The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Kim will never discover what “Demie” is short for—Demetria? Laodamia? Adamina?—or exactly how old she is, give or take fifteen years on either side of seventy, but Kim meets her and is welcomed into that “monstrous house”—the words from her notebook, later. She is perhaps too awed by the woman and the interior even to think of asking her what “Demie” is short for and how old she is. Or quite possibly she realizes very soon that she would not get correct answers if she did ask, for Demie Price, although not “ill” in the manner Kim had come to expect—she is not diseased, she is not in a wheelchair—lives at the mercy of the inventions of her lonely mind. Facts mean nothing. She tells Kim she has lived in this house for only fifteen years, but later Kim will learn that she has lived in the house for around forty-five years.

  But her perceptions of Garland City are not distorted. In answer to various questions concerning her opinions of her town, she declares:

  It’s a small country village. It has one good grocery store and a couple of gas stations.

  It exists, but that’s about all. It has no personality.

  There’s no white and black dissension. No racial problem. I think we’re pretty lucky that way.

  For a little town, I guess it does pretty well. There’s very little crime committed here.

  There have been no burglaries, no break-ins, at the Price mansion, which is remarkable because she lives there alone. (From some distant room, Kim can hear a small dog constantly barking.) But in a town where none of the three liquor stores has ever been held up, it is not incredible.

  As Corinne Person had done, Demie Price insists on a tour of the mansion. Kim leaves her tape recorder running during the tour, but Demie’s voice is quite weak, rambling, trailing with nostalgia, and Kim can catch very little of it. The rooms are like a museum; they do not appear to be used, not even the large studio where Demie Price has done much of her painting, which has a style distinct from Corinne’s but is not lifted out of ordinariness by any personal quirks or tricks. There is quite a large collection of guns, rifles, shotguns, bullets, paraphernalia: years before, Demie was a champion trapshooter.

  While they are touring the house, they are abruptly joined by a man, who says, “You’re Kim.” He is tall, middle-aged, rugged in cowboy boots, suntanned, and well fed. Kim’s first, startled thought is that he is Professor Harrigan from South Dakota, come to surprise her and join her, but before she can say “What a surprise!” he explains, “I’ve just been on the phone with your father.” He lets that sink in for a long moment of bewilderment during which Kim wonders if Professor Harrigan has been in touch with her family in an effort to locate her. But he doesn’t use a phone. Then this man wraps his arm around Demie Price and introduces himself: Glen Howard Price, age fifty, Demie’s son. He explains that he sometimes does business with Micky Gunn, who had mentioned to Glen that he had heard his daughter was destined for Garland City.

  Glen Price answers the questions that his mother cannot accurately handle: there are not a “few hundred” acres here on the Price plantation, but twenty-seven hundred of them, making it one of the largest plantations in this part of Arkansas, cultivated to combinations of wheat, rice, beans, and the usual cotton, which keeps on going out of fashion.

  Mother and son do not agree on the name of the town: it is Garland to Demie, Garland City to Glen. He laughingly explains, “I say ‘Garland City’ as a habit, but I started it as a joke, ’cause to me it’s really not a city.”

  Glen does not live in this house; he and his wife live elsewhere “on the farm” but would like to leave entirely and move into Texarkana, where most of his business activities center. His travels take him all over, and in places as far away as Colorado he has met people who have heard of the legendary Garland City Pride whiskey. The dynamiting of the bridge, however, had something to do with a lucrative ferry business run by a noted figure named Jess Smith. “Talk to his grandson about that,” Glen urges Kim. “Jess T. Smith Johnson.” He gives her directions to the house.

  But before she goes off to interview Jess Johnson, she will have one other interview suggested by the Prices, one more widow, a black one. Learning that the Price house is indeed antebellum, she asks if there were slaves, and, if so, are there any descendants of those slaves still living in the area? Demie Price and Glen look at each other. Glen says to his mother, “Martha?” His mother agrees, “Yes, Martha.”

  Her grandmother was a slave who cooked in that mansion, Martha McGough, age eighty-three, tells Kim from her wheelchair. The small house in which she is confined is in a black neighborhood on the other side of the highway from the Price plantation. “She died before I was born, but my father told me about her.”

  Martha herself, a large, cheerful, laughing woman, worked for Demie Price for forty years, and before that she worked for Demie’s mother-in-law. “I love her,” Martha says of Demie, and explains that Demie’s husband, Earl Price, died about nine years ago.

  Though for three years she has been in the wheelchair and unable to work for Demie, she is strong and can still look after herself. Kim doesn’t think she looks as old as eighty-three and tells her so, but Mrs. McGough protests, “Oh, I think I look ninety-six since I got in this chair!”

  Kim casually asks, “Do you like Garland City?”

  “Do I like it?” Martha McGough is almost indignant at being asked. “I love it. I wouldn’t live nowhere else! No, ma’am! Oh, Lord! I’ve never made my home nowhere else but here! All these eighty-three years I’ve been here!”

  “What’s so special about Garland City?”

  “Well, it’s quiet. It’s peaceful. You just feels free to do what you wanter do. If you wanter get out there and plant something, you just do it! I mean, you can raise anything you want here….” Does she know Mrs. Franklin? Of course she knows Mrs. Franklin. “I love her. I hope she’s mayor as long as I’m alive. I want to tell you what I like about Garland. You don’t have no trouble out of whites. If they’s anything they can do to help you, they’ll do it.”

  Years ago, Martha McGough knew blacks who “got rich” helping whites make bootleg whiskey, which she calls “white lightning—never you mind nothin you hear about ‘Garland City Pride.’” She laughs. Did she remember the bridge being dynamited? “Oh, yeah, I do; I was grown and married when that happened. No, ma’am, I never did find out who blew it up. The only thing I know about it is I heard the commotion of it; I heard it and I thought it was lightning. It scared me, good lands!”

  Though Martha McGough doubts that any white folks could tell Kim anything about who blew up the bridge, Kim decides to talk to a man who wasn’t born when the dynamiting occurred but who is the grandson of the man who, some think, decreed the blast. As Arkansas City was largely under the control of Henry Thane, Garland City during the 1910s and 1920s had his counterpart in Jess T. Smith, who had forty-five hundred acres under cultivation, owned the mercantile stores in Garland City, the bank (such as it was), the unsanctioned liquor store, the cotton gin, and, most important for this story, the ferries across the Red, which, before the bridge was built, were the only way that traffic other than the railway trains could get from one end of southern Arkansas to the other.

  Jess T. Smith Johnson, born in 1948, was only seven when his grandfather and namesake died, but he lives today in a house Jess Smith built in 1924, across the street from Charlene Beasley Person’s church (“Corinne’s mother-in-law really went broke funding all of those churches,” he tells Kim) and closest of any house in town to the dynamited bridge. Jess T. Smith Johnson is just finishing his supper when Kim arrives, and she realizes she has not eaten and the afternoon is fading. He is very welcoming and hospitable, just short of offering her anything to eat. He drags out the family scrapbooks and photograph albums to show Kim pictures of Jess T. Smith, who looks like an overweight version of J. R. Ewing of “Dallas.” Other pictures are of Jess Smith’s ferry, which Jess T. Smith Johnson remembers as being in a very decayed state and not operating when he was a
youngster.

  “Grandpa had one hundred head of horses, one hundred head of mules,” enumerates Jess T. Smith Johnson, “and seventy-five nigger families living on the place. Just about all the niggers in Garland City are descendants of those seventy-five families of Grandpa’s.” He becomes reflective. “He owned quite a bit, and did quite a bit, but that era faded out, so to speak.”

  Kim would like to ask, “Is there any place to get supper in this town?” But instead she asks, “Did he blow up the bridge?”

  “He dealt in Arkansas politics quite a bit,” Jess T. Smith Johnson says. “Although he was more or less in the background, a background figure, you know. Over on the river—he had a picnic grounds over there—and he’d invite thirty-five hundred people at one time for a party. He’d take all the whiskey out of his liquor store, and he’d slaughter whole cows and goats and what have you, and he’d invite all the dignitaries, politicians, and everybody from all over, and he’d wine ’em and dine ’em for the people who wanted interests thrown their way. He was sort of the background man, in the background, you know.”

  “Was he in the background of the dynamiting of the bridge?”

  “Now, actually, the man who ran the ferry wasn’t Grandpa but Grandpa’s brother, Uncle Tom Smith: Grandpa was too busy to mess with the ferry.” He adds, “Of course, I wasn’t around at the time, so I’m not sure. I think the bridge had been built for five or six years when they blew it up.”

  “Who was ‘they’?”

  “And of course the bridge was rebuilt completely, to what it is today. But when it blew up, it shook this house right here right off its foundation and blew out every one of these windows. We had a farmhouse five miles down the river, and there was shrapnel from the bridge all over the yard.”

  “Who…?” Kim begins to try once more, but decides to shift the subject and depart. Her stomach is threatening to growl with hunger. “What do you like about Garland City?” she asks.

  “Oh, I like the history of it,” Jess T. Smith Johnson says. “The schools, of course, are a disgrace, but otherwise…” He explains that he sent his own children to the Lewisville schools until the new integration laws required them to return to the Garland City school, where they were not happy. “But it is a nice close-knit community, and I’d rather raise children here than, say, Texarkana or any other larger place.”

  What about race relationships?

  “White people and niggers have known each other’s families for years and years. There are no strangers. We watch out for the niggers and they watch out for us. I know of no incidents here with racial overtones.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Johnson.” She stands, turning off her tape recorder. “Could you tell me if there is any place to get supper in town, or nearby?”

  He ponders. “Well, there’s Ham’s. You could try Ham’s.”

  Somehow, “Ham’s” sounds to her as if it might be another Grundy’s Blue Front, but she asks for directions and he gives them: very simple, get on 82, just around the corner, and drive to the other end of town, less than a mile. On the right. You could miss it, but you’ll find it.

  You could very easily miss Ham’s Fish and Steak House if you were not looking for it, or if you were not one of the hundreds of loyal customers who drive miles and miles from Texas or Louisiana just to eat there. Nobody from Garland City eats there except the cooks and waitresses, who might be commuters. In her travels around Garland City, Kim has driven right past Ham’s at least three times without noticing it: on her way to the Price plantation, on her way to Martha McGough’s house, and once to view the cemetery, which is directly across the highway from Ham’s. (And which is, incidentally, the most unsightly cemetery Kim has ever seen in all her travels or ever hopes to see again. She did not actually go into it, because many of the graves have gaping holes and tunnels as if large animals were burrowing into them or ghouls had given up. The headstones, some in the shape of Valentines, tilt at rakish angles and appear about to be swallowed up by the holes. Drainage ditches have been cut like open wounds to ease whatever soggy seepages plague the soil. Jungles of kudzu and wakefield crud encroach upon this plot, which, being directly behind the Price mansion, probably originated as a private burial ground for the slaves and continues as a predominantly black cemetery.)

  Fortunately for her appetite, Kim has entirely forgotten having stopped to cringe at this cemetery just a few hours before. Now she locates Ham’s mostly by the help of one of those Porta-signs on wheels, a kind of earthbound marquee advertising the otherwise nameless and signless edifice, a flat-roofed enlarged shack. The presence in the parking lot of several expensive cars with Texas and Louisiana plates makes Kim think at first that the facilities are being reserved by a convention of oilmen, but she soon discovers that it is a family restaurant, and she is one of the family, gathered in a downhome if not downright homely atmosphere to stuff themselves on the best fish available within a few hours’ drive.

  There is no menu. Steak is available, but nobody seems to be eating that. Everyone is paying the same price, $8.95, for the same successive accretion of plates: iced boiled shrimp (all you can eat), fried shrimp (ditto), crab roll (one is enough), followed by the main course: a huge steaming platter of catfish, not just a catfish but several catfish fillets in batter, deep-fried, and whole baby catfish and steaks cut from larger catfish. There is so much catfish on the platter that Kim wonders if she is supposed to pass it on to others, but she is alone at her table and the platter is all hers…if she can eat it. She cannot, being already stuffed with shrimp, not to speak (oh, never speak!) of all the accompaniments: golden-brown hush puppies, cole slaw, onions, pickles, peppers, relish, shrimp sauce, tartar sauce, butter, and lemon wedges. To wash it all down is a tumbler of iced tea that seems to keep refilling itself as if by magic.

  Kim sighs. If only she had Professor Harrigan to help her eat it all. The batter the catfish is fried in seems to be not merely a coating but something the fish grew as part of its natural covering, and is so golden it ought to be assayed. Thinking of gold, however, makes her think of the next city, the penultimate lost city of her travels, Bear City, which was a gold-mining boom town, and she is eager to get on, having finished Garland City earlier than she had anticipated; there is so little here.

  But Ham’s leaves a good taste in her mouth as she drives out of a town that has left a bad taste. She will remember Ham’s long after she has forgotten the shanties and mansions, the ruins and the compote. Not far out of town, stopping to consult her road map and wonder how far into the night she will have to go before coming to a motel (Texarkana is twenty-four miles westward, closer to Texas, and she has chosen to drive back east to Lewisville instead), she realizes that what she should have done, although it had not occurred to her (she was too busy enjoying the food), was interview Mr. Ham or whoever owned or managed the restaurant. Wouldn’t a restaurant owner have a lot to say about the little lost city in which he served his food?

  It is a question she will remember to ask at another restaurant, in the last of these lost places.

  After a search, she finds a motel of sorts north of Lewisville, a few miles out of town on State 29, called The Coachlight or The Lamplighter or The Tavern Lamp or something like that. She is so tired, and it is the humblest motel she has ever stayed in: very plain and simple, no pictures, no decoration whatever, very inexpensive, but reasonably clean and comfortable.

  By coincidence worth mentioning here, that stretch of plain back-country highway on which it is located, that two-narrow-lane State 29 which runs for twenty-three miles from Lewisville to Hope, was once walked, during his freshman year in college, by Professor Harrigan. It happened like this: During his January break he had hitchhiked from Fayetteville down to Houston, Texas, to spend a few days with an old boyhood pal, and on his way home had decided to detour to Hope, Arkansas, to surprise an old boyhood girlfriend named Gladys. It was after sundown when a man who had given him a ride from the East Texas hill country let him out
at Lewisville and offered him overnight accommodations at his home there, warning him not to hitchhike after dark on that lonely road into Hope. But Harrigan was eager to spring his surprise on Gladys, and he thanked the man and resumed hitchhiking, or trying to hitchhike, north along State 29, walking, putting his thumb in the air for each increasingly rare passing vehicle, walking onward into the cold January night, passing, without seeing it, this same humble motel where Kim is now (or maybe it did not exist in those days of the fifties). All night he walked, never getting a car to stop for him. Twenty-three miles. Cold. All the dogs at every house barked at him as he passed. It was dawn when he staggered into Hope, and although Gladys was tickled to see him, she did not fully appreciate the lengths he had gone to.

  Now, as Kim is checking into The Lamp after dark, Harrigan is checking into the Hilton M. Briggs Library at South Dakota State University an armload of books he has had checked out. And, while he is at it, doing some research on garlands and on gold. Earlier this day, he has purchased for a trifle a secondhand car, a 1969 Ambassador, to replace his old faithful four-wheel-drive Blazer, whose motor block cracked in the South Dakota winter.