The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  19

  And two more days. You will wake late, on your penultimate day, with your last hangover, to discover Diana in distress. She will have already been to the post office, not waiting for you to wake, and will report that there is no letter from “Day.” “I can’t understand it,” she will say. “He’s never missed a single day so far.”

  “Perhaps,” you will suggest, “your last letter off ended ‘him.’ You might have hurt his feelings by asking his permission for you and I to—”

  “I wasn’t asking his permission,” she will correct you. “As usual, you don’t understand. Day is an even firmer believer than I am in the Beatitudes of Daniel, and if you really believe them, you can’t feel such petty emotions as jealousy or envy, or have any conventional notions of ‘morality.’ So I know that isn’t the reason. There must be something else.” She will suddenly give you a narrow-eyed look, and say, “You wouldn’t possibly have purloined his letter, would you?” You will swear up and down that you wouldn’t do such a thing. You wouldn’t, would you? No. You will be convinced, now, that the real reason there is no “letter” from “him” today is that she is on the verge of giving up the pretense; today is a transitional phase: she is getting ready to face reality, to accept the fact that there will never be any more “letters” from “him.” And the time has come, you will decide, for you to help her rid her mind of the illusion completely.

  How can you prove that Day Whittacker exists?

  “Well, here are some of his clothes.” She will open a dresser to show you the pile of shirts, sweaters, socks, handkerchiefs, etc., which doesn’t mean anything at all. She could have kept his clothes after burying him.

  How can you prove that Day Whittacker exists?

  “Well, here are some of his books.” In the bookcase, several books on forestry, woods management, plant pathology, and astronomy. Ditto, she could have kept his books after burying him.

  How can you prove that Day Whittacker exists?

  “Well, here is his garden and his pigpen and there are his free-ranging chickens. I’m just taking care of them while he’s gone. He planted the garden. It was one of the first things he did. He planted some of it too early, and we had a late frost on April third which killed it, and so he had to plant it again. I don’t know anything about gardening. He just taught me how to identify the weeds so I can keep the weeds out. And I love these Poland China piglets, which he got from a farmer over on the Roxey Road, but I don’t know how to raise pigs.” You will like that allusion to death and resurrection in the killing of “his” garden by the frost, and his “replanting” of it, but the existence of the garden and pigs is no proof at all of “his” existence.

  How can you prove that Day Whittacker exists?

  “Well, here is his voice on my tapes. Listen. Can’t you hear well enough to tell that it’s his voice? Well, not really his…. I mean, this is Daniel Lyam Montross talking. You can’t hear what he’s saying? But you can hear the tone of the voice, can’t you? It doesn’t sound anything like my voice, does it?” But her voice is, at times, you will have noticed, inclined to be rather husky, and she could easily imitate a male voice, especially in her eagerness to go on believing that this male still exists.

  How can you prove that Day Whittacker exists?

  “Well, why don’t you go up on the mountain and see if you can find the pine seedlings he planted? I don’t know where they are, but they’re up there somewhere, thousands of them. You might even come across Day himself. But if you do, don’t bother him. I mean, as he says, he doesn’t even want to see you until you’ve come to believe in Daniel Lyam Montross, and that’s important to him. But if you see him, would you ask him why he didn’t write—No, I think the best thing, if you see him, is just to wave at him or something, and go the other way, without speaking….”

  You will go hunting that afternoon, old Gunner. Yes, you would look for “his” pine seedlings, you would even look for “him,” but your main excuse for hiking up the mountain will be to hunt for quail. The meals Diana has been serving will have been getting a little monotonous, the main course being nothing but the fish that she catches in Banner Creek, and you, old Gourmet, will think that a few fowl might relieve the monotony. She will not go with you. She has an aversion to firearms. Understandable. Besides, she has a long letter to write. So you will go alone.

  You know these woods of Lingerfelt Mountain. You had been lost in them at the age of five. You won’t get lost in them now. The cedars that were small when you were small are now large enough to be cut into clothes closets. The pawpaws and chinquapins are still plentiful, but somebody obviously has been cutting down the scrub trees and hardwood “weeds,” and, sure enough, replanting the forest floor with pine seedlings. But anyone could have done that. This part of Stick Around is right on the edge of the Ozark National Forest, and probably the government had undertaken this reseeding program, which is, you will notice as you go farther and farther up the mountain, quite extensive, certainly not a one-man operation.

  You will follow an old logging trail which is familiar to you; it had been the road you’d taken to get out of the woods when you were lost at the age of five. It comes to an end in a ferny glen where there is a waterfall and evidence of ancient Indian inhabitation: tiny burial mounds and rock shelters with shards of old pottery in them. This glen of the waterfall had been the place where you had met that strange old hermit, the man who’d told you how to find your way out of these woods. You aren’t lost now.

  You won’t flush any quail. Nor will you flush any Day. You will fire your .22 several times at a tree, just for target practice, and then you will go on back down the mountain.

  20

  “Well, we might as well get on with the story, if there’s nothing better to do,” you will say to her that evening.

  “There isn’t any more,” she will say.

  “What?” you will exclaim.

  “Not much, any way. There’s very little remaining, and we’ll have that when Day comes back.”

  You will stare at her, incredulous that she, having carried the life of Daniel Lyam Montross all the way through “his poems,” all the way from Dudleytown to Five Corners to Lost Cove to Stick Around, would suddenly drop the effort. “But,” you will protest, “I presume that ‘he’ did come to Stick Around, did he not? And lived here for twenty years or more, did he not?”

  She will nod. “Oh, yes,” she will say.

  “But nothing happened to him here?” you will demand.

  Again she will nod. “Nothing except his eventual death. But that’s the beauty of it. That’s why this was the right place for him, don’t you see? It wasn’t nearly as pretty a place as Lost Cove, I can tell you, or even Five Corners, for that matter, but it was a place where he could live and be happy without anything happening to him.” Your open-mouthed incredulity, old Goggle-eyes, will cause her to laugh, and say, “You novelists.” She will laugh again and go on, “You novelists have to have a lot of incidents and happenings and episodes to keep you in business. But don’t you know that all of those occurrences or experiences or adventures usually involve some pain or strife or anguish? They’re aberrations—any conflict is an aberration, and Daniel Lyam Montross had no further conflicts until the very end of his life. But without conflicts, you don’t have a story, do you?”

  “Now see here, young lady,” you will object. “I won’t be made a fool of. You aren’t going to sit there and ask me to believe—”

  “You don’t believe anyway!” she will assert. “Do you? You don’t believe in Daniel Lyam Montross. You think he’s just something I made up, as an excuse for all this traveling.” When you will not answer her positively or negatively, she will go on, nodding her head, “Yes, you’re just like I was, when I first got involved in this whole business. In the beginning, I wasn’t ‘buying’ any of it. I told Day, right off the bat I said to him, ‘I don’t really believe in reincarnation, not for one minute, and I don’t believe in hypnosis e
ither, and I certainly don’t believe you’re my grandfather.’ I told him that and let it sink in, and then I said, ‘But I would like to believe. I would like to find out. Wouldn’t that be marvelous, to be able to believe’?”

  “And now,” you will ask, cynically, “do you believe?”

  “With all of my heart,” she will say. “And you’re just like I was, G, you don’t believe in anything. That’s your spiritual deadness. You need something to believe in. And I’m offering it to you. Wouldn’t you like to have something to believe in?”

  “Yes, but you aren’t helping matters by trying to persuade me that his life suddenly stopped being eventful after he came to Stick Around.”

  She will take your hand. “Come with me,” she will say. She will take you into the room where she keeps her tape recorder and her tapes. She will indicate a stack of about three hundred or so tapes. “Those,” she will say, “were the Dudleytown tapes and the Five Corners tapes, with a few from Lost Cove. And these—” she will indicate the much larger balance of tapes, seven or eight hundred “—these are the Stick Around tapes.”

  “But why so many?” you will ask, “if nothing happened to him….”

  “Oh, several of these tapes are about him, and we still have to make our last tape. But most of these tapes are not about what happened to him, but what happened to Stick Around. It’s a nearly complete chronicle of the history of this village and everybody in it between 1932 and his death in 1953, by which time the village was nearly dead also. There are some fabulous stories here, all of the incidents and happenings and episodes and adventures that you could ever hope for, but they are not things that happened to him.”

  “Good Lord!” you will exclaim, for you will suddenly be not unmindful of what a novelist might be able to do with such a treasure trove. “You wouldn’t be joking by any chance?”

  “Listen,” she will say, turning on the recorder. “Or listen to me while I repeat what the tapes say. Just a few samples. First, here’s a typical tape about Daniel Lyam Montross, when I was trying to find out what happened to him here, and when I discovered that practically nothing did. I was just picking dates at random and asking him. Listen—”

  The day is June 15, 1934. Has anything interesting happened to you today?

  I read a nice poem by John Donne….

  Today is April 15, 1938. What did you do today?

  I taught Annie how to distinguish the oaks and ashes….

  This is March 15, 1933. What did you accomplish today?

  I meditated on the difference in sound and meaning between the “brook” of Connecticut and Vermont, and the “creek” of North Carolina and Arkansas.

  November 15, 1944. What was today worth to you?

  I heard Rupe Blackshire tell an interesting story about a coon hunt.

  Now it’s July 15, 1950. What happened today?

  I meditated on the subject of envy, and decided that envy is the most despicable of all emotions.

  Today is February 15, 1937. Anything today?

  I had a nice remembrance-having of Ammey.

  Today is August 15, 1939. What did you do today?

  I helped find a lost—

  Diana will push the Rewind button. “That goes on like that for another hour,” she will say. “And there’s not one single date on which anything happens to him that would be worth mentioning in a novel.” She will remove the tape, and put in a different cassette. “But listen to me recite this one for you. This one’s an example of his ‘Stick Around Chronicles,’ his retellings of what he heard from other people.”

  And Diana will begin repeating for you a most interesting story about a hunter of wild hogs. You will not realize it at the moment, G, but eventually you will employ this very story as a central part of a future novel which will be called Razorback.

  “Or listen to this,” Diana will say, putting on another tape, and again, although you will not be aware of it just now, you will hear a story that will serve you some day as the wellspring for your sixth novel, The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.

  “Or this.” And there in genesis will be the outrageous outlines of what will become The Scarlet Whickerbill. “Or this one. Or this one. Or this one.” And as the evening passes, there will open up for you a bountiful storehouse of incipient fictions.

  “Holy Moses!” you will cry, shaking your head at the sheer plentitude of it all. “What I wouldn’t give to have those tapes!”

  “Yes?” Diana will say, moving closer to you and becoming serious. “What wouldn’t you give? Would you give anything?” Do you want to bargain? I’ll ‘sell’ you these tapes, G, but not for cash. One thing I learned from my stupid old father was how to make a deal. And I’ll make you a deal.”

  You will be reluctant, G, out of fear that it would be some price or penalty you couldn’t pay. But you will want those tapes. Desperately. “Well,” you will say. “What is it, then?”

  “Your soul.”

  You will chuckle, but nervously, and say, “Mephistopheles!”

  “I knew you would say that,” she will say, “but, as usual, you are too quick to leap to conclusions. Mephistopheles would consider your soul a bad trade. Your soul, G, is moribund and suicidal. My tapes wouldn’t be of any use to you, because you aren’t going to live long enough to use them.”

  “How right you are!” you will say with sarcasm. “So it’s a pointless trade anyway, isn’t it?”

  “No,” she will say. “Not if you relinquish that sordid soul. What I have in mind isn’t so much a swap as a trade-in. Not my tapes for your old soul. But my tapes for a new soul that will live long enough to use the tapes and make them live too.”

  “How do I acquire this ‘new soul’?”

  “First you’ve got to be willing. You’ve got to be willing to believe in Daniel Lyam Montross.”

  “Oh, I believe!” you will admit. “I do. After all, you couldn’t possibly have ‘imagined’ or ‘invented’ all of these Stick Around stories all by yourself.”

  She will offer you her hand. “Is it a deal, then, G?”

  “It’s a deal,” you will say.

  She will shake your hand, but after you have shaken hands, she will not remove her hand from yours. She will hold your hand tightly in hers, and say, “Now we start trading in that old soul. Tell me: how does this feel?”

  “How does what feel?”

  “I’m holding your hand.”

  “Oh yes, I see,” you will say, looking at your hand being held tightly in the embrace of her hand.

  “Well, this is nice,” you will allow, off hand.

  “Really?” she will doubt you. “When was the last time you actually felt any real pleasure at the touch of someone’s hand?”

  “Off hand, I don’t remember.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she will say. She will stand up, still holding your hand, and she will tug that hand. “Come on,” she will say, and with her other hand she will lift the kerosene lantern from the table, and conduct you up the stairs. You will wonder what she has in mind.

  You will be thinking, Well, she seems to have eliminated Day Whittacker at last.

  She will lead you into your bedroom, never letting go of your hand, and she will hold the lantern high against one wall. “You’ve never bothered to read these walls yet, have you?” she will ask, and when you shake your head, she will say, “Then look up there. Look up there and see what that says.”

  She will hold the lantern high against the wall; it is a spot that only a tall man could have reached (or a girl standing on a chair, you will think, briefly, but you will dismiss that thought quickly from your mind, because you will want very much to believe). The handwriting, in old pencil, nearly faded, on the white plaster of the wall, does not seem to be a script that a girl could imitate. And it says:

  Only the lordly are imperative. So I can’t and won’t command you. So this isn’t my supreme commandment but my supreme and only prescription: embrace: cling: touch: hug: enfold: cuddle: squeeze
: hold! Hold!

  “Well,” she will say to you, “do you believe that?” Then she will blow out her lantern and set it aside. Then she will hold you. You will embrace her. She will cling to you. You will touch her. She will hug you. You will enfold her. She will cuddle you. You will squeeze her. To my prescription. Then you will go to bed, but you will not “make love.” Yes, it will be a great wonderful love that you will make, but you will not “make love.” That would have seemed, somehow, superfluous. Which is what I meant. The ultimate cure for solipsism, G, is not the orgasm, which requires no partner, after all, but the caress. All over. A last word from my dictionary [goodbye, Henry; we’re finished, old friend]: polymorphous. The whole body. You never guessed, did you, G, that there are so many different ways just to hold someone?

  In the tightness of your embrace, the hard metal corner of your hearing aid will mash against her breast, and she will ask you why you don’t take it off. You will say you want to be able to hear her.

  “But I don’t have anything more to say, for now,” she will say.

  “But there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about,” you will say. “Your Daniel Lyam Montross is beginning to seem very real to me, and I think I really do believe in him. But, you know, I used to live in Stick Around myself; when I was a young boy, every summer I visited here and lived with my aunt and uncle all summer long. That was back in the late thirties. If Daniel Lyam Montross was living here at that time, why didn’t I ever meet him?”

  She will increase the pressure of her embrace, and her lips, so close to yours, will say, “You did.”

  And then she will say one thing more: “Go to sleep, G.”

  21

  Had it been the power of suggestion? Had you identified so closely with Day Whittacker in those episodes where she had used her “magic words” on him, that now, when she used them on you, they had “worked?” Or had you been genuinely sleepy? Or had you yearned for some brief return to those happy days? Whatever the case, it will be full morning when you wake, without a hangover for the first time in ages, and you will remember your dream: