The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Chief Spencer had gone to Croppy Bryant’s beer joint, south of Lake City, on a report of a disturbance by the intoxicated Alf Wood, but just as he entered the door of the establishment Wood shot him. At his trial Wood claimed that he had mistaken the chief for a man who had threatened to kill him that same day, had been expecting the arrival of the other man, had become drunk in expectation of it, and had responded wildly when someone in Croppy’s yelled, “There he is!”

  In recent years, continuing his own investigation of all these crimes, Plug Eaton has interviewed a brother of Alf Wood. Alf died in the early sixties, after serving only seven years of his sentence. The brother presented a more complicated story, involving another man’s passion for Alf Wood’s pretty wife, a rape committed by Croppy Bryant’s son, an investigation of the rape by Bill Clements, constable of Lake City Township, and a frame-up in which the drunken Alf Wood had been expected to shoot and kill Bill Clements but had shot Chief Spencer instead, by mistake.

  Constable Clements, to whom all these links lead—not just Spencer and Wood but several lawmen in Lake City—was a classic example of a man on both sides of the law: keeping and preserving it for years, then violating it. And his is the saddest of these stories. He was born across the river, in the wilderness of Cane Island, of an old family who had settled the area right after the Civil War as refugees from the more strife-torn killing grounds; all his life Bill Clements would have a special affection for the river people, the dispossessed squatters and vagrants who wrested a living from the fish and game of the swamps. Growing up on Clements Donnick, a peninsula of cleared canebrake jutting out into the “lake” of the St. Francis just north of Lake City, he watched the town grow. From childhood he had aspirations, like Plug Eaton, of becoming a law officer, not for the state police, which did not exist then, but for the township of Lake City. He became constable of the village during the worst years of the Depression, when Lake City and his home ground across the river were filling up with migrants, failed farmers, the shiftless, the same scared wanderers his ancestors had been when they came to Cane Island.

  Many people died, starved, or were killed during those Depression years, and Constable Clements was required to investigate along with, or in place of, the county coroner, the sheriff’s deputies, and the health officer (or at least whatever temporary undisillusioned physician had replaced Doc Roberts, who ascended to his Office Upstairs at the outset of the Depression). One of the people Constable Clements went out of his way to help was a homeless pregnant woman named Nellie Hart who had come from God only knows where in search of shelter and a place to birth her child. Bill Clements gave her a bed in his own modest cottage on Clements Donnick (his wife, whose name was also Nellie, had left him, taking their three children to California), fed her from his table—or, rather, supplied the food with which she prepared a table for the two of them—and assisted in the birth of the baby, a girl, who was named Doris Jean, a good common country name.

  “Let’s drive out to Cane Island,” Plug suggests to Kim, and heads the cruiser toward the bridge. En route he points out (“I guess you could call it crime, too, in a way”) the house where lived the poor mother of the Reverend Jim Jones, whose 911 disciples killed themselves with lethal Kool-Aid at Jonestown in Guyana; Jonesboro was named for an ancestor.

  They approach the long bridge, which has a shorter span of steel that is meant to lift (“That was built to let the steamboats pass under, but it never has been raised”); the bridge does not arch gracefully but shoots straight as an arrow for a mile out into the marshland of Cane Island. It is a two-lane state-highway bridge, built in 1934, just after Doris Jean Hart was born, not quite soon enough to replace the rickety wooden one-lane bridge that had extended that mile out across the “lake.” The same year the new bridge was opened, Lake City had put together its first Chamber of Commerce, and the Chamber celebrated both its birth and the completion of the bridge with a big ceremony, a three-day affair, including live music and dancing and a beauty pageant, a contest to choose a Bridge Queen who would christen the new span.

  “This was before I was born, of course,” Plug relates, “but I’ve got newspaper accounts of the festivities. They elected this girl, a Jonesboro High graduate named Ida Frances Metz, as ‘Miss Bridge,’ and all these girls paraded in their formals and all, and they gave the Bridge Queen a bottle of beer to do the christening with. Oh, we never had heard of champagne in Lake City then, and during the Depression we couldn’t have bought any if we had it. So Miss Ida Frances Metz takes this bottle of beer and says, ‘I christen thee, the St. Francis River Bridge,’ and smashes the bottle over the cement banister there.” Plug chuckles. “In my researches, I thought how entertaining it would be to locate Miss Ida Frances Metz and talk to her. I didn’t even know if she was alive or what, but just the other day I opened the paper and there was a picture of the fiftieth reunion of her high-school class, and who should be in it but Miss Ida Frances Metz, from California. I couldn’t find her, though, but I tried.”

  The present mile-long span of cement is just a few yards upstream from the location of the old railroad bridge, of which no trace remains, and from the old wooden bridge, long ago carried away by floods. The present bridge not only serves to join Cane Island (which is not actually an island, any more than the river is a lake) to the “mainland” but is also the only link between northeastern Arkansas’s two largest cities, Jonesboro and Blytheville. As they come to the end of the long straight stretch of cement, and Plug turns off onto a dirt road, he explains, “Now, this is Cane Island. There’s a little church, Bethabara, and that’s the real name of the place, but nobody calls it that: it’s just Cane Island. Here’s the cemetery.”

  In Cane Island Cemetery, a grassless expanse of poor dirt without even a trace of wakefield crud, Kim is shown the headstones of a few of the early settlers, and then she is not taken to, but allowed to find on her own, the grave of baby Doris Jean Hart. It stands out: upon it someone (her mother? Bill Clements?) placed the iron bedstead of the crib in which she lived her short life. The sun is out again; whatever tornado had been watched for is off scaring people miles away; in the bright sunlight stands the iron crib, painted white and then repainted by recent, unknown hands. Someone long ago, carefully but clumsily, hand-lettered a wooden sign and hung it over the head of the frame: DORIS JEAN HART 1934 1935. In more recent times, someone (there are no Harts on the Island, or anyone remotely related) has placed a small, carved, compote chiseled headstone with the same letters and numbers at the head of the bedstead. There are no other bed frames serving as grave markers anywhere else in the cemetery; in all her travels through the cemeteries of the lost cities of Arkansas, Kim has never seen, nor will ever see, a child’s bed used to fence a grave. She turns aside so that Plug will not see the single tear running down her cheek, and she wipes it away. Plug says, “You know, I’ve talked to people who’ve lived their whole lives here on Cane Island, one of them eighty, and no one remembers anybody named Hart. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find out about her or her mother, and no one even knows where they came from, who they were, and where they’ve gone to.” He pauses and looks around at the other modest headstones. “But it’s a free cemetery,” Plug observes. “Anyone who wants to can bury here or be buried here. Bill Clements wanted to. That’s his grave right over there.”

  After the death of Doris Jean Hart, her mother, Nellie, wandered on, as aimlessly as she had drifted into Bill Clements’s life, and the constable turned his attention to another woman, who perhaps reminded him of his lost Hart, for she was also twenty years younger than he, and went by the name of—get this—Nellie McClish, his third Nellie. “How do you spell that last name?” Kim asks and wants this carefully preserved on her tape recorder. It could be McLish or some other variant of the ancient venerable Scottish name MacLeish, as in the grand poet Archibald; but Plug spells it M-c-C-1-i-s-h. Once again, as with William Hogan of Buffalo City, Kim wonders about her own links to these people: the ma
n who took Kim as a child bride of sixteen was a McClish, from eastern Arkansas; she will always wonder, but will never know, if Nellie McClish might have been an aunt or at least a cousin of his. Constable Bill Clements had two children by Nellie McClish and at her urging gave up the hazardous business of law enforcement, retiring to his beloved river to build a houseboat.

  The houseboat may not be the same one shown in our picture beside the bridge. If not, it was identical to it, in architecture identical to dozens of houseboats on the St. Francis: the simplest of vernaculars, with a gable on a rectangle, painted white and floated upon oil drums or great logs or whatever will float. This was the home Clements provided for Nellie McClish and their two kids for six or seven years, throughout the duration of World War II, until the day Nellie had had all she could stand of the river, or of the fish that Bill caught and she had to clean for the market, endless schools of catfish and buffalo fish. As one more winter approached, they fought, and she took the kids and left him.

  He brooded until Christmas, thinking of a Christmas morning without the usual delight he took in being Santa Claus for the kids. He drank some whiskey to help him endure the morning, but instead of soothing his sorrow it raised his anger against Nellie for her desertion of him. The last he had seen of her was when she got on the little bus that took Cane Islanders across the bridge into Lake City, and she seemed to have been flirting with the bus driver, who was a man she knew, and a man whom the former constable knew too well. On that Christmas morning Bill Clements got out his old service revolver, a little .32 owlhead, and polished it; he could find only five of its six bullets.

  He went into Lake City to the home of Nellie’s brother, Clyde McClish, with whom she was staying. Nellie was out in the back yard plucking a chicken for Christmas dinner. He told Nellie he wanted the children. She said no. He asked Nellie about the bus driver. She would not talk about the bus driver. He hit her with the butt of the owlhead, in the face. She dropped the chicken she was cleaning and began to cry. He shot at her three times, two bullets going wild, one hitting her in the temple, killing her. He had two bullets left, one for each of the two children. But it was Christmas; you can’t shoot a kid on Christmas. So he poked the snub barrel into his own ribs and squeezed the trigger. The bullet disappeared somewhere into his innards but didn’t hurt too much. He took more careful aim at his heart and fired again; this time the bullet, the final one, almost got him, but still left him standing. He took out his pocketknife and attempted to finish the job by cutting his own throat.

  Blood was everywhere when the sheriff’s deputy arrived and exclaimed, “My God, Bill, who has done this to you?” “I did,” Bill said. He survived somehow, and, recovering after months in the hospital, came to trial almost a year later, after the obligatory month-long examination at the Arkansas State Mental Hospital, where he was declared sane. He was found guilty of first-degree murder, because the crime had been premeditated at least for a day (“Good example of premeditation,” Plug explains to Kim: “The day before the murder he went to the funeral home and inquired if their burial insurance had been paid up, and was told that it would expire in fifteen days. The man at the funeral home asked him if he wanted to renew it after the fifteen days was up, but Clements said, ‘No, that’ll be plenty of time.’ That sealed his fate.”).

  He was sentenced to life in prison, and served twenty-one years of that sentence (the same number of years as the killers of the Boogerman and Chief Spencer) until, at the age of seventy-four, he was released. Then he returned to the river, found his houseboat gone or stolen or confused with several others, and spent the last few years of his life as a hermit in a shack on Clements Donnick. “Up that way,” Plug points out, is the donnick, where the shack stood. Nobody lives around there now. What’s a “donnick”? It is one of those words in common usage among local citizens; Plug has heard it all his life to mean a kind of little peninsula created by the meandering of the river.

  Leaving Cane Island, Plug asks, “Well, is that enough crime for you?”

  Kim nods. It is, indeed, more crime than she will hear of in all the other lost cities put together. But where else has she made, or will she make, friends with a lawman who is a historian?

  Back across the bridge, Kim points out the houseboat anchored on the river, the one with the signs painted “NOW OPEN” (although it appears to be closed) and, on the door, “OPEN COMIN,” and, on its roof, “LIVE CATFISH.” She asks if that might be Clements’s boat. It could have been. “See that old man there?” Plug points out a white-haired man in rubber waders strolling along the riverbank. “That’s Cotton Taft.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of him!” Kim exclaims. “Mayor Quails told me a little about him.”

  “I doubt if he’d talk to you,” Plug says. “If you just walked up there and started quizzin Cotton, he’d tell you the biggest yarns you’d ever heard in your life and there wouldn’t be one ounce of truth in any of ’em. But he’s the last of a dyin breed, one of the old trappers and fishermen, and he lives right there on that other houseboat—calls it his ‘mansion’—been here all his life and is just an ole recluse.”

  Everybody in Lake City knows Plug Eaton, and everyone is his friend…except Cotton Taft. Plug will make no effort to introduce Kim to Cotton.

  “He won’t talk to me?” Kim asks.

  “Especially not to a stranger. He might say a few words to you, but if he thinks you’re trying to pump him he’ll tell you a yarn that won’t ever quit!”

  In her notebook Kim has the name of a man Mayor Quails has mentioned, Cotton Williams, who might introduce her to Cotton Taft.

  “No wife?” she asks Plug.

  “Aw, yeah, I’ve got a wife and two kids,” he says. “Two beautiful, healthy, wonderful children.”

  “I meant Cotton Taft—is that his real name, ‘Cotton’?”

  “Just his nickname. Elvis is his real name. Yeah, he was married once. Wife left him.”

  “Like Bill Clements?”

  “Sort of like that. He and Bill were good buddies.”

  Because she has decided to spend the night in Jonesboro (there are no lodgings to be had in Lake City), Kim decides to retrieve Zephyra from the Riverfront’s lot and follow Plug’s cruiser the twenty miles out to Pine Log Cemetery. It is fun tailing a police car, but there is hardly anyone en route to see them—a flat, broad cotton country that once contained individual family “forties” of cotton land but now is mostly abandoned houses.

  At Pine Log they park their cars, and Plug shows her the graves of Allen Springer, “the grandfather of Lake City,” and other notables who had chosen this high ground west of town to be their final resting place, including the tombstone of Doc Roberts with its letters, “Office Upstairs.”

  Kim decides that this cemetery would be a good place to ask Plug the questions about his own aspirations, dreams, and reflections upon mortality. She begins, “What would you like to see written on your tombstone, Plug?”

  He answers immediately, as if he has given it some thought before: “‘An honest man who did his best to bring a little happiness to his fellow man.’”

  “And woman,” she says. “You’ve certainly brought me happiness, to give me so much of your time today,” she tells him, and thanks him for the long tour. Then she asks, “Did you ever have any hopes or dreams that never came true?”

  He reflects only a moment before answering, “No, because I’ve got the job right now I’ve always wanted. I’m very happy doing police work, and I think I do a halfway creditable job. I don’t get too many complaints. I’ve got a good home, much better than I ever dreamed about having.” He pauses and glances around him at the tombstones in this third and last of the cemeteries he has shown to her, and adds with sincerity, “I’m on a first-name basis with Jesus Christ, and I know where I’m going when I get through down here.” He gets into his cruiser and starts the motor. “So, really, what more can any reasonable man ask?”

  A week later, Kim will read in the newspap
er an account of a school-bus accident south of Jonesboro. Loaded with teachers and students on their way to Little Rock early in the morning for a convention, the bus will miss a curve, crash, and kill nine and injure thirty. It will be the unpleasant job of State Police Corporal Hershel Eaton to meet parents and friends at the hospital and tell them who has died, who has survived.

  The next morning, in contrast to the stormy day before, is bright and sunny, with fluffy white clouds hanging in the blue. Kim will remember this for a long time as her “Cotton Day”: her last day in this cotton city, beneath a canopy of cotton clouds, on a riverbank levee with cottonwood trees (the river doubtless inhabited by cottonmouth moccasin snakes), the grass sprinkled with the cottony seed-fluffs of dandelions, and she, wearing all-cotton things, talking to two men dressed all in cotton, both of them nicknamed “Cotton.”

  First Kim goes to the Senior Citizens’ Center to meet Floyd “Cotton” Williams, age eighty-four, who is not so much an inmate or a patron of the center as he is its caretaker and general factotum. Most of the patrons under his supervision are not so old as he is. Despite his age, he is vigorous and healthy (“I didn’t realize you work here!” Kim says to him). He has lived in Lake City all of his life, except for three or four months when he went out to California but couldn’t wait to get back to this place: his “folks has always been here…lived here, died here, buried here.”

  It’s just a coincidence, he says, that he and his old pal Cotton Taft have the same nickname. “When I was a kid I was just as white-headed as I could be,” Williams tells Kim. Cotton Taft got his nickname because he could whop a baseball out into the cotton patch. Unlike Taft, Williams is not a bachelor, but has been married for fifty-six years: he and Edna live right up there beside the Lake City Cemetery. Cotton’s daddy brought a three-room cabin boat to Lake City and was a commercial fisherman all his life but also operated a kind of resort on the St. Francis—swimming, boating, bathing, and fishing—which he managed until 1925, when Lake City’s “resort” days faded away. Cotton Williams lived through all of the floods of this century and could tell Kim about each of them.