The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Hubert and his wife, known to everyone as Miss Eunice (a longtime teacher of home economics, especially sewing, at Cave City High), ran the motel for thirty-eight years, kept chairs and a swing placed around the lawns where they could sit and visit with their guests, and never had any trouble other than the usual problem of petty thefts (Hubert ordered the imprinted ashtrays by the hundreds and hoped they would be stolen, as a form of free advertising). For years after Hubert sold out and retired across the street, people from all over the country would call the motel and ask, “Is this Hubert?” The motel has had three or four different owners since Hubert left. He doesn’t keep track. He doesn’t even have any idea what the rates are these days; he guesses about $6.00 or $7.00 (much too low), but in his day the rates were $1.50, $2.50, all the way up to $4.00. Kim asks him if anything unusual ever happened during all those years he owned the place. Didn’t anyone ever die in the cabins? Only once, Hubert relates: a Mr. Logan with a heart condition, a frequent guest when he was auditing the county books, checked in one night, failed to appear the next morning, and was found dead in bed. Cave City, it must be remembered, is not on the road to anywhere: people do not pause at the motel so much as make it their destination.

  When Hubert bought the cave and the land above it for his motel, the cave was not developed and opened to tourists. The town was already called Cave City, but was hardly more than a crossroads hamlet; Hubert had no idea it would become a town of the size it has. He had bought the land from Dr. Laman (more about the name Laman to come), who had done nothing to make the cave accessible to the public: “It wasn’t worth a thing in the world to him.” Hubert, with Prince’s help, set about turning the cave into a tourist attraction, installed electric lights at a time when even houses didn’t have them, and made the town into a destination.

  Kim asks the gentle question that she puts to all of her old-timers: “Did you have any hopes or dreams that never came true?”

  “No, no, never did,” Hubert says without pause. “No, I’ll tell ya. My wife and me, we both filled our duty, I think.”

  She likes the way he puts that: “filled our duty,” as if each of us has a duty yawning like a big cave in the ground, to be filled up. Let every man fill his allotted cave.

  Hubert Carpenter was one of eight sons in a family who kept trying for a girl on the way to the proverbial ten children and finally succeeded with a lone female whom they named Orilla, an Anglo-Saxon form of a bird name, Oriel, “the golden.” Golden Orilla lives across the street from her big brother Hubert, just north of the cave, in the old Carpenter home, where she was born and grew up with Hubert and her other seven brothers. In the blossoming year of 1886, this house was built by Henry Horn, the second house in town; the first no longer stands. Horn altered the house to accommodate his growing family, and Joseph Carpenter, father of Hubert and Orilla, altered it more, until today it defies description (which is one reason there is a photograph of it). Does it “address” the street? Or does it address the cave and motel? If the former, then it speaks with a portico of balustraded balcony and gingerbread trim. If the latter, it barks with a dogtrot and a house-long porch. There is no chimney. The roofline is topped with the obligatory centipedal TV mast, but there is no smokestack of any sort, not even a flue. Kim asks Orilla why there is no chimney.

  “There was a big chimney,” Orilla says, “but we took it down and used it to underpin.”

  “Underpin?” Kim says, and Orilla tries to explain. Olaf Pinkston, age eighty-three, Orilla’s husband, tries to help in the explanation. Despite his name, Olaf is not Scandinavian; his name is just a form of the good old English “Oliver,” meaning “peace.” He doesn’t look his age; hale and hearty, he has just come in from preparing the seedbed for his garden, a busy spot. Olaf plays well on the guitar, the bass fiddle, the mandolin, and several other instruments, especially the harmonica. Orilla is excellent on the mandolin, the accordion, the guitar, and especially the piano and organ. Together they know by ear hundreds of old folk songs and ballads. Together they have taught thousands of young people how to play and sing.

  They helped to organize and serve as musical directors for the Arkansaw Traveler Folk Theatre in the village of Hardy. The theatre and its popular (with tourists) one-act pageant running all summer long commemorate a famous folk song, “The Arkansaw Traveler,” which itself is based upon an apocryphal but characteristic Arkansas folk tale. (Misspelling the state as “Arkansaw” is a venerable sop to the outsider inclined to rhyme it with Kansas.) The song and the tale manage to evoke the pioneer spirit of Arkansawyers, the simultaneous gullibility and “expertise” of outsiders, and to take into consideration a whole slew of subsidiary themes: hospitality, or the lack thereof, squatterhood, the ten-children family with which we are becoming so familiar, and, in the interplay between the squatter and the traveler, the whole matter of Arkansas’s relations with the rest of the world.

  The clever repartee delivered from the Squatter to the Traveler centers on the latter’s famous jibe, “Why don’t you patch the leaks in your roof?,” to which the Squatter replies, “It’s been raining all day.” This elicits the Traveler’s setup question, “Why don’t you do it in dry weather?,” bringing the Squatter’s punch line: “It don’t leak then.” This interchange is much older than Arkansas’s squatters; scholarship has traced its origins at least to 1832 in this country, down east in York, Maine; and to 1842 in Russia, the date of publication of Gogol’s Dead Souk, in which Gogol describes the decrepit huts in a Russian village: “It seemed as though the owners themselves had removed the laths and shingles, arguing, and no doubt quite correctly, that as huts cannot be roofed in the rain, while in fine weather the rain keeps off of itself, there is no need to mess about indoors, while there is plenty of room in the tavern and on the high-road.”

  Currier and Ives made and distributed a popular lithograph of the Arkansas Traveler astride his horse, arriving at the Squatter’s cabin. The print was based upon Arkansas artist Edward Payson Washbourne’s painting of the subject, done in 1858. The Squatter’s crude hut or cabin is typical of those of the time in all particulars except one: it has no chimney. If this was an oversight on the artist’s part, Currier and Ives did not bother to correct it.

  Kim has become a kind of latter-day Arkansas Traveler herself, sometimes seeking shelter for the night and being turned away, as she was at The Cave Court, and asking questions about, if not leaking roofs, missing chimneys. The “point” of the Arkansas Traveler legend is that the sophisticated newcomer is put to a test by the raw, shrewd rustic, and, passing it by dint of his musical skills, is accepted. On one level, it could be taken as the conquering of the frontier by civilization; on another level, the taming of savagery by art; on still another level, cultivated man’s triumph over his own base instincts. It is easy to imagine Everard Dickinson arriving at Buffalo City to find himself in a predicament similar to the Arkansas Traveler’s but having no violin mastery or other art to get him out of his fix. The Arkansas Traveler tale is the story of our continual confrontation with the residues of the pioneering, frontiering, westering instinct that is part of our programming. It helps to explain why our urge to “get back in touch with our roots” or “return to nature” hardly ever succeeds.

  Here are Orilla Pinkston’s activities, keeping her too busy, at seventy-seven, ever to grow old: in addition to being musical co-director of the Arkansaw Traveler Theatre, she is active in the Church of Christ, whose new building is right across the highway, north of Hubert Carpenter’s place; in the Church of Christ she has given vocal-music lessons (that denomination is opposed to instrumental music, on the grounds that the Bible tacitly forbids it). She gives both vocal and instrumental lessons to the Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, and 4-H Clubs. She is on the county-fair committee and the community-development council.

  An excellent cook (she began by cooking for her eight brothers; her earliest childhood memory is of rising before the sun each morning to bake sixty biscuits for them),
she organized the lunch program for the Cave City schools, worked in the school kitchens with other mothers until her four children were grown, provided food for the kitchens by organizing the Cave City Parent-Teachers Association to start a school garden, then organized a food canning area on the school grounds at harvest time.

  She teaches both music and art to grown-ups through the Federal Rural Adult Education Program. Her own artwork is limited (limited?) to the production of ceramics in her own kiln and to her specialty, apple-head dolls, George and Martha Washington dolls, which she began to create in commemoration of the American Bicentennial and which were chosen to represent the state of Arkansas at the national contest in Virginia. Shrunken apples make faces full of character.

  A bonus of this high profile she has kept over the years has been her selection by a national organization as a home tester for a variety of consumer products from the research-and-development laboratories of American corporations. She is constantly given things to try out: foods, cosmetics, household products, pet foods, paints, automobile accessories, what-have-you. She tried out the first instant coffees and the first chocolate-chip cookies.

  She belongs to the Audubon Society and is a conservationist; she belongs to the White River Art Association and is active in the Mountain View Folk Culture Center, as well as in the Rackensack Folk Society. “Rackensack” is an old anagrammatic word for “Arkansas,” an ultimate play upon the many possible mispronunciations of the state’s name; some years ago, an apartment hotel in Little Rock was going to be called The Rackensack, but the image-conscious newspapers inveighed against and killed it; today the word has passed into folklore, and the society bearing its name is an occasional and thinly populated organization.

  Orilla and Olaf Pinkston have a book of their own, coauthored with Leo Rainey, Songs of the Ozark Folk (Branson, Missouri: The Ozarks Mountaineer Press, 1981), which contains capsule biographies of themselves as well as other Cave City folk singers, most no longer living, who learned the words and music of their ancient “ballits” from their mothers and grandparents. Some of the story-songs in their book are of modern invention, but others have been identified as venerable Child ballads.

  One would expect a woman as active and energetic as Orilla to look larger than life, huge, even muscular, whereas in fact she is small, thin, and extremely pretty. Kim decides not to ask her whether or not she ever worries: all of those activities, organizations, clubs, crafts, and music keep her too busy to worry.

  “Do you still have musical gatherings here in Cave City?” Kim asks.

  “Every second Saturday of the month,” Orilla says.

  “Where?” Kim asks.

  “Right out there on our porch, when the weather’s good,” Orilla says. “People can bring their lawn chairs, and we serve them cookies and some Kool-Aid.”

  “Is it mostly ancient folk ballads that you do?”

  “Well, we don’t do any country, but we do bluegrass, and of course bluegrass is all folk music.”

  Bluegrass is the modern musician’s compromise between rural tradition and urban speed. It is a clever disguise for the old music, to make it unobjectionable to an era aroused by rock. The riddle is fast anyway, and the conversion of a sprightly old tune like “The Arkansaw Traveler” into bluegrass is merely a matter of adjusting the rhythms in banjo, guitar, Dobro, mandolin, and bass. Bluegrass is clean, wholesome, “family” music. It even lends itself to gospel songs. Such sentimental moods as lonesomeness, homelessness, and unrequited love can find expression in the cool of the grass that is blue. A broken dream that must remain untold in jazz, rock, even blues, can quickly be developed and descanted in bluegrass, the Kool-Aid of music.

  “What was your earliest memory of Cave City?” Kim asks Orilla.

  “There was just one store, and a post office,” Orilla says. “An old school building, and one church. A doctor had his office in his yard. He rode a horse, and I would climb up on the upper porch to see the doctor pass. Clop-clop-clop! I remember sometimes there’d be some colored people up here, they’d get something to drink, and they’d be cursing and things like that. One day the men picked one of them up and brought him here and tied him to the porch out there and began to whip him. They all took turns whipping that colored man. My mother went out there and said,’ If you’re going to kill him, take him away from my house.’ Maybe it saved him: they put him back in the wagon and took him away.”

  “Apart from that, was it generally pretty peaceful?”

  “No,” Orilla says. With Olaf’s help, she explains: there was a lot of family feuding. The origins of these feuds were obscure, distant memories. Kim cannot understand what there was to feud about. “I don’t understand it, either,” Orilla says. “There was one family right next door to us, and another family across the street, and a third family up the road a ways, and the three families were at it all the time, feudin with one another. I’ve seen people carry a gun just to take their cows to the pasture.”

  “Does Cave City need anything today?” Kim asks as a last question.

  “We could use one of those Wal-Marts or K-Marts,” Orilla says. “Yes, it would be very convenient if we had a Wal-Mart.”

  Wal-Mart, founded and largely owned by billionaire Arkansawyer Sam Walton, bills itself as “Discount City.” This kind of “city,” which Sam Walton has decreed will be placed on the outskirts of towns, not larger cities, is the small town’s city of the future, a market for everything under one roof, making “downtown” obsolete.

  Because the family reunion has taken over The Cave Court, Kim spends the night in Batesville, in a family motel, The Powell. Powell is a common name hereabouts; as far as she can determine, there is only a coincidental connection between the name of her motel and the name of her next contact, Wilson Powell, who is general manager of the Batesville Guard, a local newspaper that has its best circulation in Cave City, where 75 percent of the families, according to Powell, get the Guard either by home delivery or in the mail. Cave City, says Powell with affection, is “one of those towns which is still trying,” still attempting to keep up with progress and the problems of simultaneous growth and decay. Powell at seventy-one has become a fixture of the Guard office and has no plans to retire. He doesn’t anticipate joining the army of local citizens who get tagged with the label “senior” and need manufactured activities to while away their sunset years, but he takes a very strong interest in their problems.

  In her motel room, doing her homework, Kim has studied the stories about old people in communities like Cave City all over the state. Next to Florida, Arkansas has the highest percentage of “senior citizens” in the population of any of the states: 14 percent are sixty-five or older. This reflects not merely the desire of outsiders to retire to the beauty, climate, and economy of Arkansas, but the longevity of the native populace in one of the healthiest states in the world. The old people of Cave City are a mixture of immigrant retirees from other states, natives who never left home, and natives who went away to spend their working years in Indiana, Illinois, or Kansas and then came back to retire.

  Entering Cave City, Kim had noticed some of the ladies walking Main Street in what seems to be almost a costume for their time of life: pink slacks, glasses with the corners turned up and rhine-stone-studded, an elaborately curled hairdo frosted or sometimes colored lavender.

  Old people seem to have a need to be uniform, and to function under uniform programs for their benefit or welfare, each with initials for a name. There is the RSVP for Retired Senior Volunteer Program, with its SCP for Senior Companion Program and its FGP for Foster Grandparents Program. The OAV is the Older American Volunteers; there is also the RVSC, Retired Volunteer Service Corps. There is RVPP, Retired Volunteer Partners Program; HOME, Housing to Match the Elderly; MAPS, Mature Adults Personnel Service; and CHORE, Community Helpers Organization for the Retired Elderly. The proliferation of initials seems to hark back to the New Deal’s alphabet soup, which all of these folks lived through. Kim think
s perhaps all the programs should be lumped together into COO, Community Oldsters Organizations.

  “The WRPA is a fine outfit,” Wilson Powell tells her.

  “What does that one stand for?” she asks.

  “The White River Project on Aging,” he says. “It works out of the Community Center in Cave City. That gives them a place to get together and carry on their activities, and that’s important to them. If you don’t have a meeting place, usually your activities don’t mean much.”

  “How does the WRPA specifically affect the lives of the old folks in Cave City?” Kim asks.

  “It gives them something to look forward to,” Powell says. “The center’s always open, and at least once a week they have get-togethers, and it gives people with absolutely nothing to do something to look forward to.”

  Orilla and Olaf had told her about a recent get-together of the WRPA, which they had helped to organize. The men of seventy or older had staged a “beauty contest,” dressing up as women. One of Orilla’s brothers (not Hubert) had dressed as if pregnant.

  “Some were afraid he wouldn’t make it!” Olaf had said, laughing.

  “It was so much fun,” Orilla had said.

  Like the majority of people, who are not old, Kim has great trouble identifying with the viewpoints and problems of the elderly. Old is cold. Old is soiled and sad. A great wrinkled face is a fearsome warning of what will become of oneself. The withered heart demands our respect but gets only our pity. And there are fewer wrinkles in the face than in the mind, which is beyond repair. Like a ghost town, the old person is hollow and forgotten. Abandoned dreams embitter the strongest mind and weaken the firmest will. The only blessing is that one ceases to care.

  “I keep hearing the name Joe Weston,” Kim says to Wilson Powell. “Can you tell me anything about him?”

  Powell, whose expression is always friendly and courteous, gives her a sharp look. “I’m not sure he’s relevant to Cave City. Sure, he lives there, just outside of town, and he published a newspaper there, but it never qualified as a real newspaper, he had no permits, no mailing permits for it, and he is a very controversial figure still, even a sensational figure.” Powell searches his files and finds an example of the Sharp Citizen, Weston’s typewritten and hand-lettered “newspaper,” its title a pun upon the citizens of Sharp County, of whom Joe Weston considered only one to be truly sharp: himself.