The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “T’ey’s not any coldt,” he said. “T’ey toldt you a lie—a cot tarn lie. You are a tarn fool if you go up t’ere!”

  “Wal, mister,” said Tom, “we want work. Do you thank they will give us work?”

  “T’ey gif you not’ing,” he said. “T’ey got no work. T’ey got no coldt. It’s all a cot tam lie!” Saying this, he walked on.

  After the rush, no more outsiders came into Bear City until modern times, when a few retirees, or young people like the couple who live in miner Harley Green’s Victorian “mansion,” came here for gold of a different sort: golden quiet, golden solitude. All of the people connected with the gold rush left town, many to try their luck at Pike’s Peak in 1891 or look for the end of the rainbow elsewhere in the West. By 1892, the population of Bear City had dropped to 120, and half of those were gone by the end of the century, when, of all the operations, only the first, the Lost Louisiana Mine, remained stubbornly “in business”; a few diehards continued to insist that all that was needed was a better process for extracting gold from the ore.

  Larkin Melson reclaimed his cow pasture from the gardens of the Ozark Hotel, and kept on blacksmithing. Wiley Rouse went on making chairs.

  Kim has interrupted him only once, so that she could change the tape in her tape recorder. Now he concludes, with almost cosmic melancholy, “‘Auri sacra fames.’ Do you know Latin? Vergil wrote, ‘Quid non mortalia cogis, auri sacra fames?’ To what do you not drive the hearts of men, O cursed greed for gold?’ But sometimes I think the possession of gold is worse than the pursuit of it. Non teneas aurum totum quod splendet ut aurum nec pulchrum pomum quodlibet esse bonum….”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I really don’t know any Latin.” She wishes she did. She wishes she could talk for hours with this man in a dead language. “Do you work all day in here? Eight hours? Ten hours?” Kim asks.

  “I don’t work here at all,” he says.

  A pickup truck pulls in between the old Ambassador and Zephyra, and a man comes into the shop. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he says. He is an older man, past sixty, dressed in overalls and with curly white hair beneath the edges of his farmer’s bill cap. He moves with authority around the shop and then sits down beside the other man, whom he does not resemble at all: he is much shorter. “Bill told me you were looking for me,” he says. “I’ve been over to Royal on some business, and—”

  She looks back and forth between the two men. “Are you Dallas Bump?” she asks the older, smaller man.

  “That’s right,” he says, smiling most cordially. “Sure am. What can I do for you?”

  She looks questioningly at the younger, taller man, who has talked so much to her and told her the history of the gold rush. He continues to look kindly and warm, but there is a twinkle in his eyes as if the two of them have a secret. Maybe they do. She addresses him: “Who—?”

  Dallas Bump looks at him, too, and the younger man says to Dallas, “We were just wondering how many hours a day you spend in this shop.”

  Dallas Bump laughs modestly and says, “Not nearly as many as I ought to! Three or four hours is the most I can stand, though I can remember when I used to work ten, twelve, fourteen hours in here and think nothing of it.”

  “Where do you sell your chairs?” she asks.

  “Mostly just people driving by,” he says.

  “But how do they know this is a chair factory?”

  “Oh, they’ve heard about me, I guess,” he says.

  She wants to ask the younger man, “Are you just a friend of his? What were you doing in the shop?” But she can’t ask that. Instead she asks Dallas Bump, “How much are you charging for chairs these days?”

  “Well, rockers run anywhere from thirty-five to a hundred fifty dollars. The dining chairs will cost you fifty or sixty. Materials are just getting so expensive these days.”

  “The stools?” Kim indicates one of the splint-woven-seat ottomans.

  “Those are twenty dollars,” says Dallas Bump.

  “I think I’ll buy one,” she says, and opens her purse.

  The younger man offers, “I’ll put it in your car for you.” He carries the stool out to her car.

  She says to Dallas Bump, giving him the twenty, “But I didn’t come just to buy a stool. I wanted to ask you some questions about chairmaking and about the history of Bear City.”

  “You really ought to talk to Clarence Jewell about that,” Dallas Bump says. “He knows a lot more than me about Bear City.”

  “That’s what he says,” she gestures toward the younger man, who is outside trying to figure out how to open Zephyra’s hatchback. “About chairmaking, too?”

  “Sure,” says Dallas Bump. “Old Jewell had a much bigger factory than mine. It was a real factory, too, not just a shop. Had a whole bunch of people working for him. Ran a sawmill, too. Only place my dad ever worked, besides making chairs, was Jewell’s sawmill.”

  “If you and Clarence Jewell are such rivals, why do you try to send people to him?”

  “I wouldn’t call us rivals. He hasn’t made chairs for a long time, and he’s nearly twenty years older than me. My dad always said, when you had competition it made business better—that was his theory of it. It was more friendly competition than rivalry.”

  Just as in the beginning, when Bear City consisted of only Wiley Rouse and Larkin Melson—not exactly loving each other but willing to help each other in a neighborly way and maybe even marry off a daughter, Tennessee Melson, to a son, Robbie Rouse (except that Robbie never asked her), yet each stubbornly determined to build Bear City from scratch, his own scratch—even in the end now, Dallas Bump and Clarence Jewell are the only two that make a town. The back end of Kim’s car contains a pair of nylon zipper bags, red and yellow, duffel-style; a six-pack of glass bottles of Royal Crown Cola; a small plastic ice chest; two pretty dresses neatly laid flat on hangers that must be lifted so that the rectangular wooden stool can be placed under them. Ask him if they see each other often.

  “Are you and Clarence good friends?” she asks Dallas Bump. “Do you see each other often?”

  “Just comin to the mailbox now and again,” Dallas says. “Neither one of us is great to visit, but if we need one another, we’re there.”

  Every man secretly despises his neighbor. Though he may profess friendship, and it is a friendship durable and true, a man resents his neighbor’s sharing of a close piece of earth and would rather have him at a distance, or at the great remove that comes from having him on the opposite side of a wall in a real city’s close confines. A neighbor is good for competition, but the contest can become too strained if his success with his grass is greater than mine. I watch closely for the slightest flaw in his yard. He fuels a grudge out of my slightest mis-deed. We warm the air between our houses with our fuming. Though I take comfort from his closeness in time of need, I shut him out of my mind whenever I can, except when my idleness festers while watching him better me. Even if I do not covet his wife, I covet his marriage to this space that ought to be all mine. We are brothers, sons of the same plot of this mother, earth, and we contend for her favor. But I am not my brother’s keeper, except when he is helpless. I don’t even speak to him when I can avoid it; I would rather invite into my house people from far down the road. Perhaps every man fails to love his neighbor as himself because he first must finish hating his neighbor as he finishes hating himself. Meanwhile, if I need him, or he me, we’re there.

  Dallas Bump went away once, for ten years. Back in the fifties, trying to break out of the family tradition, routine, habit-pattern of chairmaking, he upped and went to Illinois. He took his wife, his son, Freddie, and “three extra kids to raise”—an adopted child and two of his wife’s sister’s children—enough dependents to force a man to look for more profitable work than chairmaking. Even in Illinois he could not escape wood, and worked for ten years as a carpenter. Carpenters are to chairmakers as physicians are to surgeons, lawyers to judges, Indians to chiefs, but carpenters are
usually paid by the hour, not the piece.

  “Weren’t you homesick for Bear City?” Kim asks Dallas.

  “Oh, I’d come back two or three times a year….”

  “You were homesick!”

  His father, Fred Bump, kept the chairmaking business going back in Bear City. Fred, who had learned it at the age of thirteen from his father, Phi Bump, never did anything else. Dallas was twelve years old when Phi Bump died, and that same year Fred Bump started teaching Dallas how to make chairs, having already “employed” him for years to tend the shop’s engines and keep them supplied with water for cooling, thus staying within sight of the lathes so that he could pick up the rudiments of wood turning just by sight, without verbal instruction. Fred Bump was a man of few words and less patience.

  “He thought he’d tell you how to do something one time and you’d know how to do it!” Dallas says to Kim. “He’d never tell you twice.” At the age of twelve, Dallas was smart enough to learn something after being told it once, but dumb enough not to understand why he had to work in the chair shop. “I thought he made me work just to keep me from gettin out and playin!”

  (In Teutonic, “Dallas” means “playful,” although Dallas does not know this. When Kim asks him where he got the name, he answers, “I don’t know. I’ve asked my mother. My dad named me after a friend he had. I’ve run across a few other men with that name.” The Irish, however, used “Dallas” as a shortened form of “Daedalus,” from the Greek meaning “the cunning workman,” and as in Stephen Dedalus. Daedalus Bump is a playful, cunning workman.)

  There were (and still are) two lathes in the shop, the Big Lathe and the Little Lathe. Dallas was trained on the Little Lathe and in fact was never permitted to use the Big Lathe, which only Fred used, until after his father’s death. The Big Lathe had been built by Wiley Rouse himself when he first came to Bear City in the 1860s, its wooden parts carefully crafted by hand and the metal parts poured in a Hot Springs foundry. To power the Big Lathe, Wiley Rouse built a dam on Rouse Creek and constructed a water wheel; later the Big Lathe was run by a steam engine; today Dallas Bump uses an electric motor.

  The walls of the shop are hung with dozens of wooden templates or patterns in all shapes and sizes, used for determining the exact length, thickness, and form of every conceivable chair part; most of these templates, however, hang stacked beneath an old coating of dust. “My dad could go and pick off whichever one of those he wanted, but I’ve never been able to learn ’em all,” Dallas says; he has labeled the few he uses.

  His father was angry, then simply grieved, when Dallas left Bear City for Illinois. Another Bump, Fred’s brother, Guy, who had helped Phi and Fred operate the Bear City factory, moved during World War II to Oil Trough (of the bear’s oil) over on the White River to be closer to the good oak timber of that part of Arkansas. The Bumps and the Jewells had just about denuded the Bear City area of its oak forests.

  When rocking-chair man John F. Kennedy was elected president, the whole country went crazy for rocking chairs, and the Bump business boomed. Fred Bump renewed his efforts to persuade Dallas to come home from Illinois Since severe winters in Illinois were beginning to get to Dallas, he was tempted. His son, Freddie, had already gladdened Grandpa Fred’s heart by moving back to Bear City at the age of twenty to learn how to run the Little Lathe. When the temperature during the winter of ’64 dropped to twenty-eight below in Illinois, Dallas had enough and decided to come home for good. By then Kennedy was dead and the rocker fad had faded, but the steady customers who just dropped by the shop continued dropping by, and Dallas was reasonably contented operating the Little Lathe until his father’s death, in 1977, allowed him to take over the Big Lathe. Young Freddie, who had worked so well with his grandfather, did not continue working for his father, but sired three Bump sons who may or may not become the sixth-generation Bump chairmakers. The oldest is twelve, the right age for learning, and Grandpa Dallas is teaching him when he gets the chance.

  “Where did your husband go?” Dallas asks Kim.

  “My husband?” she says. “Oh, he moved to Little Rock, I think, last I heard of him….”

  He stares at her. She stares back at him. He gestures toward the door, through the open doorway, toward the place where the old Ambassador was parked but is no longer. “That man who was with you…?” Dallas says. “He put your stool in your car and then he just took off.”

  “With me?” she says. “He wasn’t with me. I thought he was with you; I mean, I thought he was a friend of yours.”

  Dallas smiles and shakes his head. “Never saw him before.” She is looking so puzzled that he tries to reassure her. “Well, people come and they go. My door is always open. He wasn’t in your car, anyhow.”

  She wants to protest, “But he knows the whole history of the gold rush!” She doesn’t say this, however, for she is no longer in the shop; she has jumped up and rushed outside, and is looking up and down the road. Dallas follows her. It is plain that whoever this other customer was, he has departed. The old piece of junk he was driving has rolled off down the drive and gone south or north. To get off the subject, Dallas suggests to her, “Could I show you where anything is at, in this old town?”

  She takes a long moment to respond to his question, to understand it, and then to think about it and answer. “Is there…where is the cemetery?”

  “Funny you asked,” he says, “because there isn’t one. Never was. Most folks are buried either at Lowe Cemetery over at Mayberry, or else at Cunningham Cemetery down at New Hope.” This is indeed strange. Of all our cities, Bear is the only one without any sort of cemetery, the only place where the dead—and there have been many of them, over the years—had to be taken not simply a comfortably safe distance away from the living but to different settlements some miles away. Not that there aren’t suitable locations, pleasant knolls and solemn glades, for a cemetery. It is almost as if all those who had to bury their dead sensed that Bear City lacked the permanence to harbor a consecrated graveyard. Nor were there any churches in Bear City until comparatively modern times, the thirties, when two small church houses were built. Both are temple-style but lack even the traditional belfry; one is in white wood, the other in native stone; one Assembly of God, the other Baptist; both without resident pastors or churchyards. “But there is one grave I can show you,” Dallas offers Kim, and she accepts.

  They turn northward onto Walnut Street. Kim sees the abandoned store at Third and Walnut, illustrated here, which has had its sign removed but is left with an old rusted tin advertisement for 7-Up Cola. “That was built back in the thirties, about the time we started to get more of those colas around here, like RC and Pepsi and such,” Dallas says. Usually, such a store’s exterior would be plastered with the brightly colored tin signs advertising the colas, especially the one called Coca, but also Vess, Frostie, NuGrape, Grapette, Whistle and Botl’O; but this store’s generous fenestration left little room for the signs. This store replaced Uncle Jep Smith’s General Store, which the Bumps converted into a home in the twenties.

  Like the post office and the chair factory, the “7-Up Store” is board-and-batten: there is something about vertical boards, contrasted to the more traditional horizontal clapboards, that looks more “modern” at the same time that it seems more “rustic,” more “country.” Indeed, the practice of vertical board-and-batten was popularized throughout America by the romanticism of the 1840s (the same period in which the bears became known in Arkansas), principally through the pattern books of Alexander Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing. The verticality was considered suitably “Gothic” in feeling, but because it is easier for a carpenter to clothe an edifice with vertical boards whose interstices do not overlap, as clapboards do, but are lazily covered with thin strips or battens of wood, the style came to be associated with quick, hasty construction, particularly throughout the mining camps of the West. One almost always expects the boards to remain unpainted, as they are here. The rusticality of this “7-Up Store�
�� is further emphasized by the posts or columns of the porch, young saplings of wood debarked but not shaved clean of their stubs of branches. Nothing is more classically “vernacular” than a column in which the growth of the tree is revealed by vestigial warty, knobby branches. Here it is just one branch, allowed to extend as far as the roof’s eave: notice, the branch and the roofline imaginarily join at the same point. If the Greeks’ temple frieze evolved out of a translation into stone of archaic timber architecture, if the triglyph is but a representation of the butt end of a wooden beam, if the columns themselves are only infinite refinements of old tree trunks used for posts, then we are looking here at the ancestor of a future American architectural style that will perhaps translate these pimpled poles into temple columns of steel.

  Along Walnut are buildings in states of deliberate or natural demolition, and one lone gasoline pump with a sign of sorts, “DX gas, The Only One, 9/10¢ a gallon,” nearly obscured by wakefield crud. On the northern edge of the village, one building stands alone, distinguished by its height, two full stories; by its paint, white; and by its style, Queen Anne Victorian: spindlework along the porch roofs, bracketed posts, fish-scale walls in the gables beneath a gable ornament, and a general cross-gable asymmetry. Compared with elaborate urban examples of the style, it is a cute country cousin, almost farmhouse in its simplicity, but it is the most elaborate house in Bear City and the “fanciest” one in this book. Built around 1890 by Harley Green, who came from Binghamton, New York, made money from the false gold boom, and then served as the Bear City justice of the peace into the twentieth century, it is still apparently occupied; Kim makes a note to come back later and try to interview the occupants. Dallas Bump remarks that the house has a reputation for being haunted; since any Victorian house, by its very size and encrustation, suggests hauntedness, even without the help of Charles Addams, it is easy to imagine ghosts in this place.