The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  The sheriff and a considerable posse found Arnold first, but not before spending days and nights in the search. Will Comer was kept away from the captive, who was tried, found guilty, but, because of his youth, sentenced to twenty-one years in the Boys’ Industrial School, a reformatory. There he remained only a year before being transferred to the State Hospital for the Insane. The last anyone heard of him—some years later, in 1933—was a small item in The Mountain Echo to the effect that he had killed his asylum roommate with a windowsash weight.

  Few other people remember Arnold Comer. Kim’s last interview for Buffalo City is not in the town itself but in neighboring Gassville, back on the highway. It’s an ugly name for a town to have, and the inspiration for jokes having to do with gasoline and stomach gas and empty talk, flatulent talk. In a very modest house too poor even for compote, right beside the busy highway and the roar of trucks, Kim finds Stella Beavers, age eighty-nine, being examined by a nurse from the Health Department.

  Stella Barton Caststeel Beavers grew up in Buffalo City and is related by blood or her marriages to nearly everyone on both sides of the river. The Caststeels were descended from Doctor William Caststeel, the head of one of Buffalo City’s first families, and the father of both Jonathan Cunningham’s first wife, Minerva, and his second wife, Tabitha. The Beaverses, of her last husband’s family, came from Virginia by way of Illinois and Missouri, and totally dominated the last years of New Buffalo City, owning the hotel, a general store, and the blacksmith shop, and running the ferry for Baxter Hurst’s father. Stella married John Caststeel when she was thirteen, too young for her to remember how many years she remained married to him; he drank and lost his mind and ran away. She worked hard most of her life, beginning as a cook for the railroad work gangs, and later as the stationmaster downstream at Cartney, where she tended the switch lights, sold tickets, met the passenger trains, carried mail from the post office to the train, and logged the freight shipments for a salary of $18 a month. Stella is tired, and her memory, she warns, is not reliable.

  But she remembers Arnold Comer and Clarence Vance; the Vances, she says, were the nicest people she ever knew, and the Comers were the worst. Arnold she recalls as “just a big ole stripe of a boy,” whose “mind wasn’t good enough.” As for the Vances, they left not because of any trouble but because “things just got dead, I guess.”

  “What’s your best memory of the days you lived in Buffalo City?” Kim asks her.

  “Well, when my husband was section foreman on the railroad and we lived in a section house right at the end of the bluff there, with no back yard except the river and just enough room to walk between the house and the bluff, I used to keep boarders, used to cook for all the men who worked on the railroad, cooked dinner for ’em every day on an old woodstove, maybe twenty-five of ’em I cooked for.”

  “You must have been a good cook.”

  “I don’t mean to boast, but I did used to be a good cook. I’ve cooked for the public in café’s and hotels.”

  “How much did you charge your boarders?”

  “Five dollars a week, it was.” Stella chuckles. “You’d pay that much for one meal nowadays.”

  “And that was your happiest memory, cooking for all those men?”

  Stella frowns. “I’ve lived an awful life.” She seems to be searching her buried store of imperfect memories for something better than her hours at the cookstove. Or something worse. Kim does not have to ask her if, like Kate Scraper, she has never had a worry in her life, because her wrinkled face, unlike Kate Scraper’s, has worry written all over it. “I had some babies, three of them, but they…” Her voice trails off. Moments pass. Stella studies her gnarled hands. Kim studies Stella and wonders what she looked like in the days when she was, as Kim has read and been told, “the prettiest stationmaster on the White River line,” and undoubtedly the object of kidding and courting from all the railroad men. Kim, who has always regretted marrying at sixteen, cannot conceive of what marrying at thirteen would have been like, so she asks.

  “Well, I don’t know. It was rough. I’ve had a rough life. I didn’t have any home, just my father. My mother died when I was six, and my two sisters got married and left home.”

  “When you were thirteen, were you in love?”

  “‘Love’? Girls that age don’t understand love; they don’t have any idee what it’s all about. I just wanted a home, was all. That was the main thing.”

  Stella’s voice becomes increasingly weary, and Kim decides to ask one or two more questions and go. “Did you like living in Buffalo City?”

  “Oh…” Stella says in preface, and ponders the question for a while. Her inward gaze seems to watch again the passing railroad trains and even the last steamboats (she was eleven when the last steamboat came up the river). She stands again in the shade of Stair Bluff and Turkey Mountain and looks around her. And tells Kim, “I didn’t ever know nothin better.”

  “Do you ever go back?” Kim asks.

  “What’s there?” Stella asks. “No, all it lacks is throwin the dirt over it.”

  Kim does not go back to Buffalo City for a final look around, either. It is the sort of place that looks better in memory.

  Cave City, Arkansas

  Nothing evil had been in the cave, but she had not enjoyed herself; no, she had not enjoyed herself, and she decided not to visit a second one.

  —E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924

  This is the first town Kim visits that is still a town. Among these places that have hoped for cityhood, it alone has not given up, although it has a long way to go, and many scars of the effort: the abandoned stores and houses, the awkward attempts at facelifting, the plastic surgery that is too plastic. But there are a comparative lot of people here, who stubbornly refuse to leave, or who have left and come back, because it is home.

  Cave City is large enough to have a Chamber of Commerce, which prints a little brochure with the motto “Small Town Atmosphere with Big City Pride,” without knowing that such pride is not found in big cities, that pride is a mark of hopeless smallness, fierce and doomed nothingness, blind loyalty. The original name of this place was in fact Loyal, because, it is said, the settlement was founded by a man who remained loyal to the Union when all the neighborhood hamlets seceded. The other towns in Sharp County have pretty names or quaint names like Strawberry and Evening Shade. Ash Flat and Hardy. Poughkeepsie and Ozark Acres. Ben-Gay, Grange, Calamine, and, right in the center of the county, Center.

  Unlike our other lost cities, where a river or a creek spills nourishingly alongside, Cave City has an invisible stream; it is entirely subterranean and runs through the strange cave that gives the town its name, a cavern as much a mystery to contemporary scientists and explorers as it was to the Osage who once inhabited or at least enshrined it. No one has ever been able to discover where the Crystal River originates, or where it goes. It has no known association with the far-distant Mississippi, and yet its water rises and falls with that big river’s rise and fall. Just as the original settlers remained loyal while their neighbors’ allegiances were muddied, the Crystal River remains crystal-clear and blue and calm when all the local streams are flooded and brownly roiling.

  The fish who inhabit the cave are not merely blind: they have no eyes. Centuries of evolutionary darkness have removed any vestige of eyeballs from them, but given their other senses such sharpness that they are nearly impossible to catch. There is no subtle symbol here for the human inhabitants of Cave City, who are for the most part just as sighted as anybody, if somewhat myopic to the blight around them, and are very slowly tearing down the faded ruins along Main Street only to replace them with “contemporary” atrocities such as the shingle-hooded Bank of Cave City, built not as a bank but a car dealership.

  Cave City is not on the way to anywhere. Highway 167, which is Main Street, is a United States highway, with a shield-enclosed number on maps, but is not a link, much less an artery; it begins at Bald Knob, Arkansas, and lazes
northward to the pleasant town of Hardy, Arkansas, where it dies. Hardy, always a resort town with quaint native-stone buildings, has filled up with retirees from Chicago these days, as has the nearby boomtown of Cherokee Village (no relation whatever to Cherokee City), the first retirement community in the United States, a city that has made almost an industry out of providing homes and services for well-to-do old folks. Hardy, not named for the great English novelist but evocative of his villages, is best known for its Arkansaw Traveler Folk Theatre, stocked by musicians (including Orilla Pinkston, whom we will meet later) who commute from Cave City, a kind of enclave for old-timey Ozark folk music.

  But Cave City is not in the Ozarks; that is one of its minor misfortunes. It modestly claims to be in the “foothills” of the Ozarks, but those feet are flat: the biggest hill, where the Cave City Cemetery rolls over the top, is scarcely two hundred feet high. The WPA Federal Writers’ Project’s Arkansas: A Guide to the State, published in 1941, quietly mentions: “State II continues south to CAVE CITY, 23.6 m. (659 alt., 427 pop.), a resort village whose field-stone buildings straggle along the road. The cave (adm. 10¢) consists of three chambers, the largest of which is about 80 feet wide and 10 feet high.” One of those field-stone buildings straggling along the road is shown in our photograph, still straggling: the last picture show, the sagging marquee of the Cave Theatre (Shorty Thompson, proprietor), its last film (starring Randolph Scott and Ida Lupino) but a matinee memory in the minds of children grown middle-aged (or was it something on the TV late the other night?), who also remember the rest room’s being behind the screen instead of off the lobby, and recall the theatre’s transformation into a Ford dealer’s auto-repair shop before its gradual decline into a roadside eyesore.

  Whatever people in Cave City do, most of them who work commute to the factories of Batesville, fifteen miles south, and thus Cave City is usually referred to as a bedroom satellite of Batesville. Batesville is one of the oldest towns in Arkansas, founded in 1818 and still preserving much of its nineteenth-century appearance. It is most noteworthy as the home of Colonel Charles Fenton Mercer Noland (1810-58), an early soldier, duelist, newspaper editor, and raconteur who wrote humorous sketches for the Eastern journals under the name Pete Whetstone and thus fostered the Easterner’s conception of Arkansas as a hilarious backwater.

  The backwater of Cave City is all underground, crystal-clear and populated by those eyeless fish; the same proportion of the citizenry has actually explored the cave, or simply visited it, as the proportion of New Yorkers who have visited the Statue of Liberty: less than a few. The cave has its obligatory legends, of Indian chiefs and suicidal maidens, of lost explorers and accidents, nothing terrible or especially forbidding, just enough to entice the tourist’s curiosity if the simple fact of the hole’s yawning openness, a gynecological wonder, does not: Kim will not go into that cave, not yet, and perhaps not ever. She will approach it in time, imagining in advance its damp, cold, dark confines, and she will hesitate to deliver herself into its maw for the sake of journalism or of art. Kim will discover that the dark, unbeckoning opening into the cave becomes a metaphor for a life’s passage she is not ready to face: growing old.

  In a letter to Professor Harrigan, Kim has written:

  It’s a new experience for me, talking to so many elderly people. Some have been quite friendly and helpful, talkative and interested. Some have been less eager to converse. At any rate, it has been an experience that has led me to wonder what I’ll be like as an elderly person, assuming I live long enough to earn that euphemistic epithet, “elderly.” It’s a scary thing, imagining the health problems of aging, although the ones I’ve spoken with who are especially well preserved don’t really exhibit pronounced aging difficulties; they seem healthy and happy. Two very old women have told me that they never worry, and that they feel this is the reason for their longevity. I’m still young and healthy (although I worry entirely too much), but I wonder what I’m going to be like when I’m seventy-five or eighty or older. Will I be cheerful? Dependent on others? Depressed? Lonely? Active? Sociable? Reclusive? Poor? Likable? Bedridden? Diseased? And most important, mentally alert or mentally feeble?

  Never before have I questioned this, or been aware of the vast differences in the elderly and the effects of aging. I see wrinkles, arthritic hands, very slow movements, hear crackly voices, and wonder what is ahead for me. Who that I have met will I be like?

  Kim will want to try to get a room for the night in one of the individual rock-rustic cabins of The Cave Court, a thirties motor court, father of the motel, built during a period of American history, early in the Depression, when Americans were seeking an escape from reality by way of the picturesque, romantic, rustic, roadside tourist camp with its grove of trees (why were the trees always painted white partway up their trunks?) as an oasis along the bland, relentless highway. The architecture of The Cave Court is the product of the imagination and hands of one Charles Prince Matlock (1893-1974), a local farmer who taught himself stonemasonry and set himself up in business to contract the occasional dwelling or commercial structure, and who left his mark scattered hither and yon over the local landscape. It is presumptuous to compare Prince Matlock with Antonio Gaudi, the great visionary Barcelona architect, and yet the points of similarity are indubitable: Gaudi (1852-1926) was also of very humble origin and began designing with an eccentric but colorful medievalism that hinted at such prophetic shapes as the parabolic arch; there are also hints of the parabola in Prince Matlock’s motel. Both men were “originals” with a highly developed sense of the intricacies of space, structure, color, and particularly texture, especially textures that verge on the absurd, such as Gaudi’s “chocolate-fudge sundae” sheaths and Matlock’s “spitball” coverings, which are actually assemblages of strange geologic material called “petrified foam.” Matlock also embedded into his cement surfaces quartz crystals, geodes, Indian stones, fossils, broken glass and pottery, etc.

  There are Prince Matlock buildings in Strawberry, Evening Shade, Ash Flat, Calamine—all of the local communities, including Batesville—but his main work is in Cave City, the motel as well as the older buildings of the “campus”—Home Economics and Gymnasium—of the Cave City Schools. The schools’ mascot, naturally, is “The Cavemen,” inspiring the artistic imagination of students doing posters and homeroom decorations, mostly in a “Flintstones” motif. Perhaps the prevalence of rock in Prince Matlock’s work is a kind of aboveground advertisement for all of the underground caves. He himself was an avid spelunker and holds the record for having ventured as deeply as it is possible to go into the cave, entering the fifth or lowest of five chambers by boat launched into the Crystal River and floating southward in the dark until he was stopped by a ninety-foot vertical wall beyond which there is no visible passage.

  Both Prince Matlock and Antonio Gaudi were essentially “biological” in their approach to architecture, but Gaudi, perhaps the supreme individualist in architecture, never repeated himself; Prince Matlock, on the other hand, except for his fanciful child’s sand castle at The Cave Court, is just one more rock mason, and no student of architectural history will justify devoting a thesis to him.

  The Cave Court, Kim discovers with surprisingly little disappointment, is filled with customers, an unusual circumstance; she is told that a family of far-flung Cave citizens having a reunion is responsible. “PLEASE DO NOT TAKE ROCKS OFF,” a sign warns Kim as she leaves the grounds.

  Across the highway from The Cave Court, in a house of Prince Matlock’s more conventional stonemasonry, Kim finds Hubert Carpenter, age eighty-seven, a former postal worker and route carrier who had used up his savings to commission Prince Matlock to build The Cave Court; Carpenter operated the place himself until he was too old to sign in wayfarers in the middle of the night.

  All his years as a postman, Hubert took his vacations in the same Western states where Nabokov collected butterflies, but instead of bringing home butterflies, Hubert brought home rocks, to be used i
n the construction of the motel. Friends as well as tourists brought configurations of seashells and coral from Florida and the Gulf Coast. Prince Matlock himself, a rockhound, contributed prized specimens from his collection. Prince and Hubert went to Eureka Springs to hunt rocks there and look at its distinctive stone architecture.

  Hubert Carpenter tells Kim that he, not Matlock, designed The Cave Court. “I had it marked out on paper just exactly like I wanted, the driveways and cabins and everything. I marked it out. I could go off and be gone for a month, and Prince knew just exactly what to do and how I wanted it done.”

  Through the Depression years, Hubert and Prince supervised the construction of The Cave Court as a kind of public-works project. Out-of-work men would come to Hubert for loans and he would put them to work at $1.50 a day, hauling and lifting rock for the buildings. But none of the rock was broken. Hubert points out to Kim the difference between stonemasonry and rock masonry: the former always implies the working of the rock in some way, cutting it or shaping it; but at The Cave Court, “We didn’t break ’em, we didn’t carve ’em, we put ’em there just like God made ’em.”

  “All those little rough round rocks,” Kim says, “look sort of like…like spitballs.”

  Hubert laughs. “Them are geodes. Found ’em about twelve, fifteen miles east of here, and brought in seventeen truckloads of ’em.” These geodes are small hollow rocks with crystals lining their inside walls. A pity: the beauty is all in the interior, unseen.