The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  The people seemed to forget the outside world entirely and concentrated instead on their own, building a good large schoolhouse (which was never filled) with a fine Odd Fellows lodge on the second floor (sometimes filled). The stores did enough local business to support the storekeepers’ families, and the blacksmiths continued to sweat until the motorcar arrived. Because Sulphur City was not ever really on the road to anywhere, few tourists or “furriners” ever passed through, and fewer still ever stopped. It would be wrong to call Sulphur City, as Louisa Personkins did in her article for The Midwestern Roots-Rooter, “The Town That Time Forgot.” Time never forgot Sulphur City; Time never noticed it in the first place.

  Doubtless, Peter Mankins wanted to see the century to its close, but he missed it by several months. In the eighty-sixth and last year of his life he was blind, lame, susceptible to pneumonia, influenza, and anything else microscopic and respiratory, and totally dependent on others, having lost the small pension the state of Arkansas had been paying him, a pittance in token remembrance of his wartime services. Strangely, the only friend, other than family, of Peter’s last years was an old Federal veteran, Sam Dunlap, like Peter a kind of survivor but a survivor of a particular kind: the disastrous sinking of the steamer Sultana at the close of the war, which cost the lives of over fifteen hundred Federal prisoners on the verge of freedom (see the chapter on Mound City). Like Peter, he was totally blind, and the two veterans of opposite sides would sit together for hours, Homer and Milton, regaling each other with old war stories and with valedictories for dreams that never came true. Sam Dunlap delivered a kind of eulogy at Peter’s funeral, attended by the survivors of a blinding snowstorm that blew through Reese Cemetery and up and down Middle Fork. Although the newspaper misspelled his name in the headline, “Mankind Dies at Sulphur City,” the rest of the obituary got it correctly, and concluded, “This old pathfinder we feel sure sleeps well. Peace to his ashes.”

  The precise location of Peter’s grave will remain ambiguous, perhaps by his own design. But there is an unmarked grave between that of his beloved first wife, Narcissa, and that of his second wife, Easter, who survived him by one year; quite likely he contrived to keep his resting place unmarked in order to spare Easter’s feelings and be hugged in the grave parenthetically by both wives, as it were, and it was. Some Hollywood mogul will erect an obelisk on the spot in a few more years, with an inscription, “Peter Mankins, the Archetypal Arkansawyer.”

  Kim conducts most of her interview in Buster and Margaret’s living room, a place of furnishings not exactly nondescript, and certainly not shabby, but, rather, in a manner of zeal without taste common to living rooms Kim is fated to see across the length and breadth of Arkansas, and which probably can be found any place in America where people with good intentions have assembled, without plan and without any semblance of art or elegance, the objects of comfort pleasing to their untrained eyes. This homely attempt to prettify one’s surroundings deserves a word, a name of its own, and we are about to find one: based upon the typical contents of the Prices’ living room. Nabokov’s good word poshlost will not quite do; although it conveys a hint of the corniness and philistinism, it is too snobbishly critical. A catalogue of the furnishings of this room: not one but four recliners (Barcaloungers? La-Z-Boys? of Naugahyde or artificial leather or just plastic), two pole lamps, two reproductions of paintings (an old man praying for This Daily Bread and a panorama of an autumn forest stream, its colors matching the sofa pillows beneath it), two frames filled with about fifty family snapshots, two Bibles on the coffee table, and everywhere, on shelves, tables, and the mantel, decorative colored glassware: shell-shaped vases, etched glass and frosted glass, Depression glass, Fostoria and Sandwich, saucers and bowls and compotes. “Compote”: there is our word, the long-stemmed dish for holding stewed fruit. Compote. Something about the word itself is fruity and stewed, suggesting a host of affiliates: “effete,” “compost,” “camp,” “Truman Capote,” “compute” as in “It does not compute.” In German it looks and sounds even worse: Kompott. It is possible to identify an entire stewed-fruit Kompott Kultur: not just the whatnots, gewgaws, and gimcracks of living-room decoration, but also any home display of taxidermist’s art or gun racks is compote, anything plastic is compote, any cheaply pictorial representation of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the Last Supper is compote, as are panoramic overcolored scenes of waterfalls, snow-capped mountains, lakes, and moonlight; Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton are compote movie stars; soap operas and game shows are compote entertainment; Harlequin romances are compote literature; the list is endless, and the word will be found occasionally throughout this book, not in censure but in description. Kim enjoys the Prices’ living room, and shall return.

  “Why didn’t you take over the general store from your father?” she asks Buster.

  The last general store, abandoned though it is, is not particularly old, as antiquities go: it was built around 1935, when another store on the same site, built in 1908 in roughly the same dimensions, burned. Both stores were unashamedly plagiarized from Carter’s Store in their basic neat one-floor, gable-to-the-front, white-temple style and plan. Kim notices that the deserted Price store is just like the ruin of Carter’s Store in that both have an addition, a side room on the left with sloping shed roof. Throughout the Ozarks stores had these side rooms, which served several functions: most commonly for holding sacks of feed and thus separating the animal feed from human foodstuffs, but also for storage of items accepted in barter, such as live chickens, fresh eggs, berries, and other things to be shipped to Fayetteville for resale; some storekeepers used one of the side rooms for dispensing coal oil, vinegar, and other smelly liquids in quantity to keep their smells from the rest of the store, and the other side room as a combination office and storage shed for the wool that sheep-raising farmers bartered for groceries. Kim also notices one major difference between the two stores, Carter’s and Price’s, the first built around 1875, the second a modern (circa 1935) copy of it. The older store, even without its broken windowpanes and peeling-away clapboards, somehow looks older because of certain little details of construction: narrower clapboards, a double door paneled elegantly by some local millwright, the iron door latch, the six-over-six windows, and the six-paned transom light, the bargeboard in the gable’s cornice. Carter’s Store once had a porch and porch roof, as Price’s store does, but porches are the first things to fall when a building decays. Still, Carter’s Store has a character that Price’s store lacks. It invites, Kim reflects: it makes her wonder.

  When Price’s store ceased to function as such and lost its gasoline pump out front, its shelves were already bare or becoming so, and an inch of bare shelf is anathema to any grocer, as all the manuals for supermarket operation insist and insist. At one time Buster’s father carried and sold such things as women’s house slippers, men’s straw hats, socks, work gloves, yard goods, and hardware, as well as the usual staples. But he had refrigeration enough (iceboxes) only for soft drinks (sody pop) and not for milk, meats, the cool things that customers journeyed to Elkins or Fayetteville for.

  Margaret loved to visit her father-in-law’s store, sometimes just as a cure for the doldrums or the blues. “We’d see people we never did see any other time,” Margaret tells Kim. “People would come out of these hills. They would come out of these hills just to trade at the store.” It was Buster’s father’s dream, like many fathers’ dreams, that his son would follow in his footsteps and keep the store going. Sometimes the elder Prices would go somewhere, into Fayetteville or to visit, and turn the keeping of the store over to Buster and Margaret. “They tried to get us to promise that we would take the store, and it was the heartbreak of their lives that we wouldn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you take the store?” Kim asks.

  “Why, we’d be tied down, honey,” Margaret says.

  “Couldn’t make a livin at it!” Buster says.

  The last mail was delivered to the Sulphur City Post Office
thirty years ago. When the office was forced to close, many stamp collectors ordered “last day of cancellation covers” or “final cancellation marks,” but to the people of the community, says Margaret, “it was part of our lives that was taken away from us.” Everyone was sad, even though the post office had been the main source of factions because the postmastership, Margaret explains, “was by appointment. His dad would have it for five or six years, and then we’d get a new congressman in or something, and the post office would cross the street to a different store.”

  Kim: “Did people take sides?”

  Margaret: “Oh, sides! They’d carry guns!”

  Buster: “And knives.”

  Today their mailing address is simply Rural Route 7, Fayetteville, even though Fayetteville seems a long way off.

  But the Reverend J. B. Kyger commutes to the Sulphur City Baptist Church from Fayetteville, where he has a home and an air-conditioning contracting business, his source of livelihood.

  Kim: “Have you ever heard of Peter Mankins?”

  Reverend Kyger: “No, I have not.”

  In the Fayetteville telephone directory there are no Mankinses, but there are Manatts, Manaughs, Mandrells, Maneses, Mangans, Mangers, Mangolds, Manires, Mankers, Manleys, Manns, Mannens, Mannings, Mansells, Mansfields, Manskes, Mansours, Manteganis, Mantooths, and Manwarrens.

  The Reverend Kyger does not know when the church was built, and when Kim asks him he is silent for a while before replying, “Our church does not have a complete set of records. I think it was in the early twenties, but I’m not for sure.” The architecture and construction of the building suggest that it was built just before America entered World War II. One notices that the rafter ends in the cornices are deliberately exposed, in what was known as the “Craftsman” style through the thirties, and one wonders if this deliberate exposure of rafter ends is a kind of vernacular imitation of modillions in classical architecture, just as the modillions themselves were marble translations of original timber ends. Kim writes in her notebook, “Is there such a thing as vernacular classicism?”

  As the sign says at the Sulphur City Baptist Church, there are Sunday-morning services, Sunday-evening services, and a Wednesday service; according to the Reverend Kyger, most of the fifty-odd faithful are so faithful that they go to all three. Kim asks him to explain the difference between the Primitive Baptists, which the Mankinses were, and the Missionary Baptists, which these present-day Sulphurites are. The only essential difference, Reverend Kyger explains, is that the former believe in foot washing and the latter in establishing missions. Thus, the one is inward, the other outward.

  Kim dares a question: “Reverend, since sulphur is the brimstone of the Bible associated with hell, has anyone made cracks equating Sulphur City with hell?”

  Kyger answers, “I did not know that sulphur had that definition. I always thought that brimstone was something different.”

  If Sulphur City enjoyed no boom whatever from its mineral water, it enjoyed twenty years of prosperity from its apples. Shortly after Peter Mankins brought his century to a close, orchards planted all across the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas began bearing in profusion. The Mankinses and other families of the Middle Fork had always had home orchards, with all the apples they could eat and a few to sell in Fayetteville and even, when the Frisco Railroad came in 1882, to ship to market in St. Louis, but it was not until early in our own century that apple production peaked and became the leading crop of the Middle Fork and elsewhere throughout the region. Buster’s father built an apple dryer, or evaporator, on the banks of the Sulphur Branch, using sulphur to lighten the color of the dried apple slices, and hired forty local women to help during the picking, peeling, paring, and slicing season. Two other men opened competing apple evaporators, each with a dozen helpers. Local orchardists had an abundance of dryer apples, culls from the fruit sent to big city markets, the harvest of Winesaps, Grimes Golden, and Rome Beauties. Pests and diseases had not yet discovered the delicious apple; there was no spraying. When the pests came in the thirties and spraying began, the apple industry began to die out, year by year, and all the trees were cut for firewood. There are no great orchards left today, only a family tree or two. The air misses the smells of blossomtime and harvest.

  Except for Carter’s Store and his little clinic across the road, Sulphur City doesn’t even have the picturesque but stereotyped “ghost-town” architecture. Among the few bona-fide ruins of Sulphur City are the remains of the Jones cabin east of town, just off the Mount Salem road, which the Prices live on. The traveler coming across such a log cabin with its notched corners usually assumes that this is a pioneer dwelling of early vintage, when in fact most such derelicts are of modern construction. The late Leon Jones’s father did not build this cabin until 1930. Leon Jones, born in our key year of 1886, left Sulphur City in its heyday to find real cities, traveled around the world on tramp steamers, and came home in 1950 to live the rest of his life in the cabin as a hermit bachelor, Thoreau-like but apparently without any journals.

  Was Leon Jones a “character”? Kim inquires of the Prices. “Yeah,” Buster says, “quite a character.” Margaret says, “If anybody needed a hundred-dollar loan or somethin, he’d always go to Leon Jones—if he liked ya.” And where did he get the money? Margaret: “I don’t know that.” Buster: “Well, he just never did spend any! He kept all he got!” Kim: “He didn’t have a family to spend it on?” Buster: “Not a family! And he wore dirty clothes all the time, made his own home brew, hunted a little bit, and tole big lies on himself.” Leon Jones kept dogs; Margaret says, “He’d let those dogs crawl up on the bed and have their babies!” He also had an old cat who liked to visit the neighbors. One time Leon Jones fell and broke his leg and hip; since he couldn’t move or be heard if he yelled, he tied a message to the neck of his old cat. For two days the neighbors noticed the cat wandering around with the message hanging from its neck, and finally Buster got the message and loaded Leon Jones into his pickup and took him to the hospital in Fayetteville. Leon Jones slipped his wallet to Buster, saying, “I want you to take care of this.” Buster tells Kim, “It had four hundred dollars in there, and he was afraid to take it to the hospital, because they’d get his money, you know, and he didn’t want ’em to have it. Anyway, that ole billfold was…it just…the stink, you could hardly stand it, you know, it was molded, and he had it next to his ole body, you know, and I carried that thing around here for a while and then decided I’d hide it, and kept it till he got back out of the hospital.”

  In Elkins is a small café called Smitty’s. Any town of any size has one of these, where the farmers come each morning, sometimes twice, to drink coffee or have a second breakfast or even a first breakfast to get away from their wives, to meet in fellowship and be good buddies for a moment, sitting under their two-color bill caps exchanging menfolks’ gossip—how the sheriff’s deppity screwed that gal before takin’ her on in to the lockup, ha ha, wudn’t that a good’ un?—and to discuss the weather and crops and to tease the waitress. Buster never goes to Smitty’s, because he loves Margaret so much, but the other men of Middle Fork have helped make Smitty’s into a fraternal temple, and strangers aren’t welcome, although if the stranger is Kim they will ogle her appreciatively and wink and maybe even grunt and sigh. An occasional visitor, before he got the message that he wasn’t welcome, was Robert Alexander, who, despite his faded blue jeans and old plaid shirt and sweat-stained cowboy hat, seemed just too good to be an authentic farmer, although he owned more sheep than anybody in the county. Bob Alexander had worked for twenty-five years as an executive of the Ford Motor Company, and when he decided to retire early, he and his wife, Alice, who breeds rare American domestic shorthair cats, searched the United States for the ideal location for a home. After plotting all the geographic data and running the information through a computer, they decided that Middle Fork had the prettiest scenery and the best climate, and neither of them liked Florida or Arizona as a retirement spot. They did
not know that around 1907 the Sulphur City dealer in hacks and buggies was one Grant Alexander, possibly but not likely a relation. For years Bob Alexander had been head of Ford in Australia, and later in London, whence they flew to Fayetteville one morning to buy their hilltop spread near Sulphur City before noon and hire Euine Fay Jones, the best architect in Arkansas, to spare no expense in designing their dream home and building it of native stone. Jones, no relation to Leon, had designed a scandal-ridden sprawling hilltop mansion for Governor Orval Faubus years before in a style and fashion really not comparable to what he did for the Alexanders; Jones’s recent Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs is his masterpiece and has won numerous awards.

  Kim sits in the Alexanders’ living room (“cathedral ceiling” doesn’t do justice to it, and there is not a trace of compote anywhere; a strange, monkeylike cat brushes against Kim’s arm). She asks, “Have you ever seen former Governor Faubus’s house in Huntsville? Did you visit it to get an idea about Fay Jones’s work?”

  “No,” Bob Alexander replies, “not till afterward. What we actually did was buy this place, and see Fay, and tell him we were going back to England, and generally describe to him what we wanted in the way of a house, and tell him we’d be back in nine months. Which we were, and he had it done! The house had to be designed for the site. We had told him we wanted it low and ground-hugging and we wanted to take advantage of the splendid view.”