The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “I’d think that would be all the harder if there was nobody but yourself to be with,” she conjectures.

  She is quicker with a response to that stranger than I am. I don’t know how to respond. I would like to tell her what my sister has revealed to me, and to express my disappointment that the infanticide had not been successful. “I don’t get along very well with myself,” I declare. “In fact, we’re hardly on speaking terms any longer. But at least I get along with myself much better than with anyone else.”

  “You seem to be getting along well enough with me.”

  “You’re my hostess and I have to be polite. I could be very rude to you if I didn’t have some sense of manners.”

  Her dark eyebrows rise in query. “I don’t believe that. How could you be rude to me?”

  “Well, for instance, I could say, ‘What’s a nice lady like you doing in a dump like this?’”

  “‘Dump’?” She laughs, not offended. “My husband’s father built this cabin around 1890, and it’s as sound and sturdy now as the day it was done. Maybe it’s got too many sticks of furniture in it, but everything’s clean. I used to live in that place down where this road meets the main road, that was also my store and post office, and when I married and moved into this house I had too much stuff for both places.”

  “You ran that store?” I ask. “And the post office?”

  “I was the town’s last postmistress before the P.O. closed.”

  I wonder if I had ever seen her in my youth. I spent my boyhood summers at my grandmother’s house (now gone) to the north of this town (dying even then), and while we usually patronized the general store at the larger village, I recall having come a few times to the small general store here, whose proprietress was a beautiful brunette, but I cannot recall her face clearly. The coincidence suddenly dawns on me that the same year—my fifth—that the post office was forced to close, was the year that my lousy life was nearly terminated. If I can’t speak of this to the old woman, I must get back to my cavern and try to write about it to my former wife. I stand up.

  “Thank you very much for the excellent supper. Now I must get home, if you will lend me a lantern, which I’ll return tomorrow.”

  One of her fine hands gestures toward the breezeway. “You’re welcome to a bed in the other house…”

  What would my dog think? “You wouldn’t happen to have any booze on the premises, I suppose? No? Well, you see, every night I have to drink myself to sleep. I’m afraid I would have terrible insomnia without my nightly dose.”

  “I wondered if you were keeping a mistress,” she says.

  “A mistress? No, unfortunately, I’m not.”

  “Yes, unfortunately, you are. Booze is your mistress. She is kind, and warm, and helps you escape yourself.”

  I think about that; it had not occurred to me before. “I guess you’re right,” I say. “Do you have a lantern?”

  From a cabinet she takes a lantern, fills it with kerosene, and lights it. We exchange good-nights.

  “Sorry to have kept you waiting,” I say to my dog.

  Chapter eleven

  My associate curator, who was the boss of my lover, agreed to share with me the cost of her confinement at the sanitarium, and we even sat together with the admissions physician, contrapuntally answering his questions about what was wrong with her, and, once she was safely admitted, I kissed her good-bye and kissed the Foundation good-bye, figuratively, giving it, on “extended loan,” most of the contents of my apartment, including a number of fine pieces of furniture that, my associate curator said, would go on immediate display. From the storeroom’s trash bin I took a number of pasteboard boxes, not noticing at the time that they were imprinted “Uneeda Doll Co.,” packed my best books in them, and had them shipped to the U.P.S. terminal nearest my destination. Then I took a commercial flight and two commuter flights to reach the airport nearest my destination, in a small city which had a commercial kennel where I selected from among a litter of six the German Shepherd pup who seemed most interested in me, paid for him, had him leashed, and led him out into the evening mountain air, where I caught a taxicab, whose driver agreed, after phoning his wife to tell her that he wouldn’t be home before morning, to drive me to my destination, or as near to it as he could get without eviscerating the belly of his cab. He was, I learned, a graduate student in psychology at the university in that town, and when he learned that I had been an undergraduate there some years before, he offered to drive me around the campus for a quick look “to see how much everything everywhere had changed,” but I told him that I was all too aware of how much everything everywhere had changed, and said, “Let us get on to where we’re going.” He asked why I was going there. Since psychology was his field, I told him that I was returning to the womb, and let him make of that what he could.

  It took hours to reach the place, with him stopping by the road frequently to consult his maps, his county road maps and his topographic survey maps, and taking a few wrong turns that led nowhere. My pup crapped on the floor of the rear seat, and we stopped again to clean it up. When we reached the county seat and turned into the rugged road that pointed toward my destination, and this was past midnight, my driver asked, “Are they expecting you?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Why, whoever you’re going to visit,” he said.

  “The owls, the bears, the raccoons, the rabbits, the things that go bump in the night. No, they’re not expecting me.”

  He glanced over his shoulder as if he could see me in the dark. My pup began whining. The undercarriage of the cab began thumping and grating on bumps and rocks and ruts. Here and there the silhouette of a house loomed on a knoll or in a glade, but all were dark. A buck deer trotted into the headlights, and the driver slammed on the brakes. He slammed on the brakes again, several times, going around sharp rutted curves, down steep inclines, through a shallow bridgeless stream of water.

  At last we were there, in the abandoned village. “Just let me out anywhere,” I said. He stopped at once, in the middle of the road, turned on the dome light, gave me a look that seemed to say, Just wait until I tell about this character in the seminar on abnormal psych tomorrow. The fare came to ninety-three dollars, and I gave him a twenty percent tip. He helped me unload my luggage. Then drove away in haste.

  “Here we are,” I said to the pup, “almost.”

  I had never before in my life camped out overnight, and I wasn’t about to begin. I kicked in the door of an empty house on what had been the Main Street, but found it totally empty except for rat’s nests. I kicked in the door of another house and found that it still contained a bedframe, listing somewhat to one side, with a moldy mattress on it. I opened a suitcase and spread some of my shirts on the mattress, to make a sheet of sorts. From the same suitcase I took a box of dog biscuits and opened it and placed it on the floor where my pup could root in it. From a cardboard case I took a quart of bourbon and drank half of it, and went to sleep.

  After noon of the next day, after a stroll up and down the main road, during which I ascertained that the whole village was indeed abandoned, except for large numbers of reddish ridgebacked hogs freely roaming up and down the roads, between, around, and in the buildings, I left my luggage and the pup tethered to his leash inside the vacant house and, letting my eyes scan the five mountains that towered about and surrounded the valley, selected one that had a southeasterly exposure of steep bluffs. Leaving the road, after noticing that a recent model Swedish-designed automobile was parked in front of one of the town’s abandoned stores, I found an old logging trail that climbed up through the forest, or what was left of it, cut and cutover and cutover again until only saplings remained, and I began to wonder if I could find enough good timber for my log castle, but the rises up above seemed to be capped with denser foliage, and, as the logging road faded out, the trees became thicker hardwoods. It would be some time before I could distinguish an oak from an ash or black gum from a walnut, but they were all hardwood
s except for groves of cedar and juniper. Many of the larger trees had strands of barbed wire embedded firmly in their bark, suggesting that this had once been pasture land. I ripped my trousers climbing over one such wire fence that was still intact. Here and there were kitchen middens, or the detritus of vanished homes: piles of rusted cans and broken crockery, fragments of iron implements, bottles, a headless doll, an old oaken bucket with moss on it, a blue enamel wash basin. Then I was in pathless woods and thickets, meandering steadily upward and brushing limbs from my face. I worried only somewhat about getting lost. Farther along I came upon a hundred mushrooms growing in a perfect circle: the first “fairy ring” I’d ever seen. “If that can happen,” I said, “anything can happen.” I realized I was already talking aloud to myself. The trees became thicker and taller but the earth became increasingly miniaturized: small waterfalls, little boulders, seedling trees, lakes that are only shallow puddles, caves that are only fissures. I felt like Gulliver tromping through Lilliput.

  But then I found the bluff, which was no miniature but a monolithic escarpment of sandstone jutting out from the mountainside. The land in front of it was level; the land on top of it was level: either place would do to build my log castle, and during the construction I could sleep in the deeply recessed cavern below the bluff. Less than a week later, after a hike into the county seat to buy an axe and other tools, I had abandoned the idea of the log castle and had become increasingly absorbed with the idea of living as an Indian in my cavern. Among my few books was Dr. Mark Raymond Harrington’s The Ozark Bluff Dwellers (Museum of the American Indian Monograph No. 12, 1960), the only comprehensive attempt to record the lives and habits—or merely to speculate, from meager archaeological evidence about the lives and habits—of the people who had left their remains here and vanished some years before the time of Columbus. By coincidence, the only truly domestic animal these people had kept was the dog, and my German shepherd pup was as delighted in our new habitat as I was. I think he became an Indian dog faster than I became an Indian; at least he had no endless hours of weaving to make mats and baskets. Winter was months away, and I had much work to do, too much to keep me from feeling lonely.

  Consulting the Harrington book as to what sort of implements the Bluff-dwellers had used for cultivating the earth, I learned that they had usually scored or furrowed the earth with deer antlers, so, again consulting the book on how to fashion an atlatl, or spear thrower, I made one, practiced with it, and went out and speared the first buck I came across, who had a fine rack of nine points. It was the first animal I had killed, the first animal my dog had seen killed, but he was, as I later learned, so fond of deer that instead of sniffing around the body he ran away.

  As I was dragging it home, I came across a young man dressed all in green khaki and my first thought was Game Warden! but the shoulder patch on his shirt indicated that he was employed by the U.S. Forest Service. “Howdy,” he said. “That’s a mighty fine buck ye got.” I did not say anything, although I was tempted to address him in what I fancied might have been Bluff-dweller language. There is of course no record at all of that language. He went on, “’Course, deer season doesn’t start till next fall, but that’s no skin off my butt. Howsomever, I would like to know if you’re the party who’s settled in under the bluff up yonder.” Since this was not a direct question, it required no reply, so I did not. He continued, “That wouldn’t be any matter of mine neither, except that you’re on land that belongs to the National Forest, and I could evict you if I didn’t like your looks. Which isn’t to say that I do like your looks…” He took particular note of my breechclout, bare legs and sandals. “Playing Indian, huh? Okay, so just be sure and do like the Indians did. Don’t ever cut any live wood. Get all your firewood from dead wood on the ground. There’s plenty.” He started to go, but turned to say, “Try not to step on any seedlings.”

  With the deer antlers I scratched up a level plot of ground below my cavern and planted a small garden. Then I had little to do but eat venison day after day. I tried to feed it to my dog, but he wouldn’t touch it. I had heard of packs of otherwise nice and tame dogs going wild during winter and tracking down deer and ripping them to shreds and devouring them, and I wondered if my dog was abnormal. Harrington doesn’t say anything about how the Bluff-dwellers preserved their leftovers. I ate all I could and buried the rest.

  I lived for almost two months before the first wave of excruciating loneliness attacked me. Already I had learned the full advantages of solitude: of being able to sing and laugh aloud, or moan or cry, or pick my nose or scratch myself wherever I liked, or belch or fart (or tell myself jokes aloud: “He who farts in church must sit in his own pew.”). But suddenly, metaphorically, I was sitting in my own pew, alone and ostracized, feeling nostalgia for the better times of my past, feeling, what is worse, nostalgia for times which I never experienced but always knew had been possible. The imagined past is always more lost and irreplaceable than the real past. And I had no future. All I had was now, and now was a long, unchanging, lonely moment. If, as someone said, the moment Now exhales the past and inhales the future, then I had chronic emphysema. A winding path led to my place among the rocks, a cave which was a dead end, but I had neither the path nor the cave but the edge of both. I took up bird-watching, without benefit of binoculars, and learned to know them all, but their freedom became a constant reminder of my self-imprisonment. I took up the playing of this comb-and-tissue, but even the melodies, mostly Stephen Collins Foster and Victor Herbert, evoked the lost past, and most of my time was consumed in neither bird-watching nor comb-playing, but in brooding upon the past. Certainly all divorced people, the separated, the widowed or widowered, or the homeless, know the experience of isolation or exile or permanent cleavage from a lost love, and I think I had hoped that by magnifying it, intensifying it, like taking hair of the dog on a morning after, I could lessen the pain. I had, for a while, but now it was back in full force, and I was miserable. One of two things can happen to the perspective of the lonely person: he can acquire an immense power-vision out of his solitude, or he can become so feeble-sighted as to no longer know where he is. The first person achieves a certain purification of the spirit which allows him to transcend his own poor soul; the second person cannot get out of himself because he can’t even find himself. Never in my wanderings around and through the wild forest did I ever actually lose my way, but still I was lost in the woods. And nobody was searching for me, not even myself.

  My supply of booze ran out. That compelled me to put on a proper pair of pants over my breechclout, cover my bare chest with a shirt, exchange my moccasins for boots, and go down to the main road leading out of the village, to the occupied house where the man who lived there had turned out to be a third or fourth cousin of mine, and was friendly, although so stocky and muscular and mean-browed that I would never have wanted to cross him. He seemed to be living alone, in a modest but comfortable house, and he possessed, in addition to a pair of very handsome riding horses, an expensive German automobile of recent make. I wondered if he were a gentleman farmer, but little of his surrounding land was in cultivation, and no livestock in sight except the ubiquitous free-ranging pandemic hogs. Not wanting to blurt out my request immediately, namely, if and where I could find some illegal spirits, I made trifling conversation. It was a nice day, wasn’t it? It was, he allowed. What did he do? “Do? Why, I fish some, ride my A-rabian mare back up into the hills some, or just set on the steps a-throwin food at the pigs.” I meant, what did he do for a living? “Oh, I jist keep a eye on the pigs, hep out at butcherin, and so forth and so on.” There certainly were a lot of pigs. Why weren’t they fenced in? “No need of that. They don’t wander fur.” Could he tell me where I might find some whiskey, good, bad or middling, without going all the way to the next wet county? “Most of the ’shine brewed in these hills aint fitten to use fer hoss lineament,” he said, and I had taken him to mean “liniment,” but I could conceive how inferior bootleg liquor would ha
ve an effect upon one’s perception of the lineament of a horse. There was, however, he intimated (“I wouldn’t dast be a-tellin ye this if ye wan’t my cousin”), one distiller of superior mountain dew who operated in “these parts”: he did not deal directly with his customers. One left one’s money under a certain rock near a certain cascade up on the mountain (he sketched me a crude map: it was the waterfall I had come to call Kotex Falls), and then one returned in a day, or two, or a week, or two, to find the money gone and replaced by an earthenware jug of colorless but quite potable and potent corn spirits. My cousin fetched a case of Jack Daniels, saying, “If ye can tote this up the mountain, reckon it’ll hold ye till you find yore jug at the falls.” How much? I asked. “Ten bucks,” he said. For a whole case?! “Naw, I caint charge ye for this here. I mean that’s what you’re ’sposed to put under that rock by the falls to leave for J—for the feller that will bring ye the ’shine.” Well, thanks an awful lot, I said. If I can do anything for you some time…“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Come again.” But I never went again, never saw my cousin again until the funerals.

  Ever since, once the case of Jack had been consumed, I had subsisted and quenched my thirst, and doped the demons dancing round my brain, by invisible transactions with the nameless purveyor of fine moonshine swapped for cash at the falls. Some time would pass before the inevitable coincidence of he and I arriving at the falls at the same time, and meeting. Meanwhile, I brooded about having no feminine companionship, although it had been my firm intention to eschew it by settling here. I thought of writing the Foundation’s curator, my former associate whom I had recommended as my replacement, and asking him to retrieve my doll wife from the storeroom and have it crated and mailed to me. I would dress her as a Bluff-dweller woman, namely, in practically nothing except a fur shawl. But what would they think of me at the Foundation when the truth came out? And she might disturb my dog. No, I needed someone alive. On my semi-annual hikes into the county seat, I glimpsed a comely country maid or two, or twelve, and had fantasies of offering one of them a well-paying position, or variety of positions, as my housekeeper (cavernkeeper) and companion (concubine), but I lacked the nerve to approach anyone blindly and make the proposition. On one of those trips to the county seat, however, I mailed a “Personals” classified advertisement to both The Mother Earth News and The New York Review of Books: