The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Kim will interview Gene Gregory, the young white superintendent of schools, but first she wants to talk to “Professor” J. B. (for Joseph Barry) Payne, the black former superintendent of the old school around whose modest building the new Arkansas City Schools edifice, with its one huge, modern entry arch as a kind of distant echo of brutal Richardsonian Romanesque, has been built. Professor Payne was born with the century, and was well past the mandatory retirement age for educators in 1972, when he quietly yielded his job and his old building to the coming of the new edifice. He remembers hauling wood to burn for heat in his school, and then converting to coal heat and, finally, to natural gas. Despite his honorific, more a nickname than a title (“Everybody calls me that, but I don’t know why,” he tells Kim), the professor is the sort of elderly black man that Kim would expect to see sitting on the riverbank with a cane fishing pole, and she is not surprised to learn he always went fishing twice a day during the school term, early in the morning before classes and then again about sundown.

  He still fishes. “I can go across that levee and catch a fish at any time,” he tells Kim. But he would rather teach than fish. “When I was teachin I didn’t leave each day until I thought I’d accomplished something with some student.” He thinks the schools turned out a better student in those days, but that wasn’t entirely his own accomplishment: he didn’t have to compete with television for their attention. Nowadays, since television, “I never see ’em carryin a book.”

  Until black and white students were integrated in 1956, his school was entirely black. From 1956 until his retirement, Professor Payne taught both black and white students, and he knows everybody in Arkansas City except the new “Potlatch generation,” who came after he retired.

  Mr. Gregory, as everyone calls the young superintendent, takes Kim on a tour of the sprawling educational plant potlatched by Potlatch. He shows her sections of interior wall that were part of Professor Payne’s old school and explains how the modern building was constructed around the old one. “Professor Payne has given his life to this school and this town,” Mr. Gregory declares. “He’s given his life to the education of black children in the community, and he’s very well respected by both white and black. He attends every activity we have here at school. We make sure, when we have faculty dinners or whatever, that Professor Payne is invited.”

  Herself a teacher who has taught an average of thirty students per class, Kim is impressed to learn that Arkansas City High School has only fourteen per class. But though being the state’s richest school district allows for more expenditure per pupil, Gene Gregory explains that this does not necessarily translate into higher salaries for the faculty. Faculty here remain as underpaid as faculty elsewhere in the state, which ranks next to Mississippi as the state with the worst-paid faculty in the nation.

  Unlike some school buildings Kim has seen, this one is immaculate. The walls and floors are clean, and the students seem to respect the building and take care of it. The team mascots are the River Rats. (When the lighthearted sports editors of the Arkansas Gazette voted recently for the “Best Dozen Mascots,” the Arkansas City River Rats came in first, followed by the Lake City Catfish. In fifth place were the Cave City Cavemen, beating out other towns’ Alligators, Redbugs, Sandlizards, Jackrabbits, etc.) Gene Gregory explains that the River Rats have a good-natured sports rivalry with McGehee, but never so heated as the contention over the county seat. “I think the attempt to move the courthouse,” he says, “has caused more of a competitive spirit than anything else.”

  “Out of a typical graduating class,” Kim asks, “how many go to college?”

  “Probably a third,” he says. “We’re isolated and most of our kids don’t have much of a look at the outside world until they graduate. We try to do things for them, take them to the capital, Little Rock, other places on field trips. Most of them are born here, raised here, and they don’t know much away from here.”

  Later, when Kim goes to see the Arkansas City Museum, she will wonder if any of the students ever take a field trip (they could walk) to their own museum. Blowing the dust off, and signing, the register, she discovers that she is the first visitor since the previous summer. The museum is housed in a small one-story brick building, erected in 1882, with a toothed cornice and its one floor elevated in case of floods, located at the intersection of Kate Adams and Capitol. Once it was a law office for Xenophon Overton Pindall, who practiced there before becoming governor of Arkansas for one year and eleven months in 1907-8, when the elected governor had a nervous breakdown. Ove Pindall never returned to Arkansas City except for visits after his career in Little Rock, preferring to practice criminal law there until his death. Although Kim thinks it is “neat” that Arkansas City even has a museum in the first place—none of the other lost cities has one—she is dismayed to find that the collections are a dusty hodgepodge of junk and gewgaws, an unwanted detritus of old things: Indian arrowheads, rusty guns, faded and fading photographs. Nothing is really catalogued, classified, labeled properly, or cared for. There hasn’t even been an attempt to re-create the interior of the law office it once was. Do we care so little for our past? Kim thinks, and does not stay long. The museum is the forgotten town’s forgotten attic.

  She has one more appointment in Arkansas City, with an octogenarian. In a small green cottage on a lot within sight and sound of the sleek plant of the Arkansas City Schools lives Sarah Haley, born in 1899, who in the early twenties moved to town with her husband, a millworker at Henry Thane’s Saw Mill and Lumber Company.

  Mrs. Haley tells Kim how important that sawmill was. Half of the people in Arkansas City, both black and white, worked there. Henry Thane constructed modest mill houses for the employees, charging them $15 a month for rent and providing them with playgrounds, tennis courts, horseshoe arena, car garages, and a commissary store. Sarah Haley lived in one of these factory houses, identical to dozens of others—all destroyed in the flood, along with the mill, the lumber, the timber, the woods, everything.

  For entertainment, there was the music coming from the river, from the President, a big, beautiful boat, but Sarah Haley never boarded it: she listened to its music from the porch of her house. She also heard the morning whistle, at 5:00 A.M., from Henry Thane’s company, waking all, for work began at 6:00. The screaming whistle sounded again at noon and at 5:00 P.M. And she heard the sounds the Grandfather made when he rose. Every year there was a Water Scare. When a Water Scare came, she started packing. But she never had to use what she had packed, until 1927. That year it was everybody for himself, and she took care of herself and her husband.

  Mrs. Haley does not tell Kim what Kim has already managed to figure out on her own: it was Henry Thane’s relentless rapacity for lumber, for gain, symptom of man’s grasping wresting of all the earth holds, that caused the flood. Thousands of acres of the big woods all along the Mississippi and the Arkansas, whose roots had quaffed the spring runoff of rains and stopped the water before it could reach the Grandfather, were cut down for lumber. Now there was nothing to slow, let alone stop, the eager guzzling of the Grandfather, and, yes, his consort, too, the Arkansas; call her the Grandmother. They both became drunk with an overdose of rain, and rampaged beyond reason.

  Did Thane know this? If he did know it, would it have stopped him?

  Mrs. Haley has one strong image remaining engraved on her memory of the flood, which she shares with Kim: a log floating past. On the floating log were a dog, a cat, a chicken, and a snake.

  “I imagine that was a little scary for them,” Mrs. Haley remarks. But no animal bothered the others. The dog, the cat, the chicken, and the snake coexisted peaceably on their ark. Whether or not that ark was eventually swallowed up by the Grandfather or Grandmother, whether or not the animals perished, is immaterial: for a long moment in a time of disaster they were comrades, neighbors.

  One last question to Mrs. Haley: Did you ever wish that this place would actually become a city?

  “I like quietne
ss,” Mrs. Haley says. “The older you get, the more you like quietness.”

  Garland City, Arkansas

  Come and sit by my side if you love me,

  Do not hasten to bid me adieu,

  But remember the Red River Valley

  And the girl that has loved you so true.

  —Southwestern folk song

  There are towns named Garland in Alabama, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming, and so much of Garland, Arkansas’s mail was misdirected to those places, especially before the invention of the Zip Code, that they (the post-office people?) changed the name to Garland City. That is just one theory. But in this place, more than our other lost cities, there is general disagreement about the name of the town, the use of “City” as part of its name. In Buffalo City there was some confusion because of the two places with the same name on opposite sides of the river. Here, there are people on opposite sides of the same table who will argue over the use of “City” in the name.

  Government agencies do not agree: the U.S. Census lists it merely as Garland, the post office as Garland City. The town smokestack says “GARLAND”; the town depot, where trains do not stop any more, says “Garland City.” The Arkansas Highway Department calls it Garland City but insists in parentheses, “Garland P.O.” More recently the United States GNIS calls it Garland City Station and lets it go at that, but though it is more than only a station, it is, needless to relate, not a city, and never was.

  Of our eleven lost cities, Garland is in most respects the least attractive, except insofar as wreckage itself is fascinating, squalor and desuetude have their perverse charms or at least, like romantic ruins, appeal to our passion for what is broken, flawed, failed, and gone.

  Coming here was not an easy decision for Kim. She could have chosen instead more populous, less squalid Junction City, but it straddles the Louisiana state line and belongs half to that southerly state. Or she could have picked from more than half a dozen other less populous places in this same southwestern quarter of Arkansas: Bluff City, Bragg City, Capps City, Joyce City, Crain City, Kress City, Gin City (particularly intriguing because of its suggestion of booze, though the reference is merely to a cotton gin)—each of these is a bona-fide, officially named, once-aspiring city.

  But Garland City, while lost, is within sight and sound of busy U.S. Highway 82, whereas the other places are all on state or county secondary roads, and thus it is the most accessible in the mind of Kim, who may want to get out of town fast once she has found it.

  It is easy enough to dislike this part of Arkansas for the simple reason that it is closest to Texas. Parts of the six sharp corners of Arkansas poke themselves into all the regions of the heart of America: the Great Plains, the Ozark Mountains, the Midwest, the Delta, the South, and the Southwest, but southwestern Arkansas is separated from Texas only by the Red River, and Garland City is on the wrong side of that river. Confusing? Look at a map. Miller County, in which it is located (named after James Miller, the first, bumbling governor of Arkansas Territory, an 1812 soldier whose “I’ll try, sir!” made the history books as a wimpish battle cry, and whose later, doddering life in the Custom House at Salem, Massachusetts, furnished the brilliant introductory of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter), is an oddly shaped catchall for all the southwesternmost townships of Arkansas and has the mentionable distinction of being the only county not connected by dry land to any of the others: the meandering Red River, which defines its jagged northern and eastern edges, divorces it from the rest of the state. It might as well be in Texas.

  The traditional antipathy of every good Arkansawyer toward Texas and all things Texan derives not simply from a long-standing fierce rivalry between the sports teams of the states’ universities, but from a kind of paternal disdain for a wayward, boisterous prodigal son. Arkansas was the sire of Texas in the sense that Stephen Austin and Sam Houston were footloose, foolhardy Arkansawyers for a time before they pushed on into the dry lands belonging to Mexico and colonized them, establishing the Republic of Texas. (Cities in that state named after them have become real metropolises, whereas Austin, Arkansas, and Houston, Arkansas, remain mere hamlets.) Texas’s passion for bigness and the concomitant braggartism and self-applause have always seemed unmannerly and arrogant to Arkansawyers, who watch and listen to the bullshit with the embarrassment and offense of a proper parent for a vaunting adolescent. Except for its oversize, a poor second now to Alaska’s, Texas has nothing Arkansas lacks.

  Garland City even has oil wells, a status symbol that completes its Texafication. Coming into town from the east, Kim notices the first one without knowing what it is. Beside the highway, the huge steel arm of a pump rises and falls slowly on its rotor. There is no derrick, which is what Kim would identify as an oil well, but the derrick for “New Garland City Well No. 1” did its drilling in 1951 and was removed, and the well capped with the pump, which has produced a mere 263,000 barrels since, whereas “Old Garland City Well,” to the west of town, drilled in 1932, has produced a more respectable 2.25 million barrels.

  There is no J. R. Ewing in Garland City; the closest thing to him is Glen Price, whom Kim will meet this afternoon. Now she passes the oil pump, passes the little New Gum Point Church, the blacks’ white wooden twin-towered church, and approaches the high, arching steel-girder bridge over the Red. Costing $500,000 in the Depression year of 1931, this bridge replaced one costing $500,000 the year before, which was dynamited, possibly in a gangland bootleggers’ war, in the only Event that has ever made news for Garland City. Who blew the bridge? is a question that Kim will find herself asking fifty-five years later as if it had happened the night before she arrived.

  Below the bridge flows the fabled Red River, which begins Way Out West as the border between Oklahoma and Texas and accumulates stories, legends, songs, and lies all along its thousand-mile length into this small corner of Arkansas, then wanders on into and bisects Louisiana, who thinks she owns it or is at least glad that it is called, not the Red River of Texas, or the Red River of Oklahoma, let alone the Red River Arkansas, but the Red River of Louisiana. Never mind that Louisiana has no valleys for the girl who asks the cowboy to come and sit by her side if he loves her….

  The flow of the Red beneath the bridge at Garland City is not a pretty stream when Kim sees it: swollen, roily, the slop and surge of entirely opaque, rusty mud. It is “red” only by the same optical illusion that tricks men into calling rivers White, or Black, or Green: not truly a shade of blood-red, rose-red, or ruby-red so much as a fecal henna, a copious diarrheal ooze. But its color is distinct from the Grandfather’s. James Miller’s comrade, the surgeon Joseph Paxton of neighboring Hempstead County, on the north bank of the Red before Miller County was named, put it this way: “As well might you mistake an American for a British soldier, in their respective uniforms, as the blue banks of the Mississippi for the red alluvia of Red river.”

  This was in Raft of the Red River, a long discourse written in 1828 from Dr. Paxton’s clinic at Mount Prairie (upstream from Lost Prairie, where Rufus Garland would open a store in 1833), in the form of a letter to Ambrose Sevier, congressman from Arkansas Territory. It was printed by the Twentieth Congress in February 1829, when Paxton died at the age of fifty. He was convinced that Sevier, who would lead the fight for Arkansas statehood in 1836, would persuade Congress to take extraordinary means to destroy the raft, which was not a conventional floating transport at all but an enormous logjam of timber, driftwood, debris, and sand blocking the Red River for a length of a hundred miles through Louisiana and into that corner of Arkansas Territory, making navigation of the stream impossible and flood control inconceivable. It was not until 1841 that Captain Henry Shreve, whose name the river’s largest port would come to bear, managed to direct a partial opening through the blockage, a natural phenomenon known widely as “the Great Raft of the Red.” But after fifteen years of neglect the Great Raft closed up tighter than ever
, requiring further congressional appropriations, which finally opened the channel for good and reclaimed vast acres of wasteland. (Possibly Lost Prairie, as the place where Rufus Garland settled the future site of Garland City was known, got its name from the fact that it was annually lost beneath the backwaters dammed by the Great Raft.)

  Dr. Paxton’s letter, a discursive meditation upon the prehistoric and historic origins of the Great Raft which examines the natural obstructions of a riverway as methodically as a pathologist examines the blockages of the body’s vascular system, forwards the interesting theory that the Red River and the Atchafalaya, another of Louisiana’s internal rivers, were one and the same until a prehistoric Great Raft separated them into two distinct rivers.

  His long essay-letter, assuming Sevier and his congressional colleagues took the time to absorb it (or that, more likely, Sevier read the whole thing into the Congressional Record during a filibuster), stood as an example of how governments and legislative bodies might direct enormous amounts of energy, like a magnifying glass directing the rays of the sun to burn a hole into something, into the solution of obscure problems. This overkill of verbiage finds a counterpart and parenthesis in modern times in the only other printed publication concerning Garland City, also in the form of a “letter,” this one titled simply Red River at Garland City, Arkansas (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961) but subtitled not so simply, Letter from the Secretary of the Army Transmitting a Letter from the Chief of Engineers, Department of the Army, Dated March 31, 1961, Submitting a Report, Together with Accompanying Papers and Illustrations, on a Survey of Red River at Garland City, Ark. This Investigation Was Made in Response to an Item in Section 203 of Public Law 86-645, Approved July 14, 1960, Which Calls for an Immediate Study to Be Made of Emergency Bank Protection Along Red River in the Vicinity of Garland City.