The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Ruthel remembers playing in the cave as a child. In the hottest part of the summer, “I would take my paper dolls and take my lunch in a little sack and go down into the cave and play…because it was so cool, you know. I’d play all day in there, and it seemed like a long time to me. And then there was—up at the mouth of the cave, up at the top of the bluff, where the mouth opens down into, you know—there was a little path which ran right along there. Little calves would fall off that path and fall right into the cave and break their necks. I remember hearing people talking about it, saying, ‘Oh, how terrible. So-and-so lost a calf.’ It was quite a drop, you know. The path overhangs the open mouth of the cave, and those calves would just fall off. Well, I reckon that was enticing to me, and I must’ve wanted thrills or something. I can remember running just as close to the edge of that path to see whether I’d fall in or not.”

  “That was brave!” Kim says, and asks Ruthel another question: “Did you ever wish that Cave City would actually become a city?”

  “I don’t remember ever thinking that,” Ruthel admits, “but I remember hearing my grandfather—‘Uncle Jim,’ everybody called him—I remember hearing him tell my dad that someday out on that highway—I call it Strawberry Road but they call it Center Street, I believe, and I’m sick of the way they named some of the streets—it should be called Strawberry Road, because it’s the road that goes to the town of Strawberry—oh, out that way was where the old, old school used to sit. When I was a kid, it sat out there, and on about a mile, there was a little creek and there was some houses started building up, and I remember my grandfather saying to my father, ‘There will come a time when this will be the center of town.’ He could envision that back then. But it seems it has spread more to the north, building toward Evening Shade. He thought it would develop toward Strawberry. I never thought about it. I was perfectly happy with it the way it was. It was real quaint and nice. Still is.”

  There is that house on Main Street that Ruthel would like to buy so she can leave Batesville and go home. Friends ask her if she would be satisfied there. “Yes, I would love to live there again. My earliest recollections are of the old Christmas trees at church.”

  Kim mentions Joe Weston and asks, “Do you know anything about him at all?”

  “I know he’s been in the courts a great deal,” says Ruthel, who spent her working years as a court recorder. “I don’t know the man. He’s a real individual, real independent in his thinking. I’ve seen some of the articles he has written about Eagle Street and they’re pretty bad.”

  Ruthel’s father met her mother when the latter was a student at The Cave City Institute Boarding School, a private academy founded at a time when public schools were inadequate or nonexistent. Students at the Institute came from a radius of a hundred miles or more and were subjected to a rigid discipline of “all study and no play”: dating was confined to certain hours on Saturday afternoons, and curfews were strictly enforced. A photograph here shows the large house, with wraparound porches on the upper and lower floors and a tall stone chimney, that served as a boardinghouse for the Institute, pupils and faculty together, and, with old porch rockers, swings, and other porch furniture on its galleries today, still has the look of a comfortable boardinghouse, the only one in any of these lost cities. Here lived as a child one of Cave City’s most successful sons, Eugene McNeeley, who became president of “Ma Bell,” the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in New York.

  Like Orilla Pinkston, Ruthel has rare memories of blacks in Cave City, and these only of people passing through. “There were no black people in town at all. As a small child, I remember there were a few black people in Evening Shade and Sidney, and they would drive through Cave City to get to Batesville with their big wagons. They would have these black drivers hauling merchandise….” Ruthel remembers that she would hide under the bed when they drove through town. She traces her fear of blacks to the common fear children had because their parents kept them in line by threatening punishment from imaginary Negroes, in her case, a certain Old Black Jobe. Whenever she was naughty, her mother told her that Ole Black Jobe would come “get” her and haul her off.

  Does she, Kim asks finally, have any hopes or dreams of her own that never came true? Yes, says Ruthel Laman Heasley, “when I was a young person, when I was going off to college, I wanted to go to the University of Missouri, because Robert Frost was there at that time. I wanted to study under him, and be a writer. But my folks sent me to Galloway, a little college for girls here in Arkansas. I always wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to study with Frost. That was one big ambition that never came true.”

  This time—unlike Buffalo City, where Kim could not bring herself to go back for one last look around—she does return to Cave City briefly, for a specific reason: she has forgotten to find the cemetery. She makes a point of searching out the cemeteries of these lost cities early on, but it has slipped her mind here. In the southwestern corner of town, right on the county line, is the town’s lone eminence, and upon the pleasant knoll the cemetery, with a view of sorts, of the town. The cemetery seems so new; Kim cannot find any ancient headstones in it, and no distinctive or original headstones. She hopes that Prince Matlock, at least, will have a bizarre or original tomb marker. She searches for it, and at length finds it lost among numerous others of the same factory-cut, corny compote style. Charles Prince Matlock, a native genius of indigenous architecture, lies beneath a stone not just ordinary but of suffocating banality. Surely he did not choose it for himself.

  In August the Lamans of America will forgather for their Second Annual Gathering, and the people of Cave City will hold their annual Watermelon Festival, opening the Arkansas watermelon season ahead of the town of Hope, down in southeastern Arkansas, which has the biggest (over two hundred pounds) watermelons in the world but not the tastiest, which are grown around Cave City and get the flavor, according to legend or truth, from the rocky soil. Jim Laman’s apples are mostly gone, and a few descendants of Jack Laman’s strawberries straggle on, but everybody raises and eats the watermelon, and people come to the town from far and wide to buy them, people who couldn’t care less about the cave itself and never go near it, except perhaps to sit in the shade of the trees around it on a hideously hot afternoon in the worst month of the year, cooled by the cave’s breath and the mouth-drenching squish of bites into red-ripe melon.

  Lake City, Arkansas

  Cain was the first builder of cities.

  —Rabelais, Works, bk. V, ch. 35, 133

  Between the storms upon the earth and the storms beneath the earth, Lake City has had a hard time of it. (The “lake” from which the town takes its name was never that, only a wide place in the St. Francis River, not a pond or a pool of water, but a flowing stream. Lakes do not flow; they are inland bodies of water. There is no body of water here, just the sluggish brown little St. Francis, whose stuporous tranquillity belies its occasional spree of flooding, and gain-says its rambunctious past in the earthquake-ridden formative years of these pocked and pimpled “Sunk Lands,” which was Lake City’s official name for a long time.) There was an Indian village here, as in Buffalo City and in Cave City (and in Mound City to come), when, in the winter of 1811-12, one of the worst cataclysms known to man (but barely known to history, because so few lives were taken, miraculously) shook and tore this region, with the epicenter of the seizure somewhere just to the northeast of here. Farther northeast is the village in the boot-heel of Missouri called New Madrid, pronounced New Madrid, which, because it was the only populated place affected by the upheaval, gave its name to the disaster. Kim is in northeastern Arkansas now, just a few miles from the sharp toe of that “boot-heel,” all vestiges of hilly countryside far behind her; she will not see hills or hear the Theme of the Faraway Hills again on this journey until she has completed a swinging loop down through the southeastern and southwestern parts of the state.

  For now, there is this somnolent, stagnant village in a topographic freak of earth
shaped within the memory of man, even if unrecorded by those men who lived here and, being Indians, had no need for records. The white man’s records kept not far away in New Madrid that winter were awesome: the sense of the earth, the smell first, the strange organic smell, as of the very bowels of the earth putridly eviscerated. Then the sound: described by the literate earwitnesses as an ominous subterranean rumble, not like the growling of an empty stomach but like carriage wheels on cobblestones, impatient and threatening, and growing in intensity until the sight came: the terrifying sight of trees falling everywhere, whole massive masts toppling, forests flopping, and then the ground, the earth itself, becoming like gelatin, rock and soil viscously quivering.

  The New Madrid Earthquake—unlike the more famous San Francisco Earthquake ninety-four years later, which was all over in one day (although the fires went on for weeks afterward)—lasted for three months in recurrent jolts, like a long-drawn-out orgasm, with trickling aftershocks for a whole year (and tales are still told of innocent lovers’ blaming the earth’s jolts on their own blissful shudders, a misconception Hemingway echoed in his “moving earth”). Seismologists have declared that the sequence of New Madrid shocks surpassed any other recorded earthquake in the history of the North American continent in terms of the number of shocks, the length of the disturbance, the size of the area affected, and the estimated severity on the Richter Scale. Furthermore, the prospect of another great, more destructive earthquake in this same area is certain and appalling. But nobody cares; nobody has heard of New Madrid.

  It would be wrong, however, to blame the dermatological disfigurements of the landscape hereabouts on the New Madrid Earthquake alone; the pocks and cracks and sinks, the pits and sloughs and donnicks, are the result of an ancient attempt by the Mississippi River to change its whole course westward, an abandoned attempt, like so many of the fickle waywardnesses of that Grandfather of Waters. The Mississippi today dodders along forty miles to the east of Lake City, as the alligator gar swims, and yet its former detour through these Sunk Lands can be detected in the quality of the soil, a beautifully rich mud-born delta silt which makes some of the best farmland in the world, even after a sesquicentennial of hard use by farming man.

  A blemished face can protect the privacy of an overflowing heart. No tourist comes to Lake City to see these Sunk Lands and disturb this isolation. Even though Lake City has the highest population of any of our lost cities, it is in its own way more lost than the others, which have some attraction for the lover of scenery, or of architecture, or of ruins, or of nature’s steady determination to reclaim its land. It is also one of Arkansas’s several lost “second” county seats. Roads were so bad in the nineteenth century, streams were so deep and unpredictable, and, in the case of the Sunk Lands of eastern Craighead County, the rich land itself was so inaccessible, that it was necessary to have more than one county seat simply to make government available to all the people. Jonesboro, the first or primary county seat, is only twenty miles from Lake City, but it was an all-day trip by wagon—during those seasons of the year when it was dry enough to make the trip at all.

  So Lake City was given its own courthouse, of sorts, and its own chief deputy sheriff, and its own county clerk, although it has to share the county judge with the other county seat. Kim decides to start at the top, with this man. His name is Roy Bearden and he is called “Red” by himself and everyone who knows him, because of his rufous hair, with freckles and a rotundity to match. Judge Bearden’s office is in the Art Deco-style courthouse at Jonesboro; he has no other, smaller office in the courthouse at Lake City. Jonesboro (with thirty-two thousand people, the seventh-largest city in the state) is also the home of Arkansas State University, homely stepsister to Fayetteville’s main university, a school associated with templed hills and towers of learning, whereas the Jonesboro campus is for flatlanders, farmers, and swamp dwellers. There is just as much difference between eastern and western Craighead County, and Kim begins her all-too-brief session with the very busy judge by asking him about this distinction.

  Despite his appearance of a well-fed good ole boy, Judge Red Bearden is impatient and no-nonsense, nonjovial. He explains to Kim, “I would not really say it is differences beween the two as much as it is, uh, personality, uh, especially wunst you cross that St. Francis River into that country beyond Lake City, where they feel like a bastardly child as far as the rest of the county is concerned. And they probably have some concrete reasons for feeling that way, I don’t know. Sure, they’ve got a courthouse over there, but this here is really the courthouse. They’re just sort of like a branch bank.”

  “Why don’t you just consolidate the two?” Kim asks.

  The red judge winces. “That would be political suicide, lady,” he says. “The courthouse over there is very personal to the people in the eastern part of the county. It’s something they’ve held on to over the years. Besides, if we was to move that courthouse over here we wouldn’t save very little monies.”

  “Isn’t it personally inconvenient for you to have to sit on both benches, over there and over here?” she asks.

  “I don’t do that,” he says. “I’m not a judicial judge. I’m just an administrative judge. I go over there purely on administrative business.”

  “You run Lake City, then?”

  “No, the mayor does that. Talk to her.”

  “Her?” Lake City, Kim discovers, has a woman mayor.

  The March morning sky darkens and clots with heavy, looming clouds as she drives eastward toward Lake City. All her life she has known this pattern to herald the need to look out for fierce cyclic winds: what the radio, now she turns it on, would call a Tornado Watch, as the first stage in a public anxiety leading up to the second stage, Tornado Warning, and sometimes even to the third: Tornado!

  In terms of the number of deaths resulting therefrom, Arkansas is the worst tornado state in the country. Farther west, the flatlands of Oklahoma and Kansas have a reputation for a storm cellar in every back yard, as well as daily alerts in anticipation of the big funnels, but Arkansas, especially its flatlands (in which Kim now finds herself), has the most destructive of the big twisters. For some reason perhaps having to do with the whirling wind’s preference for the line of least resistance, the tornadoes do not like the mountain country of the Ozarks and are comparatively rare there; none were ever seen in Marble City or Buffalo City. In Lake City, there is nobody who has never glimpsed or endured a tornado.

  The word “tornado,” of relatively recent usage, replacing the synonym “cyclone,” is from the Spanish for “turn” but also from the Latin for “thunder,” suggesting the heavy rain and sound effects that accompany the storm; whereas the quiet, more classic “cyclone,” from the Greek for “coil” or “wheel,” does not evoke such special effects. Most old-timers prefer the latter, but there are superstitious people who avoid calling the storm by either name, lest the utterance of the name itself bring on the beast. A circumlocution thus replaces it: “monster storm a-brewin,” or “hell wind a-churnin,” but most likely a euphemistic “somethin bad a-comin.”

  The usual true accounts of automobiles and heavy trucks swept off the highway and carried great distances by the tornado are matched by unauthenticated stories of people being lifted high into the air and returned unharmed to a walking (or running) position, of a sack of meal that was hanging on a porch being hit with a gust that blew away the sack but left the meal hanging, of water wells being turned inside out and pouring well water all over the country. More likely are such stories as (according to one old-timer) that the tornado momentarily sucked the St. Francis River dry and poured the water out of the top of the spout of the funnel, or lifted the roof off a house without disturbing a table set for dinner. Indian legends favor the identification of the cyclone with a wild horse; farmers report numerous “sightings” of horses being lifted bodily from their stalls, blown around the decapitated barn, and returned alive to earth.

  Along with recurrent droughts, equal
ly recurrent floods of the St. Francis River, and the not recurrent but always possible earthquake, the seasonal, cyclical cyclone appears to be less a destructive force than a theatre for displays of heroism, exhibitions of charity, outpourings of kindness, bringing out the best in people who never knew what resources of goodness they had in them until the storm demanded their mettle. If Lake City is a hazard area—a dangerous climate and a menacing geography—it compensates by lacking the boredom and lethargy that attend the safe backwaters of society. The excitement of the weather is also reflected in the excitement of misadventure of another sort: crime. Lake City has a history of misconduct to match its goodness and render it the most wicked of our lost cities.

  In a little shopping plaza in the “new town” on the western fringe of “old” Lake City is a small “modern” brick shed that serves as a city hall, and here Kim locates the mayor, who is just hanging up on a phone call with Judge Bearden when Kim arrives to see her. Pat Quails is a very young and pretty forty-three, a farm girl, ex-teacher, and, like Orilla Pinkston, long-time music teacher; she still teaches piano and voice. She grew up in Monette, across the river from Lake City, but married a Lake City farmer. “Judge Bearden and I have a good working relationship,” she tells Kim, in her little office.

  “What’s your main headache as mayor?” Kim asks her, getting down to business after the two women have exchanged pleasantries and comments on the weather: tornado watch for the rest of the morning.