop there any more to unload her uneaten vegetables on them.