The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  During the six years of its life, the Sharp Citizen contained no news other than the news of Joe Weston’s continuing battles against the establishment. He couldn’t have cared less about church socials, local births and deaths, marriages, or community events. He regularly slandered, if not libeled, persons in power, bankers, the county sheriff, machine politicians, the governor. He was caught in a kind of vicious circle: he would attack those who he imagined wanted to attack him; his attackees would then attack him; he would attack his attackers, who would attack him for attacking them; then he would attack them for attacking his attacks on them.

  It was his whole life, all he did or seemed to know how to do. A man of seventy-two dying of diabetes and its complications, Joe Weston was not a native of Cave City but of Little Rock, an air force veteran, and a “real” newspaperman in San Diego and Salt Lake City, where he was converted to Mormonism, took a Mormon wife, but was later excommunicated; he came home to Arkansas to nurse his illnesses and his grudges against mankind. After getting a sense of power from starting the Citizen, he ran for governor as a Republican against Senator-to-be Dale Bumpers but won almost no votes; then he waged a vicious campaign against Senator-to-be David Pryor, using in his campaign the same style he used in his newspaper: “I’m going to hold my own press conference and come out with a sensational, personal charge against the governor. He’ll spend his Wednesdays answering my Tuesdays.” But Governor Pryor ignored him, mercifully, and his campaign was another of his lost causes.

  His latest lost cause was a multimillion-dollar suit against all of his real and imagined enemies, including the Supreme Court of Arkansas, the Mormon Church of the United States, various local judges and district judges, politicians and officials. Somehow the suit had managed to reach the Supreme Court of the United States, where it was awaiting a hearing and giving a whole new meaning to the word “plaintiff”: it was both the most complaining of suits, in the sense of petulant griping, and the most plaintive, in the sense of melancholic and mournful.

  “Should I talk with him?” Kim asks Wilson Powell.

  “If you can,” Wilson says.

  She phones Weston in advance, tells him her purpose, and asks for directions to his house. “Are you armed?” he asks her. She laughs and says of course not. “Should I call out the squad?” he asks. She doesn’t know whether to laugh again, even nervously. She is more than a little frightened of him. He gives her the somewhat complicated directions to his place.

  He lives north of the village, on a little farm, one of those subsistent but self-sufficient organic farms, with lots of goats and vegetables. A beautiful blonde girl, teen-aged, is riding a pony in the meadow. Weston’s present wife, Ann, looks not much older than the girl, and the place seems to be full of her kids, including a little boy who is named Free Press Weston. It is not fair to name a child that; as he grows up his peers will nickname him “Freep.” The boy and his brothers and sisters and Ann’s mother, Lou Jean, who, Kim is to learn—later, elsewhere—is actually Joe Weston’s previous wife, come in and out of the room, and sometimes stay, as Kim talks to—or, rather, simply listens to—Joe Weston. Heavyset, overweight like many diabetics, he has a full head of crewcut graying hair, and beady eyes; his face is expressionless, and his mild manners belie his fiery character.

  Kim’s fear of him rapidly gives way to utter boredom, for he is a terrible windbag. She is permitted to ask him only one question—“Why did you decide to move to the Cave City area?”—and from there on he does all the talking, recounting his long past, his career in the air force, his injuries in World War II, his association with the Mormon Church and his experiences in Salt Lake City. Kim is acutely aware of his speech—quiet, slow, with exact phrasing and precise pronunciation—of which he, too, is aware: “I have an excellent command of the English language,” he comments during his never-ending story.

  She wishes he would pause long enough for her to ask her next question. He never does. He launches into the story of his lawsuit now before the Supreme Court, as well as the various suits against him and his countersuits, which have led up to it. “I expect a victory; I will be quite surprised by anything less.” He talks of his newspaper endlessly. “No one has ever brought to Arkansas such an extensive journalistic background as I possess.” She only half listens. Occasionally she hears a name she knows: “Fulbright…McClellan.” Like most braggarts, he is a shameless name-dropper. Many of the big names he mentions she does not know but feels that she ought to know. She has so little interest in politics. She never reads political news in the papers, and though she has lived all her life in Arkansas, and voted, she never knew that Joe Weston was running for governor. She really wishes he would shut up. She begins to feel like crying. Or screaming. Her notes dutifully record: “jurisdiction districts, pay-offs to a judge (or is it pays-off?), indictments by grand juries, prosecuting attorneys, liquor in dry counties, call-girl operations, stays in jail, counts of perjury, double jeopardy…What is ‘double jeopardy’?”

  There is the briefest pause. Now hurry: she has time for a very quick question: “Whydidyouaskmeiflwasarmed?”

  “We’ve been shot at at least a hundred times,” he declares, and uses the question as an excuse for telling the long story of all the harassment and persecution he has been subjected to. His wife, Ann, sits listening, never nodding her head or shaking it, never registering any emotion, never seeming either to indicate that she has heard all of this before or to suggest that it is all news to her. On the walls of the living room, in a house that is not a shack or a ranch-style but something in between, are her paintings, still lifes mostly. She has an M.F.A. degree, Master of Fine Arts. So young and pretty, she must have her special reasons for bearing so many children to old Joe Weston. In James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, there is a tenant family named Woods in which the multiparous young mother, Ivy, married to fifty-nine-year-old Bud Woods, has her mother, Miss-Molly, who is the same age as her husband, living with them in their crowded cabin. But Miss-Molly is not Bud’s former wife, as Ann Weston’s mother is Joe Weston’s former wife.

  When, finally, Kim manages to get up and begin backing off toward the door, Joe Weston thrusts into her hands a copy of the sixty-page booklet printed for his case before the Supreme Court, and then another booklet, The Sharp Citizen Story, on the history of his newspaper, and then various other pamphlets he has published. She takes these back to her motel to study.

  Wilson Powell had told Kim, “Weston and I have been personal acquaintances. Note I didn’t say ‘friends.’ We haven’t had any problems between us, but I don’t think the man has any close friends. Everybody is afraid of him. He can take a simple rumor and make it really rough.” The primary target of his magnification of simple rumors, Kim discovers by reading the material Weston gave her, is a man named Eagle Street, Cave City’s banker. Born with the century, Eagle Street founded the bank in 1920 at the age of twenty, and retired in 1980 at the age of eighty. Street might serve as an archetype of the small-town banker everywhere: shrewd, lean, upright, poker-faced, political, and very tight-fisted. If in his old age he is not loved, he has the consolation that throughout his adult working life he was too feared to be even liked. One of the cardinal rules of banking is “Never give a loan to anybody who needs one,” and Eagle Street adhered firmly to this rule all his life, making enemies everywhere. One of Joe Weston’s biggest mistakes, when he first tried to start his newspaper, was to ask Eagle Street for a loan.

  The head of the Bank of Cave City today, housed in a crewcut flat-top building that was once the Street Motor and Tractor Company, one of Eagle’s numerous sidelines, is Eagle’s grandson James Mack Street. Kim discovers that he is not lean and unsmiling like his grandsire Eagle but is a young-looking thirty-four, friendly and inclined to pudginess: he looks and dresses like a banker of the current yuppie crop. Kim is eager but uneasy about asking him questions concerning Eagle, who, according to Joe Weston’s “newspaper,” was a rake, playboy, and debaucher,
and who retained such sexual power into his seventies that he continued his wanton seduction of all the women in the county, married or not. Joe Weston’s journalistic accounts of Eagle Street often read like a bad pornographic novel.

  Although young James Mack Street is executive vice president of the bank and Eagle is officially retired, the old man “still comes in for a couple of hours on Mondays and a couple of hours on Fridays, enough that he thinks he still has control, you know, and that he’s still calling the shots. I guess he is!”

  Kim has never talked to a banker before without needing money, and after all these days of talking to people past seventy it is easy, relaxed, and refreshing to talk to someone her own age. “Have you ever had any robberies or holdups?” she asks.

  He smiles. “We’ve never had an armed robbery, but we’ve had a lot of people rob us with a pencil.” He explains, “They would say, ‘I promise to pay,’ but they really didn’t mean that when they said it.”

  “How do you feel being called a ‘bedroom community’ for Batesville?” She hopes that isn’t construed as an off-color question.

  “I find it very comfortable to be just fifteen miles from Batesville. I grew up there and went to school there.”

  She wonders if the mention of Joe Weston would anger him, or if he would make a polite effort to conceal his anger. But because there is no problem of the poor hearing or weak voice or wandering mind that she so often encounters in the aged, she comes right out and asks, “What do you know about Joe Weston?”

  There is no anger or even irritation in his expression, but a kind of amused tolerance. “He’s our resident outlaw…or a real kook, I’m not sure which. He was really down on Granddad. Weston got his start picking on local politicians and then graduated to the state level.”

  “Why was he down on your grandfather?”

  “Mainly because Granddad wouldn’t loan him any money, that’s all. It’s always a motive like that. Weston would very skillfully pick up an ounce of gossip and make it look as if it was very close to the truth. It was so absurd it was funny, really. Some of his accusations…‘Eagle Street, the bastard tyrant of Sharp County…’” James Mack Street laughs.

  “What was your grandfather’s reaction?” Kim asks. “Was he amused?”

  “Granddad took it that if people were going to believe that kind of garbage there was nothing you could do to change their minds about it. He did explore a potential legal action, but he finally decided it would do more harm than good to try to counteract it, so he just shrugged it off.” James Mack Street tells a little story. “There was one lady that Joe Weston wrote about, who was going around with some other man, not Granddad. That kind of gossip. One day Joe Weston parked his car on Main Street and walked over to the post office. We heard all this ruckus and going-on out there, and looked out to see the lady working him over with her shoulder bag.” Street chuckles. “She was really letting him have it with that shoulder bag. He ran across the street and into the restaurant, and she just walked up and down the sidewalk, waiting for him to come out. Then she went into the hardware store and bought a can of black spray paint and sprayed it all over the windows of Weston’s car! I guess he suffered about as much as he dished it out,” James Mack Street concludes. “His is the kind of reputation the town doesn’t take pride in, and we would’ve gladly shipped him anywhere else.”

  So many of Kim’s contacts will die before the year is out, she will become afraid to read the Gazette’s obituary columns. But it is hard to avoid seeing the Gazette’s headline: “Editor Joseph Harry Weston, 72, Dies; His Prose Led to Controversy, Lawsuits.” The obituary will say, “Still pending is Mr. Weston’s appeal to the United States Supreme Court in his lawsuit for $39 million in damages from Independence County, the Supreme Court of Arkansas, the Mormon Church and various public officials.”

  Not long after that, the Supreme Court will turn down his appeal.

  Considering the importance of the Streets to Cave City, it is remarkable that the town does not have a Street Street, but the humor of this redundancy has escaped them. There is a Matlock Road leading out toward the treeless subdivisions with street names like Melody and Tammy Drive, and on the development’s edge a short lane called Laman Street.

  Most of the Streets and that street are descended from Laman. James Mack Street, among his other civic volunteer positions, has served as the chairman and master of ceremonies of the First Annual Gathering (reunion) of the Laman family, three hundred descendants coming from coast to coast to honor their ancestor George Washington Laman, who came from Tennessee to Arkansas, not to found Cave City, but to sire the two brothers who did.

  The name Laman, family tradition says, comes from France, where it was originally LeMan. “The Man” in French, as Faulkner has pointed out in explaining the genealogy of the Chickasaw patriarch Ikkemotubbe, is “l’Homme,” which Ikkemotubbe himself anglicized to “Doom.” But for our purposes we might think that Laman means “The Man” as much as Mankins does, and if Peter Mankins can serve as a metaphor for mankind as it came to Sulphur City, then George Washington Laman can represent the patriarch of the family of man moving into Cave City. But little or nothing is known about him; he first settled in Arkansas near another “city,” Lake City (next chapter), but found the swamps and the flatland there too conducive to malaria and moved on into the highlands of Sharp County. In the Old Testament another patriarch, Isaac, was buried by his two sons Jacob and Esau in the cave at Machpelah, one of the Bible’s famous caves; for their part, the two sons of George Washington Laman, Jim (James Andrew) and Jack (John William), became the founders, planners, plotters, and platters of Cave City.

  For our purposes it would be nice to relate that Jim and Jack fought on opposite sides in the Civil War, but they were young boys at the time of the war, and it was not until the last decade of the century that they set about changing the name of the post office of Loyal to Cave City. Jim founded the Cave City bank that his great-grandson and partial namesake, James Mack Street, now runs, and Jack founded the Laman Mercantile Store for general merchandise, although Jim built another, competing Laman Mercantile Store for general merchandise. The two brothers built side-by-side houses on Main Street, moved into them the same day with their side-by-side wives, Martha Elizabeth and Elizabeth Ann, and planted most of the rest of the town to fruit: Jim to strawberries, Jack to apples. This bigeminality of birth, house, spouse, job, and crops ought to provide for fabulous parable or allegory.

  Eagle Street married one of Jim’s granddaughters. One of Jim’s sons, George Thomas (Doc Tom), studied medicine and became the town’s doctor when other physicians, having discovered the place was too healthy, moved out. Doc Tom’s practice was not a busy one and he was often broke, but he stuck it out for forty years, until his death, because Cave City was home and he couldn’t leave.

  When all the descendants of the Lamans congregated for their first family reunion, it was at the behest, urging, and organizing of Doc Tom’s only child, Ruthel. The other 274 descendants presented her with a framed citation as “Patriotic Citizen Initiator of the First Gathering of the Laman Family.”

  Ruthel Laman Johnson Heasley, now seventy-eight, lives by circumstance in Batesville but dreams of buying a house on Main Street in Cave City for her last years. On one of Batesville’s quiet back streets Kim finds her house, two stories that are neither modern nor quite old and have not a trace of compote but many tasteful antiques. There is nothing compote about Ruthel, either; although she is old enough to have been Orilla Pinkston’s original music teacher, she is ageless. Like almost everyone of her generation, she must take daily medicine (in her case cortisone, which sometimes leaves her dizzy to the point of seeming drunk), but she has an elegance of appearance and of manner that gives the lie to her years.

  Kim and Ruthel (it is accented strongly on the first syllable) begin by talking about her best pupil during the twenties, Orilla, when Ruthel herself was only a teen-ager; Orilla, slightly younger, would in tur
n become a music teacher at seventeen. Because Orilla had to do all of the sewing and washing and ironing for her eight brothers, “she was bothered by arthritis and she had a great deal of trouble with her hands,” Ruthel recalls. “She would come to my house for music lessons and she would’ve ironed shirts for eight boys. I don’t know how many shirts they each had, but even eight would’ve been an awful amount. She was real tired and her hands were sore.”

  Ruthel remembers her grandfather Jim Laman very well, but not her great-uncle Jack. When she was just a very little girl, Jim, who lived just a few doors down Main Street, would come and ask her, “Would you like to go knocking around?” She would be thrilled, because it was her favorite means of travel: “I would put my right foot on his right foot and I would put my left on his, and he would hold me by the hands, and I would walk on his feet, you know. And we would go places.”

  Jim would take his granddaughter knocking around to his gristmill to watch the wheat being made into flour, and to his gin to watch cotton being hulled.

  Ruthel’s father, Doc Tom, owned the cave for many years before he sold it to Hubert Carpenter, who developed it. Kim remembers Hubert Carpenter replying to her question “The cave itself is mysterious and interesting to me, but I wonder if the people who live here find it mysterious and interesting?” “No, no,” Hubert had said. “I bought it from a doctor and it wasn’t worth a thing in the world to him. He wouldn’t ever do a thing with it.” Doc Tom had no desire to commercialize the cave, and for years left it as it was: a big hole in the ground, which he and his neighbors used as a refrigerator in hot weather in the days before even “iceboxes.” Olaf and Orilla had explained to Kim how each family had its own lard bucket in which milk and butter were kept cool in the cave. Olaf had explained, “Each one had a different-colored ribbon so you’d know his bucket, you know! But now you wouldn’t dare leave anything down there!”