The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  There are no people moving through Dogpatch or along the highway when Kim first enters the grounds, and the asphalt pavement is not hot but very cool, almost cold in the late afternoon with the sun already behind the mountains. Despite its absolute emptiness, Kim can imagine the hordes of families swarming among the rusticated buildings on a hot summer’s day. The gate is open, Zephyra goes right through without let or hindrance, and for a while Kim just drives around on the broad blankets of blacktop, weaving in and out among the buildings and along the lagoon. The whole park begins at the sheer wall of Spring Bluff on the north and ends at the Marble Falls and the waterwheel on the south. Spilling out from under the bluff is a sequence of sizes of trout in a trout hatchery, ranging from fingerlings to lunkers; the cold spring waters are teeming with them. Kim, who loves to fish but has no tackle with her, could reach down and grapple one, if she had a place to cook it. She wanders on, strolling past the “sway-back” roofs with large, curiously bleached statues of goats perched atop them (nowhere in the Ozarks has a goat, no matter how sure-footed, ever been known to clamber upon a house roof). The other sculptural art of the village is equally cutesy and toylike—the Shmoo, a giant razorback hog, the “Kissin’ Rocks,” which Al Capp primitively plagiarized from Brancusi’s famous The Kiss although he hated modern art, and the equestrian statue of General Jubilation T. Cornpone, Capp’s satire on the military.

  A few of the cannibalized, transplanted settlers’ cabins in the park have been faithfully reassembled in a natural setting, although obviously selected with an eye for their “quaint” and impoverished rusticity: hewn-log cabins that have front doors but no windows, or a lone window on the side, with massive stone chimneys of the aggressive rubble masonry that gives backwoods architecture its character. A gratuitous picket fence has been strung along the porch of one of the best of these, but apart from this attempt at comedy, the cabin might have been found in its original setting away off in some locked-in holler of these hills.

  Kim eventually parks Zephyra near one building without a sway-backed roof, with a sign on its porch, “Dogpatch Chapel,” a belfry that looks like a tiny privy, and telltale sides that conceal what had obviously been the dogtrot or breezeway of a rural home. Compared with The Basins church, which she has just seen—an authentic example of white temple-form rectangular and properly belfried vernacular ecclesiastic architecture—this Dogpatch Chapel is an obvious fake, although it easily fools the park’s customers. More than a fake, it is an embezzlement of a real mountain cabin, the old Brisco place, uprooted from its hillside eight miles west of Marble City and burlesqued into this caricature of a church house as the Dogpatch establishment’s concession to its customers’ origins in the Bible Belt. Ironically, as a local fan of “Li’l Abner” has observed, there never was a religious building in the actual cartoon village called Dogpatch.

  Doyle Harp’s grandfather, Martin Brisco, built the exemplary dogtrot-style cabin and raised his family in it (there is a passage on Kim’s tape in which Harp relates his boyhood memories of the place—“You had to wade the snow across the breezeway to get from the living room to the kitchen and up the stairway”—and explains how the cabin was actually taken apart, its logs numbered for the removal to Dogpatch), and even with its end chimneys torn away to make room for the chapel’s entry, it still has a homey and cozy aspect. But beside it is a “joke cemetery”: wooden crosses with cutesy Dogpatch-style names on them, making a laughing matter out of death, which was one of Al Capp’s preoccupations.

  From the sham chapel, Kim hears the sound of roaring water and walks down the slope to the Marble Falls, where stands a huge new waterwheel. The red mill itself has not yet been restored or reconstructed, but Kim has seen old pictures of it and can imagine how it would look: three tall red-painted wooden stories rising above a rock-and-cement cellar clinging to the cliff side.

  High over the falls themselves runs a narrow-gauge railroad trestle of recent construction, designed to carry tourists on a miniature steam train over the gorge of the falls and creek. Kim imagines the train, too, but cannot even imagine herself, with her fear of heights, boarding the tiny “West Po’k Chop Speshul Train” with kids screaming in delicious dread and one of them vomiting his hot dogs and cotton candy into the falls while Mommy holds him and Daddy admires the awesome workmanship of the waterwheel, slowly but powerfully turning, the world’s largest wooden waterwheel.

  The wheel is still now. The flume is closed, the sluice gates shut. Kim imagines the gates opening and pouring four thousand gallons a minute onto the wheel. She imagines the creak of the wheel above the roar of the falls. The place holds her. She is captivated, not by the awkward juxtaposition of the Dogpatch railroad and the accurate, faithful reconstruction of the waterwheel promising further restorations to come, but by the experience of being alone, or almost alone, in an entire deserted village with all of its buildings intact (if deliberately battered): Kim, who has been now to Sulphur City, of which only a vacant store and a couple of houses remain, and Cherokee City with its two dead stores and one live one still standing, is now surrounded by a completely unpopulated town where nobody really lives but where people long ago lived and dreamed and died….

  But it is late afternoon, increasingly cold, and Kim must get back to her motel room in Harrison and read what little she has found to chronicle the rise and decline of Marble City: a copy (given to her by Dr. Robinson) of the old mimeographed Newton County Homestead, a sporadic publication of the Newton County Historical Society, but written and edited almost solely by Walter Lackey. Born in 1892 in a one-room log cabin in western Newton County, Lackey was raised with a primitive education (three months a year for six years in a one-room log schoolhouse) to just a few notches above illiteracy, enough to write one book, a poorly written but highly readable history of his hills and their people. His semiannual Homestead managed to survive for three years (1959-61) despite an almost total lack of interest. “Those that have paid their 1962 membership dues will receive a refund,” he announced in the final October issue, which, devoted almost entirely to Marble City, was thus, unwittingly, a Mobius strip: the last breath of a broken dream singing the elegy of a broken dream.

  There is much in that last issue on Dr. Silas Shruggs Stacey, born in the eastern part of Kentucky, the fertile crescent that spawned so much of the civilization of the Ozarks. His mother, Rebecca, was a full-blood Cherokee, the tribe that provided so much counter-spawn for the white civilization of the Ozarks. When the Cherokee were routed from their homes in 1837 and forced westward on the cold and pestilential Trail of Tears, white William Stacey took his wife and eight-year-old son and joined the caravan, the forced march through southern Illinois and into Missouri on which thirty-five hundred died. When the caravan reached Springfield, Missouri, in the very flat Springfield plateau of the Ozarks, William Stacey began to anticipate and dread the flatness of Oklahoma, and he escaped the Trail of Tears and took his family into a cavern in the Missouri hills near the present town of Ozark. The cavern is now a tourist attraction with electric lights, nicknamed “the Holland Tunnel of the Ozarks.” Walter Lackey visited it for the purpose of seeing where young Silas had lived, and reported that “it is a wonder to see. The cavern front is about 60 feet wide and about 40 feet high and the ceiling rock tapers several hundred feet back. The floor is solid rock and nearly level with a nice stream of water running down the center. An ideal place for a home.” The mouth of the cavern could shelter several wagons at a time, and the Stacey stake-out became a stopover for other displaced Indians. But restless William moved on, into more remote Douglas County, where Silas grew up and married a girl named Matilda, who would improve on the customary ten by bearing him eleven children. “Do it one better” became Silas’s motto throughout his life.

  During the Civil War, Silas did it one better by joining the Union forces, not just once but twice at the same time: he was in both the Missouri Volunteers Infantry and the Missouri Militia Home Guards. When the action w
as slow for one group, he switched to the other, changing uniforms, then switched back. Still not satisfied with this double duty, he assumed a third identity as “military surgeon,” after months of watching real doctors extract bullets and set bones and amputate limbs. His military record as Corporal Stacey for one unit and Sergeant Stacey for the other was undistinguished, but he was in wide demand as Dr. Stacey. After the war, when all the limbs were amputated that were going to be, all the bullets extracted, and all the bones set, he did it one better by turning from surgery to internal medicine. No longer cutting people except in dire emergency, he began administering compounds of herbs and roots learned from his Cherokee mother, who had learned them from a tribesman named Wofford. He also became convinced that ingestions of, and baths in, sulphur water would cure almost anything—except whatever was ailing Matilda, who died after bearing the eleventh baby. He took his younger children and his parents and moved southward in 1874 to a sulphur spring in Arkansas called Sulphur Spring but not to be confused with two or three other places of the same name. Silas Stacey’s sulphur spring was his very own, located in the wilderness beneath Sulphur Mountain, east of P D Flat in what would become Marble City Township at his insistence (Kim does not know yet how P D Flat got its name), and he did it one better by opening not only a medical practice there but also a resort.

  “Dr. Silas S. Stacey’s Mountain & Water Cure” was too inaccessible to become popular as a resort. It could be reached only on foot, but, ironically, the patients who needed it were not ambulatory. Over the years a few patients were carried in, but not enough to support his large family and parents, so in 1881 Dr. Stacey left an older son in charge of the resort and farm and moved westward a few miles into the community called Willcockson. Here he promptly did it one better by rechristening the town as Marble City, although the Post Office Department never would recognize it as such. He did his town clinic one better by also opening a general-merchandise store, which became the town’s leading business. He married a dark-haired beauty with strange ways named Bettie Morgan, and the doctor used his growing influence in the town to get Bettie to replace Mander Willcockson as postmistress. Taking triple control of the clinic, the general store, and the post office, he did it one better by building and opening a hotel, then began buying up all the property in and around Marble City, building rental houses and becoming a landlord, and in his spare time doodling all over his prescription pad the placing of the streets and avenues and boulevards of his imagined Marble City. He named one of the grandest boulevards after recently assassinated President Garfield and the others after other presidents; he arranged his street plan not as a checkerboard in the customary rigid-plat perpendicular-and-parallel plan, but almost as a free-form, organic plat, taking cognizance of the roll and rise of the land, the hollers and hills. It is one of the most beautiful unfulfilled street plans of all our lost cities.

  As the most prominent citizen of Marble City, Dr. Stacey was a kind and benevolent man, with a lively sense of humor, unable to stand solitude, and an excellent doctor who rarely lost a patient or failed to cure one, despite his lack of any formal medical education. He contributed regularly to the Methodist Episcopal Church and paid for the erection of the handsome white, steepled church house, although he himself never attended services. His nonreligiosity, if that is what it was, did not do him one worse in the eyes of his townsmen, although it provided an example for the Reverend Absalom Phillips, who could always build a good three-hour sermon around the doctor’s supposed Satanism and would blame any of the town’s misfortunes on the doctor; never mind that in private Phillips and Stacey were the very best of friends.

  Besides the marble quarries in which Dr. Stacey had a large stake, he did his mineral interests one better by buying up all of the deposits of high-grade zinc ore north of Marble City. But the natural resources he was proudest of owning were his acres of medicinal plants. All of the two hundred known species indigenous to the Ozarks grew on his land or in his woods, and he hired people to pick them: mandrake, bloodroot, goldenseal, black snakeroot, lobelia gentian, sarsa-parilla, ephedra, ginseng, springnet, senega, stramonium, colocynth, wahoo, wakefield crud, wafer ash, pleurisy root, catnip, horehound, pennyroyal. From a select mixture of these, compounds and distillations, he not only treated and cured his own patients but secured a patent for “Dr. S. S. Stacey’s Sulphur Mountain Bitters” and did it one better with a patent for “Dr. S. S. Stacey’s Perfection Universal Golden Elixir,” found in every home’s medical supplies but never perfect according to him, for he kept doing the stuff one better by adding one more ingredient each year of his life.

  His life was long, and he never quit. In his eighty-sixth year he did the roofers of his house one better by carrying the shingles up a ladder to them, on a hot summer’s day. A world war had already broken out in Europe, Marble City was declining rapidly, Stacey’s friends and many of his family were dead, and those remaining had been convinced by the doctor, who loved white lies all his life, that he was actually 103 years old and had no business carrying shingles up a tall ladder on a hot day. His resultant illness was treated with all of the Stacey patent cures, and, to do them one better, he concocted a “Dr. S. S. Stacey’s Black Nonesuch Draught,” sold for years afterward as a death cure; it did not, however, cure Silas’s ailment, and he was buried with sorrow.

  His life would make a book, and no doubt will. He was a tall, red-haired, handsome man, a bit of a dandy. He loved good clothes and was an impeccable dresser at all times, doing it one better by wearing one of his twenty-seven hats to bed. He loved good horses and had an imposing stable full of fine steeds for riding and breeding, doing it one better by training race horses and building a racetrack. He loved good whiskey and preferred making his own, doing it one better by using the same distillery he used for his medicines and adding a few bitters for flavor, and doing that one better by the unheard-of practice of aging the whiskey in charred-oak casks and letting it sit for several years before drinking it. He loved good women and always did them one better. He loved good books and had the finest library in Newton County, doing it one better by actually reading it rather than merely displaying it, including leatherbound, buckram, gilt-edged, and gilt-stamped octavio full-sets of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and, to do them one better, George Meredith. Dr. Stacey was (and perhaps remains) the only person in Arkansas to start and finish Meredith’s Evan Harrington.

  “He lived in a big two-story white house and died in it and had his practice in it,” Ethel Coker remembers, and tells Kim. Her father’s mother was Stacey’s daughter, and she was born a Kilgore in 1906 on Boston Mountain south of Marble City. She was orphaned as a small child and went to live with her grandmother and her great-grandfather Dr. Stacey in the big two-story white house. “I used to help him there in his office when I was just a little girl,” Mrs. Coker records on Kim’s machine. “I’d come in, evenings after school, and I’d help him clean up his office. He used to say he would make a doctor out of me. Bless his heart, he didn’t live long enough. I was only nine when he passed away.”

  Ethel Kilgore Coker, like Medea Dickson and many other widows Kim encounters among these cities, lives alone in a modern, efficient mobile home. Hers is parked off a secondary gravel road north of Harrison (address: Omaha, Arkansas). Kim gets lost twice trying to find the place, traveling on back roads that Zephyra disdains. The interior of the mobile home is pleasant, not cluttered but still compote, even boasting a compote radio—a big old late-forties wooden Art Deco radio cabinet, its innards still working, in lieu of a television set—and whatnot shelves in the corner and along the wall with whatnots on them. Does she perhaps have any of those books of Dr. Stacey’s? Did he leave her anything of his?

  “No, I don’t have. And I wish I did. I wish I had even something he wore. He wore those old-timey hats, high top, high crown, real wide brim, all the ti me. And suits—I never seen him without a s
uit on. He had this suit with these tails, split duck tails, always dressed up, always had a white shirt on and a suit. As old as he was…It seemed to me like he got around awful good to be that old, as old as he was, or as old as I was told he was—over a hundred when he died. He used to use a walkin cane all the time, but he didn’t use it to walk with, he just walked around and kind of flicked it around.” Ethel Coker laughs and pantomimes the motion of his cane.

  Kim asks, “Do you remember anything in particular about your great-grandfather that you loved?”

  “Oh, everybody loved him, he was just a wonderful person, but he was just like a father to me, because I didn’t have one. Everybody in that country came to him. People would come to him from miles away, and there was people came to him from St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, everywhere around, far and near, and when they came to him he would put up their horses and feed them and put up the people in the bedrooms upstairs.”

  Even after he officially closed his office in his last years and took down his shingle, he never turned away a patient. “They’d still come over there to him to get their medicine,” Ethel remembers, “and he’d say to them, ‘Well, I’ll give it to you if you’re not afraid to take it,’ and he would not take a penny for it.”

  Ethel Coker lived through the decline of Marble City. The school, even though a typical one-room schoolhouse, was a large white building dominated by a male teacher (all the public-school teachers were male in those days) named Frank Carlton of whom we will hear again. The school closed about the time the United States entered World War I, and Ethel had only completed the fifth grade, the extent of her formal education. She watched the other buildings, one by one, empty and close. Her uncle Jim Stacey, Silas’s youngest, was the village blacksmith for many years, and she watched the spread of the motorcar drive him out of business. Other Stacey offspring moved elsewhere. Silas’s son Silas Monroe Stacey settled in the county seat, Jasper, where he raised a family and opened the town’s leading general store and livery stable; he eventually gravitated back to his birthplace—Sparta, Missouri—where he operated a general store for the rest of his life. “His son taken it over,” says Ethel, “and I suppose now that if it’s still there, then some of his grandchildren are runnin it.” The only known Stacey still around Newton County today is DeVoe Stacey, another grandson, who lives on Mount Sherman, west of Jasper.