What about his nursery? Did he make good money at it? He had built two greenhouses, which Elton and Dovey had tended for him, but his parents had not been in the best of health for such labor, and “I got too busy playin politics. The peak seasons at Cherokee Gardens did not coincide with my political business, and I enjoy politics.” Was there something about growing up in Cherokee City that had drawn him into politics? Most of Arkansas is staunchly Democrat; northwestern Arkansas for many years has been just as staunchly Republican, and conservative. Joe Yates is a conservative Republican, a distinct minority in the Little Rock legislature.
“My grandpa Rob Yates, more than anyone or anything, influenced me,” he says. “He did not believe in the government doing anything. He would not accept an old-age pension. His philosophy was that the government should leave you alone. Strictly. And you had no right to ask the government for anything. That philosophy influenced me a great deal and made me very independent.”
With the passing of his Cherokee Gardens, the village was left with only two businesses: Carol’s Store and a place called Lapland, Inc. Carol had told Kim about Lapland, and Joe’s parents had mentioned it. Dovey Yates had explained, “They get out and buy these dead animals and they, uh, they…” Elton had supplied, “Make dog food out of ’em. They cut it up, I think, and get it ready, and then they send it off, I don’t know where to.” Dovey: “I couldn’t tell you their names. I’ve never saw ’em. They’ve been over there for a long time. Carol could tell you who they are. It doesn’t bother us. Now, some of ’em on the other side have complained at times that they’ve had an odor.” Elton: “’Course, I think the county or state or law have made ’em refrigerate all that stuff, see, and that takes the odor away then, you know.” Dovey: “Health Department’s been out there a few times to check on it, but I don’t know if they were—” Elton: “They’re licensed and everything.” Dovey: “They go all over the country and pick up dead animals, which makes it pretty nice, really. If it wasn’t for that, why, a lot of people would just let ’em lay in the fields and do nothin with ’em and be really a lot worse than what this would be.” And Kim had asked, “So, you consider their service a benefit to the community?” Dovey: “Oh, yeah, I think it is.” Elton: “I do, too.”
Kim asks Senator Joe Yates, “What do you think about Lapland?” Joe replies, “If I lived over there I wouldn’t feel too good about it, but I don’t think they’ve been much of a problem for anyone unless they live over there pretty close. It’s a very low-key type of thing.”
On one plat map of Cherokee City there is an area of a few square blocks designated as “City Park,” which, according to Kate Scraper, had once actually been used for that purpose, with swings and merry-go-rounds and refreshment stands that sold taffy and lemonade. Now it is the site of the Lapland operation: a single large shed surrounded by dozens of rusting fifty-five-gallon drums. When Kim drives there and stops briefly, there is a large dead bloated black-and-white cow lying in the open entrance to the shed, but there is no person around, and no activity. She does not park her car and walk past the dead cow to see what is inside the building. Across the road is the house of Ken and Ivy Cossel, who own and operate Lapland: he does the actual dirty work, she answers the telephone. The house is nondescript, not one of the historical houses of the town. Mr. and Mrs. Cossel are not handsome people. Their kitchen, where Kim is required to stand for the interview, is not tidy.
In nature’s scheme of things, the scavenger is all-important but somehow repulsive, a necessary evil. The early form of the word, scavager, meant “streetcleaner.” Lapland cleans the highways of dead livestock. The scavenger in the animal world, the vulture or buzzard, whose job is cleaning up, is an ugly creature, almost as if the unpleasantness of his task were reflected in his appearance. Janitors and garbage men are never matinee idols. But Faulkner said, “You know that if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.” The scavenger is efficient and utilitarian, and, as with all things utilitarian, design and appearance are secondary; looks count for nothing. Ken Cossel is tall and muscular but abominably abdominous; Kim cannot suppress the thought that his distended belly contains parts of a dead cow. Although blond and possibly of Scandinavian origin, he has none of the Finno-Ugric of the Laplander in him, and thus Kim’s first question is not, as she would like, “What do you think of buzzards?” but, rather, “Why is your business called Lapland?”
Because, he explains, with the impatient patience that busy and manly men reserve for inquisitive females, it overlaps three states: Arkansas, Oklahoma just a quarter-mile to the west, and Missouri just thirteen miles to the north. “I could of called it Tri-State or something like that,” he says, “but I wanted something different that would stick in people’s minds.”
Lapland is a small operation covering a large territory, around fifty miles in each direction. There is no competition. Neither Ken nor Ivy is from Arkansas; Ken has some relatives in Gentry, but he is from Kansas, and Ivy (he calls her Baby) is from Illinois. He was a trucker, driving a big semi, before getting into the disposal business. Now he works anywhere from four to sixteen hours a day, six and seven days a week, with Ivy on the phone twenty-four hours a day—“Calls late at night, and it may start ringin again at four-thirty, five in the mornin, when the dairymen get out and start milkin and they might find a dead one and call us right then. They don’t give a damn whether we’re up or not, they just go ahead and call!”
They do not pick up dead dogs or cats, only livestock—cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses. (Deadstock, rather.) Ken simply picks them up, carts them to his shed, cuts them up, and packs them into barrels, which are hauled to the Tenderer’s plant in Russellville, Arkansas, some 180 miles distant. A truck from Standard Rendering Company, a division of Darling-Delaware, Inc., comes each day to carry off what Ken has packed into the fifty-five-gallon drums.
“Do you want to go watch me?” Ken offers Kim.
“Not really,” she says. “I really don’t.” They both laugh. She asks, “Is the process of your cutting up the animal something you’re very used to? Did it bother you at first?”
“Uh…a little bit at first. Some days it still bothers me. I wouldn’t want to go in there with an upset stomach, I guarantee ya.” Ken doesn’t know what happens to the butchered carcasses when they leave his plant. He believes that the renderer converts them into bone meal and dry scraps that find their way into cattle feed, chicken feed, and, of course, dog food.
“Do you have Health Department standards you follow?” Kim asks.
“Yes, ma’am!” Ken says, almost defiantly, as if she had accused him of something. “You never know when the federal inspector’s goin to walk in the door. And the reason he comes is to make sure that some of this meat is fresh enough to go on the kitchen table, by looks and smell—but that’s the reason he comes in here, to see to it that we don’t sell it for human consumption. I wouldn’t do a thing like that, but it has been done at other places.”
Kim glances around her at the cluttered kitchen, and cannot resist a final glance at Ken Cossel’s stomach before she says, “That takes care of my questions,” and makes good her leave. She begins to brood that she is just a scavenger, too, picking up carrion villages. In one of her dreams, she is swooping down, buzzardlike, on a dead and decaying town, and devouring it. Her final interview is in Fayetteville, with Chris Yates, a twenty-two-year-old university student who is the first person younger than Kim herself whom she has interviewed. He is the son of Senator Joe Yates, grandson of Elton, great-grandson of Rob, a fourth-generation independent Republican Yates. He is not native-born, because his father and mother happened to be living in Anaheim, California, when he was born. Anaheim is a sort of enclave for displaced, adventuresome Arkansawyers—particularly Ozark Arkansawyers—who want to get rich in California. Most of them stay in Anaheim and die in Anaheim. Joe Yates
came home and brought baby Christopher back to the place of his own boyhood, to grow up in the Cherokee House hotel of his grandfather. Chris Yates remembers Great-Grandpa Rob. “When my sister and I were little, we’d be out in the yard and he’d give us rides on his back, and chase us, and he was already in his nineties. I think the biggest thing I remember is, everybody talked about how honest he was. When he told you he’d do something, you could count on it.”
Chris’s hand sweeps across the map of Cherokee City that Kim has on the table. “He used to own all this land, and there were outlaws, and he used to talk about them.” Rob’s mother, Nancy Norris Yates, was a good friend of Jesse James’s mother, and they exchanged letters that touch upon the adventures of their sons, Rob’s at home, Jesse’s in the field, holding up trains and banks and such, deeds of which his mother and everybody else was proud; he was never an outlaw to his own people. Chris Yates has only a vague memory of having heard of Harve Norris, the sixteen-year-old suicide; he knows none of the details.
Chris is already into politics, a senator of sorts himself: a member of the university’s Student Senate, which has to deal with such hot contemporary issues as homosexuality on campus. Chris considers himself even more conservative than his father, although “We agree on practically everything. We’re strong conservatives and Republicans.” Senator Joe Yates is very proud of his son, who is a straight-A student majoring in finance and banking and a member of several honor societies and the Baptist Student Union, as well as the College Republicans.
“Aren’t you pretty busy?” Kim asks with an understated smile.
“Yeah,” Chris admits. But he has a busy career mapped out ahead of him, and he is impatient. As soon as he has finished graduate school at some distant but worthy place—Harvard or Stanford—he will come back to Arkansas, take a top job in the investment structure of a holding company, get into politics, and work his way up. Like his generation of college students at large, he has been frightened by the economy into seeking a strictly practical education: “I think it’s possible to get a degree without really knowing anything. If you’re going to get a job, if you’re going to compete, you better be prepared, more so than in the past, when maybe just a college degree would take you a long ways. I think now you better know something along with the degree.”
Chris goes back to Cherokee City whenever he gets a chance, especially during the summers. He doesn’t go to see people (except his grandparents); he goes to see the place. He has explored Hog Eye Creek all along its length, and he has ventured into the abandoned buildings.
“Did you ever try to imagine,” Kim asks, “what the town would have looked like if all of the plots on the plat had been filled?”
“I’ve seen pictures of the turn of the century, all the people on Main Street, and I’ve thought about what it would be like if the railroad hadn’t gone to Gentry. I’ve thought it would be nice sometimes if Cherokee City were still there and growing, but in other ways I’m glad that it’s not, because it’s such a peaceful place now.”
One day Chris might well be governor of Arkansas, or United States senator. “One day I’d like to be senator,” he admits, without specifying whether he will seek his father’s seat or aim for higher office. Kim can imagine him at the turn of the century, in Washington, saying, “I never give a speech or have anyone introduce me but what I point out the fact that I’m from Cherokee City.”
Marble City, Arkansas
Did that there Dawg Patch in the funny papers e’er even have ary churchhouse nohow?
—local old-timer, 1985
No trace of this most ambitious of cities remains beneath the asphalt of a tawdry amusement park lifting its name, Dogpatch, from a defunct comic strip in which rustic yokels cavorted in a manner supposed to have originated in backwoods Kentucky, not Arkansas. Kim has never read the terminated “Li’l Abner” or heard of its long-dead creator, Al Capp, not because she is too young to remember them or because she feels some resentment at the false, shabby, ridiculing image that they presented of mountain people, but because she never was one to read the funnies much, having better things to do at breakfast time. Although this is her second visit to Newton County, the most “scenic,” most isolated, most rural, most backward and primitive of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties (on the first visit, she was hunting for a village less “comic,” more “real,” than Dogpatch, called Stay More, in another part of the county), Kim has never been to Dogpatch before and would not be going to it now, when it is off season and closed, except that she is curious and a bit miffed that the Dogpatch management has never answered any of her repeated but increasingly polite letters asking for some information about the Marble City that lies concealed like Troy beneath the hokey buildings and gimmicky rides of the “theme” park. Are they afraid of her?
All along the highways coming into this part of the Ozarks she has seen the billboards: “Have a heckuva day at Dogpatch USA.” She will indeed have a heckuva day (two of them), but not in the “family-fun” fashion that the billboards advertise. State Highway 7—running south out of Harrison, the only true “city” in this part of Arkansas—has been called one of The Ten Most Beautiful Highways in America (the parts that are visible beyond Dogpatch’s billboards). It snakes through the heart of the Ozarks, which are the heart of the nation, dips through forested ravines and hollows, and trips along crests and ridges with spectacular panoramas. It is not a safe road—somebody is always getting killed or hurt around its curves on motorcycles or in cars, trucks, whole passenger buses that careen over the ledges—but it is reasonably well paved these days, after a long career as a mere dirt-and-gravel surface. Dirt roads aplenty fall away from it to wander among rugged hollows and gorgeous valleys where the way of life is still simple and earthbound enough, while not exactly unadulterated Anglo-Saxon yeoman backwoodsy, to attract new immigrants from the counterculture, young back-to-the-landers who may or may not be outmoded hippies, although some of them give one a déjà-vu sense of the sixties. Once upon a time this land seemed quaint because it held pockets of people still talking and dressing and acting like their eighteenth-century forebears, resistant to all change and progress from the outside world. Now it is beginning to seem quaint because so many of its homesteaders are people still talking and dressing and acting like their older brothers and sisters, who have long since given up the sixties’ youth culture in favor of the yuppie life style.
Elsewhere in Arkansas the latest-blooming hippies have all cleaned up and moved back to the suburbs. Those who persist and endure in Newton County are the strong ones, fit survivors, like the real pioneers in the nineteenth century, who came as a kind of last spillover of the mountain settlement to the east. While genuine “residenters,” as the old-timers are known, remain somewhat aloof if not uncordial toward the young “furriners” who move in, they seem to share one great trait: a desire for removal from the mainstream, an unwillingness to accept the common man’s kowtowing to institutions and gadgets, bread and circuses, mammon and mores. The residenters wink at the newcomers’ cash crop of choice, marijuana, remembering their own profits from distilled corn juice.
The newcomers, when they can get hold of a newspaper, read Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” or Breathed’s “Bloom County” with the same devotion that an earlier generation paid to “Pogo” and “Li’l Abner.” Comic strips, like aspiring cities, become ghost towns. Something there is in the climate of Newton County that nourishes anachronisms and keeps the dead alive. Perhaps Dogpatch is no more outgrown and outmoded than the hippies and the hill people that it shares the county with. In time Dogpatch itself will fail and become a broken dream for those who are keeping it going.
When it goes, when the last ride closes and the last sham yokel gulls the last remnant of a crowd, it will have been the sixth or seventh broken dream upon the same spot, if we include whatever dreams the Choctaw Indian had, or go back even before him to the Bluff Dweller Indian who lived in and under Spring Bluff hundreds of years before an
d had no dreams whatever in the sense of aspirations or ambitions, other than the desire to exist and keep his belly full and be buried with dignity and ceremony. (Don Dickson of Cherokee City has been responsible for excavating some of the important Bluff shelters of Newton County and for transporting a “burial”—the mummified remains of one of these thousand-year-old Indians—to the University Museum in Fayetteville.) These Bluff Dwellers had died out, perhaps from disease or from conflict with other tribes, long before Newton County became Osage country in the early nineteenth century.
But the Osage were not “civilized.” The first historical non-savage homesteading in the place that would become Marble City was not an Osage, or a Pawnee (who had a village a few miles to the west), but a Choctaw, named Archibald Toomer, or, as his name was entered into the Newton County land records, Ah-Che-To-Mah. The Choctaw people, originally from central and southern Mississippi and Alabama, were one of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” but were of a Natchez-Muskogean linguistic group more closely related to the Creeks than to the Cherokees, and were politically more closely allied with the French than with the British. They were forced out of their lands in 1842 and dispersed across Arkansas and into southeastern Oklahoma (Indian Territory). There was no Trail of Tears for Choctaws, but the move was not painless; Ah-Che-To-Mah “escaped” and hoped to take up farming and hunting in the remote sunny glades of Newton County forests, and managed to hang on to his spread despite the influx of white pioneers from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia.
Ah-Che-To-Mah was completely outnumbered by the Bellahs, the Willcocksons, the Alexanders, and the Harps when he sold his farm in 1852 to Richard Alexander and disappeared, perhaps to rejoin his brethren on the reservation in Indian Territory. Ten years earlier, the county had been established, and named, not for a president, general, governor, congressman, or river, or even for the celebrated discoverer of gravity, but for a mere mail carrier and marshal named Thomas Willoughby Newton. Thus, even in its naming Newton County broke with tradition and cast itself outside the mainstream.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 103
