The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  What use is knowing, if the heart’s in tow?

  “Well,” said Diana, “what do you think of it?”

  “I recognize the form,” I said. “It’s a strict classic French form, called a ‘vanillelle’ or ‘vallinelle’….”

  “Villanelle,” she corrected me. “Never mind the form. What do you think of the content?”

  “Where did you get it?” I asked.

  “I wrote it,” she said.

  “Obviously,” I said, because the sheet of paper was clearly in her handwriting. “But what did you copy it out of?”

  “I ‘copied’ it,” she said, “out of Daniel Lyam Montross’s head. Daniel is the author of this poem.”

  I puzzled over this. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t believe it. Whether or not the idea that Daniel Lyam Montross is only the creation of my imagination, or even of my unconscious, is acceptable, I know this much: I didn’t write that poem. I wasn’t equipped to write it. I can conceive that all other aspects of the “persona” of Daniel Lyam Montross might possibly have come up out of my unknown inner resources, but I know that isn’t where that poem came from. I began to suspect something very disturbing to me: Diana herself was the author (or authoress) of this poem, even though I wouldn’t have given her credit for that much talent. She had been brooding about her identity, and perhaps had decided to assert her It or identity by writing poems which she “attributed” to Daniel Lyam Montross. This suspicion was reinforced when she went on to tell me something which she claimed that “Daniel Lyam Montross” had told her during the recent “session”: that he was disappointed in the way that I was telling his story, and that if I didn’t do a better job of it, he was going to “take over” and do the job himself. And in verse, yet! This made me feel terrible, even if I didn’t believe it. It was as if Diana, in order to assert and prove her own It, first had to destroy my It. Can’t two people have equal Its which can get along together in harmony and cooperation? Goddamn you, Henry Fox, there’s a question for you!

  October 18 was Diana’s birthday, her twenty-second, and I decided that if she was having such an identity crisis, it might help or even cure her “It jitters” if I made her birthday into a really special occasion. So I used our reflector oven to bake a big cake for her, with twenty-two irregular candles that I had hand-dipped with string in tallow. Also I killed a fat partridge with my slingshot, so our main course for the dinner was a delicious partridge roasted in an imu pit in the ground. Also, I had spent several days making for her a handsome, colorful necklace, which I fashioned laboriously from bright-colored pebbles found around the brook, each pebble drilled slowly with a hole by heating a nail red hot; it took a long time, and I did it in secret, hiding long hours off in the woods by myself, and the finished product was something to be proud of.

  But after supper, after she made her wish and blew out the candles on the cake, although she said “Oh, thank you!” when I presented the necklace to her in a box lined with dark green moss to set off the colors of the pebbles, she didn’t seem awfully happy with it specifically or her birthday party in general. I wondered if she had expected me to take some of her own money and go to Woodstock and buy her something fancy and expensive, but I couldn’t ask her if this is what she had been expecting, and even if she had, I couldn’t have done it, I mean, I couldn’t have spent her own money on her. I thought it was more appropriate to give her something I had made myself, like the roast partridge, and the cake, and the necklace. Anyway, I asked her why she was brooding. Was she still having “It jitters”? Did the fact of becoming a year older, and having a birthday, aggravate her identity crisis? Not exactly, she said. Well then, I said I wondered if it was because all of our chipmunks had gone into hibernation. There had been six of these chipmunks that had practically lived at our place, they had eaten out of our hands and had even jumped into our laps, and we’d even given individual names to each of them, although they were kind of hard to tell apart, but now they had disappeared, almost as if they were waiting for Diana’s birthday to go into hibernation. Yes, Diana said, she was sad about that, but that wasn’t what was on her mind. Well, what was, then? I persisted and pestered. Finally she said it was the wish she’d made when she blew out the candles. What was the wish? I asked. She said she couldn’t tell, that you aren’t supposed to tell what your wish is, because then you’re sure not to get it. Well, I said, sort of playing around as with Twenty Questions, did it have anything to do with me? Yes, she said. Well, I said, did it involve something between me and her? Yes, she said. Well, I said, was it perhaps in some way related to our previous argument? Yes, she said. Well, I said, was she really so preoccupied with it as to make it the object of her birthday wish? Yes, she said. Well forget it, I said.

  And that ruined the rest of her birthday, I guess. But I was annoyed, even if birthday wishes and all that are a lot of kid stuff, that all she could think of for a birthday wish, after I’d gone to such trouble to make that necklace and bake the cake and find that partridge and hit it with my slingshot and pick its feathers and clean it and cook it all day in the imu pit, was some trifling unnatural itch of hers.

  When I woke up, it must have been after midnight, the fire was still blazing bright and hot, I was sitting in one of our Adirondack chairs and she was sitting in the other. She had a kind of ironic but satisfied smile on her face. I assumed that she had been having another regular session with Daniel Lyam Montross, and that now she would play back the tape for me if I cared to hear it. But I felt very strange, and it took me a moment to identify the source of my uneasiness. The particular perfume that she wears sometimes, Réplique I think it’s called, was very strong in my nostrils…and in my mouth, along with it, under it or over it or both, that singular exciting piquance which is the carnal tang of her sex, not really like licorice but with the same acridity. I sat there for a while staring at her smile or smirk or whatever it was, and ruminating upon these twin odors in my nose and mouth, and then I said,

  “Damn you.”

  “It wasn’t you,” she said. “It was him. And he made me feel for a while that I might really have an It, after all.”

  “It’s my mouth, damn you,” I said. And I got up and drank at least a pint of cider, trying to forget. And then I said, “I think your It is positively disgusting and loathsome,” and then I went off to bed. And tried to sleep. But my dreams were bad and wild.

  Three days later we had our first snow. It was not a hard snow, nothing like the ones to come later, but it was our first snow. It began in the late afternoon, when the heavy sky flaked and dusted our woods with white feathers slow-falling and silent as time. We moved the Adirondack chairs into the lean-to, and sat in them for a long time wrapped in our blankets and watching the snow fall, and saying to each other things like “Oh isn’t that lovely!” and “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” and “How wonderful!” and all kinds of gushing stuff like this. And the way it fell, so gently but deliberately, as if it had a job to do and was going to take its time and see that the job got done properly. Within an hour, all the ground was white, all the trees were covered, and some of the trees still had a few clusters remaining of their scarlet leaves, now like blood on snow, like Rachel’s hair on her pillow. “Let’s dance in it,” Diana suddenly suggested, and we threw off our blankets and threw off our clothes and spontaneously choreographed a Snow-Welcome Pas De Deux, to the music of her humming and my whistling, all very slow and white and drifting. Once before we had been air and water, alga and fungus, in a thing she rigged up to a piece by Vaughan Williams. Now to our own impromptu music we were earth and snow, she the snow, I the earth, and this was symbiotic too, the one needing the other. In the happiness of this time we forgot our little grudges and prejudices, we transcended ourselves, I guess you could say, or I guess Henry Fox would’ve said that our Its found the right place and abandoned some other place that was anti-having or de-having because what we finally did was not, to me then at least, unnatural, but part of our da
nce, the end of our dance, the snow stopped, and resting upon the earth, the snowfall ended, the earth covered, the white blanket resting, and although the feel of the snow was icy and nipping on our naked skins, it did not seem long, it seemed fleeting and transitory, that new right place, but it did seem right, I swear it did, that the snow lay with the earth, the snow’s soft head upon the earth’s groin, the earth’s head buried beneath the crotch of the snow, all soft touchings and strokings.

  Oh, this is a story of a lost place in a snowfall, of a boy and girl symbiotic and devoted and lost together, oh, this is a story about a wise philosopher who sought gold and lost it but found wisdom and shared it, oh, this is the story of his sharing, of his sharing his wisdom with a young schoolteacher with an empty head ready to be crammed (oh, how’m I doing, Daniel? is this any better? Could your poetry beat it?), oh, this is a story of a boy who looked for the right place where people had lived simply and honestly and had devotion to work and to duty, but found instead some other place of unnatural behaviour, a story of some other place that became for me the right place because there are Its and I have one and so does she, even if she doesn’t think so, and so do you.

  Oh, It is.

  One of the few pictures in Henry Fox’s Gold Brook Chateau was a painting, or rather a good copy of a painting which had been painted not by a master but by a nearly unknown late-nineteenth-century academician named Adolphe William Bourguereau. The good copy, which possibly surpassed the original in its pristine clarity and naturalism, was signed only by the initials D.H. The copy of the painting was quite large, over eight feet tall and nearly six feet wide. During the Five Corners gold rush, when there was a saloon among the buildings in the compound at the mine entrance, this large painting had hung over the bar of the saloon, where drinkers could admire it and receive stimulation or at least amusement from it. When the mine operations folded, Henry Fox removed the painting and hung it in his sitting room at Gold Brook Chateau, to serve, as he explained to Daniel Lyam Montross, as a “mnemonic device” to help him in recalling and reliving the lost, passionate Its of his youth, although Daniel doubted that the particular experience depicted in the painting had ever happened to Henry Fox. The title of the painting, Fox told him, was simply “Nymphs With A Satyr,” and Fox explained to him what a nymph is and what a satyr is. Daniel thought the painting should have been called “The Reluctant Satyr,” for that was the essence of its subject: a muscular, tanned satyr, with a goat’s legs and ears, in the lush woods, trying to put up a great resistance as he is being pulled, tugged and pushed by a quartet of extremely luscious and contemporary looking nude nymphs, who with great abandon are determined to get him to go off some other place with them and serve their fancies. Two things about the painting impressed Daniel Lyam Montross, apart from the sheer lushness of the woods and sunlight and dappled voluptuous bodies: the face of the satyr, except for the goat’s ears of course, was remarkably like his own face; and the idea that four women, together, would so hungrily pursue this obstinate fellow. It was a complete reversal of the usual role in which man is the pursuer and woman the pursued. This made it both comic and flattering to the male ego. Henry Fox, expatiating about this painting to Daniel, conjectured that it was an ancient prophecy, as translated by a contemporary man in 1873, of what the world might be like in that distant twentieth or twenty-first century when the Its of man and woman became equal, having was equalized, and man became pursued as well as pursuer, and therefore ended all his wars and other aggressions. The importance of this vision, so central to Fox’s thought, was somewhat lost upon Daniel, however, because Daniel already enjoyed that rare privilege denied to most men: being pursued by women, by more than one. Looking at the painting, sometimes, Daniel could see not only his own countenance in the face of the satyr, but also a good likeness of Rachel in the nymph who tugged his left arm and neck, and a good likeness of Melissa in the broad-hipped nymph who was pulling his right arm.

  Daniel was happy, complacent, and a bit smugly self-satisfied with his life, so that even though Henry Fox warned him prophetically that he would have to learn eventually to live upon the memories of this life Daniel saw no reason why it should ever end. His success as a schoolmaster, due in no small measure to the crash course in brain expanding that Henry Fox was giving him, made him something of a figure in the community. Judge Braddock personally congratulated him, expressing surprise that he was doing so well, and offered him a small raise to continue for another year. The parents who had opposed him for his failure to flog his unruly charges were eventually won over by his success in making the unruly charges ruly without use of the ruler. The pupils loved him almost as much, but not in the same way, as his eldest pupil Rachel loved him. He had become a proficient organ player, and he was able, because of his friendship with Henry Fox, to give his pupils instruction in worldly matters not covered in their textbooks. The only bad time in the whole year happened to occur in early May when Rachel found her mother and her schoolmaster/lover celebrating spring together out in the woods. Rachel hated him for weeks, even months (or years?) afterwards, and hated her mother even more. Daniel reasoned with her and argued with her, to no avail, for the female It, as Henry Fox could have told him, is totally immune to reason or logic. Daniel’s primary argument was that since Rachel was constitutionally or emotionally unable to fuse with him in the “normal” way, that he was required to do this with Melissa, and that besides, there was more than enough to go around, wasn’t there? No, Rachel believed. It defiled him and it defiled her mother to do that dirty thing like animals do it. And what bothered her most was that the more of himself he shared with her mother the less of himself did he have to share with her. She would no longer bring lunches for Daniel. She seemed to become unhinged. She began to act peculiar in school, and embarrassed the teacher and the other pupils by noisily sucking her thumb a lot. At the end of the term, in June, she failed all of her examinations, so miserably that, even though Daniel wanted to pass her anyway, his conscience as schoolmaster would not allow him to overlook such a poor performance, so she was destined to have to repeat the school year, to be his scholar one more year if he chose to accept Judge Braddock’s offer.

  Daniel was glad when summer came and school was over and out. He got a job, in return for room, board and a tiny wage, as a farmhand for Jirah Allen. The only disadvantage of this arrangement was that he had to share a room with the boy Marshall Allen, the same simple but evil-minded hooligan who had disrupted the school all year long. As roommates, they lost no love on each other. Marshall had only a little more mentality than Daniel’s poor sister Charity had possessed; he could communicate, at least, but usually only by replying “Yeyyup” or “No-hup” to direct questions. As his roommate, Daniel had to suffer being witness to the boy’s sadistic nature, his fondness for pulling the wings off of insects and watching their helpless struggles, his subtle torturing of the Allen family’s dogs, cats, and livestock, his gross habit of tying up his sister Floriana and fusing with her in her velvet, navel, armpit, mouth, and ear. Daniel considered reporting this behavior to the father, Jirah, but the father already was in the habit of flogging the boy every day, and Daniel saw no point in increasing the lashes. Instead, he got away, as often as he could.

  The large Allen farm was several miles south of Five Corners, which put him much closer to Henry Fox’s place, an easy couple of miles, in fact, so that even though the working hours on the Allen farm were long and hard, sunup to sundown, he was able, in the evenings, to see more and hear more of Henry Fox than he had during the school year. And he found a favorite spot, halfway into the village, a glade surrounded by thick spruces, where he often met Melissa for a few minutes of pleasure. He didn’t see Rachel all summer long. Melissa never mentioned her, and he never inquired of her to Melissa. Personally I think he was being a complete bastard for dropping Rachel like that.

  In late August, Daniel went into Five Corners village for the first time that summer, not to visit Rachel but to se
e two other people: Judge Braddock and Jake Claghorn. He told Judge Braddock that he was agreeable to serving a second year as schoolmaster. Then he found Jake Claghorn and told him that if Jake placed a bid in this year’s auction Daniel would kill him with his bare hands.

  At the auction, conducted once again by Judge Braddock (for what was to be the last time; a Plymouth town ordinance would abolish the practice the following year), after the bidding had reached an unprecendented low of fifty dollars, which was the Allens’ rock-bottom offer, Daniel Lyam Montross was struck off for forty-five dollars to a terribly scowling Joel and a terribly jubilant Melissa McLowery. Joel even lost a little face among his neighbors for such a rash offer, and the neighbors began to gossip that Melissa had forced him to it, not, however, they thought, out of a wish to have him for herself but out of a wish to “line him up” for her daughter Rachel, whom everybody assumed (and hoped) that the handsome young schoolmaster would eventually marry, because the poor girl seemed more and more to need “straightening out” by a strong, firm and smart young man. Rumors of her conduct during the past summer had circulated among the villagers, and her few younger playmates or girlfriends had stopped seeing her. Someone said he thought he had seen Rachel, under a full moon, running naked down the road and through the covered bridge. Someone else claimed that Rachel was often seen to go into the schoolhouse at four o’clock in the afternoon and not reappear until suppertime. But since Daniel Lyam Montross had never been seen in the village during the summer, none of these rumors connected him with her.

  When Daniel was taken home by the McLowerys, he found that his quarters were not to be in the rather modest McLowery house but instead one of the outbuildings, a roomy shed which Melissa had decorated (with the grudging help of Rachel) tastefully into a homey, cozy bedroom with its own stove and a good large mirror and a washstand with stoneware pitcher and basin. This was to be his home for most of the next six or seven years…and the site of our home, as I’ve mentioned previously our lean-to was erected on the same spot, in nearly the same exterior dimensions, as Daniel’s shed. From the opening of the lean-to, we could look down the hill to the spot where the McLowery house had stood, with tangled clumps of lilac still around its foundation, and now in November the dead stalks of perennial peonies that Melissa must have planted some long time ago. A few of the immense stone slabs of the barn’s foundation are the only other evidence left behind, although there is a spot, the other side of our lean-to, where the gate to the pasture stood, where the ground is still worn in a trail by the hooves of Joel McLowery’s sheep. I often thought I could hear sheep baa-ing somewhere up the hill behind us, and Diana swore that she could hear them too, but we tamped all over the hill without finding any sheep, so it must have been only the wind. They were Cheviots and Merinos, a wrinkled type with more surface of wool, the meat secondary, and a stronger flocking instinct than most sheep. Joel had several hundred of them, and Daniel’s help was needed at shearing time. Although Joel would sell surplus lambs in the spring, the McLowery’s income was almost exclusively from the sale of the abundant wool, bought by the textile mills at Bridgewater.