The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Today, the seeker who comes for the first time upon Sulphur City expecting to find even the ghost of a town will be utterly dashed. People live roundabouts, yes, maybe sixty of them, but there is not one business, no store selling gas or candy or cigarettes, no store selling anything, no sign of anything (the last post office closed thirty years ago) except a white sign in front of a forties-built white house that somehow looks less like a home than what the sign claims it is: “Sulphur City Baptist Church.” But the Reverend J. B. Kyger, age fifty, pastor for seven years, does not even know that once a fledgling city tried to take off from here. “City?” he says. “Why, that’s just the name of the church. That’s what folks around here call the church, its name, like the sign says, ‘Sulphur City Baptist Church.’ That’s just the church, there’s not any city.” Reverend Kyger knows nothing of the history of the place. He has never heard of Peter Mankins. But Peter Mankins never lived his life hoping to be remembered by J. B. Kyger, or even by Kyger’s God, although late in life Mankins professed to be a Baptist himself, because late in life, when most things are done, there isn’t much left to be done except profess. Peter Mankins, late in life, also sat down, whereas most of his life he had remained standing, or running, except for that once when he climbed the heights east of New Prospect to sit and rest from clearing bottom land and to speculate about what the neighborhood would look like if it ever became a city. This effort for Peter Mankins must have been baroque and whimsical, for he had never seen a city.

  Although ringed by hills, his land was as flat as he could find it. No doubt this was deliberate: his graduation from mountaineer to valleyeer. The farm back in eastern Kentucky had been steep, not a flat patch in it, not even one approaching flat, some approaching vertical. It has been described after a recent visit by one of the Mankins descendants, Louisa L. Personkins (a genealogist who, despite her pride in her family name, had it legally changed in 1972 at the height of the women’s movement), as “so hard to reach that nobody could go up the mountain at the same time that anybody was trying to come down the mountain. Some guy in his pickup had to pull over smack against the side of the mountain to let us go by.”

  Why did the mountaineers pick mountains? For many reasons. Mountain land is infertile and therefore cheap at half the price. Being so steep, it takes twice as much exercise, for man and beast, to cultivate, and this builds bodies and character. It offers good views but, paradoxically, limited views, only as far as the next range. The air is said to be superior, and mountain spring water has no equal in the bottoms. There is more variety in the topography, and this range of highs and lows, peaks and depths, ins and outs, becomes a metaphorscape for achievement and disappointment. Flatlands have little mystery, less visual stimulation, and less challenge.

  But mountains restrict. They enclose and contain and limit, and, though lifting a man high, leave him there, stranded, aloof. He wants a new prospect and he goes looking for one, one that combines the elbow room of the valley meadows with the hugs of the embosoming hills. Keeping the mountains at arm’s length, always handy, there to see, there to climb, but not there to plant, any more. Peter Mankins fashioned a bull-tongue plow from local oak and an heirloom steel point, drove it behind a yoke of oxen, and converted his Buffalo Fork river bottom into the finest pasture in Arkansas, helped by the sulphur branch that meandered through it. He did not know of the sulphur; the water tasted “off,” but he had no inkling of what it did for the grass and the cows and the people.

  What does sulphur do? Everette William “Buster” Price, a farmer of seventy-five who owns the Mankins spread today, isn’t sure himself what sulphur does. Like most people, he hasn’t thought about it too much. Born in Sulphur City and having lived all his life there, he used to take a drink from the sulphur spring now and again, especially when he felt ill. Today the spring is virtually dried up. Margaret, Buster’s lovely wife two years his senior, says, “I never took a drink of it in my life, never did, it smelled so bad.” Reverend Kyger admits he has tasted it: “It just tastes like bad water with a real salty taste to it.”

  Buster admits it smells like rotten eggs. “But it really has a better taste to it than it smells,” he declares. “If I really got real thirsty, it’d satisfy my thirst when other water wouldn’t do it.” Cows’ thirst, too? “Why, cattle used to come to this sulphur branch for miles and miles. There was somethin about it that did ’em good and they knew it.”

  There is something about Sulphur City that does one good, and one knows it. Buster and Margaret have heard about Peter Mankins; though they are leading members in Reverend Kyger’s church, they haven’t told their minister anything about Peter Mankins. They live in a very pleasant old white cottage at one end of “Main Street” in Sulphur City, not far from the Baptist church, not far from the sulphur spring, a little farther from the old general store, which Buster’s father operated from 1907 to 1970, when the last business left town—or stayed there but closed and became a rental dwelling, paneled and carpeted. A little farther down the road is the stone foundation of the two-story schoolhouse where both Buster and Margaret were once schoolteachers, until the school closed, too, and was consolidated with that of Elkins, a larger town three miles east (and, like Atkins, Gaskins, Watkins, and Perkins, one of several “-kins” towns of Arkansas, as Mankins once was). Until it fell, Buster used the schoolhouse to store hay for his cattle.

  In the Prices’ back yard are neatly stacked the hewn stones that once made up the tall chimney of Peter Mankins’s two-story log mansion. The stones are just waiting there until Buster can use them to build a patio. What would Peter Mankins have thought, laboriously dragging those rocks from the creek bed on a “stone-boat,” or sled, if he had known they would one day be used to pave a patio? Would his wife, who did the harder work of trimming the stones into even rectangular blocks, have minded? Her name was Narcissa (variously misspelled Narcissus, Narsissia, Narcissis, or, on her tombstone, Narcisus) and she would bear Peter ten children, as well as do the hard work, like trimming chimney stones.

  Where did he find his daffodil, Narcissa? We know so very little of the origins, let alone the appearance and demeanor, of the wives of all our frontiersmen, founding fathers, or settlers. Her tombstone says that she was the daughter of “Isac v R Mills,” who was, we gather, an Indianian, but did Peter find her in Indiana or was she waiting for him in Arkansas? If the former, did he bring her with him (unlikely)? If the latter, how did he meet her, woo her, and wed her? We will never know. We can only visualize her, one day, sitting in the broad meadow anent Buffalo Fork, hacking away at slabs of sandstone to square them off into building blocks for a chimney. Although Buster Price could not leave that chimney standing alone in the meadow and had to take it down, there are enough similar chimneys still standing all over the Ozarks to give an idea of its texture, its height, and its shaftiness. Narcissa cooked on the hearth of that chimney’s fireplace and warmed ten babies beside it, and at the age of forty-seven, at the height of the Civil War, sat alone beside it, ill, while her husband was off whacking the bushes for Yankees, and died. Her grave in the old Baptist cemetery at Sulphur City is clearly marked, which is more than can be said for her husband’s.

  Whereas Narcissa had ten babies, one each year for a decade, Margaret Price had only two, both girls. Peter and Narcissa and everybody else in the nineteenth century had so many babies not because methods of birth control were unknown but because a couple had to have so many to guarantee that a few would survive. Even in the twentieth century, only one of Buster and Margaret’s daughters survived. Narcissa Mankins’s best friend, Sara Long, is buried in the old Baptist cemetery beneath one of several curious coffin-shaped cenotaphs (strugglingly described by other writers as “mummy-type tomb,” “box-grave cover,” “sarcophagus-like crypt”: an irregularly hexagonal slab of sandstone making the capstone of a dolmen, an empty chamber, symbolizing the long-rotted pine coffin in the earth beneath it; “cenotaph” comes from the Greek meaning “empty,” an e
mpty tomb, hence a monument erected in honor of a dead person buried elsewhere, the elsewhere being in this case the earth directly below it; there are some of these coffin-shaped cenotaphs in other cemeteries in the valley of the Middle Fork, and the name of the stonecarver, Nathan Tharp, is known, although Tharp himself did not get a coffin-shaped cenotaph when he died). Sara Long’s five children, who died before her or, in the case of the last one, with her, are buried in smaller coffin-shaped cenotaphs of diminishing size on either side of hers, a tragic sight in this or any cemetery, reflecting the high child-mortality rates of a time when diseases as simple as worms, rickets, or mumps, or as complicated as typhoid fever, whooping cough, or diphtheria, could be expected to snuff out a lot of good kids.

  We are all descendants of Peter Mankins. But he was a descendant of Old Peter Mankins himself. Question: what is better than a Peter Mankins? Answer: two Peter Mankinses. Even with newfound Narcissa to pleasure him in his new days and novel nights in New Prospect, he missed his father. Peter Mankins the Elder was already a legend in his own time, in all the places he had lived—Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky, Illinois, a travelogue of America’s westward movement. Born near Annapolis the year of the Boston Massacre, 1770, the same year frontiersman Mike Fink was born, he drew from memory rather than imagination to tell his son about standing, at the age of eleven, on the parade route of Washington’s march to Yorktown to defeat Cornwallis, and about remembering, not the military pomp of the spectacle but his own question, simple but puzzling: Why do women wave their handkerchiefs? To dry them when they are soaked with tears? To flag their surrender to the brave warriors? Or to stir a little air to speed them on? Such basic but inconsequential questions would occupy his thoughts all of his life. He told, too, of working as an apprentice baker at Mount Vernon; he never saw Washington, but he often wondered if the bread he kneaded helped sustain the general.

  Peter Mankins the Elder was himself the son of a John Mankins and a Delaware Indian maiden named Masa, called Macy. The first of the Elder’s three marriages, in North Carolina, was to a young widow, Rachel, with three children, destined to have nine more, among them Peter the Younger. In Kentucky he planted all of his steep acreage in corn, made bourbon whiskey from it, and sold all that he could not drink. There is a well-documented legend that the senior Mankins once fought and whipped Mike Fink, the fighting king of the keel-boatmen. Mike Fink actually did engage in so many brawls—gouging out eyeballs, tearing off ears, and biting off noses while living a lifetime free from mutilation himself—that any man who would challenge him and not only survive unscathed but actually reduce Fink to begging for mercy was guaranteed instant and perpetual notoriety. There were a number of such men, but Peter Mankins the Elder was one, and he never let his son forget it.

  Surely among the many reasons young Peter ran away to Arkansas was the hope of escaping his father’s shadow and casting his own. But after a time, the son wished his father and his mother and sisters and brothers and half-brothers all lived in Arkansas, too, instead of Kentucky. There was plenty of room for them on his 160 acres, and he decided to send for them. How does a frontiersman send for the kinfolks he left behind? In the Johnson County, Kentucky, Historical Museum is a letter dated October 13, 1833: “Dear Pappy & All. Well, here I be, safe in the Territory, and aint dropped off the far side of the airth yit. I aint writ you before count of no news. Have been monstrous busy clearin land & haulin rock & shootin elk & buffalo & bar & sech. Methodists are sceerce. It is fair land, O, fair like you never seed. You would be alive here. It is country like you aint never hearn tell of. Please come, all, soon. I will look for you. Well my paper has gin out. Your son, His Mark.” There is no proof that this letter was addressed to Peter Mankins, Sr., or written by Peter Mankins, Jr. But, whatever, a short time later the Elder Mankins sold his distillery and removed his family down the Ohio and the Mississippi and up the Arkansas in the wake of his son. To the confusion of neighbors and historians, the future Sulphur City would have two Peter Mankinses in its population.

  But both would find themselves nonplussed not so much by the confusion of names as by the indelicacy of the given name itself. Throughout the Ozarks, “Peter” is a common byword for the male “family organ” and therefore indecent, unmentionable in mixed company. Respectable parents never name a boy “Peter,” and they even avoid “Richard” because “Dick” is pretty bad, too. In the old days, “Peter” simply would not do, at all. Once a Baptist circuit rider visited New Prospect and preached before a large gathering, including all the Mankinses, on the subject of the Apostle Peter’s denial of Christ, at the conclusion of which he demanded grandiloquently and rhetorically, “How many Peters are they here?” Nobody laughed or tittered; the congregation was simply shocked into silence. When the preacher realized what he had said, he flushed scarlet and withdrew.

  Everybody called the elder Mankins “Ole Pete” and his son “Young Pete.” The latter was sixty-eight years old before they stopped calling him “Young Pete,” following the death of his father, who was then 111 years old. Then the elderly son was called “Ole Pete” for the rest of his life, another eighteen years.

  One of Young Pete Mankins’s first paid labors after getting settled in the bright new land of Arkansas, perhaps even before finding and wedding and bedding Narcissa, was to ride his horse a dozen miles each day into the little county seat village, Fayetteville, and lay it out, or help lay it out. He was only the chain carrier in the survey crew; his task was to stretch the chain out from the surveyor’s leveled telescope, attach the chain to the rod, or pole, and plant the pole. The historical record says only that “A. Mankins bore the chain” when Fayetteville was surveyed into lots in 1835. Since there was no Archibald Mankins or even Albert Mankins, we can only assume that there was a Mankins, and that was Pete. His work was confined to laying out the twenty-four blocks of “downtown” Fayetteville around the square, which is still there. These twenty-four blocks of Fayetteville are all irregular rectangles, suggesting that Mankins and the rest of the crew may have been drunk, but twenty-four became a magic number for Peter Mankins: a double dozen divisible by three or six; a half-century later he would use the same number in laying out the blocks of Sulphur City, all perfectly even, all stone sober, each divisible into twelve lots separated six to a side by an alley. This is a perfect, orderly mathematical grid: man’s—or Mankins’s—imposition of logic, harmony, and convenience upon nature. Almost all of the thousand cities of the American West are grids: right-angled intersections, a plexure of streets, monotonous in their network but handy and rational, manlike; no animal, not even the busy ant (or the octagonalizing bee), duplicates it in making a place out of places.

  “Stick!” the surveyor hollers, commands. The rodman or chain carrier, Peter Mankins, holds the pole with both hands and jabs it down into the earth and replies, “Stuck!” Surveying, like garbage collecting, is a conspicuous public profession: all over the landscape or all along the road from time to time, we see the man with the telescope or transit mounted on a tripod, peering through his instrument and waving his arms overhead to signal the other man holding the pole way off out yonder, who answers, loudly, “STUCK!” Every time he yelled it, Peter Mankins couldn’t help thinking of a bawdy ejaculation that rhymes with “stuck,” and each time he yelled it and thought of such, he daydreamed of women or perhaps already Narcissa in particular, and he thought of the planting of seeds in the earth and the planting of cities and the rising of cities and perhaps his mind already entertained visions of the Fayetteville Hilton, a modest skyscraper where a lot of that sort of planting and sticking or stucking still goes on.

  Peter Mankins the Younger became the first American cowboy. Although he never wore chaps or a ten-gallon hat, didn’t carry a lasso or know how to rope, and his footwear bore no resemblance to cowboy boots, he fits, by any definition, the idea of the archetypal working hero of the American West. It wasn’t really west, except that in those days Sulphur City was about as far west as
you could go without getting scalped. There were scarcely any fences; barbed wire hadn’t been invented; it wasn’t necessary for him to brand his cattle, because he knew them by sight; and his chief cowboy-function wasn’t to round up the cattle and drive them into the ranch but, rather, to drive them away from the ranch once they became addicted to sulphur water. If one word were required as a job placement category for everything that Peter Mankins ever did, it would be “drover.” Years before he became a far-reaching drover of cattle and thus the first cowboy (although he never heard the word until late in life, when he watched his first Wild West Show), he was a far-reaching drover of swine and thus the first hogboy. He drove huge herds of hogs on the hoof as far north as Chicago and as far south as New Orleans. There is nothing romantic about a hogboy. For one thing, hogs cannot move nearly as fast for sustained distances as cows can. Hogs can stampede, but, compared with a stampede of cattle, a hog stampede is about as dramatic as a rush of shoppers getting into a department store at opening time on sale day. Hogs are far more intelligent than cattle and like to take their time and enjoy the scenery, and they are in no hurry to go all the way from Sulphur City to Chicago on foot. We do not visualize Peter Mankins attempting to hurry them.

  The trail over the mountains from New Prospect to the Arkansas River landing at Ozark, where the hogs would embark on large rafts for New Orleans, followed almost exactly the route of what would become the crooked highway that today is called the “Pig Trail” not in memorial to Mankins’s swine but because the road is used, as previously mentioned, as a convenient shortcut for fans of the Razorback football team to go to and from games at Fayetteville or games at Little Rock. The Razorback is of course purely a creature of legend and tall tale, although Peter Mankins did not believe that, because all of the hogs driven to New Orleans were mixed-breed razorbacks of the unmistakable spiny-bristled backbones that give the animal its name.