The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Harrigan spent the early hours of each evening assembling his lecture and color slides for the next day’s class in the history of art. Then, when the noise on the street grew too oppressive, he would check to see if he had enough ice cubes and cigarettes to get him through the night, refill his tumbler of bourbon, hook up the safety latch on the door, sprawl into the lone easy chair, overstuffed and threadbare or overthreaded and stuffingbare, and begin his nightly Meditation Upon Ruins. He could have shut out the noise on the street by the simple expedient of turning off his hearing aid, but then he would not have heard the knock at the door—even though, in all the months he lived there, the knock never came. But the sounds of the imagined musical instruments playing the Theme of the Meditation Upon Ruins, along with his usual tinnitus, an auditory phenomenon of the hearing-impaired, were enough to obscure the street’s constant honks and yelps and clatters.

  One day, toward the end of the calendar year, when the students were all gone home for the holidays to their sunflower farms and their jerkwater towns with names like Crook City and Hub City and Junction City, and the poinsettia the department’s secretary had given him as his only Christmas present had begun to droop, and the blizzards had not yet blown in off the plains, he got away for the first time since coming to Brookings, and headed his four-wheel-drive Blazer northeastward toward Sauk Centre, taking back roads and blue highways snowplowed and accessible but leisurely, wandering through tiny hamlets with names like Clara City and Big Bend City and Holmes City. Slowing down just enough to pass through, he wondered, How did they dare name such places “City”? When he got to Sauk Centre he discovered that it looked exactly like Brookings. There were even walk-ups over the Main Street furniture store, and he almost knocked at the door of one that looked like his own. Instead he drank a half-pint at the grave of Sinclair Lewis and returned the way he had come. Driving back to South Dakota, he felt a pang of conscience for not having knocked at that door, behind which someone was probably waiting for a knock.

  Back in Brookings he found a substitute for the knock that never came at his door: a letter in his mailbox. Apart from his monthly bank statement and the usual offers of instant riches if he would but subscribe, there were not even bills. He had no memberships and he had escaped from Visa. He had also escaped from the few living friends of his past and from all but his wife, who did not write. He had given his Main Avenue address to only a few, including his publisher, who had not published him for years but needed to send semiannual computerized royalty statements attesting to the absence of sales, and, less than semi-annually, a forwarded fan letter. This appeared to be one of those, its return address in Minnesota, whence he had just come. One of those little sad accidents of destiny: had its gushing author written a few days earlier, he might have gone to visit him (or her) during this recent trip.

  The writer had carefully typewritten the letter and thus could not be easily sex-checked; he (or she) had recently read an old Harrigan novel about a young couple’s exploration of Eastern ghost towns. “Never has a story so totally captured my interest and attention….” “…I reacted with varied emotions—curiosity, uneasiness, fascination, sadness, and finally, awe….” Before he could get a word in edgewise, the reader continued this prefatory flourish. “…captivating…such suspense and romance…portrayed beautifully…” Harrigan realized why he had been so reluctant to open this letter: he did not need such praise at a time when he had almost convinced himself that he was not worthy of it. He did not want to be enticed into any more ambitions, to give up the mere teaching of art history and turn his hand again to fiction. “STOP!” he nearly yelled, but waited until the enthusiastic fan paused for breath and asked Harrigan an abrupt question:

  “Have you ever lived in Arkansas? How did you know so much about it?”

  Before answering, he stole a quick glance again at the return address. His mistake: Minnesota was the name of the street, not the state, a certain Minnesota Street in a certain Beebe, Arkansas. He remembered, vaguely, Beebe (pronounced identically with the projectile of the airgun manufactured by Daisy of Arkansas), and he mentally changed his reply from “You’ll be surprised I drove through your town just the other day” to “You’ll be surprised to know I’ve driven through Beebe a thousand times, but never stopped. Maybe next time I’ll stop.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” he said to—what’s the name? the signature at the bottom, Kim, was bold and boyish; Kipling’s Kim was very much a boy—“I was born in Arkansas, and grew to manhood there. I’ve been through Beebe many times.”

  The New Year’s Eve party of the Brookings Singles Club went on without him. The students returned from Mound City, Lake City, Rapid City, Silver City. The blizzards blew in and his Blazer’s engine block froze and cracked, making him walk to the university each day, better than coffee for sobering up. One evening he came back with both arms full of groceries, necessities, half-gallon of bourbon, bag of ice cubes, carton of cigarettes, and just enough fingers to pluck the letter out of the mailbox.

  “How interesting you’ve traveled through Beebe so many times. It’s a small and comfortable little town. The library has your other novels, and now I’ve read them all! Yesterday I hopped into my Z and drove off to Newton County and tried to find ‘Stay More.’ I didn’t; I found Jasper, though, and Parthenon, and some other places. Being there gave me a sense of history, of serenity, and”—she paused, seemed to be groping for words—“and a longing for something I am not even sure of.”

  A longing for the author, perhaps? Every writer writes, one of them once said, in expectation of love. Suddenly the music of the Theme of the Meditation Upon Ruins began playing in his tinnitus as she went on: “It is as you wrote, in that most haunting of passages, interrupting your own narrative of the love story to interject: ‘Oh, this is the story of—you know it, don’t you?—a story not of ghost towns but of lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul, oh, this is not a story of actual places where actual people lived and dreamed and died but a story of lost lives and abandoned dreams and the dying of childhood, oh, a story of the ghost villages of the mind….’”

  He wished she had not quoted back his words to him. Of all the words he had written, those were the ones he could not bear to hear.

  “You say that Stay More does not exist,” she continued. “Maybe not. But while driving around Newton County in search of it, I came upon a place that is called, or used to be called, Marble City. It isn’t Stay More by a long shot, although the people who once lived there must have been the same kind of folks who populate your books. I couldn’t help wondering, Did they really expect it to become a city? It could have been one, if all their dreams had come true. But it never even came close to being a city. And now there’s nothing there.”

  He wanted to tell her that Minnesota and, yes, South Dakota, too, are full of places that had once aspired to be cities, and had called themselves Illgen City and Canyon City and Grove City and Trail City in anticipation of becoming metropolises, but had long since abandoned the dream. For all he knew, all over America there were such “cities.” Newton County, the actual place in Arkansas, was literally the back yard of his novels, the palm of his own hand, and yet he had never mentioned, or known about, Marble City.

  “Yes, I’m going to find out what I can about Marble City,” she continued. “As a first step, I’ve gone to the larger libraries in Little Rock, and the historical associations, and I’ve written a few letters. Should I keep you informed?”

  Oh, by all means, Kim, keep me informed. South Dakota is still in the grips of winter. Daffodils will soon be blooming in Arkansas, will they not?

  “For one thing, I’ve found that Marble City is only one of thirty or forty places in Arkansas that called themselves ‘City,’ and not one of them made it.”

  He told Kim that he had not exactly been transfixed with immobility at his end of the correspondence. In the library of South Dakota State University, he had looked at
atlases and totaled up these figures: the state of Missouri had seventy-six “cities,” California had twenty-nine “cities” that were ghost towns as well as fifty-six populated “cities,” Pennsylvania had sixty-six populated and unpopulated “cities.” Even tiny Rhode Island had one inhabited city, Garden City, and one ghost town, Rice City. Every state in the Union, including Hawaii and Alaska, had “cities.”

  “Let’s just stick to Arkansas,” Kim replied.

  Let’s, he agreed. He suggested that she ought to try to find a plat map, if one was ever drawn, for each city, by writing to the county clerk or circuit clerk of the county in which the city was located. A plat map, with streets named, would give some idea of how much ambition each “city” had had in the beginning. Also, maybe you could write a letter to the editors of all the county newspapers, trying to locate residents of those “cities” or former residents.

  “I’ve bought a tape recorder,” she informed him, “and tomorrow I’m taking off for the mountains to talk to some of the old-timers.”

  Wait for me! he nearly implored. Seriously he considered chucking his job and going to join her in the quest for those places. The semester had three more months to run. If he simply quit, he would never find academic employment elsewhere again. But, for that matter, since his contract was only for one year, he might never get a college teaching job after this year anyway. Even apart from the excruciating homesickness that he often felt for Arkansas, now he was feeling a kind of future-sickness for this kindred spirit, seeker of lost places in the heart and in the landscape.

  Only a sequence of fortuities kept him from rushing to join Kim at once. He had his Blazer towed into the shop and its cracked engine removed and replaced. But the replacement turned out to be defective. The people at the shop searched for two more weeks, and again a replacement was found that turned out, maddeningly, to be defective. He had no way of getting himself and his modest personal effects down the eight hundred miles of interstate highway to Arkansas. Or maybe he was simply a coward. If he really had had the nerve to quit his job, he could have taken a bus, or bought a cheap secondhand car.

  In the weeks ahead, a postcard or a longer note would come from Kim, occasionally written on the stationery of some motel in some out-of-the-way Arkansas town.

  On her way back to Marble City, Kim had decided to detour through a place called Sulphur City, just to look around, but had stopped to talk to a sweet old couple who lived in a little white cottage beside the road there, and that interview had led her to talk to the local pastor, and to some other people, and before she knew it…

  “Be sure,” he wrote to her, “to ask them who was the most colorful or interesting individual who ever lived, or who still lives, in the town. Also find out if the city was founded as a resort, trading center, mining town, or what.”

  “Our book will have to have lots of hermits. And suicides. The village idiot. The town bully. The town drunk.”

  “Our book?” he asked her.

  “Our book,” she answered. “Well, I can just help find the raw material, and do the interviews, because you can’t hear, but you will have to do the writing and handle the illustrations.”

  “Be sure,” he suggested, “to ask each person, ‘Did you have any hopes or dreams that never came true?’”

  He promised her that when the semester was over, the very day it ended and the grades had been handed in to the dean, he would come and join her. She did not know whether to believe him or not. In the weeks ahead, she would sometimes encounter a person in some “city,” a village idiot or a town drunk, and wonder if it was Harrigan in disguise, playing a joke, planning to surprise her. Once she met an idiot who was also drunk and was so convinced it was Harrigan that she addressed him as such, to his genuine bafflement. Then she gave up, and began to wait patiently for the day when he might actually come. It was something to look forward to, for her, for him, both of them who, like these lost cities, had abandoned all ambition.

  Sulphur City, Arkansas

  Mankind Dies at Sulphur City

  —Typographical error in newspaper obituary, 1899

  It is not on the road to anywhere. The closest it comes, shy and lonely, is two miles to the highway, a little highway, State 16, used by farmers mostly, and seasonally by Razorback fans and students who call it the “Pig Trail” and use it to avoid the traffic from Fayetteville to Little Rock and back but get stuck behind farmers’ pickups moving sanely around the treacherous curves. Fans and students never detour to Sulphur City.

  The landscape comes as a sudden delight, something Constable would have painted, or perhaps Inness, gentle pastoral downs, undulant as a massage. These are Ozark hills, but not the crewcut tables found elsewhere around, no flatwoods, as the natives call the plateaued vistas. “New Prospect” was the first name of the place (almost all of these cities have had more than one name) and that is what it was, and remains: a river valley rimmed by hills, no two alike; a new view, a new chance for success, a new present to the eye.

  New Prospect was settled in 1833 by a youth named Peter Mankins, a name whose metaphorical connotations are to prove inestimable: little man, mankind, everyman, or a Möbius strip of “kinsman.” As in the medieval moralities, Everymankins progresses from sin to a kind of salvation of his own, not on the scale of John Bunyan but, rather, that of Paul Bunyan: Peter Mankins comes closest to being the only authentic folk hero that Arkansas ever had, and yet almost no one has ever heard of him.

  He left behind him Paintsville, Kentucky, itself a frontier town with no aspirations to become a city, since “-ville” always implies a perpetual village (although Louisville became the biggest city in Kentucky, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, is at least a city of the second class). Paintsville was a pleasant enough place, unpainted, carved out of the dark forests and cane thickets in the mountains of eastern Kentucky around the Big Sandy River, which surges into the Ohio and thence westward, always westward. Although the Indians and the first white settlers in Dan Boone’s wake had depleted the elk and driven the buffalo westward, Paintsville was still hinterland, but not virgin enough for Peter Mankins, who had the moving-on itch that infects all young folk: the pack-up, get-out, keep-going, don’t-look-back blues, the relocation yearning, exact opposite of homesickness: craving passage, deliverance, transmigration. “Wanderlust” is such an arty and effete word. So many of us leave our fathers behind.

  Paintsville got its name from the first white settlers’ discovery, not too long before, that the Indians or somebody had stripped the bark off large trees and painted the smooth undertrunks with representations of birds, elk, and buffalo, in red colors and black. This artwork, along with captions in indecipherable hieroglyphs, was also found all over the sandstone slabs of the creeksides and any other smooth surface: paint everywhere, not splashed but carefully brushed, as if the Indian or somebody in his departure before moving had to graffitize the landscape with a valedictory to old happy hunting grounds. As a child Peter Mankins asked his father about these paint jobs, which, in all modesty, he thought he could outdecorate, if only there were a buffalo standing still long enough to model. There were no buffalo any more. His father (hereinafter called “Old Pete” or “Mankins the Elder” or some such distinguisher) asked him, “Son, is what’s drawn from memory better’n what’s drawn from ’magination?” Mankins the Younger thought about this often, and wondered if he could learn to answer it.

  Peter Mankins left Paintsville, his father making bereft faces while his mother and three brothers and five sisters cried and cried, to find a new country, a new prospect in which to locate a buffalo or two, which is what he told his weeping sisters and his sniveling brothers, who assumed, wrongly, that they would never see him again. Nowadays when we leave home we do it subtly by going off to college or going off to the big city to work and never coming back, or coming back only to visit when it is demanded or begged, but in those days a man of twenty did not have a big city to go off to, let alone a college, and he simply jumped o
n the next boat heading down the Ohio and disappeared forever and didn’t even have to write home, most of the time, because he was illiterate. Mankins the Elder watched his namesake son hopping on the raft and thought he was as good as dead already because Mankins the Younger would never write the old man and tell him how much he missed him and how obliged he felt for his upbringing.

  How do founders find the places they are looking for? New Prospect, later called Mankins, later still called Sulphur City, straddles a pretty stream of water, which is the Middle Fork of the White River in Arkansas but was then known as Buffalo Fork, and maybe the name alone attracted Peter Mankins, although he was already well settled or well squatted and into the third month of clearing his 160-acre pre-emption of good alluvial bottom land before he actually saw a buffalo or two come moseying down the banks of Buffalo Fork. In squatting on bottom land, he could not have known that year after year the river would flood his fields and ruin his crops or/and deposit more rich silt, like the Nile; or perhaps he did remember a previous incarnation alongside the Nile. When his bottom was all cleared and planted or grazed, Peter Mankins hiked up to the heights east of it and looked down on it, not with fear of the floods to come, but with pride and probably with a vision of a city rising there, and here on the heights, safe from any flood. Try as he would, he could not avoid imagining that city.