The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Viridis looked at what wouldn’t become Latha Bourne’s General Store and Post Office until June of 1932; there were lights of kerosene lanterns burning within the two wings of the store that were living quarters, and she was tempted to stop there first, just to ask for directions. It would have been ironic to ask Tilbert Jerram for help in the beginning of what would become her fight against his brother. But she did not. She turned Rosabone around and began to ride slowly back down Main Street. There were lights burning at Doc Plowright’s, but I don’t blame her for having a sense, even then, that he wouldn’t be very sociable. Across the road she could see through the window of Doc Swain’s, where Colvin was sitting at a table peering through a microscope, and something about that—and the moonlit shingle hanging out front: C.U. SWAIN, M.D., DOCTOR OF HUMAN MEDICINE—convinced her that he was a very busy young man who wouldn’t take kindly to an interruption. She only wanted to ask for directions.

  Didn’t dogs bark at her? When I attempted to retrace her movements through the village and the surrounding countryside, weeks later in the moonlight, pretending to be her, some of the dogs pretended I was her too, and although they knew me they barked at me. Doc Swain’s great big old hound Galen nearly attacked me, and Doc Swain raised his head from the microscope and came outside and said, “Hush, Galen! Down, you dumb bawler! Oh, it’s you, Latha. What are you doin out this time o’ night?”

  “Jist a-playin like I was her,” I said, and he knew who I meant. “And I was jist wonderin, did dogs bark at her that first night? Galen must’ve.”

  “I reckon he did, but I never took no notice,” Doc Swain said.

  If there was anyone who heard the village dogs barking at her and thought to go see who or what the dogs were barking at, it was probably that old lady who lived two doors down from Doc Swain, in the big fine two-story house directly across the road from Willis Ingledew’s store. This house had been built way back around the time of the War Between the States by old Jacob Ingledew, who died the year before I was born. He had been the founder of Stay More, he and his brother Noah, and right after that war he had served for a time as the governor of the whole state of Arkansas. Compared with Governor Hays, who wouldn’t pardon Nail Chism, he…but I’m digressing. This lady had been a friend of his wife’s when they lived in Little Rock at the governor’s mansion, and when Sarah Ingledew came back to Stay More she brought her friend with her, to stay. In this year of 1915 both Jacob and Sarah had been in the Stay More cemetery for going on fifteen years, but this lady, who inherited the house, still lived on there, and would continue to do so until sometime in the early twenties (I wasn’t living in Stay More the year of her death, so I don’t remember). To tell the honest truth, I never knew her name. Older folks who had known Sarah Ingledew just called her Sarah’s Friend, and in fact that’s all that you’ll find on her tombstone. If she ever told Viridis her name, and she must have, it’s not recorded.

  But she came out on her front porch, wrapped in a thick afghan shawl, to see what the dogs were barking at…assuming the dogs were barking. That porch runs the whole length of the big house, and it has fancy jigsaw Gothic balusters running along the edge of it, hardly more than an arm’s length from the road, and the lady stood up against that porch rail and looked at that moonlit figure on horseback. Viridis stopped and turned Rosabone toward the lady and said, in that genteel Little Rock/Paris voice of hers, “Good evening, madam. This is Stay More, is it not? I’ve just arrived in town, and I’d like directions for finding the Right Prong Road that goes to the Chism farm.”

  The lady smiled. “Which part of Little Rock are you from?” she asked.

  Viridis was taken aback, to put it mildly, and her first thought was of some kind of conspiracy: somebody, maybe Nail himself, had gotten word to these people that Viridis was coming. But this woman was asking her which part of Little Rock she was from, as if there were divisions or distinctions, and—Viridis could not help noticing—this woman was not asking the question in the mode of expression or voice she would expect from a native of these parts.

  “Why, the central part,” Viridis answered. “Why?”

  “Louisiana Street, Center, Spring, or Broadway?” the old woman asked.

  “West of that,” Viridis said. “Arch Street.”

  “I guessed as much. That’s not exactly central. Well, as they say hereabouts, light down and hitch, rest your saddle. Come in and eat you some supper.”

  “I’m just trying to find the Chism place,” Viridis said.

  “You won’t find it in the dark, or even this fine moonlight. Are they expecting you? They won’t be able to give you a decent bed.”

  “I don’t want to impose on you,” Viridis said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve room for your whole family, if you’d brought them with you. Well, maybe one of your brothers would have to sleep on the floor.”

  Viridis was delighted. She accepted the offer of hospitality and discovered that the woman had the whole large house to herself, eleven rooms, simply but tastefully furnished. Behind the house was a small stable, where Rosabone was housed comfortably for the night.

  The woman had just been starting to prepare her own supper at the time Viridis arrived, and it was no trouble for her to make a double serving of everything: roast pork, boiled potatoes in their skins with chopped parsley, fresh garden kale (it survives January’s freeze) cooked like spinach, and a light wheaten roll baked in a manner called Parker House. Viridis watched as these things came off of and out of a huge cast-iron and white enamel cookstove that gave off an additional fragrance of burning cedar logs, and of the sweet-potato pie they would have for dessert.

  “Now,” said the old lady, “if I can just remember where the governor left that bottle of Alsace wine. Excuse me.” She disappeared upstairs, climbing the staircase with an agility that belied her years, more than eighty of them, Viridis guessed, and within a minute she returned, wiping the dust from, sure enough, a tall, narrow bottle of Gewürztraminer.

  During the meal Viridis remarked, “You mentioned the governor. Were you speaking in the familiar sense of one’s husband, father, superior, or employer?”

  The old woman smiled with amusement. “He was not my husband, but he was my ‘father,’ you could say. He was definitely my superior, and certainly my employer.” She paused to sip her wine, then added, “But Jacob Ingledew was also the governor.”

  “Of Arkansas?” Viridis asked.

  “Don’t the schools of Little Rock teach Arkansas history anymore?” the woman asked.

  Viridis had actually taken mandatory Arkansas history in the eighth and ninth grades, but there had been so many governors and she couldn’t remember their names. She asked, with a smile, “Which part of Little Rock are you from?”

  “East of Main,” the woman said. “Do you know the Pike mansion?”

  “Of course!” Viridis replied. Her boss’s cousins, the Fletchers, owned the mansion that had been built by Albert Pike. “Did you live there?”

  “No,” the woman said, smiling as if to excuse herself for misleading her guest, “but in the neighborhood, just a few doors to the east.”

  The conversation died for a few moments before Viridis decided to ask, “What are you doing in Stay More?”

  “I’ll be happy to tell you,” the woman said. “But first you must tell me: what are you doing in Stay More?”

  These two Little Rock ladies, the one eighty-six, the other sixty years younger, stayed up talking until bedtime, and even beyond, telling each other their stories and their reasons, very good ones, for being in Stay More. The old woman certainly knew about the trial and conviction of Nail Chism, although she did not know enough of the facts of the case to have any opinion on Nail’s guilt or innocence. Summers she sat on her front porch and observed the men sitting on the storeporch across the way, and she knew which one was Nail, because he was taller than the others, younger than most of them, quieter, less inclined to joking although a quick audience for othe
rs’ jokes, but of course she was in no position to say whether he had been there at his usual time on that particular afternoon, which was just one more June day in a passage of rare ones. Yes, she knew of the Whitters; they were the “dregs” of Stay More society, and Dorinda’s oldest brother Ike had been the town’s ruffian and rowdy until the day the lynch mob disposed of him. The woman showed Viridis a number of plugged-up bullet holes in the walls of her front rooms, souvenirs of a raging gun battle Ike Whitter and his cronies had fought with the lynch mob, who had commandeered her house and required her to cower in a back room, frightened out of her wits, while every pane of glass in her house was shattered. This had happened ten years before, but the old woman still trembled sometimes in recollection of it.

  At breakfast the next morning (Viridis had slept wonderfully and warmly on a thick mattress stuffed with goose down, beneath several heirloom quilts, in a big walnut four-poster in the one of the three front rooms that had been Sarah Ingledew’s) the gracious old woman, urging a second helping of bacon and eggs on Viridis, said, “You aren’t intending to wear those today, are you?” and indicated Viridis’ jodhpurs.

  “I expect to do a good bit of riding,” Viridis explained.

  The woman shook her head. “You might do some riding, but you won’t do any visiting if you wear those.” And when breakfast was finished, she suggested they take their third cups of coffee back into Sarah’s room. Viridis, the woman observed, was the same size that Sarah had been. The woman opened a walnut wardrobe, then took down a dress and held it against Viridis for a moment, replaced it, and took down another, until she had one that she considered “not too dressy but good enough.” Viridis protested that she couldn’t ride Rosabone in that dress. “You aren’t going to ride Rosabone,” the woman said, and then selected the shoes, which were twenty years out of style and unlike any that Viridis had ever worn. And then the hat, or bonnet, rather. And a shawl. “And now the finishing touch, what Sarah called her thanky-poke,” the woman said, giving Viridis a purse to carry, a purse larger and fancier than any she would ever have dared hold in Little Rock. The woman turned Viridis to look at herself in the mirror and commented, “I declare, if it weren’t for your red hair, you are Sarah.” Viridis felt a bit uncomfortable, not because of the fit of the clothes or their being twenty years out of fashion but because she felt she had no right to be wearing the clothing of the former first lady of Arkansas. She expected to do a lot of local traveling and interviewing today, and she didn’t want to expose the clothes to dirt and dust and snow and mud.

  The old woman dressed herself in attire that was also from an earlier era, the 1890s, and then she led Viridis out of the house, down the steps, and across the road to Willis Ingledew’s General Store. The storekeeper (who was also postmaster of Stay More that year) was in his customary captain’s chair facing the large potbellied stove whose stovepipe rose three floors straight up to the roof as the centerpiece surrounded by the balcony of the second floor, where the clothing and shoe departments were. There were a dozen other men sitting in chairs or on bulging wooden kegs within the radius of the stove’s warmth. Two of these men faced each other across a cracker barrel atop which a checkerboard had been placed, but the men, Viridis noticed at once, were playing chess, not checkers.

  One by one the men looked away from the stove or from the chessplayers and took notice of the two ladies who had entered the store. One by one the men’s jaws dropped open.

  “How be ye, boys?” the old woman said. The response, she later explained with a light laugh to Viridis, was exceptional: it was customary for a man greeting a woman simply to touch the brim of his hat, or perhaps just to raise his hand in the direction of the brim, or, at the very most, to grasp the crown of the hat and gently raise it before setting it back down. Each one of these men whipped his hat entirely off his head and held it to his heart, and some of them even stood up. Holding their hats thus, they chorused, each and severally, “Howdy do, ladies,” and “Fine mornin, ma’ams.”

  The storekeeper, Willis, standing up, was nearly as tall as Nail. “I’ll be jimjohned,” he exclaimed, looking at Viridis. “You shore guv me a turn. I thought fer a secont thar ye were Grammaw. Don’t she put ye in mind of Grammaw, Paw?” he said to one of the seated men, a very old man who simply nodded and didn’t take his eyes off her.

  “This here gal is Miss Verdus Monday,” the old woman said, in a thick approximation of the local speech. “She hails from Little Rock, and come all the way here jist to see what she can see about Nail Chism’s trouble. She thinks he’s blameless. Don’t ye, gal?”

  Viridis had never before in her life been called upon to speak in front of a group, especially not a males-only enclave of general-store loungers. At first she could only nod in response to the question, but then she found enough voice to add, “Yes, and I hope all of you do too.” She looked around at them, one by one. Each man was nodding his head.

  “Willis, have ye still got that phaeton yore grampaw was so partial to?” the old woman asked the storekeeper, and when he nodded, she said, “We’d be obleeged to ye iffen ye’d hitch her up so’s this gal could git up towards the Chism place.”

  “I’ll carry ye myself, ma’am,” Willis offered.

  But the old woman said, “No need of that, Willis. Jist hitch it up to two of yore best hosses and bring it around.”

  As Willis exited through the rear of the store toward his livery barn, one of the others said to the women, “Don’t ye gals be rushin off. Stay more and pull ye up some cheers or kaigs.”

  “Yeah,” invited another man, “lift yore hats and rest yore wraps.”

  “She’ll be back directly, I reckon,” the old woman said. “Won’t ye, gal?”

  “I’d like to talk with each one of you about Nail,” Viridis said.

  “Shore thang,” they spoke or grunted assent: “Any old time.” “You bet.” “Come back when ye can visit more.”

  Outside, the old woman indicated the phaeton that Willis was bringing into the road and asked Viridis, “Ever driven one of these? I’d go with you, but I think you’d feel more comfortable on your own, wouldn’t you, now? Look, you turn right at Jerram’s corner up there and you’re on the Right Prong Road. Stay on it eastward without turning off to the left or right until you’ve reached the top of that mountain yonder. You’ll see the Chisms’ house on a cleared knoll set back from the road a ways on your left. Nancy Chism is going to be tickled to see you. So will they all. If I don’t see you at bedtime, I’ll know they talked you into staying. But come back when you can.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” Viridis admitted.

  “You’ll thank me enough with the pleasure of your company,” the lady said.

  Viridis drove the two-horse phaeton without any trouble, although she’d never driven one before. She drove in the direction she had ridden Rosabone the night before, up between the clinics of the two doctors, past the stone bank building, right at Jerram’s store, which would become mine, right on the road I live on but not turning to the left on the Bournes’ trail. I wasn’t there anyway that morning. I was in school, across the creek, the other way. All oblivious to her driving the fine phaeton of Governor Ingledew right past my turnoff, I was standing at my desk reciting for Mr. Perry a poem from our reader, William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray: Or, Solitude.” It is about a lonesome young girl who gets sent on an errand in a winter storm and disappears, and it always brought a tear to my eye, especially when they traced her footprints in the snow as far as the middle of the bridge, and then no more.

  —Yet some maintain that to this day

  She is a living child;

  That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

  Upon the lonesome wild.

  O’er rough and smooth she trips along,

  And never looks behind;

  And sings a solitary song

  That whistles in the wind.

  I never thought that “behind” could rhyme with “wind”; you’d have to cha
nge the way you say one or the other, and I didn’t, as I read it, and Mr. Perry didn’t correct me, and the way I pronounced “wind” was lost anyway beneath the sound of a sob from Dorinda, who then commenced another one of the crying jags she had all the time these days. As I said before, she no longer shared my desk; she had been moved, first down to where the third-graders sat, but then Mr. Perry had completely lost patience with her and had her sit over to one side of the first-graders, big enough to be their mother but too big to share a desk with any of them, so she was just sitting on the stool that Mr. Perry sometimes used for the dunce’s corner and had to borrow from her when he needed to make somebody sit on it there, and of course there were jokes about her being our permanent dunce, with or without the corner. Whether or not she was dumb enough to be with the first-graders was questionable, but she certainly cried more than any of them ever did. The least little thing would set her off, and I should have known when I read “Lucy Gray” that it was going to give her a real fit of weeping. If only she knew that the lady who was going to save her soul was on her way up to the Chism place!

  Up on the lilting mountain far above the village is a farmplace so old the trees still sing of it. There is a pretty trail rising from the village of Stay More to the farmplace; the trail meanders all over creation before it gets up there, and from places along it you can see forever across the hollers and the hills. The trees singing their fool heads off were a fat maple whose name I wish I knew and a gangling walnut I’d have to call a lady’s name were I to dub it, neither of them with even a leftover brown leaf from last autumn, although their buds were swelling and the only green in sight, save the copse of cedars and the first sign of new grass, were the nests of mistletoe in the upper limbs of the maple, mistletoe a shade of green that you only see in winter, winter’s green, which has a special song of its own. I wish Viridis could have heard these trees a-yodeling like crazy as she drove into sight of them, and maybe she did, for all I know. I don’t know everything about this story.