The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Quit callin ya teacher, I will, if ya don’t watch out. As lief call ya Dan, Dan. Gettin so’s I’m with ya half the time, and the other half I’m thinkin ’baout ya. Papa’s started teasin. Says t’me, “Don’t ya run off with this one.” Says t’me, “You run off with this one, we won’t have no schoolmaster.”

  Oh, shouldn’t tell ya, no, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, but once ’pon a time I absquatulated, I run off from home. Don’t ya hold it agin me, neither, I was a fool-headed butterfly lookin t’see th’other side a the mountains, I’d never been as far as to Woodstock. This feller told me he’d show me all the big towns, but he only showed me one and I didn’t keer too much fer that one, Springfield, jest lots of big factories and such. Wouldn’t’ve flew off with him t’begin with, ’ceptin he told as how he had this big house in Rutland that I could live in an be a princess, but he didn’t tell me till later, when we never got to Rutland but this other town Springfield, that he already had a princess in that house that he was married to. That’s when I up and left him quick, and come back home, but by then he’d already done me like a prince does his princess every night. More’n two months, it was.

  You won’t hold it agin me, will ya, Dan? I was fool-headed an callow, I didn’t know the fust thing ’baout all the things I would wonder and wonder ’baout, and he promised to teach me. He did. I’d still not know the fust thing but for whut he taught.

  Like he was the one told me how people are different from animals because they have souls. When animals, say like sheep, fuse to make their lambs, the ram has to work his picket into the ewe’s velvet, and that way his seed has to pass through all her stuffings before it can reach her belly, and it’s all so messy and awkward-like. But when God made people and gave them souls, he fixed it so’s the man wouldn’t have to use the woman’s ugly velvet but could use her pretty mouth instead and that way the seed would go direct to her belly down her gullet.

  Thinkin I was his princess, young as I was, I got t’thinkin whut fun t’have a baby, so I let him fuse me like he told. Fust time was terrible hard fer me, but he says fust time allus is. Nearly choked, I did. But it didn’t give me a baby. Never swole in the belly the way you’re ’sposed ta. Even though he did it every night, and sometimes when he got home from his day’s peddlin, he’d jest take out his picket and I’d take it in and swaller.

  Ast him why my belly wa’n’t swellin the way it orter’ve, but he jest said some girls naturally can’t make babies, which made me awful sad, but he went on tryin anyway. I got to thinkin ’baout it, and once, once I didn’t swaller but waited till he’d gone and then I spit it out and looked at it. It was white, and I got to thinkin maybe it orter’ve been red instead a white, and it was his fault not mine that I couldn’t make a baby. But I never said anything ’baout it to him.

  What bothered me the most, though, was that he seemed t’get such a hull lot a pleasure out a fusin, I mean, he’d do it so often and allus with lots a jerkin and cooing when the sirup commenced shootin, it must’ve been a sight a pleasure fer him. But not fer me. How come, I ast him, if God made people with souls so they could fuse this way ’stead a the nasty way animals do it, how come only the feller gets all the pleasure out a it, and none fer the gull? Wal, that puzzled him some, I tell ya. And he ast me, didn’t it give me no pleasure to gobble that nice fat picket and feel that hot sirup pourin down my throat? And I told him, not much it didn’t. He said, Wal, some women was that way, that they didn’t get no pleasure from anything. That made me feel awful sad too, but try as I could, I couldn’t get no pleasure from him, and I begun to think maybe that was his fault too.

  I got to thinkin it was on account of he wa’n’t very gentle. Would you be gentle, Dan? He wa’n’t, he’d commence by gettin this look on his face, this kind a slit-eyed look with a fleer on his mouth and he’d yank out his picket and say things t’me like, “Come on, gull, I got a hot gift fer ya,” or, “Open up, sweet, here comes yer supper!” You wouldn’t talk like that, would ya, Dan? And then whilst I would be doin him, he’d sometimes swear at me, and say, like, “Watch yer goddam teeth, kid!” or like, “Faster, you little bitch!” You wouldn’t swear at me, would ya, Dan? And he’d get rough, and grab holt the back a my hair and act like he wanted t’poke a hole out through the back a my neck. You wouldn’t be rough, would ya, Dan? Would ya?

  There’s one thing I certainly can’t admire very much about Daniel Lyam Montross, and that is that he neglected, right then and there, to straighten that poor girl out of her hideous misconceptions about intercourse. He could so easily have given her the true facts of life, right on the spot, but for a moment he wondered if maybe she were right, if, after all, the correct way for man the “higher animal” to fuse was as she described it, and what is more, her telling of this revolting story, instead of repulsing him as it should have, actually caused him to have an erection, and caused him to want to “fuse” with her in that horribly incorrect fashion.

  Diana and I had another quarrel, over this. It seems as if, at times, we were quarreling every day, over anything. She was playing back on her tape recorder this part of the tape, so that I could listen to it, and my shock must have been amusing to her. Then, after Rachel’s monologue, came the part of the tape where Daniel Lyam Montross began telling about his first “fusing” with Rachel.

  “Turn it off!” I said to Diana. “I’d just as soon not hear it.”

  “Oh, don’t be a prude, Day,” she said. I seem to recall that she had called me that a few times or several times before.

  “Prude, hell!” I said. “It’s not a matter of prudishness. It’s a simple matter of good taste and restraint. Daniel could screw his idiot sister all he wanted to, back in Dudleytown, for all I cared, but when it comes to taking advantage of a poor, ignorant—”

  “But don’t you see?” Diana said. “It wasn’t exactly a matter of taking advantage of her. Because he was gentle. Very gentle. He was everything that that lecherous pedlar had not been. In fact, she even had an orgasm for the first—”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” I yelled at her. And for the rest of that day, I was unable to allow myself to listen to any more of the tapes. I thought: I’m going to have to kill you, Dan, if you don’t watch out.

  The new assortment of epithets which she thought up to toss at me includes: “straitlaced,” “intolerant,” “narrow” “parochial,” “small,” and, interestingly enough, “uninteresting.”

  I called her a few things too.

  The next time we were in bed, and she pulled that playful little stunt again, of putting my finger in her mouth, I jerked it out and called her a few more things.

  But Daniel Lyam Montross, whatever might be said against him in regard to this episode, was at least kind and considerate enough to lose no time in explaining to Rachel, afterwards, what little he knew about the true facts of life, which wasn’t much. The poor girl was at first shocked and refused to believe him. Then when he made it sound so logical that she could no longer quite disbelieve him, she cried for a long time.

  The odd thing, the terrible thing, is that she still thought that natural, true intercourse was somehow bestial, dirty and perverted, and even though, eventually, after months of his trying, she let him have her once in the natural way, let him have her natural virginity, you might say, the experience disturbed her so much that she actually vomited and was sick at home in bed with a fever for several days, missing school, which was just as well, as far as Daniel was concerned, for he needed several days to recover from the experience himself. During these days, he made his first trip up the mountain to see the hermit-home of Henry Fox, and even to meet and to talk with the man that everybody said was crazy. This meeting was one of the important things that happened to him in Five Corners. In fact, getting acquainted with Henry Fox was one of the most significant events of his life.

  I should have known better, after my previous experience with an overdose of hard cider, which had led to our worst quarrel, but I liked this beverage more tha
n a lot, and sometimes it was hard to know where to stop. Anyway, the weather was much too chilly, now, for us to take our baths in the brook any more, even on sunshiny days. We usually heated water in pots and kettles on the fire at our lean-to, and instead of soaking we would just use a washcloth, like they do to hospital patients. Diana called this a “spit bath”—an inelegant expression if ever I heard one. Well, sometimes I would scrub her back and she would scrub mine, but this time, because we’d been making inroads on the cider barrel, she didn’t stop with just my back. And later, when we were toweled off and drying beside the fire, and drinking more of the cider, I didn’t object when she started doing what she did, although it still seemed to me, even in my tipsiness, an infantile if not a perverted thing to do.

  Oh, this has been the story of a boy who loves ghost towns, of a lonely boy who goes off into the woods by himself, or with a nice girl if he’s lucky, oh, this has been the story of a ghost town where nobody lives anymore, where once there was living, and loving, and singing and laughter, oh, a story of things lost that will never be again, of people who are gone, of buildings built and vanished, of dreams dreamt and faded, oh, this has been the story of man’s little pleasures and of his foibles and afflictions, a story of wild places, desert woods, of great trees in breezes, oh, and this has been the story of a boy bathed and naked, dreaming of a pretty girl on her knees.

  It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

  Henry Fox was born in 1849, coincidental with the California gold rush, not in California but in Zurich, Switzerland, to Heimerich Voecks, an Austrian dentist, and Lillibet Holbein, a Swiss beauty. His parents were not married; he never met his father; his mother took him in his infancy to England, where she anglicized his name to Henry Fox and later attempted unsuccessfully to have him enrolled in one of the better public (that is, private) schools. Resenting the exclusive class system of England, she took him to America in search of equality and opportunity. Finding New York too large for her tastes, she lived in, and sent him to public (that is, public) schools in, successively, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Terre Haute, Indiana, and Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

  One thing Henry Fox had in common with Daniel Lyam Montross was a precocious maturity; he ran away from home at the age of fifteen and went to South America to seek his fortune, earning his passage as a steward on a steamship. Three years of hard labor in the gold mines of Argentina taught him all that he knew about gold mining but failed to make him rich, and he returned to America at the age of nineteen nearly penniless, working first as a dishwasher in third-rate Manhattan restaurants, and then as a newshawk on the streets of New York. One day when nobody was buying his newspapers, he sat down on a curb and read one of them and happened upon a small article to the effect that gold had been discovered in Vermont.

  He arrived in Five Corners billing himself as a professional “assayer” and offering to make, without charge, an appraisal of any gold that had been found. He quickly surmised two things of importance: one, the gold which had been washing into the streams around Five Corners probably was coming from rich mother lodes in the surrounding hills, possibly even a vein of pure gold quartz; and, two, none of the men engaged in the gold search knew the first thing about mining, other than simple stream panning. One of the men was a local farmer, another a government land agent returned from Indian territory, another a shoe store proprietor from New York. None of these men had ever mined gold before.

  Only one of them had capital, the former land agent, Charles Rook, and because of this the company which Henry Fox helped them to organize was called the Rooks Mining Company, although everybody in Five Corners called it the Fox Mining Company because Henry Fox was superintendent.

  To add drama or at least showmanship to his work, Henry Fox fashioned a weird contraption out of metal rods, which he called his “divining rod,” and set about trying to locate the mother lode. The contraption was worthless, but it fascinated his associates and the crowds of local people who would come each day to watch him hunt. What he was really using was his keen eyesight, trained in Argentina to detect telltale outcroppings indicative of gold deposits. Within a few days of searching, he found a gold-bearing rock on a hill some miles to the south of Five Corners, and after shouting “Eureka!” he claimed that this was the location of a vast mother lode of gold quartz.

  The trouble with Henry, perhaps attributable to his youth, was that he stuck to his guns, even if the guns were out of ammunition. Although he had a talent for spotting possible digging sites, he had no talent, indeed, nobody had any talent, for determining just how large the vein might be. Ever afterward, Henry Fox would refuse to believe that this spot he picked was not the right place, that the greater part of the gold, if there was any, lay hidden in some other place.

  Everybody was so impressed with Henry’s discovery that endless capital for the operations began flowing in from eager investors. A boardinghouse was built on the spot, and large crews of men began digging a shaft according to Henry’s instructions. When the shaft was finished, construction began on a large compound of buildings: a large mill for the quartz, shaft houses, several dwellings for employees in addition to the boardinghouse, and even a special residence for Superintendent Henry Fox, a two-and-a-half story dwelling which he called “Gold Brook Chateau.”

  Diana and I made a hike up the mountain to locate the place. The buildings are all gone, except for one fallen wall of “Gold Brook Chateau.” The mine entrance has caved in, but rusty iron tracks still lead to it, and mossy timbers jut out of it. I had a kind of strange feeling that if you were to dig into the shaft, you might still find a lot of gold.

  But they didn’t, Henry Fox and his associates. The shaft ran for 365 feet back into the mountain, where it joined a vertical shaft that rose 300 feet to the top of the mountain. Somewhere back in there Henry found some gold. On October 27, 1883, against a backdrop of flaming autumn color, Henry Fox proudly displayed to visitors and newspapermen the first ingot of gold produced by his operation. It was 6 × 1 × 3/4 inches and weighed fifty-one ounces and one penny-weight. It was, he declared, 97/100 fine and was worth $1021. News of this was reported as far away as San Francisco, where the newspapers made envious and invidious comparisons between Vermont gold and California gold.

  More investments poured in, and a Boston banker bought control of the company, established himself as president, and appointed a board of directors to incorporate the company. The board made plans to quadruple the capacity of the operations, to earn faster profits, and the equipment was dismantled and packed away to prepare for this expansion. Henry Fox had wisely returned all of his own earnings and salary into the company, and now owned several thousand dollars’ worth of stock. But the directors, inexplicably, were slow in commencing the expansion, and Henry Fox suspected that this delay was related to a visit by a team of assayers and geologists hired by the directors.

  Three years went by without any more action at the mine, and Henry Fox ultimately was forced to sue the directors for his back salary. The court decided in his favor and ordered all of the mine property to be put upon the block at a sheriff’s sale in Ludlow. The directors bid $12,000 to get their property back, but Henry Fox raised it by $500 and it was struck off to him.

  At the age of thirty-eight in 1887, Henry Fox began his long years as hermit mine owner, panning the brooks for a flake here and there. He was forty-eight when Daniel Lyam Montross first met him ten years later.

  How is all of this relevant? Why have I devoted so much introduction to this man who wasn’t even a native Vermonter and therefore doesn’t have one jot of “local color” to add to our story? Simply because Henry Fox had more influence on Daniel Lyam Montross, for good or for bad, than anybody else he ever met in his whole life. And Daniel Lyam Montross himself, in his old age (if we ever live that long, and get that far), will become a kind of hermit like Henry Fox, in some other place.

  Henry Fox looked foreign; he did not look like a Vermonter. He was a thin, sharply boned
man with hair already turning yellow-white and a large flowing moustache, also yellow-white. His house was yellow-white and his dog was yellow-white. The dog was the one that Daniel Lyam Montross met first.

  The dog was a large, muscular creature, some indeterminate species of mostly hound and partly bulldog, husky, shepherd and fox terrier. The dog had strayed into the yard of Gold Brook Chateau one day a few years previously, and Henry Fox had thrown at it the only hard object handy at the moment, which was a stale biscuit. The dog ate it in one swallow and attached himself for life to Henry Fox. Henry Fox named him “Pooch.”

  When Daniel Lyam Montross came walking up to Gold Brook Chateau, big Pooch did not snarl nor growl nor bark nor snap like most dogs; instead he “yolloped” (Daniel’s word). Daniel’s imitation of this sound isn’t easy to transcribe from the tapes; the dog sort of opened wide his jaws as if inhaling sharply; on the inhale he said something that sounded like “Yower,” on the exhale a louder and more forcible “FROWER.” Thus yowr FROWR! and again, yowr FROWR! The third time that Pooch said yowr FROWR, Henry Fox came out the side door of Gold Brook Chateau with a shotgun.

  Between the dog’s yolloping and Fox’s brandishing the shotgun, Daniel got pretty nervous, and when Fox demanded, “What’re you here for?” he could not think of anything to say. He couldn’t very well say that he had come out of curiosity. Strangely, what he found himself doing was breaking suddenly into song, and singing “The Five Corners Academy Song” about the leaking roof and hot stove and old water and fusty air and all. Singing this song calmed his nerves at the same time it gave him an entry, which was to ask Henry Fox if he had written that song.

  “What if I did?” Fox answered. He was quite surly. The dog Pooch said yowrFROWR! a few more times.

  Daniel explained that he was the new Five Corners schoolmaster and said that he thought the song was the best thing he’d ever heard.