The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Kiss that adorable raccoon for me. What are you going to name him, or her, or it?

  love love love O infinite love,

  Diana

  P.S. My new friend G is a very lonely person, a very sad person. You know what Daniel tells us, in his Seventh Beatitude, that the true peacemakers are those who never close themselves off from their kindred. And G is our kindred. I think what he’s really looking for is love. And you won’t mind, will you? Remember the Fifth and Sixth Beatitudes.

  Reading this letter, old Grasper, will give you a mixture of feelings: at first, you will feel covetous of those sweet endearments she addresses “him” with, but then you will become gradually certain that this letter is not really addressed to “him” but to you (after all, as she says, she has “decided” to let you read it), and it is her indirect way of letting you know that she herself is willing to admit the possibility of Day’s nonexistence, and that furthermore she is getting ready to accept you as her lover but will have to “clear” it first with her conscience in the form of this dearsomest Day-O.

  “What are these Beatitudes?” you will ask her.

  “You haven’t noticed the walls of your room?” she will ask you. When you shake your head, she will tell you, “Well, next time you’re up there, take a close look at the walls. That was his room, as I told you, Daniel Lyam Montross’s room, and during his last days he wrote on the—” she will pause, and resume, “On second thought, don’t look at the walls. Not yet, anyway. You’ve got to hear the rest of the story first, and read—Oh, look what we’ve got here!”

  You will have arrived at the post office, and she will now “find,” stuff ed into her box so that its door won’t close, a roll of notebooks, soft-cover spiral-bound notebooks of the kind used by your college students. “They’re Day’s tablets,” she will exclaim. “He sent them, after all! I didn’t think he would!”

  You will notice again there are no footprints in the dust except her own. So that, you will tell yourself, explains her absence from the house this morning. She had to come down here to “plant” Day’s notebooks, and also, probably, another “letter” from “him.”

  “Here,” she will say, giving you the notebooks. “These are for you. And this is for me”—she will indicate the “letter” which, you notice again, is in the same kind of envelope as those she sends her letters in. She will begin “reading” it to herself, keeping her distance from you so that you can’t pry, and giggling occasionally (rather falsely, you will detect) at the “contents” of the “letter.”

  When she has finished and refolded the letter and reinserted it in its envelope, you will protest, “Why won’t you let me read his letters if you’ll let me read yours?”

  “I can’t share everything with you,” she will say, laughing. “There are some things that are simply too personal. But I can tell you most of what he said. He said that he’s glad you’re here; he thinks it’s just what Daniel Lyam Montross is looking for, that is, your coming here is just what we need. And therefore Day is glad to be of any help, and he sends you his tablets with his compliments, his best respects, and his doubts that ‘such a great writer,’ as he calls you, would find his style very attractive, but he adds a caution that in reading his tablets you should refrain from judging him too harshly, or judging me too harshly, until you’ve heard all of the rest of the story, and, although he would love to meet you, he is not going to come back until you’ve heard all of the story, and are prepared to acknowledge two things, first, that he and I have done nothing ‘wrong,’ in your opinion, and second, that you believe with all of your heart in Daniel Lyam Montross.”

  A clever and inventive girl! you will reflect, admiring her for the swiftness of her mind that can concoct ad libitum such fanciful but plausible contingencies. But your own swift mind, old Gambiter, will detect the Queen’s sly maneuver to put you in check, and will make your Knight forestall her.

  “That sounds almost like a kind of blackmail,” you will point out. “What you’re saying is, in effect, that he will never appear unless I meet those two conditions. And what if I can’t?”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic,” she will say. “And there, you have his notebooks. So get busy and read them, and, as he says, don’t be too quick to judge either one of us.”

  You are not a fast reader, and it will take you most of the day to read the notebooks. You will be deliberately reading slower than usual, trying to understand all the circumstances leading up to the hanging. For a shady reading spot, you will pick a secluded thicket across the road from the post office, a spot where the Squires Creek Bank and Trust Company had stood before it was taken apart so that its stones could be piled along the road edge to hold back the waters of the occasionally flooding Squires Creek. From this shady thicket, you can spy on the post office, in case Diana comes again to “plant” another letter or to retrieve her own letter. But, absent from the Ozarks for such a long time, you will have forgotten that thickets such as this one you are hiding in are likely to be infested with chiggers and ticks. When you will begin to scratch, in the late afternoon, you will think that it is nervous scratching brought upon you by Day’s story of their unhappy life in Five Corners.

  Your feelings toward Day Whittacker, while reading his story, will be ambivalent, to put it mildly. You will feel that Day wasn’t able to understand Diana very well, that often the age difference between them became an age gap. You will wish that it had been you who had lived with her in Five Corners. But then you will realize that the foundation for such a wish lay in the fact that you and Day Whittacker are very much alike. You will remember yourself at the age of nineteen. There will be times when you will find yourself not only scratching but brushing away a tear or two from your eyes. When was the last time you were ever able to weep while reading anything? Go ahead. It will be good for you. It will help you believe.

  In time, although you will realize that your tears are real, you will become aware that your scratching is not produced by the same source; you will remember that there are such things as ticks and chiggers, and you will quickly if belatedly get out of that secluded thicket. Before returning to Diana’s house, you will check the post office and find that her letter to “Day” is gone. Had she used the back door of the post office to retrieve it? The footprints in the dust are the same, only hers. But she has not, you will be pleased to notice, “planted” another “letter” from “him.” A good omen? Is she getting ready to give him up?

  When you see her again, at suppertime, you will say, “Well, I’ve finished his notebooks. And naturally, I’m left with a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  She won’t mind.

  “My most important question,” you will point out, “assuming that I am expected to write this whole story, and make it plausible, is simply this: If Day Whittacker hanged himself in Five Corners, why, for God’s sake, why must you go on with this pretense that he still exists?”

  “That’s simple,” she will say. “I hate to spoil whatever illusions you would like to have, G, but the fact is that he didn’t succeed. He must have forgotten about ‘Fox’s Law,’ one of the most important things that Henry Fox ever taught to Daniel. I’ll play the tape for you if you’d care to hear it. Anyway, the essence of Fox’s Law is that there is an inverse ratio between how much one wants or expects something to happen and how likely it is to happen. In other words, if you expect something, you won’t get it. If you get something, you didn’t expect it. I guess I must have forgotten it myself, because I should have known that as long as I actually expected him to…to…well, you know why he tried to hang himself, don’t you? because I…I had this selfish whim to watch him play…well, you read that awful part, didn’t you? I should have known that since I wanted and expected him to do it, he would never, never do it. And when he climbed that tree, I expected that he wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t jump. And because I expected he wouldn’t, he did. Yes, he jumped. But, don’t you see, Fox’s Law was operating on him too. He full
y expected to kill himself. He was quite confident he could do it. Confidence breeds expectation. He knew he was quite skilled at climbing trees. Even more was he skilled at tying knots. He had every expectation of success. And for that reason he failed. Don’t you see?”

  No, G, you will not see. A clever job of backing and filling, yes, but obviously another ad libitum concoction. “How do you mean, he ‘failed’?” you will ask. “What happened?”

  “Oh, it was pathetic. When he jumped, he sort of tripped, and fell only about eight or ten feet, down to another limb, and got all tangled up in his rope. It took me nearly an hour to climb up there and help him get loose. And even then he was in a state of shock, and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk to me. But Daniel would still talk to me. What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?”

  “There remain a couple of other questions. One of these I have asked you before: Who, then, is buried in that grave?”

  “And you remember what I answered last time you asked it, that both of us are. That’s the end of your story. I died of a gunshot wound in Woodstock Hospital, and Day buried me in Five Corners and then hanged himself, and Dr. Fox came back and buried Day in the same grave with me. Isn’t that beautiful?”

  “You’re aggravating my solipsism something awful.”

  “Is that why you’re scratching yourself so much? Is your solipsism itching you, or do you scratch just to prove that your flesh still exists?”

  “No, they’re chigger bites.”

  “But, ‘I itch, therefore I am,’ right? As long as you itch, you know that you are. But you’ve got to let me, and Day, and Daniel exist too. Because we are. That ‘grave’ you found was nothing but a trench that Day dug to bury our stuff in. Dr. Fox left us only one pair of snowshoes, and in order to get out of that place, Day had to carry me. As Dr. Fox told him, jokingly, if he could carry me four miles when I was shot he could carry me one or two miles when I was well. But anyway we couldn’t carry all of our stuff with us—you can’t imagine how much junk will accumulate in a few months—so Day, who’s such an ecologist, you know, decided to bury it. Call it, if you want to, the symbolic burying of ourselves, the awful selves that we were in Five Corners before we resolvd our ‘It Jitters.’ That’s why I put a copy of Daniel’s poem, ‘Of a Lost Town,’ on top of that ‘grave.’ I thought of it as appropriate to the symbolism.”

  “But there’s one more little detail,” you will point out. “That poem was obviously in your handwriting. I recognized that at that time. But answer me this: why are the last pages of Day’s notebook, the part about his hanging, which he obviously couldn’t have written himself if he hanged himself, why are those pages in the same handwriting, that is, your handwriting?”

  “Well, don’t you see?” she will offer, somewhat desperately, you will detect, “I had to finish it myself. Can’t you understand? Poor Day was…well, I mean, after all, at that particular time, he wasn’t in any condition for doing any more writing himself….”

  That “condition,” you will be certain now, was death.

  18

  “Are you ready for the poems?” she will ask after supper, and there will ensue this cozy domestic scene: the two of you at the table on either side of the old kerosene lantern, you holding in your lap the three-ring binder of my collected cadences and doggerel, Diana holding in her lap her knitting; she will be knitting, in anticipation of autumn chill (four months off, but underlining her optimism and her forethought), a sweater for “Day,” a sweater which, you will be happy to notice, is large enough for your own frame, provided you succeed in shedding the rest of your surplus avoirdupois.

  Although it will happen that you will hear fiddle music, seeming to come from right outside the window, fiddle music in the tinnitus of your ear playing one of eight Playford dances to the tune of the iambic measure to help you scan my verse, you will not read my rhymes and songs for any appreciation of their rhythms and figures; you will read them in search of further clues that Day is dead, and you will find plenty of these clues, beginning with the very fact that no mention whatever is made of his “recuperation” or “recovery.” The poems seem to take it for granted that he “exists” without bothering to explain how he has suddenly surfaced from a state of death or of supposed shock. He hanged himself in the end of the notebooks, and now suddenly we find him making love to Diana on the floor of the deserted Salter house. But of course! Since he is only a figment of her imagination, or, as the early poem entitled “Entity” puts it, “She thinks he’s what a girl as silly as she is / Would fantasize, sweetly, on hysteric whim,” she felt no need to justify his “recovery” by wasting any other poems on the subject of his existence, although that poem called “The Curing,” which details my own recovery with the help of Aunt Billie’s herbs, will seem to you an allusion to Day’s recovery.

  And what about this “Flossie”? This ghost? Unquestionable proof, if any were needed, that Day did not exist. One person, one very deluded person, might very well imagine seeing a ghost, and Diana in her pitiful isolation and loneliness would certainly be prone to such illusions. But two persons? No, two persons together would not agree upon seeing a ghost.

  You will mention this to Diana. Although you are not really interested in the thread of continuity which the poems have, you cannot help but chuckle, once, at the antics of Flossie, and to challenge Diana, “Oh, come now! Did you really see this ghost?”

  Diana, remembering Flossie, will laugh too, and say, “That old dear! I wish I could send her a postcard or something just to let her know that we’re okay, but where would I mail it to, for heaven’s sake?…Goodness, G, those chigger bites are really getting worse, aren’t they? You’re scratching yourself to pieces. Maybe you’d better let me put something on them.”

  “But a ghost, Diana, a ghost….”

  “What’s a ghost town without a ghost?” she will say, and put down her knitting and fetch some stuff to put on your chigger bites. “First let’s try this—” a cotton swab soaked in kerosene “—and then this—” a tube of some kind of ointment.

  You will be somewhat reluctant to expose all of the locations of your chigger bites; whatever you are, old Grandstander, you aren’t an exhibitionist. But she will be persistent and thorough. “They bit Day there too,” she will say.

  Her ministrations will arouse you, but you will remain cool enough to say, “Diana, I’m afraid that nobody is going to believe in this Flossie character. In rewriting the poems, you ought to make it clear that she was just your imagination, or—perhaps better—she was an actual, real-live old character, some old recluse who lived in Lost Cove.”

  “You sound like a college writing teacher,” she will say, dabbing at your nether regions with the ointment. “Which reminds me, do you know Kynan Harris, or have you read his work?”

  “An insufferable buffoon,” you will remark. “His novels are meaningless.”

  “Well, anyway, he was my writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence, and he told me that all of my stories were ‘pedestrian.’ I guess they were. But what do you think of these poems? Are they pedestrian?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you think they’re publishable?” she will ask, and the ointment she is stroking onto your chigger bites is persuasive.

  “Most of them. As I say, with some revision, to make the characters more credible….”

  “But I can’t revise them!” she will protest. “Because I didn’t write them.”

  “All of this handwriting is obviously yours,” you will point out.

  “Of course!” she will say and give one of your chigger bites a light pinch. “Can’t you get it through your head that I was the only one who could take up pencil and paper and put the words down?”

  “Where was Day?” you will shoot at her.

  She will stop ointmenting your bites. “He was…well, don’t you understand? he had to be put to sleep.”

  “Yes, ‘put to sleep’ is the apt euphemism.”

  She will stare at you. �
�Oh, darn you,” she will say, but she will resume searching for chigger bites and dabbing ointment on them.

  Her attentions will be deliberate and intimate. Not to lose touch with the subject, you will say, “After all, Sylvia Plath was about your age when she wrote some of her best work.”

  Diana will sigh. “You flatter me enormously, G. But I swear, I don’t have the least bit of talent for verse.” And her fingers will not stop with the small swellings of your chigger bites; they will find a larger swelling.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” you will tease her, but she will not blush.

  “Well, do they still itch?” she will ask.

  “Not they,” you will say. “It.” She will laugh, but you, still clinging to the subject, will go on, “Maybe you think you have no talent for verse, but have you ever heard of ‘automatic writing’? The opening of the gates to the unconscious? If you would like to publish these poems, I’d be happy to recommend them to my agent. But of course, you’ll just have to face up to the necessity for revision, to take this ‘ghost’ out….”

  “Oh, darn you!” she will say. “Darn you!” And she will run off to bed, leaving you alone with your bottle of booze and your itch, the Itch of your It. I itch, therefore I am. And apparently, you will decide, she intends for you to pay a price for the relief of that itch. The price of your belief. Belief before relief.

  You will leaf through the poems again, not skimming and skipping in search of clues, as you will have done during your first reading, and you will, for the sake of your itch, finally persuade yourself that Diana could not have written the poems, that even if she had written them, through some kind of automatic writing, they are inspired by, imbued with, a presence that is beyond Diana. I appreciate that, G. I’m rewarded that you’ll make such an effort, even out of ulterior motive. To show my gratitude, I’ll permit you to satisfy, in part at least, that ulterior motive. But not tonight. This night is your penultimate one, and Diana is already fast asleep, fabricating a splendid future in her dreams. You will have one more night in Stick Around after this one.