The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “I’m honored. Would you like to see the house now?”

  “If I may.”

  She was surprised at how sprightly you got up and hopped into her automobile. She drove you into the abandoned town. “That’s where the bank used to be,” you pointed out, but she said,

  “Yes, I know. And that house next to it was the doctor’s office.”

  You passed another abandoned house and came to the town center, where she stopped. She stared for a long while at the big boarded-up general store, as if reluctant to force her eyes away from it and turn her head to the other side of the road, to look at The House. But finally she had to. (Hear me stopping and muting the horn again?) Her eyes changed from emerald to turquoise. Her breathing quickened. She opened the car door and stepped out. So did you. She ran her eyes the length of the porch: her eyes caressed the porch rail and the balusters, the three doors and their screen doors, especially the third one, and each windowpane, and every nail. In a whisper, as if in a sanctuary, she asked, “Is it locked?”

  “Yes. But I have the key.” You reached into your apron pocket and produced the key, which your grandson had given you several days before. Several days before, after the Bluff-dweller had left you, you had come here to “red things up” or “spruce” the place: sweeping, dusting, mopping, and making the bed in The Third Room, or, rather, The Room Behind the Third Door, because when the house had been converted into a hotel, the partition between the first and second rooms had been torn out in order to make a “lobby.” Now you unlocked The First Door and led the woman into this lobby. The furnishings were nondescript: little of the governor’s or his wife’s furniture remained; the fireplace had been walled up and the barrel woodstove replacing it was of this century. But the furnishings of the governor’s wife’s Friend, who had been his mistress, in The Third Room, were her original things, shipped from the capital: four-poster bed, bureau, mirrors and all. When Eliza Cunningham stepped into this room, she promptly fainted. You, who almost all your life had been familiar with the experience of fainting, knew that there was nothing to be done except wait. You, who almost all your life had been familiar with the experience of waiting, waited. You took a pillow from the bed and placed it beneath her head. You did something, which we are not permitted to observe, to test, to your own satisfaction, that it was a genuine swoon, not feigned. It was a quite authentic passing out. You waited. You fussed about, wiping up spots of dust you’d missed, rearranging the wash bowl and pitcher, straightening a mirror, lifting and squinting at the gold-framed photograph of the woman that had been taken by the old peddler when he had come to town as a photographer, the town’s first and only photographer. The resemblance was striking, but the woman had been much older at that time, and the photograph was black-and-white and did not hint at the color of her eyes or hair. Emerald possibly, and auburn possibly, and in possibility is the resurrection and the life. You did not believe that the Forest Ranger was the reincarnation of the Hermit who was both Grandfather and Father of the Forest Ranger’s Mistress. As anyone who knew their story is permitted to do, you believed that the Forest Ranger simply possessed a rich imagination. Now you did not believe that Eliza Cunningham was the reincarnation of Eliza Cunningham, but rather that she had managed, somehow, to find out so much about herself, no, I mean about the other Eliza Cunningham, that she identified with her so strongly that when she came ultimately in view of the room in which Eliza Cunningham had actually lived, the sight of it was too much for her consciousness, therefore she lost consciousness. You waited. You gazed at her, her lovely breasts rising and falling with her deep breathing, her face tranquil, her closed eyelids fluttering ever so slightly. She was so beautiful, and I would never have this chance again: I got on my knees and bent down and kissed her. You did not see me. She did, briefly, but then she stared at you. She stared and stared.

  “Are you all right?” you asked.

  She got to her feet and sat on the edge of the bed. She gave her head a vigorous shake. But then she nodded it. “I’m all right,” she said, “I’m home!”

  “Would you like a glass of water?” you asked, solicitously.

  “I’ll get it,” she said, and she knew not only where the bucket was, but where the well was, and she took the bucket to the well, and drew the well-bucket on its rope and poured the water from the well-bucket into the house bucket and returned it to the house, and with the gourd dipper scooped up one glassful for herself and one for you. She toasted, “Here’s to here.”

  “Here’s to here,” you repeated, charmed by her. You drank the wonderful water. There is no water anywhere on earth that tastes as good as that water. You reminded yourself to recommend it to the Bluff-dweller. After you drank the water, you offered to show her the rest of the house. You took her upstairs, where there were three other bedrooms, which had been the governor’s children’s rooms and, later, the guest rooms of the hotel, behind one of which is that room called “The Unfinished Room,” meant to be the room for the child that Eliza Cunningham never had, the child that she very carefully refrained from having, for it would have embarrassed her dear friend the governor’s wife if she had ever conceived anyone’s child, it would have outraged her if she had ever conceived a child by the governor, requiring that she watch the days of the month closely and also whenever possible to satisfy her lover with extravaginal orifices and artifices. Later generations had sometimes referred to The Unfinished Room as “The Storeroom” or even as “The Attic,” although it was not in the attic, but it was packed floor to ceiling with trunks of old clothes—whenever anyone had died in this town, this room for some reason had become the repository for their effects: a graveyard of garments, photographs, old books, mostly textbooks but also law books, medical books, out-of-date atlases and anthologies of obscure poets, and other junk: a pair of crank telephones, a wicker baby carriage, a spinning wheel, lamps of all kinds. It was here that your grandson had found the unfinished but nearly complete manuscript of the memoirs of his great-great-great-grandfather, the governor. It was here also that he had found the trunk containing the eighty-nine small journals or diaries of Eliza Cunningham. The trunk was still there, and the woman moved immediately to it and opened it, and gasped in disappointment at finding it empty.

  You explained, “My grandson transferred them to safekeeping in his vault at the bank in the county seat.”

  “Has he read them?” she asked, with alarm.

  “No,” you reassured her. “He started to, but, as he told me, it would have been an invasion of privacy, and he had no right to read them.”

  “Convey my thanks to him. Does he resemble The Governor?”

  “Quite a lot. The same blue eyes. Taller, even. And yellower hair.”

  “When can I meet him?”

  You hesitated. After all, you had hoped to “fix up” Eliza Cunningham with the Bluff-dweller. What if she met your grandson, now deprived of his Mistress, and your grandson made a grab for her, or vice versa? Anyone would love Liz. Anyone would love your grandson. “What shall I tell her?” you asked me. I hesitated. I had not counted on this. Any rational twenty-seven-year-old woman, given the choice between a runty forty-three-year-old alcoholic bluff-dwelling ex-curator and a tall, handsome twenty-seven-year-old millionaire philosopher ham-curer, could only choose the latter, even if he were not the direct descendant of the man that her namesake had been crazy about. Even if she wasn’t the actual reincarnation of Eliza Cunningham the First, who had wildly loved the great-great-great-grandfather of your grandson who was his spit and image, even if…“Hello? Are you still there?” you persisted, while Liz wondered why you searched the air.

  Yes, I’m here, but I’m doing some serious thinking. I suppose it’s inevitable that your grandson meet her, even though it’s not inevitable that either I or the Bluff-dweller ever meet him, farther along. But it worries me. The propinquities are out of sync. Kindly explain to her about your grandson’s Mistress.

  You told her that your grandson had bee
n living for a number of years with a woman who was his first cousin and who was eight years older than he, who had fallen in love with him on the day he was born and had decided right then and there to marry him when he grew up, but when he grew up he was determined never to marry anyone, so she had married someone else and had had two sons by that man, but kept on being in love with your grandson and finally took his virginity and kept on taking it until it was all gone and her husband was gone too, with the two sons, whom she eventually began to miss most miserably, even though she was able to live with and love your grandson in the extravagant solar-energy “double bubble” house that he had built for them at great expense, and that she wanted to restore the town while he did not, and they had fought over that, among other things, and she had missed her sons so much that just recently she had abandoned your grandson to fly out to the Coast and see them again. She might come back, but then again she might not, and you knew on pretty good authority that your grandson was a highly sexed individual and would leap at the chance to take a woman as comely as Liz into bed or grass or hay or even standing up. “Horny Old Horn,” you grumbled at me.

  “I wasn’t even thinking of that,” Liz protested. “I simply wanted to see The Governor’s descendant, and meet the discoverer of Kind.”

  “Re-discoverer and co-discoverer,” you pointed out. “He had some help from his best friend, the Forest Ranger.”

  “I’m eager to meet him, too,” she declared.

  “Well,” you said, leading her out to her automobile, “we might as well go meet them all.”

  Disgruntled, I sat in the porch swing and did not watch you ride out of sight.

  Chapter nineteen

  Mistaking dusk for dawn, he could not understand how the day grew darker as he scampered down the mountainside. His dog could have explained things to him, given voice, which I cannot do, this time around. So he plunged on, into the gloomy gloaming, and when he saw the green automobile parked in your yard he wondered who had spent the night with you, and waited for the sun to rise, but it did not. Instead, lightning bugs came out, and told him that it was night, not day. Somebody came out of the dogtrot and got into the green automobile and drove away, and he never saw that car again. Not that he didn’t see Somebody again: the next day she sold her car in the county seat, and walked back. When she was gone, he knocked on your door, and when you opened it, he spontaneously embraced you, not as a son hugs his mother, either. You embraced him in return; it was the first hug he’d had in a coon’s age, if coons lived that long, and most of them don’t. You were a few inches taller than he, but it didn’t much matter. He called you by name. You called him by name. A pity we cannot hear you, but we can see you, standing there, briefly touching, how touching. Then the clench broke, and he said, “I guess I overslept again.”

  “Have you eaten anything yet?” you asked.

  “No, but I’m not hungry.”

  “Yes, you are. How about some breakfast for supper? Scrambled eggs and bacon.”

  He sat at the table, noticing the dirty dishes, yours and hers. “Who was that?” he wanted to know.

  “What shall I tell him, at this point?” you inquired of me.

  Tell him of the sun and the moon, tell him of the tides, tell him of yin and yang, of doubles and shades. Tell him of bigeminal architecture. Tell him of Kind. Tell him the rest of the story of your life. Tell him the rest of Farther Along.

  “Don’t you hear that Old Horn?” you asked him.

  Down the road a ways the green automobile was honking at a herd of pigs who completely blocked the way.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The pigs took their own sweet time moving aside.

  You served him scrambled eggs and bacon. He asked you to please continue with your story.

  “Now where did I leave off?” you wondered.

  He prompted, “You woke up out of your trance one morning in that cheap hotel…”

  “Yes, and I had no idea where I was. I didn’t know the name of the city, or anything. I got my clothes on as fast as I could, and ran out of there, and kept running. I didn’t even have a handbag, nothing. It was a big city. I walked seven miles to get out of it. I walked seven years to get back here.”

  “It was that far?” he asked.

  “Oh, I wasn’t walking all that time. I had to stop and rest. I had to work to feed myself. I had one job for years. I wasn’t even sure how to find my way home. But I kept on coming back. And I was just lucky, I guess. I sort of just drifted back home by accident almost.”

  “You didn’t stop at your sister’s to see your baby or try to get it back from her?”

  “How could I? They might have locked me up again.”

  “When did you first see your daughter after coming back?”

  “I already owned my store, and I had just been appointed postmistress. My name must have been in the newspapers. The first two letters that came when the post office was moved from the big old store into my little store were, first, a letter from the Secretary to the Director of the State Hospital, congratulating me on my appointment and asking if I was by any chance the woman of the same name who had mysteriously escaped from the maximum security ward nine years previously, and, if so, could I satisfy their ‘burning curiosity’ as to how I had escaped, no further questions asked and no charges pressed, since the statute of limitations had passed and since, in any case, if I were sane enough to get myself appointed postmistress I must have been ‘well.’ I wrote thanking her and saying that it was very likely that I was the person of the same name but that I had no recollection of having escaped or even of anything following Christmas of my first year at the institution. The other letter was from my sister. My daughter, she informed me, was now twelve years old, was beautiful, was doing well in school, had just had her first menstrual period, and was proud to know that her ‘aunt’ had been appointed postmistress of her ‘mother’s’ hometown, and was eager to meet this ‘aunt’ whom she had never seen. My sister and her husband had no objection to allowing their ‘daughter’ to visit me, but only on condition that I solemnly swore never to reveal to her that I was her mother. I made that solemn oath, and kept it, until…but I’m getting ahead of my story.”

  “Yes, you are. There’s that seven-year gap. What happened during those seven years?”

  “Between escaping the asylum and reaching home?”

  “Between waking up out of the trance in the cheap hotel and getting back here.”

  “Well, it took some doing. When I walked those seven miles out of that city, I wasn’t even sure which direction I was heading, I just wanted to get out of that city. All I had with me were my clothes, which my hero, my rescuer, the man who wouldn’t for another fourteen years become my husband, had picked out for me, because, as he later told me, they had kept me stark naked in the state hospital, and he had had to wrap me in a blanket to get me out of there and then had stopped at a small country store to buy me a dress that was a size too small for me and a pair of shoes that were two sizes too large for me, and that’s all I had on when I walked those seven miles out of the city. No handbag, no wrap, and I figured it must still be March or early April, and right airish and crimpy, but as the day wore on and the sun got high it began to get hot. I couldn’t stop walking, though. I should at least have stopped at somebody’s house and asked for a drink of water, but I had to keep on walking. Just by instinct I was heading west, I don’t know why, as if somehow I knew that I had been taken eastwards from my home state, or like the stories you hear of cats that are taken a long ways from home but always somehow find their way back. I didn’t have any idea how far I was from home, but I suppose cats don’t either when they start out, and they just keep on walking until they’re tired and curl up under a bush or something, probably first they find a puddle of water where they can get a drink, or they catch a field mouse, and just keep on keeping on. I should have had the sense to know when to stop, but I just kept on walking, as the day became hotter, and not even the
way my feet were hurting, from all the walking as well as the two-sizes-too-big shoes, would make me stop. I must have fainted, or had a heat stroke. I woke up lying in a ditch beside the road, and a woman was mopping my forehead with the hem of her dress, and a man in some kind of uniform was standing behind her. I must have been a sight. Later, when the woman took me into her house and I caught sight of myself in a mirror, I wondered why the woman had even bothered with me. Falling into the ditch, I had got dirt all over my arms and dress and cheeks. My hair looked as if it hadn’t been brushed in months, or more, and perhaps it hadn’t, because I doubt if they ever brushed it in the asylum or let me brush it myself, and probably my hero/rescuer couldn’t have afforded to buy a hairbrush. I probably looked like a runaway from the crazy-house, and this woman who had rescued me and taken me into her fine home must have wondered about that too, because the first thing she did was to try to find out if I were sane.

  “‘Do you feel all right?’ she asked.

  “‘I guess I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I guess I must’ve passed out from trying to walk so far.’

  “‘Where have you been walking from?’ she wanted to know.

  “‘From the big city back yonder,’ I said.

  “‘What is the name of the city?’ she wanted to know.

  “I realized then that she was testing me, and that if I really had been a prostitute in that cheap hotel she might have me sent back there, or she might telephone to tell them that I had been found, and they would send somebody to get me and haul me back. ‘I don’t know,’ I told her. ‘I was just passing through.’

  “She eyed me suspiciously. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  “Enough of my memory had returned to me that I knew my name, and I told it to her. She noticed the absence of any handbag or purse and asked me if I could prove that was my name. I said she would just have to take my word for it. It wasn’t very smart of me to tell her my name. How was I to know that my name had been in all the newspapers, as an escapee from the asylum? I lived in her large house for over six years, as her ‘maidservant,’ and it wasn’t until I was ready to move on after all those years, not so much ready to move on as forced to move on, that she told me, the Christmas before I left, that the name I had given her at the time I first arrived was the same name that had been in all the newspapers, the name of a young woman who had escaped from the maximum security ward of a state hospital in the adjoining state. But the woman had come to believe that I was not insane and had thus not reported me, nor deported me from her house, or mansion really, but cleaned me up and gave me a starched maid’s uniform and employed me as what must have been one of the few servants in that county who were not Negro. She told me once that she did not believe in hiring Negroes; whether this meant she disliked Negroes or sympathized with them I never knew. Every year at Christmas she gave me one of her old dresses to wear on ‘my day off,’ but I never did anything on my day off except stay in my room and read or knit or sew. Every year at Christmas I would ask her when I could leave and try to find my way on home, but she would say something about ‘the statute of limitations,’ which I did not understand, and then tell me how dependent she was on me, and how hard it would be for her to get along without me, and then she would give me a raise, a generous raise, and since I never spent any money for anything I was able to save it all.