The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Don’t become too interested in him,” said the ring finger, “because most of his heart will always belong to her,” indicating the left middle finger, “Jeleny Wieny,” who, however, by some illusionistic trick of Tricky Jick’s, suddenly disappeared.

  “I don’t see her,” said the little finger. “She’s gone.”

  “Yes, but she might come back,” said the ring finger.

  “When and if she does, I shall not stand in her way,” declared the little finger. “But until then, he fascinates me considerably, and I would like to know him well.”

  The moonshiner clenched his fists and shook them. “Damned gabby women,” he said, and reached for the jug and tilted himself a lusty swallow. The Bluff-dweller was rendered speechless, and took the jug back and poured a good quantity down his throat.

  When at length the Bluff-dweller was able to frame his question, it was simply, “How do you do that?”

  “Do which?” the moonshiner said.

  “Make your fingers say those things.”

  “Aw, wal, now, I jist lissen, and pro-jeck. Or Pro-Jick.”

  Ursulie the bear was curled up in sleep, with Robber asleep atop one of her powerful shoulders. The Bluff-dweller’s dog crept cautiously nearer, sniffing.

  You and Eliza Cunningham were sitting together on the porch of The House. She was reading to you a passage from one of First’s diaries.

  Your grandson, unseen, was sitting in his swivel chair at the big round window of his living room, observing you through his powerful telescope. After a while, he swung the telescope northward, and observed the return to town of the expensive German automobile belonging to his foreman whom we are calling “Foreman.”

  Dusk was coming on, and the Bluff-dweller had to leave soon, to find his way home. But first he said, “Jick, would you help me do something?”

  “Depends,” said Jick noncommittally.

  The Bluff-dweller’s voice was a little slurred. “I want to bury that old man in the store. I want to give him an Indian burial in Bluff-dweller fashion.”

  “He weren’t a injun,” Jick pointed out.

  “He was the Indian’s mirror,” the Bluff-dweller said. “Do you understand? Or he was the end of the parentheses, but you wouldn’t understand that. Or would you? The white man came here and displaced the Indian. The Indians were Osages, not Bluff-dwellers, but I think the Osages must have been descended from the Bluff-dwellers. The Indians were driven west. The old man came here from the east, a Yankee peddler, bringing the apprut…the appurtrances…the appurtenances of progress, the things that these country people never realized they had any use for until he sold them to them and they became accustomed to using them, and couldn’t do without them, just as today most people who get television can’t break the habit, although they feel guilty about it and have to justify it endlessly to themselves and others. I’m sure the old man probably wasn’t aware of the harm that comes with progress, it was just a job to him, selling those things, a way to earn his living, but he kept on coming, year after year, bringing and selling something new. In a way, it’s appropriate that he’s in that store, because the store itself sold a lot of stuff that people could have done without if they hadn’t known it existed. You said that some people, ‘mean-spirited folks’ you called them, claimed that the things he sold in the town caused the town to die, and therefore it’s appropriate that he is the only resident of the town today. That might be partly true, in a way, but—”

  “He aint the only resident of the town anymore,” Jick said, and again his left little finger rose up and took a curtsey.

  The Bluff-dweller ignored her, and went on, “The point I’m trying to make is—have you ever heard of ‘Montezuma’s revenge’? No?—well, in a way, the old man was the Indian’s revenge, by bringing progress to the white settlers who had displaced the Indian. For centuries the Indian had lived happily an essentially unchanged life. There was no such thing as progress, no such word in the Indian’s language. Of course, the white people who lived in these hills were the most deliberately unprogressive of all the people in this nation, but they could not help wanting and buying the articles that the old man brought from the east year by year, and their increasing materialism contributed in large measure to their decline.”

  “I aint sure I understand that none too well. If you was to ast me, I’d say that the town died out because most all of ’em moved out west lookin fer even more progress.”

  “But the peddler had whetted their appetites for that progress, don’t you see?”

  “Yeah, but I still don’t see why he’s got to be buried. What right have we got to bury him, injun-fashion or any old way?”

  “It’s not so much a right as an obligation. No one else seems concerned about his interment. As you said, that old store building could collapse at any time. If the old man can’t be buried in the village cemetery because he wasn’t a resident, then he deserves a ritual Indian burial.”

  “Where?”

  “Beneath the floor of my cavern.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way the Bluff-dwellers buried them.”

  “You reckon you’d be comfy still livin there with a dead body underneath?”

  “If the Bluff-dwellers could, I can.”

  “Hmmm.” Jick seemed to be thinking about it. “But what if they find out?”

  “They who?”

  Up stood the right middle finger, your grandson. “He owns the store, after all,” Jick pointed out.

  “But he doesn’t own the body.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “No one can own a body, except his own.”

  “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When do you aim to do the burying?”

  “Tomorrow. But we’d have to move the body under cover of darkness. Tonight.”

  “Whatever ye say, ole buddy.”

  After a final exchange of swallows from the jug, the Bluff-dweller and the moonshiner went to the Bluff-dweller’s cavern to get his lantern. It was the first time that the moonshiner had been there, and he was impressed at how much larger it was than his own rock shelter. He observed that there was plenty of room to bury a body.

  “Stay here,” the Bluff-dweller told his dog. “Sit. Lie. We’ll be back soon.” He and the moonshiner went down into the village as the full dark of night came on. Inside the store they fashioned a litter from a couple of men’s overcoats tied to a pair of long hoe handles, and on this stretcher they placed the body of The World’s Oldest Man, removed from the candy showcase. Out through the rear window they edged it, and, with Jick carrying the front of the handles behind him and the Bluff-dweller holding up the rear, and the lantern, they transported the body undetected out of the almost-deserted village: they noticed a kerosene lamp burning within the old hotel and the silhouette of a woman reading. “Who is that?” the Bluff-dweller wondered aloud. The moonshiner, both hands firmly gripping the stretcher handles, was only able to wiggle his left little finger.

  At the cavern, the Bluff-dweller thanked the moonshiner for his help, and asked, “Do you want to attend the funeral tomorrow?”

  “Why, I reckon so. What time?”

  “The body should be lowered into the grave at the same time, and at the same speed, that the sun sets. We’ll have to dig the grave before then.”

  “See you tomorrow afternoon then,” the moonshiner said, and the Bluff-dweller lent him the lantern to find his way home.

  The Bluff-dweller got out his jug for his sleeping medicine, struck flint to ignite a Bluff-dweller-type torch to read by, and reread the section of the Harrington book on Bluff-dweller burials. He drank and read until he could no longer concentrate on the words. Then he tried to sleep, but discovered that he could not erase the thought of the dead body that was sharing the cavern with him, nor could he resist giving the body an occasional glance. He drank some more. And then he drank some more. And some more.

  When the moonshiner returned t
he next afternoon, the Bluff-dweller was still asleep. The moonshiner decided not to wake him. In the innermost corner of the cavern, he began to dig the grave by himself, using the Bluff-dweller’s crude Bluff-dweller-type shovel. He dug and he dug, and the Bluff-dweller did not wake up. Deep into the dust and dirt, he found projectile points and heaps of the shells of periwinkles, the tiny water snails that had constituted an important part of the Bluff-dweller’s diet. The old Bluff-dweller, not the new one. Digging deeper, the shovel struck a pelvic bone, and the moonshiner put the shovel out of the pit and used his hands, his ten magic fingers, to scoop away carefully the dirt around the remains, fairly well preserved, of a Bluff-dweller maiden. The World’s Oldest Man, a loveless bachelor all his life, was going to have a bedmate in his final burial. She was buried in the fully flexed position characteristic of the Bluff-dwellers (says Harrington), her knees drawn up almost to her chin, as she rested face down on a deerskin robe atop a bedding of grass. The moonshiner thought it was only a child, so small she was, but the Bluff-dwellers had been a small breed of people, and this was the body of a fully grown woman.

  The Bluff-dweller’s dog was whining piteously and pawing at the sleeping body of the Bluff-dweller. The moonshiner climbed up out of the grave and gave the Bluff-dweller’s shoulders a vigorous shake, but it did not rouse him. “Git up, sir!” the moonshiner hollered. “The sun’s a-gorn to go down in jist a little bit!” But the Bluff-dweller would not wake.

  The moonshiner continued with the grave, widening it so that the body of The World’s Oldest Man could lie beside the body of the maiden. The dog continued whining and pawing at his master.

  The grave was finished. The sun was about to touch a distant mountain peak. The Bluff-dweller woke up slowly, stood slowly, bent from the waist slowly, and vomited quickly, blood, bile, parts of stomach lining and “Kind knows what all!” as the moonshiner later tried to describe it to others.

  “You okay?” the moonshiner asked when the Bluff-dweller had nothing left to vomit. The Bluff-dweller shook his head. “I done got the grave ready, and lookee thar!” the moonshiner pointed at the red sun. “Hit’s jist about to set!”

  The Bluff-dweller, clutching his abdomen in excruciating pain, staggered to the edge of the grave and peered into it.

  “They’s a injun already in thar!” the moonshiner said. “Lookit her long hair. Must’ve been a gal.”

  “I feel terrible,” the Bluff-dweller said, but he had enough presence of mind to fetch a new deerskin robe for the moonshiner to spread on the earth beside the maiden’s body, to receive the body of the old man. Just in time, for the sun had touched the mountaintop. The Bluff-dweller was in too much pain to assist the moonshiner in lowering the old man’s body into the grave. The moonshiner had to do it all by himself, lowering it slowly in tune with the sun’s decline.

  The Bluff-dweller had only enough strength to raise his arms and intone the words, “Great Spirit, we commend him unto you.”

  The moonshiner repeated this, but changed it to, “Kind Spirit, we commend him unto you.”

  From the near woods, hidden people began to sing, and my French horn began to sound. You were there, your grandson was there, your grandson’s father was there, “Foreman” was there, Eliza Cunningham was there, the Forest Ranger and his Mistress and their Son were there, and several others, all of the people who still lived near the abandoned town, some thirty-odd, singing:

  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.

  The moonshiner joined in, with an excellent countertenor or male alto voice. The Bluff-dweller tried to join in for the chorus, but his head was ringing, he could not hear the notes well, and his stomach was giving him the worst time of his life, and it was perhaps in avoidance of this terrible pain that he managed to black out. He went into a coma and fell headlong into the grave.

  Chapter twenty-three

  You hated that room, with its bamboo furniture and its bamboo coffee tables stacked with old Reader’s Digests and ashtrays never emptied of their butts. It was not so long ago that you had had to spend so much time in that room, morning, noon and night, waiting for the word that you did not have to wait for, shouldn’t have been required to wait for, because you knew what the word would be: dead, although that hadn’t been the word they had used, choosing instead some euphemism you’d already forgotten: “departed,” “gone,” “called home,” “left us,” or “at rest.” You sat with the others, the others there were chairs for, others standing up or, like the moonshiner, pacing restlessly up and down the corridor. “I.C.U.,” they called this place, and you had, before, played with that both as “I see you,” “I see you dying,” and “Icy you,” you being icy cool in the face of death. Intensive Care Unit is what it stood for, but now you played, in your idleness, with alternative meanings of the initials: I Cannot Understand. It Couldn’t Unmake. Illness Cured Unawares. In Comes Undertaker. Indifferent Casual Usefulness. Intermittent Cruel Utterances: “The X-rays are mostly negative, except for gallstones and a duodenal ulcer…” “The pulse is erratic…” “We can’t know yet if there is brain damage…” “The white cell count is very high…”

  The doctors came and went. At dawn Foreman went and came, bringing coffee, orange juice and donuts for all, as well as a can of dog food for the Bluff-dweller’s dog, who was sitting on the steps of the hospital. The first time you’d ever been in this hospital was when your first grandchild was born here, the same one who’d written you recently, in the same mail with Eliza Cunningham’s letter. The last time you’d been in this hospital was to stand here in this same I.C.U., waving in the face of one of these same doctors a copy of your husband’s living will and demanding that they remove the respirator from his mouth and nose. Now this man who had in such a short time grown so close to you was hooked up to all the machines, respirator and needles and electrodes and stomach pump, tubes extending from all his parts to drain and leech and feed and bleed him, and you had no right to demand, if the time came, that he be removed from them. You glanced at Liz Cunningham, who was yawning so much you could see the back of her throat.

  Your grandson and his best friend the Forest Ranger had wandered down the hall to look at a terminally ill cancer patient. Your grandson and the Forest Ranger’s Mistress, both millionaires several times over, had mildly argued over who would have the privilege of paying the Bluff-dweller’s hospital expenses. They had decided on a coin flip, and the Forest Ranger’s Mistress had called it “tails,” which it was.

  Noon passed. You dozed. Foreman drove Liz Cunningham “home” so she could get some sleep; this matter didn’t terribly concern her…yet. You took advantage of her absence to open and read the dossiers that Foreman had compiled on First and Second, matching them: First was born in 1838 in the small hill village just north of the state river in what was then virtually a wilderness; her father had a criminal record. Second was born in 1953 in a small railroad village near the center of the state north of this one; her father also had a criminal record. At the age of six, First was taken to the capital city of this state to live with her grandfather, who had been the capital’s first physician and mayor. At the age of six, Second was taken to the capital city of her state to live with her grandfather, who was a lawyer and state senator. First’s grandfather and Second’s grandfather had each given their granddaughters the best education that was obtainable at the time and under the circumstances (First’s: 1844–1856; Second’s: 1959–1977). Both grandfathers had been very strict, perhaps cruel. Both grandmothers had been mentally unbalanced. Upon completion of her education, First had taught school at a Female Academy in the capital, from 1857 until she met the Secession Convention delegate who was to become her lover and to become governor during Reconstruction. Second had taught history at the branch of the state university in her state until the present time, when she met th
e great-great-great-grandson of that governor. First had been violently opposed to slavery; Second had written her Ph.D. dissertation about slavery. First had had one brief affair, at the age of 20, before she met the governor-to-be. Second had had a one-year affair while in graduate school.

  “What does it matter?” you asked me, closing the dossiers. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I can’t tell you that, my love, I replied. Don’t ask me.

  “Were you speakin to me, ma’am?” the moonshiner said.

  “No,” you said, but you changed your mind. “Yes, I was asking you if you could tell me if he’s going to die.”

  The moonshiner held up his right little finger, which was completely black.

  You gasped. “Do you mean he’s already dead?”

  The moonshiner shook his head. A doctor, passing by, noticed the black finger and seized the moonshiner’s hand, saying, “Good Lord! How did that happen? We’ll have to amputate it.”

  “Lak hell ye will!” said the moonshiner, jerking his hand away and shoving it into his pants pocket.

  “But it’s severely gangrenous. If we don’t amputate it, you could lose your whole hand. Or arm.”

  “Mister, I’ll worry about that.”

  “Boy, are your parents here?”

  “They’re both dead.”

  “Who’s your legal guardian?”

  “Aint got ary.”

  The doctor turned to you and asked, “Are you related?”

  “Yes,” you said with a smile. “We are Kindred.”

  “Then I urge you to persuade this boy to go into surgery at once.”

  “I can’t tell him what to do.”

  The doctor clapped his brow and walked away, muttering, “Stupid hillbillies.”

  “How did it happen, Jick?” you wanted to know.

  “He drank too much,” he said.

  “Your finger, I mean,” you said.

  “That’s what I mean,” he said.

  The afternoon wore on. Your neighbors came and went, and went and came. Somebody informed you that the Forest Ranger’s Mistress had instructed the hospital administrator to have the best specialists flown in at her expense. They were on their way, from their big city hospitals.