The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  “Heard it scream.”

  “That wa’nt the timber. That were the saw. Nothing but the metal a the sawblade, made that. Why, if timber could try and talk, it’d jist say how happy ’tis, being squared inter nice lumber.”

  “How come? Then it’s dead.”

  Scratches his hair. Scratches mine. “Not at all, son. Jist changes fer the better. Tree standing in the woods, it aint good fer but shade and birdroost. Don’t live very long, even if it aint hit by wind or lightning. But you take a tree and make good charcoal outen it, and that charcoal helps ’em make iron in the furnace, and iron, boy, it lives forever.”

  “Don’t like iron.”

  “Well, never ye mind, jist now. You get to sleep and hush your tossin’ and turnin’. Your poor mother’s got dyspepsy, and neuralgy on top of it, and you’re keepin’ her awake. Now shut them eyes and drop off the deep end.”

  His great heavy hand presses my head into the pillow and holds it down a while, then lifts, I am lightened, and he is gone.

  But the trees redeem, they redeem! Day unto week I watch them do it. By their own law, nature’s unwritten writ of replevin, they take back what was theirs. Even if their numbers are sacrificed to the making of iron, they will outlast all iron. My father is wrong. The trees deceive him. They will outwait and outwit their users. Already the alders are reclaiming half of Parmenter’s meadow; though he curses them and cuts them, soon they will have it all. Alders breed faster than rabbits. I see a litter which wasn’t there yesterday.

  I hear the men talk, I listen to their idle grousings. The news is that the Mount Riga ironworks in Salisbury, closed since ’47 may never reopen, and the Sharon works may soon shut down. This is the beautiful irony of iron: that the furnace of Mount Riga helped make the iron horse, and the iron horse made Mount Riga extinct. Dudleytown’s own furnace, down at The Bridge, where the railroad runs, may soon go. The men talk of selling their charcoal for common stove fuel, a disgrace.

  The men talk about “this biggity Britisher, Bessemer,” who has found a way to make steel out of pig iron, and to use cheaper ore, at that. The men have a favorite thing they say, each of them, every day: What is the world coming to?

  The world comes, for me, to these lairs and aeries that are my range: my lodges in bushes and beneath the house, my nests in certain trees that let me climb them. These are my diggings, my restings and roostings: my theatres and gymnasia: my courts and pleasances: I will do what I like here. Or I will do nothing at all.

  Or I will do nothing at all: I will just sit here in the half-dark and stillness. And when they call to me, if I do not wish to I will make no answer. And when they come close and speak to me I will make like I am not here. If any or all of them tell me that dinner is ready I will not be hungry. I will say they cannot if they say they can see me.

  I will just sit here in the half-dark and stillness. When they say it is time for my naptime, I will make like I am napping. I will say nothing. I will say they are wrong if they say I am sickening. If they bring spoons and bottles I will clamp my lips tight. If they force my lips open, I will not swallow but spit later. Because I am me and no one else will be me, I will be what I wish, for I have to. I will not eat my turnips, neither my greens. If they say this will make me spindly and pindling, then I will wither and waste to nothing and become a wisp, drifting on air too high and far for them to reach.

  If I choose, I will just do nothing. In the half-dark and stillness I will just sit here.

  My father yawps: “You shinny down outen that tree ’fore I let loose on ye, you little dickens!”

  I climb to a higher limb.

  “I’ll give ye a dose a strap oil!” he bellows. “Light down outen there, you devil!”

  I climb to a higher limb.

  “Get your little tail back down here!” he yells. “I’ll clobber ye silly, you brat!”

  I climb to a higher limb.

  “Want I should come up arter ye?” he shouts. “Don’t think I won’t! If I have to climb up there, I’ll truly thrash the sauce outen ye!”

  I climb as high as I can go. It is an old chestnut, high as time, and I’m near the top. He can’t even see me, though I can see him: he leaps for the lowest limb and grabs hold but cannot pull himself up. He twists and dangles and says terrible bad words. He yells: “How’d ye get up there, anyhow?” He drops back to the ground and goes toward the barn. I think he has given up, and I start to climb down, but then he comes back, bringing a ladder. “Wal now,” he says, “jist let me get my hands on you.” He climbs and climbs.

  Can I fly? Oh, I’ve had dreams of flying! I dream full many a time of taking the air! The air is easy to take: you just take it into your arms and climb over it, kicking your feet. Slow it is, and thick, but lighter than a leaf, down, lighter than a fluff of seed puff, up. Up.

  He’s climbed as high as he can go. His hand gropes up for my limb and my ankle.

  I take the air.

  Oh, I soar! Oh lovely I mount the air and drift there one lovely instant, hovering free. But then I fall. The air denies me. Down, down I plunge, through branches, the hard earth waiting.

  I ask the tree to save me. And she does. Her lowest arm she puts beneath me, and when I hit it it bends gently with me and stops me, and I hold it. It lowers me slowly to the ground.

  I stand a moment, getting back my wits, and then I run, leaving my father in the tree. He is yelling, “Wal I’ll be hanged!”

  4

  Her third day in Dudleytown, Diana began to keep a diary, of sorts. More a journal in some respects, more an annals in others, it was casual; she did not intend to keep it faithfully and regularly. It was something to do, when she felt like it. It was something, she realized, with long foresight, which she could read again in her old age, when there are no longer any adventures.

  These are her first entries:

  June 23

  Today we found that chestnut tree, the one he supposedly climbed and jumped out of. It was dead, it had been dead a long time (Day says a “blight” killed every chestnut in the country back in the early part of the century) but it was still standing.

  It looks like it will stand a long time. Its limbs are mostly gone, the limb that caught him is gone, but the sturdy trunk endures.

  Dead a long time but still here.

  I had to explain the significance of the tree to Day. He choked up. There is something curiously similar between his love of trees and his love of trees. Suspicious too. They aren’t supposed to be alike.

  Big question: is Day projecting into the “other” parts of himself, or, if this is for real, is the “other” somehow shaping Day?

  We had an imu for supper. He began preparing the imu early in the afternoon and condescended to explain it to me: he dug a hole and lined it with rocks, then built a fire in the hole and let it burn down to hot coals, then shoveled the coals out, and took a whole chicken and some potatoes and carrots and wrapped them in wet leaves and put them on the bed of hot rocks in the pit, shoveling the coals back in on top, and covering the pit with dirt.

  He left it, his imu, like that for 3 or 4 hours, while we went off exploring. Then at suppertime he just dug it up and we ate it. I’ve never tasted better chicken.

  I’m going to learn to do these things myself. He does so much, I ought to do the cooking.

  Oh, and I nearly forgot, the eggs at breakfast, the way he did them, poached them or coddled them or whatever: after we had eaten our oranges, in halves, he broke an egg into each half-orange shell and laid them directly onto the fire coals for about 10 minutes. Delicious! and just faintly tasting of orange.

  I wonder how much of all this he learned from his Scout handbooks, and how much he learned from Daniel.

  Daniel, at the age of 4 or 5, ran away from home, after getting out of that chestnut tree, and was lost for nearly 24 hours. Of course, when they found him, they gave him a severe beating.

  June 24

  Our temperatures are about the same. Which is to say th
at both of us are more on the cool side. I don’t have much energy, and here in the woods with this idleness I would seem indolent to anyone but Day, whose temperature is as slow and cool as mine.

  Daniel, on the other hand, seems to have the highest temperature possible. Today I felt his pulse, and timed it, and then afterwards when he was just Day again I felt Day’s pulse and timed it. Results Daniel, 110; Day, 75. But maybe it’s only because Daniel is still only a child and children have higher pulses.

  Yet everything he says has a higher pulse. Day’s words just trickle out. Daniel’s erupt. It makes me understand that old-fashioned word referring to speech, “ejaculate.” I used to be confused or embarrassed, in reading old novels, to come across “He ejaculated,” or, worse, “She ejaculated.”

  Today we found the location of Bardwell’s store on Dark Entry Road. Every Sunday afternoon Daniel got a penny from his father; his older sisters each got two pennies; his brothers, three. They went to Bardwell’s store, the only store in Dudleytown, and bought candy. It is one of Daniel’s favorite places. He is sorry about all the things in the store which he can never afford to buy, but he has so much fun standing in front of the glass showcase and trying to decide which candy he will spend his penny on.

  There is no trace of the store now except its stone steps, leading up into air.

  Wild greens for supper, and a kabob on a spit pit: the spit a long green stick strung with lamb chunks, onions, peppers, tomatoes and mushrooms, turned slowly over a pit of coals. It took Day two beers to finish his share of it. He was almost a little tipsy.

  June 25

  Occasionally, but not terribly often, I have to justify all this for myself. The past couple of days I’ve found myself wondering, Am I doing my own thing? But it doesn’t bother me. The answer is always yes. I might be lazy, but I am never incurious or indifferent.

  Daniel fascinates me. I want to learn as much about him as I can. Over Day’s mild protests, I bought a tape recorder, and I’m recording on tape everything he says, his whole life from beginning to…how long will this take? At this rate, months, maybe. But it is a fascinating life, at least the way he tells it. It is a life I could never imagine, and sometimes I find it nearly impossible to believe that Day could imagine it either.

  But there is always that suspicion. Last night I did some gazing at the stars. Exposed to them, on a clear night, to the zillions of them, I just gazed at them for a long time, until bedtime. I felt the way I always do, gazing at the night sky: the sense of personal insignificance. Stars die. Even stars. When a thing on puny earth dies, it is dead. For good. Isn’t reincarnation a preposterously vain and arrogant dream, a selfish foolish delusion?

  Well, isn’t it?

  Today we found the site of the schoolhouse, south up Dudleytown Road, very near the place where I’ve been parking the car. Nothing there, of course, although Day excavated a funny little tin contraption, like a telescope, which Daniel later identified as a collapsible drinking cup. Why collapsible? So it would fit into the child’s lunchbox.

  The teacher’s name is Abigal Fife. Now that certainly sounds like a made-up name. I pretended I was Miss Fife, and followed Daniel through his daily school routines. Apparently he is the only child in his grade. Whether he was the last child born in Dudleytown is not known; at any rate he was apparently the only child born that year, and the only one in the first grade.

  For supper, four small poached trout, which Day claims he caught in Bonny Brook with grubs baited on a hook fashioned from chicken bones. I didn’t see him do it but I believe him because how else could he have got them? (I ribbed him about not having a Connecticut fishing license.)

  Hot rocks have it all over Teflon as a cooking surface. We honored the fish with a domestic white wine, a Pinot Chardonnay from California. I explained to Day the niceties about white wine with white meat and red with red. I believe he is beginning to appreciate wine.

  June 26

  Intruders today! I heard them while Daniel was talking and had to bring Day back. We listened. Voices from the woods in the distance. They did not come any closer, and we didn’t go to investigate; whoever it was has as much right to be here as we do, I suppose, but I couldn’t help resenting them. There was laughter from time to time. Later, after a few hours, the voices went away. We went and found their encampment or picnic spot or whatever you could call it: near the Caleb Jones cellar hole they had built a small clumsy fire and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, leaving behind their considerable litter of napkins, and paper plates with imitation walnut grain printed on one side. Day demonstrated that he actually knows some strong curse words.

  But it is Saturday, and this was the first time anyone has been here but us, and we did not see them nor they us.

  I asked Daniel to tell me what he looks like, at the age of seven, but it was hard for him to do. I pretended I was Miss Fife again and his “assignment” was to describe himself without looking in a mirror. He has long dark bushy hair (Day’s is short and light brown), that’s about all of interest I could determine. And he wears short pants.

  I asked him to locate the church or meeting house but apparently there isn’t one and never has been. That seems strange, because it had been a town of religious people, Puritans in the beginning, later Congregationalists. Daniel doesn’t go to church. But every night at bedtime he says the “Now I lay me” prayer, ending with, “And God bless Papa and Mama and Charity and Emmeline” and all his brothers and relations and friends. “Friends.” That’s funny. He has none. None his own age.

  The menu this evening: just plain old ordinary prime porterhouse steaks! Grilled on charcoal which he made himself. Steaks black on the outside, bright pink inside. With a bottle of Chateauneufdu-Pape. For dessert: wild strawberries. It took us nearly two hours this morning to find and pick less than a quart of them, but it was worth it.

  June 27

  More visitors. Seen this time, as well as heard. Dudleytown was uncomfortably overpopulated today. Sunday traffic. A man and his wife, middle-aged, with back-packs, who had apparently been hiking on the Appalachian Trail, detoured through our glade this morning and paused to ogle us. The man scowled as if in disapproval of our obvious sinning, and started to say or ask something, but his wife tugged him on. This afternoon two boys in a jeep came driving up, stopped, backed, and over the roar of the jeep’s motor they tried to make conversation, but I couldn’t hear them. They were Day’s age, I guess. They smirked and leered at me, and nudged one another, then drove away laughing. Day gave evidence that at some time in his life he must have overheard some sailors swearing. Or maybe Daniel taught him those words.

  Still later this afternoon another group of Appalachian Trail hikers, five altogether, of various ages but wearing identical red-white-and-blue nylon back-packs, came through our glade. One of them stopped to ask me if I didn’t know that this was a haunted ghost town we were camping in. I said I knew it was a ghost town but we have been here nearly a week without being haunted. “Nervy,” was all he said before moving on.

  I was beginning to feel paranoiac, with all these people coming into our glade, so we went for a walk, just to get away. But on the Dudleytown Road we met a whole family on an outing. First we saw the boys, throwing rocks at something in the woods and generally raising hell, fat little brats. Then the fat father, who looked like a plumber or a cook or something, carrying a fat baby, and the very very fat mother, puffing. Politely we said “Hello” as they passed, but they only stared at us, as if we were strange specimens of wildlife and this their first trip to the woods.

  For supper tonight he agreed to let me do the cooking. I did the one thing I’ve had some experience with: spaghetti. I did it nicely, too, but somehow the meal seemed out of place, not a woods thing.

  Guess what, dear diary. Romance! Tonight he held my hand.

  5

  Girl. Why’s a girl? I have seen Charity and Emmeline. Why the bare groin? Both are blank there. A congenital defect? But Reuben Temple says
they all of them are. Rube’s a year older than me, but I tore it out of him when he tried to tell me how I was born. Laced his jacket, I did, and sent him bawling home. Nobody can say things like that about my mother and father.

  Still I studied it, afterwards, and I bethought me: maybe he was right. I have never seen a stork. I have watched, and once I saw a bird, but it was some kind of crane, not a stork. We come from God, but how? I don’t believe in angels either.

  I guess I thrashed poor Reuben because he told a truth I didn’t want to hear. As if you know, because of the thunderheads, that a storm is coming, but still you stay out, and when the storm hits you it seems a surprise.

  They tease me in school, that I do not have a girl. All the others, olders, have a girl. Felicia is Jonathan’s girl. Alvina is Hector’s girl. Violate is Renz’s girl. My own sister Charity is Seth’s girl, even if she doesn’t know it because she doesn’t know anything. What do you do to have a girl?

  Danny, Danny, little manny

  Pink ears and purple fanny

  Never had a girl but Granny

  Never can he, never, can he?

  is what the boys chant, ringing round me but keeping their distance because if they come near I will clobber them. I am not little, my ears and rear are neither pink nor purple, and both my grandmothers returned to dust ’ere I was born. All taunts are false and unfair.

  And I would have a girl if there was one. But all are older, and taken.

  Yet now there is one who, though taken, and though older, seems to decide to become mine. It is all in sport, of course, or seems to be, the way this afternoon when school is over she comes and sits upon my desk, the others around her, behind her, and she rumples my hair with her hand and smiles, and says to the others, “I’m going to be Danny’s girl.”

  The others titter and giggle; this makes me think she is just joshing, but she says to them, “I mean it. I am.”

  She must be two or more years older than me, though she’s not any bigger. Her name is Hattie Rose Pearl Bardwell, least daughter of Storekeeper Bardwell. Nobody calls her just Hattie, because Miss Fife doesn’t. Miss Fife always calls her Hattie Rose Pearl.