The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Except for the big stone slabs, which were part of the barn’s foundation, the only other trace remaining of the McLowery homestead is a slight depression, a trench about five feet long and a foot deep, in a clump of sumac saplings about fifty feet to the northwest of our lean-to. Although I dislike mentioning such mundane matters as routine body functions, Diana and I had already been using this trench as our latrine before we discovered that it was in fact the foundation of what had been the McLowery privy. I mention it now only because that privy played an important part in the subsequent story of Daniel and Rachel. The trench then was a good bit deeper than it is now, and over it was a small building of pine planks, containing a knee-high shelf or bench cut with two holes large enough but not too large to accommodate the adult buttocks. Furnishings and decor were few: a chromolithographed picture of a small girl rolling a hoop with a stick, a recent calendar (as if the privy user were inclined to stay more than a day!), a bucket of wood ashes in one corner for the purpose of covering the waste, in the other corner a board with its smaller hole to be placed over the larger holes by a child—this not used since Rachel was five years old.

  Just why this privy, like most others of the time, was what was known as a “two-holer” is a mystery to me. Perhaps in an emergency, if the privy was occupied, there was a “spare” hole for the impatient, but this must have been very rare. Most users of the privy eventually developed a natural inclination toward one hole or the other, and never alternated between them. And without any spoken rule or principle to the effect, one hole was customarily used by males, the other by females. In the present instance, the north hole was used by Rachel and Melissa, the south by Joel Mc-Lowery, Daniel Lyam Montross, and the McLowerys’ hired man.

  Now, Daniel Lyam Montross had been living in the McLowerys’ shed for several weeks and had never seen Rachel except at school, where she always sat quietly with lowered eyes and hardly ever responded if he called on her to recite, which he soon stopped doing. The window in Daniel’s shed commanded a view of the path between the house and the privy, but he had never seen her on the path and supposed that perhaps she used instead a “thunder mug” inside the house. But one evening in late October, after supper, Daniel Lyam Montross was attending a call of nature at the privy, meditating at length upon some theory or other he had recently picked up from Henry Fox, when the privy’s door (it had no latch) slowly opened and Rachel slipped in and closed the door behind her. She did not look him in the eye, and he wondered if, in the half-light of early evening, she could even see him. But when she lifted her ankle-length dress and lowered her calf-length ribbed cotton drawers and sat down on the other hole beside him, her arm brushing his arm, he knew that if she didn’t know he was there beside her it was because she was in a trance or something. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t exactly mind, I mean he didn’t have any great modesty, and his embarrassment was no greater than his surprise. In fact, one of his idle musings or fantasies while sitting on one hole of a two-holer had been to wonder what it would be like if two people, preferably of opposite sexes, sat side beside together there—a contingency which never occurred, as far as he knew. He was afraid that if he spoke, if he even said quietly, “Hwarye, Rachel?” she might disappear into thin air. So he jut sat, not looking at her. He heard the faint tinkling of her water. Then the two of them just sat there meditating for a while before she finally spoke.

  And this is Rachel, in the outhouse. Listen to her:

  Rachel’s bad, she is, Rachel’s bad, bad, she is, she is, oh, is she? she is yup. Rachel’s tryin t’be a creeter, she is, she’s wantin t’be a creeter, she’s tryin t’be a varmint, she is, ’caise her Dan wants her t’be, he does, he does, so they could run thu the woods and be creeters and do like creeters, breathin a the air a the woods that no human creeter e’er breathe-it, the air a dead leaves and spruce boughs and rotten wood, and the air a skunk even, yes, skunk’s not bad from afar, smells of the woods, and mink too, all musky, and weasel and fox, all musky, musky, the woods’s perfum’ry, wild creeter’s perfum’ry, smells a the wild, of woodsy wild waftins and the wind a-sythin thu putty Rachel’s hair, her a weekit, weekit, wild and weekit creater rompin in the musky perfum’ry a-waftin from her Dan-creeter, him a creeter-smellin creeter musky and weekit too with his creeter-pink picket poking out twixt his legs whiff y and salty and sharp t’make putty Rachel’s head dizzy and heady, seem’s ’ough she’d flung wide her arms and spun round and round in a circle to make her head stagger her and drop her but wild creeters can’t stand and spin julluk dizzy putty gulls so she’d need the smell of his creetermusk t’spin her and drop her, inter the dead leaves and spruce boughs and rotten wood, where she’d turn and wiggle waitin, twist and squirm and give off her wild creeter perfum’ry, till he spun and dropped too inter dead leaves and spruce boughs and rotten wood and wiggled with her while the musk a-wafted round ’em, and she would be bad and weekit julluk he allus wanted, and take him inter her weekit velvet julluk he allus wanted ’stead of her putty mouth. But now I will only hold it, I will, like so, in Rachel’s putty fingers, and hang on a little, jest t’touch and hold a little, so’s when nightfall coops up putty Rachel in her lost bed far from the musky woods wild waftin’s she kin lay her weekit head dizzydown on these same fingers and have dreams a woods and creeters if ever sleep takes her and if it don’t then in wakey rest she’ll lie breathin of her fingers and thinkin still of her Dan-creeter and his woods whiffings. I thank you kindly, sir.

  She fled then, and though he called after her he did not pursue her. She did not pause nor turn when he called but ran down the path into her house, leaving him there transfixed by her words and wearing a bothersome erection from the brief grip of her fingers. He was convinced almost beyond doubt that she was not “right in the head” (his words; I’m not making a pun) but he desperately wanted a wiser opinion, so even though it was evening and he had to teach school the next day he took his lantern and hiked all the way up to Gold Brook Chateau to tell Henry Fox what Rachel had done and what she had said. Henry Fox, who rarely laughed, laughed. But then he told Daniel that the incident perhaps signified that Rachel, who considered normal fusing animalistic, was trying to become an animal in order to become “normal.” And also that she was trying to show him, by sharing the intimacy of the privy with him, that she wished to share the privy places of her It with him.

  “Too bad,” said Diana to me, after another of her psychologizings, “that this Austrian Henry Fox, with all his insight, did not have the techniques which his fellow Austrian was developing at the same time for treating mental and emotional disorders.” I told her to take Freud and shove him.

  The girl needed help obviously (Rachel I mean, not Diana, although come to think of it…), but the only help Daniel could give her was to be as nice as he possibly could and to try to understand the weird turnings of her wandering mind. If she really wanted to pretend to be an animal, he was more than ready to join her in the play-like. But she didn’t really; she just wanted to fantasize about it. The uninvited and unexpected call which she paid upon Daniel in the rest room was not her last. She began regularly visiting there, as if she watched from the house to see when he went in, then quickly joined him. He did not mind, although he did not consider the atmosphere particularly “salubrious,” and her talk bothered him, and even her presence beside him, even if she did not touch him, was enough to give him such erections as made difficult the business he was there for. All she ever did was talk and touch him; she was not interested in having him nor allowing him to have her. Day after day, she sat silently in school with her head bowed; evening after evening, she sat beside him in the two-holer, talking her wild head off. Once Joel McLowery in obvious need of quick relief barged in on them, but just as quickly backed out, muttering “’Scuse it,” and never bothered them any more. Sometimes she would fantasize aloud that they were king and queen, sitting on their throne together. When the weather grew cold in November, they would wrap an arm about one
another while they sat. It is a picture, if a crazy picture, and I will leave the picture hanging in this gallery for a time, while I tell what happened to us.

  One thing I’ll have to say for Diana, she did not begin insisting that we use the latrine together. Not then, anyway. Perhaps that would have been going too far. But all along she had kept wanting to “try out” or “act out” or “play” the various things that had happened to Daniel Lyam Montross, so I was a bit surprised that she didn’t start joining me at our facility, which, however, was quite primitive in contrast to the McLowery outhouse.

  By the first of November all of the leaves had fallen from the trees, and only the carpet of the woods still had some color to it. For nearly a week in early November we had a lot of rain; it was a very drippy time. But whoever said that November is an ugly month didn’t know what he was talking about or had not seen Five Corners at that time. Though the trees were bare, their bareness revealed the intricate etching filigree of their branches. November is thought of as a gray month, but not much of it in Five Corners was gray; there was a play of colors: black trees, blacker in the rain that soaked them, white trees—the birches—set off against them, and whiter because of the rain that soaked them, green trees, deep green trees, the thick evergreens, and the rich warm browns of the leaves still clinging to some trees. November is a more mature vision than other months, and more mellow, but no less beautiful than the color riot of October.

  And yet, despite the beauty I found so easily in November, I was becoming very much aware that I did not like Five Corners, that I would rather be in some other place. Why was this? I asked myself. Had I grown tired of the place? Was I dismayed by Daniel’s behavior? I wasn’t sure what it was. One afternoon, I was just leaning on a low tree limb, gazing at the rain-washed beauty of deep blacks and high whites and greens and browns in the woods, and trying to figure out why I wanted to leave, when behind my ear Diana’s voice said, “I suppose that sensitive gaze of yours means you think you’re more aware of the beauty of these woods than I am.” I turned and looked to see if she was just ribbing me, but I think she meant it. Anyway, it led to another one of our quarrels, this time I arguing that I didn’t consider myself the least bit more sensitive than she was, and she arguing that it was terribly condescending of me to say that, and soon there we were again flinging epithets at each other, which ended up with my saying that if she really wanted to know what I had been thinking at that moment she accused me of looking so “sensitive,” it was that I thought the woods were lovely, dark, and deep, and all that, but that I had miles to go before I sleep, and all that, in other words, I was thinking that we had been here too long and that this place, even more than Dudleytown, seemed to have some kind of curse on it, and that if we continued staying here something bad was going to happen to both of us. And all this quarreling and bickering, I said. I said I wondered if she was maybe getting sick and tired of seeing so much of me and only me, and that maybe she needed to go away to some other place for a while or even forever.

  She lay her hand on my brow for a few moments and said, “I think you’re running a temperature. And you’ve been blowing your nose a lot lately. I was just about to say that we’ve got some unfinished work to take care of here. For instance, we were going to clear brush out of the cemetery. Remember?” She bundled me up in blankets in an Adirondack chair beside the fire, and made for me a hot toddy of cider, and then gave me my notebook and ballpoint, and a huge stack of cassettes for the tape recorder, for me to listen to, and told me to see how much of Daniel Lyam Montross’s story I could write down as quickly as possible without worrying about any “felicities of style.” Then she took my axe and said she would go up to the cemetery by herself and start chopping the brush out of it. She seemed more cheerful to be “taking command.” I sat here and listened to the tapes and tried to write a few more pages about what happened to Daniel and Rachel, but I would read a page after I had written it and then tear it out of my notebook and crumple it up and throw it into the fire. I don’t know if my trouble was that I was ill, or that I had some kind of “Writer’s Block,” or that I just wasn’t able to face the “reality” of what happened to Daniel and Rachel. Probably the latter; for example, I tried unsuccessfully five or six times to write the description of a scene where that sadistic idiot Marshall Allen meets Rachel McLowery out in the woods. This is recorded in Rachel’s crazy words on the tapes, and I just couldn’t straighten out all the details. It seems that Marshall Allen, with his warped half-brain, had been watching farm animals mate, and had developed the fixation that the bull or ram or stallion always comes up behind the cow or ewe or mare and grabs her from behind and enters her velvet from behind. There were some rumors and jokes circulating around Five Corners about what had happened to dumb Marshall when he tried his approach on a couple of girls. But one day he came upon Rachel in the woods. She must have been pretending to be an animal, a doe from what I can judge she says on the tapes. She was bent over, eating a flower, or pretending to eat a flower, I couldn’t tell which, when Marshall came sneaking up behind her and….

  I just couldn’t write it. When Diana came back from the cemetery some time later, saying that the work of chopping brush had been discouraging and that being alone in the cemetery had made her very nervous, I asked her to read my last attempt to tell about Marshall and Rachel. She read it and agreed that I wasn’t doing such a good job of it. I half-jokingly suggested that it might help if we “acted out” that scene, but she didn’t think this was funny, and in fact wasn’t interested in sex at all, not then, and not the next day, and not the day after. She just wasn’t having anything to do with sex, all of a sudden. I thought it might have something to do with the repulsiveness of Marshall’s “affair” with Rachel, which became eventually a regular and wild sort of relationship, but it wasn’t exactly this which accounted for Diana’s sudden disinterest. In fact, I think that even this sordid business excited her. One afternoon she was sitting in her Adirondack chair beside me, listening to a playback of one of Rachel’s terrible tapes, and her legs were crossed, and the foot of the top leg was swinging, swinging so steadily that it made her hips and thighs move. I figured at first it was just restlessness, or that kind of nervousness you see when girls are doing that while they’re taking final exams or something in school, but there was also a distinct sexual quality about it which has led me to wonder if some girls can even masturbate by swinging their foot like that. Anyway, I asked her, off hand and casual, if she would like to make love, even though my fever seemed to be worse and I didn’t really feel like it. “Oh, don’t put yourself out,” she said. It took me a moment for the pun to sink in, and when I got it I tried to laugh but couldn’t. But as it turned out she didn’t really want to make love. The next time she went off to the cemetery to cut brush, I sneaked a look in her purse and found out why. She was out of The Pill. The package had twenty-eight little empty holes. I wondered why she didn’t want to tell me.

  On November 20, a day of light snow, I became nineteen years old. I was still technically a “teenager,” but it seemed to me that there is something special about being nineteen; it is the last year, the biggest year, of the teens; it is close to entering the twenties; it put me just two years away from the age Diana had been before her recent birthday; it made me feel, for one day at least, older and wiser and taller. But Diana, after all the trouble I’d gone to for her birthday, seemed to have forgotten mine, although she had clearly marked it on our calendar. I didn’t want to remind her of it. I was really too ill to care, very much; I began to wonder if I had pneumonia or something. But what got me, more than her forgetting my birthday, was that she didn’t even seem to care how ill I was, and she made me “work” hard that day, that is, she held a very long session, seven or eight hours, with the tape recorder and Daniel Lyam Montross. I thought how ironic it is to spend most of your birthday in a state of trance. She seemed to be in a hurry to get all the rest of his story out of him, which I thought was a good
thing, although it made me very jealous to feel that on my birthday she had spent more time with him than with me. In bed that night I tried to snuggle up to her, but she turned her back to me. That stung me, so I came right out and told her that it was my birthday. She reminded me that I had insisted that she not buy me anything. All right, I said, but couldn’t she just be affectionate, for a change? No, she said. Why not? I asked. I just can’t, she said, and then she turned over toward me and said a very crude thing: Well, come on and I’ll blow you, if you want.