The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  It was a very interesting story, Hank thought, although he didn’t see any particular significance in it, unless it was just about time in general, time passing, time coming and staying awhile and going away forever not never to come back anymore. It was kind of sad, he thought. It was almost like not knowing whether or not you really existed because in order for you to have been born your mother and father had to speak to one another and go to bed together, and as far as he knew his mother and father never had. Eli Willard seemed to be a very wise old man, and Hank decided that when the old man got finished telling his story Hank would ask him for his opinion on whether or not a person could exist if his parents had never spoken to one another or gone to bed together.

  It seemed to be getting late. The lightning bugs had all come out and filled the air. The old man’s voice was becoming weak and hoarse, but he seemed to be near the finish. He was at the part where he drove the first horseless carriage into Stay More and Uncle Denton sued him for it and he went away and joined a circus and didn’t come back again for twenty years.

  He’s almost done, Hank realized, and then Hank could ask him some questions. He had to strain his ears to hear what the old man was saying in his weak, hoarse voice. And then he could not hear him at all. The old man’s lips were still moving, but Hank couldn’t catch a word. Hank put his ear up close to the old man’s mouth and managed to catch one feeble word that sounded like “peanuts” but then he couldn’t hear anything else. Eli Willard’s lips went on moving. “I caint hear you!” Hank hollered into his ear, but Eli Willard just closed his eyes, and his lips went on moving for a while and then stopped moving, and his chin fell to his chest. Hank gave his shoulder a shake and Eli Willard fell over.

  Hank ran up the road to Doc Swain’s place and fetched Doc Swain, who came and inspected Eli Willard and declared that it looked as if he had been dead for many years. Doc Swain took his shoulders and Hank took his legs and they carried him over to E.H. Ingledew’s dentist shop, where E.H., who was a mortician as well as a dentist, carefully embalmed him. The next day the people of Stay More assembled and discussed the situation. They didn’t know where to ship the body, and even if they did they couldn’t afford it. A search of the dead man’s pockets had produced just a tiny amount of cash, not even enough for a box coffin. Hank Ingledew didn’t tell anyone about the gold wristwatch, which rightfully belonged to his future son; he wrapped the watch in flannel and put it into a tin lard pail and buried it in a place that not even I know. Eli Willard was not buried. The Stay More cemetery, after all, was for Stay Morons, and Eli Willard was not a Stay Moron. Willis Ingledew offered in place of a coffin an unused glass showcase in the rear of his general store, and Eli Willard’s well-preserved body was laid to rest in this showcase, and all of the Ingledews, at least, gathered around it and sang:

  Farther along we’ll know all about it,

  Farther along we’ll understand why;

  Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,

  We’ll understand it, all by and by.

  One day Hank Ingledew laboriously hand-lettered a sign, “WURL’S OLDISS MAN,” and took it into the store and, with Willis’s permission, placed it on top of the showcase. Hank brooded sometimes because Eli Willard had not lived long enough for Hank to ask him the question about whether or not Hank could exist if his parents had never spoken to one another or slept together. Sometimes when Willis was sitting out on the store porch, Hank would slip into the rear of the store and sit down beside the showcase and make believe that he was talking to Eli Willard and asking him questions. In this way, over a period of time, he came to understand the power of make-believe, and this was a consolation to him.

  Eli Willard rested in peace in the showcase for several years, and people came from all over Newton County to see him, and while they were in the store they would usually buy a candy bar or a plug of chewing tobacco or something, and this business helped Willis Ingledew survive the lean years of the Great Depression and even to make modest loans to all the other Ingledews to help them survive.

  Willis was totally forgiven for whatever errors of credulity he had made long ago; people began to believe him; they believed anything he said; they even believed, all of a sudden one day, that he actually possessed an automobile. On the day they believed he possessed an automobile he was driving it into Jasper for repairs when he lost control on a sharp curve and plunged down a steep embankment, totally wrecking the car. He died instantly and they buried him, singing “Farther Along” over his grave. He was the last male of his line.

  His niece Lola, whom nobody realized was secretly his daughter, inherited the general store, and her first act as proprietress was to insist that the other Ingledews kindly remove the glass showcase with the body of Eli Willard in it. She said she would not set foot in the store until they did. So she did not set foot in the store, which was all right with just about anybody, because nobody had any money to spend there, although unfortunately the post office was also inside the store. But Lola did not inherit the postmastership, because U.S. government positions are not inheritable. When Willis Ingledew died, the Beautiful Girl, who had returned to Stay More after a long and mysterious absence and had purchased Bob Cluley’s little general store up at the other end of Main Street, purchased it with money that nobody knew how or where or why she had obtained, now applied to the U.S. government for the post of postmistress, and was granted it, much to the chagrin of Lola, who could only watch helplessly as Tearle Ingledew loaded the cabinet of post office boxes into a wagon and hauled it up Main Street to the Beautiful Girl’s general store. Lola and the Beautiful Girl had in common that they were spinsters and that they were general store proprietresses, but they had absolutely nothing else in common.

  The Jasper Disaster ran a feature story on the corpse of Eli Willard under the title, “Connecticut Itinerant Has No Final Resting Place, Even in Death.” One of the national wire services picked up the story, and soon it was running in papers all over the country. A family of Willards in Rhode Island wrote to the Newton County coroner, claiming that Eli Willard was their longlost great-grandfather, but the coroner replied that Eli Willard was a lifelong bachelor who had no kin or descendants. The students of Yale University took up a collection for the purpose of having the showcase shipped to Yale’s Dwight Chapel, but the university administration vetoed the idea. The Governor of Connecticut wrote the Governor of Arkansas suggesting that something ought to be done, and the latter replied that his staff was investigating, with the main problem being to locate Newton County in general and Stay More in particular. Meanwhile a man drove up to Lola’s store and introduced himself as Philip Foogle and asked to be allowed to view the remains. Lola said she wouldn’t set foot inside the store, but she would unlock it for him, and did, and the man went in and later came back out and said that the deceased had been, when last seen, wearing an extremely expensive gold chronometer wristwatch which was not now on the deceased’s person. Foogle claimed that he had loaned a considerable sum of money to the deceased, who had spent it on the wristwatch. In short, he, Foogle, wanted the wristwatch. Lola said she didn’t know nothing about no wristwatch. Foogle asked who had been with the deceased at the time of his deceasement, and Lola told him Hank Ingledew, and gave him directions to Hank’s house, and Foogle went there and was mildly surprised to discover that Hank Ingledew was a grown-up version of the same ten-year-old kid whom he had almost converted into a permanent clown several years before.

  “Aha!” said Foogle, and then, “Okay, kid, come clean. What did you do with the wristwatch?”

  “What wristwatch?” said Hank, having learned in the school of life how to maintain a perfect deadpan and a tone of innocence.

  Foogle, forgetting momentarily that he was no longer dealing with a ten-year-old circus punk, began to twist Hank’s arm, whereupon the grown-up Hank flung Foogle all the way back to his car. Foogle drove back to Lola’s store, thinking he might at least salvage something if he could lay claim
to the showcase and contents, and exhibit it in his sideshow. Lola was more than happy to let him have it, if he would haul it off. It wouldn’t fit in his car. He drove off to Jasper to hire a truck, and Lola gloatingly boasted to the Ingledews that she had worked her will, and that soon she would set foot inside her store.

  But before Foogle could get back with the truck, Hank rounded up his three younger brothers and the four of them gained entrance to the store through the rear door, and transferred the showcase and contents to the abandoned mill, where they concealed it inside the wheat roller machine, and where it remained for many years. The Ingledew brothers pledged one another to secrecy. Lola set foot in her store. She had no idea on earth, she told Foogle, where the showcase might have gone. She was just glad it was gone.

  What has all of this to do with the illustration at the head of this chapter? That curious “carpenter gothic” house, located a mile up Banty Creek from downtown Stay More, was built by a man who, like Eli Willard, was not a Stay Moron, but that in itself is no reason for making his house the headpiece for this whole chapter. The man was also a native of Connecticut and was also, like Eli Willard, a wanderer, but neither are those any reasons. I will offer a reasonably good reason in just a few minutes, but for the moment I need only point out that, chronologically, the house was built during one of those years that Eli Willard lay in state in Willis’s store, the same year that Bob Cluley sold his little general store to the Beautiful Girl (although there is no connection) so that this carpenter gothic house represents those years and that year, not only chronologically but also symbolically, because the retardataire gothicism of the house relates to Eli Willard and his death. Nobody knew well the man who built it, but they knew he must have been a carpenter, not just because of all the carpenter gothic details but because it was well-built and is still standing, although it was vacant for some twenty years after the violent death of the builder.

  The man was known only as “Dan.” He was already in his fifties when he first came to Stay More and although he did not have a wife he had a young child, a girl as reclusive as her father. Neither of them was seen in the village more often than the Second Tuesday of the Month. People sat on the porch of Lola’s store and speculated that the man was an escaped convict. Then one by one the people moved to the porch of the Beautiful Girl’s store not only because it had become the post office but also because they liked her better than Lola, and on that porch they speculated that Dan was a runaway bank embezzler and had a pile of money stashed away somewhere in his fancy carpenter gothic house. Now and then someone would come upon the man out in the woods hunting, and marvel at his marksmanship, extraordinary even by Stay More standards. A lucky few people happened to be within earshot on several occasions when the man was playing his fiddle, and they agreed that there had never been a better fiddler, not even the legendary Colonel Coon Ingledew.

  During the years of the Great Depression, the Stay Morons all of a sudden revived their interest in the old-timey music and the old-timey ways, and both the Stay Morons and the Parthenonians tried to persuade Dan to play his fiddle for public events, but he would not, not out of shyness but because he knew that square dances fostered drunken fighting, and, as he said, he had been in enough fights to last him for the rest of his life. So, in effect, unlike Eli Willard, who over the years kept bringing things to Stay More, the strange near-hermit named Dan contributed nothing to Stay More, but rather took from it, in the form of a meticulous observation of its history and culture that resulted, indirectly, through means I have discussed in some other place, in the present volume. If Dan himself has no place in the present volume, he was responsible for it, and his house has a place in it, for it was in his house, after Dan was killed and the house was abandoned, that the Ingledews deposited the glass showcase with the remains of Eli Willard, after a flood had undermined the foundations of the abandoned mill. Even in death Eli Willard kept traveling, but once he was deposited in the abandoned house of the near-hermit Dan he was left in relative peace for another twenty years.

  Just in passing, we might note that the house was, and still slightly is, yellow. It was one of the few painted houses of Stay More. We need not get involved with the architectural significance of painted vs. unpainted houses, but we should consider the symbolism of the color, as Dan saw it. It had nothing to do with cowardice, for Dan was one of the bravest men who ever lived. If he had been an Ingledew, which he was not, his legend would have equaled anything in this book. Nor did yellow have anything to do with jaundice, lemons, Fusarium wilt, Orientals, or egg yolks. The Indo-European root of yellow is ghel, a formation which also produces gold, gleam, felon, glimpse, glitter, glisten, gloss, glow, glib and gloaming. All of these apply to Dan, but he painted his house yellow as a symbol of fair-haired women, and of the rising sun.

  Chapter fifteen

  Recognize it? The practiced student of architecture should be able to examine an altered building and determine the form of the original—“read” it in translation, as it were. Here we see the somewhat imaginative, if architecturally uncomely, result of Oren Duckworth’s attempt to convert the unused barn that Denton and Monroe Ingledew built four chapters back into an industry, specifically a canning factory, or “Cannon Fact’ry” as they pronounced it. Unless we count the present-day ham processing operation of Vernon Ingledew as an industry, the Cannon Fact’ry was the only modern industry that Stay More ever had. Rare was the Stay Moron who enjoyed working for someone else, for wages. No farm in Stay More ever had a hired hand. Just as Jacob Ingledew had never even considered owning slaves because he felt that a man shouldn’t own more land than he and his sons were capable of cultivating, successive generations of Stay Morons felt that they should not hire help; if they needed extra hands during haying time or threshing time, they swapped help with one another. But during the Great Depression, the farms of Stay More were reduced to bare subsistence enterprises, yielding the families a meager larder and nothing else. To earn even enough to pay for staples like salt and pepper and chewing tobacco, it was necessary to find a job, and the only jobs to be found in Stay More was the seasonal labor in Oren Duckworth’s Cannon Fact’ry. Later the W.P.A. and the C.C.C. and the A.A.A. and the rest of the New Deal’s alphabet soup brought relief to some, but most Stay Morons considered those government agencies a form of welfare or even charity, which was worse than working for somebody else.

  Oren Duckworth started his canning factory not to provide jobs for his neighbors but because with the death of John Ingledew Stay More was without a leading citizen and Oren Duckworth desired to become a leading citizen. He was Jim Tom Duckworth’s oldest boy, and attorneys’ sons were always expected to amount to something, although Oren was past forty before he thought of the idea of taking the old engine from behind the abandoned mill and putting it alongside the abandoned barn to convert it into a factory. I’ve always wondered why he didn’t simply convert the abandoned mill into a factory; possibly E.H. Ingledew, the oldest of his line and therefore the legatee of the mill, wouldn’t sell it to him. At any rate, when old Jim Tom Duckworth went to his reward, he left behind a modest amount of accumulated lawyer’s fees, which Oren used to purchase the simple machinery for his factory: conveyors, cleaning trough, canner and cooker.

  Unconsciously no doubt, in planning his factory, Oren Duckworth preserved the bigeminality of the original barn: the left crib was where the women cleaned and prepared the snaps and ’maters and put them into cans; the right crib was where the men sealed the cans and cooked them, and the male-female division of labor was always clear in the minds of those who worked there. Snaps and ’maters were the only products of the factory; the former were canned during June and the latter during July and August; both vegetables grew abundantly all over the place. Additional jobs were provided for the pickers. Farmers hired women, teenagers and even children to pick, paying them usually a few pennies per bushel, and hauled the bushels by wagon to Oren Duckworth’s factory, where a stout girl unloaded
them into a trough around which sat a dozen women who cleaned, snapped the snaps or peeled the ’maters, pressed them into tin cans being loaded on the chute up in the loft by another person, also female, and placed them on a conveyor belt which carried them over into the other crib, where a group of men manned the machine that put a lid on each can and then arranged them in large iron bails that were lowered into a vat of boiling water; after the cans had cooked and cooled, they were conveyed up into the loft of that crib where another person, also male, packed them into cardboard cartons.

  In the early days of the operation, the cans bore Oren Duckworth’s own gaudily chromolithographed labels, imprinted with the legends “Duckworth’s Finust Snaps” and “Duckworth’s Finust Maters,” but, even though the former clearly pictured a luscious mound of plump green beans while the latter showed a huge red tomato, nobody in the cities, where the cans were shipped, appeared to know that “snap” means green beans and “mater” means tomato, and the cans did not sell. Eventually Oren Duckworth made contact with a large and well-known food processor in Kansas City, a company whose lawyers will not permit me to mention its name, and thereafter Duckworth’s finust snaps and maters were sent in unlabeled cans to Kansas City, where the Big Name Food Processor attached his own label, and you and I were unknowingly eating them when we were children, although the Cannon Fact’ry closed down before we were grown up.