The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  If anybody or anything had come along and spied on me, Rouser would’ve barked. He never did. And also, I took my .22 rifle with me, just in case. Not that I was afraid, being back up in that dark, mossy, woodsy holler. It was real cool after a couple hours of chopping weeds out of the garden patch, and the water that trickled over that ledge was almost cold.

  Of course I never stood under that waterfall when I was having my monthlies. Everybody knew that would be a terrible thing to do, almost suicide. Anybody could tell you of a fool girl or two who had got tuberculosis or a stroke of paralysis from taking a bath at the wrong time of her month.

  I have been called superstitious, but I know some things which have never been known to fail. This is not boasting but observation. There are plants that work wonders and always have for thousands of years. I never got chiggerbit, because I knew where the penny-royal grew, and I rubbed it on my legs, and when the chiggers were chewing my sisters alive, they didn’t bother me at all. Now, is that superstition?

  Take the common mullein, which some folks call the velvet plant because of its velvety leaves, a shade of green so pale you’d think the plant was worthless. And it is, for most things; cows won’t eat it, and although I’ve heard of some outlandish remedies concocted from the seeds, I’ve never known one that honestly works. The mullein stalk grows straight up, sometimes as tall as eight or nine feet. The yellow flowers are small and moderately ornamental, and I’ve known a few folks’ yards where they let the mullein grow just for decoration.

  In late June the mullein hasn’t even started to flower, and at most it’s just a few feet high, and inconspicuous, and totally worthless…except for this: if somebody, or something, is lost, you can name a mullein plant after him, her, or it, and then bend the stalk down to the ground. Likely, it will stay bent down. It will surely stay bent down and keep on growing that way if the lost person or the lost thing remains lost. But if that mullein stalk straightens back up, the lost will be found.

  This never fails. At least, I have never known it to fail, and I have lost a lot of things: recovered some and never found the others.

  Because somebody who has left Stay More is, in a way, “lost,” the mullein is also good for letting you know if they are ever coming back. When I saw the first mullein of June that was tall enough to bend down, on my hike back up into the holler to my bathing-place, I named it Viridis and bent it down. Not too long after that, another mullein started growing tall right near it. I bent that one down too, after naming it Nail.

  Each morning, after two or three sweaty hours in the garden, I would hike up to the waterfall to clean up, and I would pause to notice that both mullein stalks were still bent down. I would greet them and tell them I hoped they would straighten up.

  When I had bathed and put on a fresh dress, I would mosey on down into the village and hang around Ingledew’s store at the time of morning when everybody was there to get their mail. I never got any mail, except from Viridis. But she never wrote to tell me exactly when she was coming.

  The men would sit on the furniture of Ingledew’s storeporch like it belonged to them. The women and girls would have to stand around, not on the porch but off to one side, or out in the road, or sometimes inside the store around the dry goods, which was an exciting place to be, especially after Willis Ingledew received a new shipment of bolts of cloth, clean and bright and smooth. Nothing smells better than fresh cloth. But while I enjoyed hanging around the dry-goods department, more often I stood outside off the edge of the porch near enough to the men to listen to their stories or their talk about current events. The main current event now was Nail’s escape. How long would it take him to get home? There was no doubt in any man’s mind that he was coming home; there were only two questions: how long did it take a feller to walk from Little Rock to Stay More if he was careful not to let himself get seen? and how soon after coming back to Stay More would Nail do something to Sull Jerram?

  Every man was of the opinion that Nail would do something to Sull Jerram. If he didn’t kill him, he’d mutilate him beyond recognition or something equally terrible, and Sull knew it, and the men who’d been to Jasper lately reported that Sull was…I thought they said “scared spitless” and figured they meant he was so frightened he couldn’t work up enough saliva inside his mouth to take a decent spit, because a man in that predicament was practically unmanned. From my observation, every male human being above the age of twelve or thirteen had to be able to spit at least once every fifteen minutes or he risked being mistaken for a female.

  I had to watch where I was standing when I eavesdropped on the porch loungers; I had to be ready to jump to one side quickly.

  I told nobody about my mullein stalks. You don’t ever tell, which would break the magic. Nobody in Stay More except me, and I suppose the old woman who lived at Jacob Ingledew’s (although her house was directly across the road from Willis’ store, she hardly ever crossed the road; I never saw her), knew that Viridis might return to Stay More any day now.

  One morning in late June on my way to the waterfall after working in the garden, I paused to observe the two mullein stalks and noticed that one of them, the one I’d named Viridis, was behaving like a pecker ready for love. I was so excited I could scarcely take time to go on to the falls and take off all my clothes and get real wet. Later, on my way to the store, and at the store itself, I couldn’t understand why all the rest of the world, except that mullein stalk, remained so normal and unexcited. It was a typical dull, slow morning in Stay More. The mail wagon came out from Jasper, and Willis Ingledew sorted the mail, and folks saw what they got and read it, or read it for those who couldn’t read, and I didn’t get anything, but I didn’t need anything, because I knew she was coming!

  And sure enough, she came! Mullein stalks are never wrong. That very morning, while we were all still there, in or on or around the Ingledew store, the twenty-odd porch regulars loafing in their chairs or on their kegs and keeping the dust of the road down with their spitting, ankle-deep in the shavings from their pocketknives, the children playing in the road without fear of traffic, for there was none, the women mostly inside around the dry goods, and myself leaning up against one of the posts that held up the corner of the porch roof, a slow-moving wagon came into view, coming not from Jasper but from the schoolhouse road that goes westward up the mountain toward Sidehill, Eden, and places beyond. There was an additional horse tied behind the wagon, trotting briskly. I think I recognized that horse, or mare, before I recognized the passengers in the wagon. I could tell by her gait. It was Rosabone.

  I let out a yell. Everybody turned to stare at me briefly before returning their gazes toward the distantly approaching wagon. To the few who continued staring at me, I explained my outburst: “It’s Viridis. She’s here.” Then I started running toward the wagon. I was barefoot, as I always am when the weather’s warm, and the gravels of the road bit into my pounding feet, but I scarcely noticed. Rouser chased after me and commenced barking. Other dogs picked up his cry.

  So there was a great hubbub as Viridis returned to Stay More. As soon as I started running, others followed me, not all of them running but moving as fast as they could to keep up with me. We didn’t give the wagon a chance to arrive and stop at its destination, whatever its destination was: I still don’t know whether Viridis had told the driver she wanted to go to Ingledew’s store, the old woman’s house, my house, or the Chisms’, or the Whitters’, or where. We stopped her right there in the road. Rindy jumped down from the wagon like she expected a big hug from all of us at once, but it was Viridis I hugged first, and then I hugged Rindy, and the way other people were hugging Viridis, she might have been kinfolks and long lost…or at least the heroine that all of us knew her to be.

  Women were exclaiming, “Did ye ever!” and “I swan!” and “Lawsy sakes!” and men were saying, “I’ll be a son of a gun!” and “Wal, dog my cats!” and “What d’ye know about that!”

  Then all the commotion ceased as sudde
nly as it had begun, and it was absolutely silent for a time, so quiet you could hear the trees behind Willis’ store whispering. Waymon Chism broke the silence by declaring, “He aint showed up yit.” We all knew who “he” was.

  Viridis had been smiling that great smile that made her mouth look so pretty, but now she frowned and bit her lip. Then she said, “Well.” That’s all that was said for a while by anybody, although they were all looking at one another and exchanging expressions. Then Viridis declared, “We’ll just have to wait for him, won’t we?” In response there was a chorus of men’s and women’s declarations: “He’ll turn up” and “Give him time” and “Any day now” and “Shore as shootin” and “You bet ye” and “Shore thang.”

  Then came a dozen different offers from a dozen different women, my mother included, for Viridis to stay with them. They were all disappointed that she had already promised to stay, for the time being, at least tonight, with the old woman who lived in the Jacob Ingledew house right yonder. Men fought each other for the privilege of carrying her luggage to that house. Viridis paid the driver, a young man, or just a teenager actually, and thanked him for bringing them all that distance from Pettigrew.

  As it turned out, the young driver, whose name was Virgil Tuttle, did not intend to turn around and head back to Pettigrew, not right away. It had taken them a night on the road to cover the distance (they had put up at a sort of hotel in Sidehill), and during the long trip and that night Dorinda had become real friendly with Virgil, or just Virge as she called him, and now he accepted her invitation to stay at least tonight, and maybe longer, at the Whitter cabin, where, before sleeping with two or more of Rindy’s brothers, he might be permitted to “sit up” with her. She was sweet on him, and I could see why: he was sightly and strong, and he could talk the hind foot off a mule.

  He drove Rindy and her new suitcase on toward her house, with her mother riding in the back of the wagon to chaperone them, and I hung back to watch Viridis and the old woman at Jacob Ingledew’s house greet each other and then disappear inside. One by one the other citizens of Stay More returned to their accustomed places in, on, or around Willis Ingledew’s store, or they drifted on home for dinner. I was alone except for Rouser at the foot of the steps leading up to the porch of the big fine house where Viridis was staying with the old woman. I looked at it sadly, disappointed I’d scarcely had a chance to say more than hello to Viridis. But I figured she was tired and also wanted to visit with the old woman, who was her friend, after all, and had just as much claim to her as I did, or more.

  But while I was standing there looking at the house, the door opened and Viridis reappeared, coming out on the porch and smiling at me. “I didn’t mean to walk off from you like that,” she said. “My hostess wants me to ask you if you would have a bite of dinner with us. Will you?”

  “Gosh, sure!” was all I could say, and I joined them for dinner in the kitchen of the Jacob Ingledew house. I had never been inside of that house, and I was thrilled. Oh, in the years since then I’ve seen some finer houses in other places, and looking back I have to think that my world was awfully small that I would consider that house such a palace, when, by comparison with any good city house, it was just a country shack. But to me, then, going inside that house was like stepping into another world.

  And both women treated me not as some child eavesdropping on their grown-up conversation but as an equal, almost. I was drawn into their talk as if I really was grown up and had something worth saying and worth listening to. The only times I felt a little left out were when the old woman and Viridis would refer to what had apparently been a lengthy correspondence between them, longer and more continuous than mine with Viridis, One of them would say, “As I mentioned in my last letter…” or “You’ll recall when I wrote to you in early April…” or “But you said to me in your letter of May 15th…” and I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt I ought to consider myself privileged that such an intelligent and beautiful and heroic woman as Viridis would have bothered to write to me at all, let alone as often and as lengthily as she had. And I got a chance, too, to throw in a couple of expressions like “Remember what you said to me in that letter about…?”

  We talked for most of the afternoon, and I suppose Rouser got tired of waiting for me to come back out of the house, and he went on home by himself. Finally Viridis looked back and forth between the old woman and me and asked the question that she had been putting off. “You don’t suppose he might actually have come back but is hiding and doesn’t want anybody to know he’s here?”

  I thought it was a kind of desperate question, as if she couldn’t quite face the possibility that something had happened to keep him from coming home. After all, terrible as it was to contemplate, he could have drowned in the Arkansas River. Or he could have been recaptured, and we wouldn’t know about it until the next week’s issue of the Jasper newspaper. Or he could have changed his mind about coming home and gone to Colorado.

  “Aw,” I said. “If he was home, he’d of told his folks he was here.”

  “But what if,” she asked, “what if he’d made them promise not to tell anyone else?”

  That was possible, I considered. But I protested, “Waymon wouldn’t have lied to you like that.”

  “With all of those people standing around?” Viridis said. “Maybe he couldn’t take any chances that somebody he didn’t want to hear it would hear it? Maybe he’s waiting until he can tell me in private?”

  The more she talked in that vein, the more desperate she sounded, so I wasn’t surprised when finally she declared that she wanted to ride Rosabone up to the Chism place for a private talk with the Chisms. She changed from her dress into her jodhpurs and saddled Rosabone and rode off, telling me she’d stop by my house on her way back to the village.

  But she didn’t, although I waited up past bedtime. Maybe, I thought, her suspicion might have been right: maybe Nail was hiding out at the Chism place and had made his folks promise not to tell anyone, but once Viridis had gone up there, they couldn’t keep it from her. And now, I thought, as I lay in bed trying to sleep, they are in each other’s arms at last.

  The next morning I worked for only an hour in the garden before heading for my waterfall to bathe. The mullein stalk named Viridis was standing proud and tall. But the one named Nail still drooped to the ground. I took a real quick shower bath, returned to the house and had a quick breakfast, and was sitting on the front porch of our cabin when Viridis rode up on Rosabone.

  “He wasn’t there,” she said.

  “I know,” was all I could say. But I did know, from the mullein stalk, that he had not come back to Stay More.

  The Chisms of course had been so delighted with her visit that they hadn’t easily let go of her. She’d had to stay with them through supper, and until it was scarcely light enough to see her way home, and by then she had been too tired to remember her promise to stop by my house. She was sorry. I said that was okay, that I was sorry she hadn’t found Nail.

  “You don’t suppose,” she started again with those familiar words that sounded sort of desperate, “that he could be somewhere up in the mountains or lost hollows, hiding out?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t break the magic and tell her about that mullein stalk named Nail, or it would pop right up and pretend he wasn’t lost when he actually was.

  “You don’t suppose,” she asked, “that he might not even want his own parents to know that he has come back?”

  “Viridis,” I said, with a little exasperation, “I know that Nail’s not anywhere around Stay More.”

  “How can you be so certain?” she said, not really asking it so much as accusing me for my cocksure conviction.

  “I just know,” I declared. “Believe me.” I nearly added, by way of consolation, I’ll tell you the minute I see the mullein straighten up again. But you can’t tell anyone about the mullein.

  She said, “Latha, Nail told me tha
t you could tell me where he would be hiding. Do you know where it is? Would you show me?”

  Then I remembered what I’d written to him in that letter about the lost glade, or glen, of the high waterfall, way back up on the mountain beyond his upper sheep pasture. I was flattered that my telling him about it would have made him want to use it as a hiding-place. For a moment, even, I wondered if the range of my mullein’s magic extended that far into the wilderness. Could it be that my mullein didn’t know he was already there? But no: the mullein will tell you if something or someone is lost even if it or they are a thousand miles away. “Sure, I could show you,” I said, “but I don’t think you’ll find him there.”

  “Can we go there?” she asked, and that note of desperation still gave an edge to her question. She observed, correctly, that I was just sitting in the rocker on the porch, not doing anything, and she asked, “Are you free to go right now?”

  I looked around as if somebody might try to detain me, or as if to see if anybody was spying on us, but Viridis and I seemed to have the morning all to ourselves. “Let’s go,” I said.