The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  It was almost suppertime before the first tentative diagnosis was brought out by one of the doctors: “Among other things, acute necrotic pancreatitis.”

  Somebody tried to explain this to you. It was one of the most critical gastrointestinal disorders: a severe inflammation causing death of tissue in the pancreas, that organ which secretes digestive juices into the duodenum and also produces insulin.

  By nightfall they had not been able to bring him out of his coma, and somebody suggested that you be taken home to get some sleep. Somebody took you home. Somebody took Liz Cunningham back to the hospital. Somebody allowed her into the I.C.U. to take a good look at the Bluff-dweller. Somebody drove three big-city internists from the airport to the hospital. Somebody died in the hospital, but not him.

  You tried to sleep, but couldn’t. You wanted to say a prayer, but knew that Kind neither listens to nor answers prayers. You are Kind; how could you pray to yourself? So you “prayed” to me. “Dear old Horn,” you observed, “your notes are so mournful and poignant lately. Are you preparing for the end?” There is no end, I said. THERE IS NEVER ANY END, I roared. And those notes sailed up the mountain and hit the cliffs and came floating back as echoes that can still be heard on any given night.

  Chapter twenty-four

  Alone, Liz Cunningham retraced her steps up the mountainside to the Bluff-dweller’s cavern. She had invited your grandson to go with her, but he had declined, partly because he had promised to drive you back to the hospital and partly because he was still somewhat miffed with the Bluff-dweller for burying the old man without his or his father’s permission. Not that they had any proprietary rights to the corpse, but his father, as a boy of ten, had been the last person the old man had seen and spoken to, when he died, sitting on the edge of the store porch and telling the boy the whole story of his many returns to the town.

  Liz did not consider that she was snooping, any more than she had been snooping by reading First’s diaries. She had a historian’s curiosity, a deep interest in the past, in anyone’s past, and she believed that in all likelihood the Bluff-dweller was dying, thus she wanted to see if she could not find out more about him than you had been able to tell her. Someone would have to write his story if he died. At least this was what Liz was telling herself as she poked around the cavern, examining his fire, a semicircle of stacked rocks, the crude clay bowls that he cooked with and ate out of, his woven baskets, his atlatl and spears. She was impressed with the miniature log castle on its throne, and wondered at the significance of it. A dollhouse? She was more impressed with his primitive but elaborate bed, and she lay down on it, trying it out, and found it so comfortable that she fell quickly asleep, something the Bluff-dweller had never been able to do, and she had a dream wherein she was a life-sized (although only 5’2”) doll, or statue, like Galatea, and Pygmalion in the form of the Bluff-dweller touched her and caused her to come to “life,” and to wake up from the dream.

  She was thirsty, and took a drink from the cavern’s icy spring. She noticed the pasteboard boxes imprinted “Uneeda Doll Co., Inc.” and examined the books they contained. She decided to “borrow” Dr. M.R. Harrington’s The Bluff Dwellers, and set it aside. She opened a large wooden box and found hundreds of 3 × 5 spiral-bound notepads, called “Ring-Master.” She opened one and saw that it was not a diary or even a journal as such, but a collection of brief essays, vignettes, about the decline of Western culture, the decay of American civilization, the deterioration of institutions and standards and art, the dying of life, all written in a small, cramped, page-filling handwriting that must have been the Bluff-dweller’s. He had a certain style. Although his ideas were thoroughly cynical and pessimistic, they were not so much disillusioned as without illusion: he saw through everything, his piercing vision stripped away all sham and hokum…but he failed miserably to inspect himself. Unfortunately, the notebooks were not dated, and she could only guess by the fading of the covers and pages which were the older ones, which more recent. She “borrowed” a couple dozen of the more recent ones and placed them atop the Harrington book. Then she inspected his wardrobe, both his Indian attire and his “civilized” attire, the latter including several pairs of fine elevator shoes.

  She selected a suit to bury him in, but then reflected that he would prefer an Indian burial like the one he had given to the old man. She noticed that someone, probably the moonshiner, had filled in the grave and tamped down the earth and covered it with one of the Bluff-dweller’s woven mats. There was plenty of room elsewhere in the cavern for the Bluff-dweller’s grave, but she wondered if there would be any state or local law against burial outside of an authorized cemetery. She had recently visited First’s grave in the village cemetery, and had noticed that the Bluff-dweller’s father and mother lay side by side not far from it, and there was an adjacent empty space where perhaps the Bluff-dweller might be properly buried. Wouldn’t he have wanted to lie beside his parents? It would be better to know his wishes, but he would probably never regain consciousness before he died. She searched through all of his effects, hunting for a last will and testament. Surely, if the Bluff-dweller had had such a strong death wish and such a self-destructive abuse of alcohol, he must have left a will. Where had he put it? Well, where would he keep his money?

  Under the mattress, of course. Or inside it. She felt around the edges of the bag of woven bluestem grass stuffed with wild turkey down. There was a pocket of the same material sewn into the foot of the mattress. She opened it and found hundreds of dollars in the denomination of tens. And she found the will.

  The will was not written in strictly correct legal terminology, and it had no witnesses, but it was obviously in his own handwriting and would probably pass probate. It gave brief instructions for his burial: his corpse was to be dressed in breechclout, sandals, his fanciest robe covered with quail feathers, and his sparring helmet, and placed with his atlatl and spears in a grave dug in the floor of this cavern. He cited page numbers from the Harrington book regarding this burial and the simple ceremony accompanying it. He specifically requested that those in attendance refrain from singing “Farther Along,” because, “Don’t you know it’s a joke? We won’t understand a damn thing farther along. But cheer up, my brothers and sisters, anyway.” He listed his assets, a considerable amount of stocks and bonds in a safe-deposit box of a local bank. Whatever contents of this cavern might be desired, he willed to his “dear friend,” the moonshiner. “My financial estate,” he wrote, “is to be divided into four equal parts and distributed as follows.” One of these four parts he left to you, dear lady. Another he left to the moonshiner, enough to enable him to retire from the trade if he would wish to. The third part he willed to his former wife. And the fourth part he left to “The woman, whoever she is, who was going to save me from myself.” Liz Cunningham realized, with a start, “That’s me.” She also realized that she had better not let on that she had discovered this document herself. She tucked the will back into its pocket at the foot of the mattress. When the Bluff-dweller died, she could simply suggest to your grandson, if he didn’t guess it himself, the possible location of a will.

  Are we getting a poor impression of Liz Cunningham? Can we not forgive her that the thought passed through her head that her share of the Bluff-dweller’s legacy would enable her to take several years off from her teaching duties at the University and devote them to researching the life of Sarah Pulliman, the only black woman resident of this county in the 1860s, who had been befriended by Eliza the First? You, dearest, have already remarked that she was “conceited,” and I am not saying anything to remove the impression of her self-centeredness. I cannot very easily give you all my love without viewing her as a competitor, just as she could not even think about giving any love to the Bluff-dweller as long as your stunning grandson was “available.” If the Bluff-dweller died, I would want part of the blame to devolve upon that woman, whoever she was, who was going to save him from himself but who did not act in time. So we cannot feel
much sympathy or admiration for her.

  But we should recognize that, out of that very self-centeredness, her primary motive in coming to the cavern was not to find out about the Bluff-dweller so much as in the hope of finding out something about herself. What could the cavern possibly have revealed to her about herself? Well, it might have convinced her that she would never have had the fortitude to have lived alone as a Bluff-dweller, or even to have lived with the Bluff-dweller as his squaw. It might have made her wonder if she had the fortitude to be First as well as Second. It might have made her remember all of the fortitude that had been required for her simply to be Second. If nothing else at all, the experience of the visit to the cave would have made her suddenly realize something that has escaped all of us, even the Bluff-dweller himself: the almost too-obvious metaphor of Plato’s myth-of-the-cave, of projections of illusions, of selves and life too insubstantially seen, of the rift or gap between “reality” as we would like for it to be and as it often so sadly is. This is the essence of what my horn and your harmonica have been trying to evoke. When Liz Cunningham thought of this, she began to feel compassion for the dying Bluff-dweller, as well as compassion for herself, her self caught between a barren past and an undreamt future. She took some of the Bluffdweller’s notebooks “home” to read, and read them well, and found them most interesting.

  Chapter twenty-five

  Privately, the specialists, the internists who were getting several hundred dollars an hour for their services, spent hours arguing among themselves. One of them wanted to administer calculated doses of curare, a deadly poison, in order to reduce the metabolism so that the digestive system would not digest itself; the other two were opposed to this. Meanwhile the patient remained in “critical condition.”

  Meanwhile you sat at his bedside, holding his hand. “Horn, can he hear me?” you asked. Possibly, I replied. Unconsciously or subliminally, he can probably hear you. “What shall I say to him?” you asked. “How can I get it across to him that we don’t want him to die?” There’s nothing you can say that will do that, my heart. “Then what can I say?” Why don’t you play on your harmonica the rest of your story, the story of how you and The Visitor and his girl-baby came back home? “I’m getting tired of this ‘harmonica’ business,” you said. “At a time like this, I don’t think it’s funny.” It’s not meant to be funny, love; it’s meant to describe the sound of your voice when you speak. Speak. Please speak and let us hear you.

  You spoke. “He was fifty-two years old, but had never been married. The mother of his little girl had been married, against her will, to another man and had died in childbirth. Bluff-dweller, will you live to have a child? The mother’s husband challenged him to a duel, which he, the husband, lost, was shot and killed, so that he, The Visitor, had to take the girl-baby and flee. He fled, and in his long trek westward from that tiny and lost mountain town he perceived at one point that the little girl was very thirsty and he perceived a white mansion on a knoll not far from the road he traveled, and saw a thirty-one-year-old woman sitting in a car beside the mansion and thought to ask her for water for the baby and quickly perceived that she was bound and gagged, and liberated her, and demolished her tormentor. Together they—we—set out to find my way home. Unlike the loutish chauffeur, practically the only man I’d known for years, he was extremely polite, courteous, and gentle, but he never even suggested that he wanted me physically. I never slept with him. I slept near him, very near him, a number of times, but never with him. When the baby girl was old enough to talk, she called me “Mama” but I did not mother her, much, and he had to wait until she was even older to explain to her that I was not her mother. By then, we were back home. It had taken some time, all of it on foot. I suppose I could easily have afforded to buy bus tickets, but I did not know what bus to take, because, truthfully, I didn’t know where my home was. I knew what state it was in, and that it was in the mountains, and I knew the name of the county and the county seat and the town itself, but I didn’t know there was any such thing as a map, other than a map of the world, which was too large, or rather too small, to show the town, and apparently he didn’t either. We just kept on walking, day after day, following the sun. Sometimes I would carry the girl. Anyone we met—but we met scarcely anyone—would assume that I was the girl’s mother.”

  A nurse came out from behind the glass-walled observation station and touched you on the shoulder and said gently, “I doubt that he can hear you.”

  “Is there anything wrong with my talking to him?” you asked.

  The nurse looked flustered. “Well,” she said, “it might be disturbing him.” This was ridiculous, because he did not look disturbed. But hospital regulations required that at least two attendants be on duty at all times in the Intensive Care Unit, and they did not always have anything to do. They stood at their monitors and monitored. Everything had to be just right. It did not seem right to this nurse that this old lady was holding the comatose Bluff-dweller’s hand and talking nonstop to him. Maybe she was his mother. “Go on, if you feel like it,” the nurse said, and retreated behind the glass panel.

  You felt like it, and you told him, “Once I got up my nerve and asked The Visitor his destination, and he replied, ‘the hills of Vaucluse.’ I asked him where that was, because I had never heard of the place. He laughed and said, ‘Oh, it could be anywhere.’ Another time he told me that he was just looking for some other place which would remind him of places he had lived before. We went on, and as the mountains rose higher I sensed we were nearing the right place, and I stopped to ask a farmer what county we were in, and sure enough it was that county, and the farmer told me which roads to take to reach home. When we reached it, when The Visitor saw the little village, which wasn’t at all dead and abandoned then, but had several stores and the little hotel and a blacksmith and physicians and dentist, The Visitor said ‘This will do,’ and I thought, Oh good heavens, he intends to settle here, and I knew that if he did I would probably become involved with him. He did settle there, he got himself a jigsaw and built a Carpenter Gothic house up in a holler on the east side of a mountain east of town, and he painted it yellow. You’ve never seen that house, have you? Don’t you want to live, so you can see it sometime? It’s where the Forest Ranger lives with his Mistress and their Son. It has natural air-conditioning, partly because of its construction and partly because of cool air coming from a cavern beneath it. Was your cavern always cool on the hottest days? But if you live, you don’t want to go back to it, do you?

  “No, I did not become involved with The Visitor. I used my money to buy that house which had a general store in the middle of it, a house-and-store that had been built when I was a child, and operated carelessly by a man who drank too much and lost the mortgage on it. Drinking too much never made any man better, but it sure made a lot of them think they were better, and they were all wrong. But I’m not going to preach to you. The Visitor came to visit my store not more than once a month, if that often—but then he was not The Visitor anymore, he was the Hermit, or that’s what people called him. No one ever knew that he and his little girl had come to town with me, no one ever heard the story of how he had rescued me from that chauffeur. I would listen to the loafers sitting on the porch of my store speculating for hours on end about who the Hermit was and where he had come from and what he was doing. It gave them something to do. I thought that if I told them what I knew about his origins and his life, it would deprive them of the pleasure of exercising their imaginations in the fabrication of wild stories about him. Sometimes, when the loafers thought I was inside the store and couldn’t hear them, they would speculate about me, too, wondering where I had been all those years I’d been away, imagining where and how I had obtained the money to buy the store, and kidding each other about who was going to get up the nerve to propose to me or even to proposition me. The Hermit would always come to the store when he knew the loafers would not be around. He hardly bought anything: a box of salt or a piece of cloth
. But he would sit for a while and visit. I never learned what he did for income, for what little money he had to buy even a box of salt, but I learned everything else about him, and he about me. It was funny, in a way: the loafers sitting on the porch knowing almost nothing about either of us, but concocting the craziest stories about us, while we knew everything about each other, and had to concoct nothing. If you will live, if you will get well and live, I’ll tell you his whole story some day. Nothing of significance ever happened to him while he lived in our town, until his death. He raised his child to womanhood, and taught her the ways of the world.

  “Nothing of significance happened to me, for years, until one night the man who had fathered my child and had rescued me from the asylum and had taken me to that hotel where he lost me, and had become a minister of the gospel because he had thought that ‘God’ had told him that’s what he would have to do in order to make me well, returned to our town after fourteen years and found me. The story of his return, and his finding me and marrying me, is a beautiful story, but I won’t tell it to you unless you promise me that you will live.”

  Chapter twenty-six

  You went out into the night air to escape the smells of the hospital. You sat alone on a bench on the lawn of the hospital. Shortly the Bluff-dweller’s dog ambled over and sat at your feet, giving you an imploring look, but there was nothing you could say to him other than to call him by name and pat his head. You inhaled deeply of the fragrant night air and reflected that there is practically nothing that smells worse than a hospital. I quite agree, I said. “Old Horn, are you there?” you said. Of course, I’m always here, I said. “I wish you could hold my hand,” you said. I held your hand and asked, How’s that? “Oh, great Kind!” you exclaimed. “You really are doing it, aren’t you?” I really am. “If you have such power, please tell me what’s happening.”