The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Slade had told her that if she wouldn’t accept the exorbitant figure, they were going to offer it to Harry Wolfe. Apparently Harry had also turned them down. Could it be that Harry, for all his other shortcomings, at least possessed a conscience? Or a sense of loyalty? Once before, during the primary, the Reverend Dixon had put in a very high bid for Harry’s services, but Harry had turned him down. And Lydia knew, because her friend Monica was in charge of the payroll, that Harry hadn’t received a raise for turning down Dixon or Bradfield. Lydia wondered if she could have held out for a higher salary herself. She needed it on her resume for whatever future campaign might employ her. But she was not going to “sell out,” for any amount of money.

  Still, she was not a happy camper. She wanted more than anything in this world to see Vernon Ingledew installed in the governor’s mansion, which was at least a reasonable desire, compared with her unreasonable desire to have him return her love. There was a good chance that if he were elected he would make her his press secretary and they might have some moments of intimacy behind his office door. And whether he was elected or not, she knew she’d always want to be a part of Stay More. She genuinely loved this place. If only she could relax here and have nothing political to preoccupy her, it would be heaven. She had fantasies of dressing as sometimes she’d seen the Woman Whom We Cannot Name and her new friend the Indian maiden dressing—in country calico cotton—and sitting on the porch of the old Governor Ingledew house watching the world go by…or failing to go by.

  During her previous stay in Stay More, Lydia had taken a hike up to the dogtrot log cabin where Vernon’s grandmother, Latha Bourne Dill, persisted alone and fiercely independent beyond the age of a hundred, and Lydia had a delightful visit with the old woman, who knew everything about the history of Stay More. As press secretary, Lydia had an ulterior motive: perhaps a human-interest story could be publicized about the colorful old lady, who kept a yard full of cats (many more than Lydia’s half dozen), and whose pastoral kindness and keen-wittedness had been inherited by her grandson. But when Lydia had mentioned the idea of an “interview” and of photographers, the woman had said, “Miss Caple, whatever that boy Vernon does has always been okay with me, but when it comes to his wits and his ways and his twists, he takes after his momma, my daughter Sonora, and I’d just as soon not have anybody looking at me as if I had anything to do with it.” Sonora Dill Ingledew had of course been dead (breast cancer) since Vernon was only ten years old.

  “What about his daddy?” Lydia had asked. “Did Vernon inherit any of his character or features?”

  “You haven’t met Hank Ingledew?” Latha had asked.

  “I haven’t been aware he existed,” Lydia had said. Vernon had never talked about him, nor had any of the other Samurai mentioned him, and Lydia had written nothing about him in Vernon’s press bio.

  “I’m sorry to say my son-in-law and I don’t visit, but I reckon that’s as much my fault as his,” the old woman had said.

  Lydia had made a mental note to make the acquaintance of John Henry “Hank” Ingledew on her next visit to Stay More, and now it was time, although now she had the weighty matter of Harry’s radical scheme to think about. She didn’t ask Vernon or Bo for their permission to visit Hank Ingledew, or for directions to the house. She asked George, who had been her favorite of these local people until she’d met Latha. George was only too glad to get away from the attentions of Thomas Bending Bear and to give Lydia a ride “up high to the yon side of Ingledew Mountain,” where Hank Ingledew lived alone in a “modern” house he had constructed for his large family back in the Fifties, just before Vernon was born. Lydia was more curious to see the house Vernon had grown up in than to meet his father. The house was indeed remote from the rest of Stay More, which somehow made Vernon’s father seem like a hermit.

  Hank Ingledew was a well-preserved man past eighty, and Lydia saw at once that Vernon had fallen heir to his handsomeness, his height, and, alas, his congenital woman-shyness. Hank managed to shake Lydia’s hand while studying the rug as if searching for an invisible insect. And for the whole length of her visit he was never once able to look her in the eye. “I’ve heared about ye,” he allowed, and, gesturing toward his television set, a surprisingly large and recent model, he said, “I keep up with the news and politics and all, and I’ve known ye to work for other fellers before you went to work for my boy. Democrats one and all. I’ve got to tell ye, I’ve voted Republican all my life.”

  “Really?” Lydia said. “Well, I assume that’s going to change in the next election.”

  “Last I heared tell, my boy was a-fixin to run as a Democrat, and if that’s so, he won’t get no vote of mine.”

  “Oh, what a thing to say!” Lydia lamented. But she had a sudden inspiration. If Harry’s proposal was accepted by the Samurai, and they did in fact embark upon an operation to heap defamation upon their own candidate, wouldn’t it look great if the public knew that Vernon’s own father wouldn’t vote for him? “Don’t tell me you have any admiration for Shoat Bradfield,” she said to him.

  “He’s a upstanding member of the Republican Party, and that’s good enough for me,” Hank said.

  Lydia wondered if she should try to explain Harry’s scheme to the old man, and decided against it. “Would you actually do something to help Bradfield against your own son?” she boldly asked.

  “If it would keep Bradfield in office,” Hank Ingledew said. “Besides, Vernon would be a right smart happier if he’d just stick to raisin’ hogs. Right, George?”

  “Sure thing,” George put in. “I’d vote for Bradfield myself if it would help keep Vernon here in Stay More. But I got to admit, I’m just as much a lifelong Democrat as you are a lifelong Republican.”

  “Never held it again ye, George,” Hank said. “There’s lots of idjits in this world, and we don’t blame ’em for their mental deficiency, we just try and humor ’em along.”

  “Wal, don’t ye go tryin to humor me, Hank. I can cuss the Republicans more thundery than you can cuss the Democrats.”

  Lydia would have liked nothing more than to listen to George and Hank argue politics. But there was business to tend to. She asked Hank, “What if a reporter came up here and asked you to reveal all the bad things Vernon did when he was just a boy? What would you tell him?”

  Hank needed more than a moment to think. “Hmm,” he said. “Well,” he said. He scratched his stubbly chin a bit and said, “Well, now.” He stared out the window and finally cleared his throat and said, “I do seem to recollect there was a time, when he wasn’t but about six or seven, when he didn’t have the sense to latch the pasture gate behind him, and the cow—we didn’t have but one cow in them days—she got out and wandered off and we had to go for purt near a whole week without ary milk.” Hank looked at George for confirmation of the severity of this deed.

  “That was a real dumb thing to do,” George admitted.

  Lydia kept silent and did not reveal her disappointment that no capital could be made of such a minor misdeed. At length, Hank said, “Then there was the time, he must’ve been maybe eleven or so, when he was shootin at tin cans with his BB gun, just a-tossin ’em up in the air and tryin to hit ’em, and he shot an eagle! Hit that eagle right in the eye. Didn’t kill him but put his eye out. Grady Bullen, the game warden, found the eagle and took him home and nursed him back to health and that darn eagle never would leave the Bullen place but hung around for years afterward, and Vernon used to go and watch it, but he never told Grady it was his BB gun which done the deed.”

  “That might explain why Vernon is so opposed to guns,” Lydia observed.

  “He is, is he?” Hank asked. “Well, heck fire, aint nobody gonna vote for the fool if he is. Ever man has got the right to keep and use all the shootin arns he needs, to pertect his fambly and kill him some game and what all.”

  “Darn tootin,” George said. “Many a time I’ve told Boss that I don’t see how he can make any friends among the voters if he wants
to do away with guns.”

  Lydia herself greatly admired Vernon’s stance on gun control (or extirpation, not to split hairs), but she didn’t say this to the men. “Still, the two misdeeds you’ve mentioned were both accidents, more or less, wouldn’t you say? Didn’t Vernon ever deliberately do something that was wrong, or illegal, or very bad?”

  “Nothing that he was ever arrested for, or even taken to account for,” Hank said. “But because I wouldn’t give him money to waste on the pitcher shows—I wanted him to have to earn his own spendin money—he used to sneak into the pitcher show, the Buffalo Theater over to Jasper. I don’t rightly know just how he got in, but he did it, more than once, until he was caught. But Tim Barker, the Buffalo’s manager, just gave me a phone call about it, and I told Vernon that I was going to cut off his—”

  Hank faltered and grew red in the face. Lydia asked, “Yes? Cut off his what?”

  “His nose?” Hank offered. “I just told him that what I’d been threatening to cut off ever since he was just a pup if he ever did anything real bad that I was now a-fixin to do it.” Hank chuckled. “That boy just run away from home. He was gone for three days, God knows where. But I couldn’t hold that against him, because I run away from home myself, to join the circus, when I wasn’t but the same age. We both came back, of course.”

  Lydia wondered if Harry Wolfe might have better luck worming some information out of Hank Ingledew. She suspected that because she was a woman Hank was not only very shy about speaking to her but also reticent about revealing any of Vernon’s childhood or adolescent conduct that might have involved sins of the flesh.

  Before the Samurai reconvened to discuss Harry’s proposal, Lydia learned from her host, Day Whittacker, of the Indian maiden’s plan to build a house (or mansion) in Stay More and of her intention to conceal it with transplanted trees. Day brought the subject up because he needed Lydia’s advice: would the busy activity of the building and transplanting attract attention from the occasional journalists and photographers who snooped around town, and, if so, might it harm Vernon’s campaign?

  Now Lydia realized that if the busy activity were to occur under “normal” times, that is, when Stay More was as sleepy and undisturbed as usual, it would draw a lot of attention, but if it happened in the midst of the initial furor over all the “scandals” revealed about Vernon, it would go unnoticed or unremarked. In fact, as she thought about it, the building of the mansion might even be used as one more potential scandal: if it was true that Vernon was involved with the Indian maiden, that in itself was going to be a major scandal, and her construction of a mansion on land that Vernon had simply given her would further embellish the scandal to the point where the public, already disaffected by the reports of Vernon’s extravagant double-bubble house, which Bradfield have given considerable time and space to exposing in the sixth week of his attack on Vernon’s albatrosses. Although they had not been able to photograph the house, even from the air, they had hired an artist to render an imaginary conception of it, inaccurate and misleading but at least emphasizing that it consisted of two huge round globes bonded together. “Would anybody who chose to live in a place like this be happy in the governor’s mansion?” asked the advertisements and TV spots. It was a noisily rhetorical question, and perhaps more than Bradfield’s use of the other albatrosses it left the populace convinced that Vernon was simply not One of Us.

  So Lydia’s last expedition, before the Samurai reconvened, was to interview Juliana Heartstays. Several days were needed to talk herself into it, because her jealousy of the Indian maiden was bitter and galling. Lydia had expected to find her at the wigwam, but she was instead at the home of the Woman Whom We Cannot Name. Going there to talk to her, Lydia realized that when all of the “scandals” broke and the village began to fill up with snooping newspeople, it might cause problems for the Woman Whom, who guarded her privacy, who was almost desperate not to be discovered as the famous novelist who had supposedly been murdered several years before. Lydia decided that if the Samurai did indeed decide to embark upon the campaign of super-saturation of scandal, she should have a talk with the Woman and suggest that she might want to take a vacation (go home to visit Svanetia?) for the duration of the breaking scandals.

  Swallowing her animosity, Lydia gave a little white lie to Juliana Heartstays: as Vernon’s press secretary, she was intrigued by the reports that Vernon had “donated” a parcel of thirty acres, more or less, to Juliana, a descendant of the Indians who had once owned that land, and she wondered if a human interest story might be made of it.

  “I’d much prefer to keep it as quiet as possible, if it’s all the same to you,” Juliana said cordially but firmly.

  “But if the story gets out, we should be prepared to offer our ‘official’ version,” Lydia said. “Couldn’t we simply say that some Osages had regained possession of their tribal lands through Vernon’s generosity?”

  The Indian maiden smiled, with perfect teeth. She truly was an unutterably fine-looking woman, and Lydia knew that if Juliana became a centerpiece of “Vernon’s Vices,” as Lydia was beginning to think of the scandals, her picture would not only be in every newspaper in the state but would probably appear in a few national magazines. “Vernon doesn’t like to think that he gave the land back to us,” Juliana said, “because indeed he didn’t. We simply reclaimed it.”

  “Whatever,” Lydia said. “You plan to stay, right? You’re going to build a house on it?” The Indian nodded. “You’re going to become a permanent resident of Stay More, and sell your Oklahoma house?”

  “I didn’t realize anyone knew anything about my Oklahoma house,” Juliana said.

  “I’m just assuming that you had a home there, somewhere,” Lydia said.

  “Yes, I did. I do. I haven’t put it on the market yet. I might have trouble selling it. It’s a peculiar house.”

  “As peculiar as Vernon’s?”

  “I haven’t seen Vernon’s house yet,” Juliana said.

  “Oh,” Lydia said. “You don’t visit him. He visits you. Because of Jelena.”

  The Indian maiden stopped smiling. Her look was fiercely challenging. “What do you mean by visit?”

  “You and Vernon are having a relationship,” Lydia declared flatly.

  Juliana Heartstays looked so stunned that for a moment Lydia wondered if possibly she’d been mistaken to believe that. “Where on earth did you get such an idea?” she demanded. Lydia simply smiling knowingly. “Who told you that?” Juliana persisted. “Was it Bo?”

  “Bo hasn’t told me anything. Nor has Vernon.”

  “Then who did? You’re staying with Diana and Day. Did one of them tell you they thought I was having an affair with Vernon?”

  Lydia decided not to reveal to Juliana that it was practically common knowledge, or at least common rumor, among all the Samurai and everyone else in Stay More, including Day and Diana. Instead she said, “I just have a pretty good hunch. For years I worked for a newspaper, and reporters often have nothing to go on but their hunches.”

  “But you’re putting two and two together and coming up with the wrong sum,” Juliana protested. “Why me?”

  “You’re beautiful,” Lydia said honestly but painfully. “And I know Vernon.”

  “Have you told Vernon—or anybody—of your suspicion?” Juliana asked.

  “Just you,” Lydia said.

  “Well, you’re dead wrong, and I hope you’ll keep your suspicion to yourself,” Juliana requested. “You had better keep it to yourself. If it gets out, I’ll hold you to blame for any trouble it causes.”

  But when the Samurai got together—in the store part of Sharon and Larry’s house, the one available meeting place other than Vernon’s living room that would hold the six of them, the first subject that came up, even before anyone proposed a vote on Harry’s suggestion, was the matter of Vernon’s “recreational activity during his too-frequent visits to Stay More,” as Harry Wolfe put it. Monica Breedlove boldly delivered herself
of the opinion that it was just terrible. Arch Schaffer said that as long as they were going to refer to it as “recreational activity” then they ought not begrudge the man his dalliance. Cast Sherrill said that under ordinary circumstances the story would be romantic and exciting and even thoroughly American but that the timing couldn’t be worse for a gubernatorial candidate. Bo Pharis said he was personally appalled by the situation but didn’t see that it would damage the campaign unless it “got out.”

  “‘Getting it out’ is what this meeting is all about,” Lydia reminded them. “We’re here to consider Harry’s radical proposal that we disclose all the possible damaging goods on Vernon in order to give the public a stomach ache. So if we decide to do that, the crown jewel of the damaging goods is going to be Miss Juliana Heartstays.”

  “You beat me to it, Lydia,” Harry said. “But I was going to make a case for bringing in the redskin lady as a kind of pièce de résistance of a full, seven-course feast that will not only give the public a belly ache but cause such dyspepsia and vomiting that they won’t have any appetite for months afterward…or at least until after the election.”

  “But do we want to bring her in at all?” Bo wondered. “Couldn’t we accomplish our motive without her?”

  “What have we got so far?” Arch wanted to know.

  The Samurai got down to work, and each reported on whatever he or she had found, or knew about, that could be used against Vernon. Lydia related in detail her visit to Hank Ingledew, and all that she’d managed to learn from him. “We can’t do anything with the business of letting the cow out of the pasture,” she observed, “but maybe we can make something out of that shooting the eagle and sneaking into the movies. Best of all, maybe we could divulge the information that Vernon’s own father plans to vote against him.”