The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Just north of the Green home, where Walnut bends to become no longer the main thoroughfare but a county road, was the site of Colonel Moffet’s smeltery, a large mill that went through the convincing motions of actually melting down the mined ores in order to separate the gold from them. As long as it lasted, it was the largest building in Bear City.

  In the deep woods along the county road, Dallas stops to lead Kim a short distance up the eastern slope of Bear Mountain to show her a pool of fresh water, a rock-lined spring that is all that remains of (according to Julia Rouse, Dallas’s grandmother) the “Old Soldiers’ Home,” presumably a long-gone retirement boardinghouse for Civil War veterans. A snake lies sunning itself around the spring, and Kim does not bend to sample the water.

  The road passes into a ravine, hollow, or “gulf”; on the other side of the road is a steep wooded hillside, full of second- and third-growth oak saplings trying to fill the spaces harvested by the Bump and Jewell timbering activities. Some of these trees, although not yet ready for another harvest, are of considerable size. (Dallas Bump, with the help of Bill Hopkins, still must “import” the wood for his chairs from lumber mills at Malvern and Poyen, fifty miles to the east.) Dallas guides Kim through this forest, up the steep slope; she can barely keep up with him on the climb.

  They come to a bearing tree. Bear City should have a bearing tree, to give bearings: directions, location, the intersection of Sections 16 and 17, 20 and 21 in Township 2 South, Range 21 West. The bearings were inscribed and dated 1934. Near the bearing tree, all alone in the middle of the forest, is the only grave in Bear City, that of a woman named Amy Mitchell. The tombstone as such is but an irregular slab of uncut sandstone, scratched with her name and “Died September 20, 1905.”

  Dallas tries to tell it. This surrounding wood was once the cleared homestead of Orson Hager, who had been Mr. Fulmer’s superintendent for that Lost Louisiana Mine. (Orson comes from the Latin for “bear.”) Amy Mitchell had been a black slave whose owners, the Bartenschlagers, continued to employ her when they moved to Bear City years after the Civil War, to open a hotel, but abandoned her there when the gold boom died. She worked for one, then another of the remaining families of Bear City, caring for children, who were especially fond of her; everyone called her “Aunt Em.” She asked if when she died she might have the right to be buried “in just one corner of my white folks’ graveyard,” but when she died there was general agreement that she could not be buried among whites, either at the Lowe or the Cunningham Cemetery. The year before her death, Orson Hager had departed for California, leaving his farm to his daughter, Miss Katherine Hager, who offered this corner of her hillside for Amy Mitchell’s grave.

  The effort they have taken to reach this humble grave suggests to Kim that Dallas Bump considers it one of the important places of Bear City, although she doubts that he offers to show it to just anyone who buys a stool from him. She looks around at the woods, expecting to see the man she had met at Bump’s shop hiding behind a tree. Back down the hill, at the pickup, she points at the county road northward and asks, “Where does this road go?”

  “Used to go to the town of Cedar Glades,” Dallas says. “Just goes to the lake now. Cedar Glades is underwater now.”

  Sport fishermen use this road to get to the Brady Mountain “Use Area,” a boat launch. At the foot of Brady Mountain, which is a sister to Bear Mountain, is the Brady Mountain Lodge, a tourist accommodation with service station, restaurant, and lodgings at the end of the road, very popular in the summertime, when the traffic through Bear City, oblivious of the existence of a town there, gets heavy.

  “Are they open this time of year?” Kim asks. But Dallas Bump doesn’t know.

  Later on, as the afternoon wanes, Kim will drive up that way to investigate. For now she has time for just an interview or two, and Dallas wants her to meet his mother and sister. When he returns to the chair factory, he takes Kim next door, the house where once Uncle Jep Smith had his general store. Dallas’s sister, Ola, was only an infant when they converted the store into a house in 1920 and moved into it.

  The house has no room for compote: it is filled with Ola’s artwork. With particular pride, Dallas and Ola show Kim a painting of the furniture shop that Ola did five years before, in a style agelessly primitive, direct, and as rustic as any of the chairs the Bumps have turned out. Ola painted the picture for her nephew, Freddie, perhaps as an inducement of nostalgia to get him back to the chair factory, but she kept the painting when Freddie lost interest. Elsewhere in the house are dozens of dolls, in a great variety of styles, which Ola makes to sell in Hot Springs to the tourist trade. She would rather paint than make dolls, but there just isn’t as much demand for her paintings. Ola walks slowly with the help of metal arm-brace canes.

  The mother, Delia, ranks right behind Clarence Jewell in age, the second-oldest person in Bear City; she will be eighty-five in November. Although she is a tiny woman, greatly stooped by osteoporosis and slowed in her gait, and so hard of hearing that Ola must “translate” Kim’s questions for her, she is very sharp mentally and has an excellent memory.

  “What did Bear City look like when you were a child?” Kim asks her, and Ola repeats it to her mother.

  She remembers both Lark Melson and Wiley Rouse, her husband’s grandfather, who were old men when she was a girl. There was never any rivalry between them; they were good friends who had had to work together to build the town, and grieve together as the town declined.

  “When I was growin up there was a lot of houses all over,” says Delia. “Been tore up now. This here building was Uncle Jep Smith’s store. I remember him so well; he knew what the kids liked. I remember a bunch of us came in here and he asked what we wanted, and I’d say we just come to show our cousin the store, and he knew we wanted candy, so he’d give us candy!”

  Delia remembers when Bear City had meat markets, and saloons, and big hotels, and the whole town was lighted and powered by electricity produced from the town’s own dynamos, long before the coming of “rural electrification.”

  Next to Uncle Jep Smith, who was the most colorful character? Why, Postmaster Peter Huber, of course. “He was such a good ole fellow, and he’d help you any way he could, and he had a beautiful handwrite,” Delia says. “But he had arthritis so bad.”

  Peter Huber stands next to Peter Mankins as one of the great personalities of these lost cities, although his early life is obscured even in the imaginations of those who tell his story. His year and place of birth are not known; that the birth definitely occurred in Germany is one of the few solid facts known about him. There was a rumor that he was of noble birth, that his name was originally von Huber, that his aristocratic parents disowned him for his profligacy and drunkenness, that he fled to America when he was driven out of his ancestral castle on the Rhine. More likely is the story that he came to this country to escape being drafted into Bismarck’s army during the struggle against the Poles in their critical year of 1886. According to the tellers of the tale, he was drawn to Hot Springs either because of the “cure” of the waters, which was to help his alcoholism, or because of the rumors of gold in Bear City.

  There was an area of Bear City, between Walnut Street and Main Street, nicknamed “Dutch Hollow” because there lived several Germans, including “Professor” R. R. Waitz, the “chemist and metallurgist”; his old friend from Colorado, Herman Beyer; and J. D. Stufft, who operated the Bear City Meat Market. These men spoke German, and possibly Peter Huber met one or more of them in Hot Springs and was talked into joining the Bear City boom.

  When the boom burst, Stufft stayed on to sell meat, but Dutch Hollow emptied out. Peter Huber had developed a fondness for his hill-folk neighbors almost equal to his acquired fondness for the alcoholic beverage they made from the distillation of mashed and soured corn. If he had come to Hot Springs for the “cure,” he had not been cured, and would continue his immoderate consumption of spirits until his last years, when Clarence Jewell’s beautiful wife,
Elsie, would begin rationing him to a daily dose prescribed by a doctor. But despite being the “town drunk” for the forty years he lived in Bear City, until his death on October 28, 1931, he remained sober enough to handle the postmastership for thirty-three of those years.

  Clarence Jewell’s father, James Bruce Jewell, had rushed down to Arkansas from Wisconsin during the height of the boom, in 1886, to prospect for gold; finding none, he had married Orson Hager’s daughter Effie (also from Wisconsin) and stayed on to operate a sawmill and to serve as postmaster for four of the post-boom years in the nineties, employing Peter Huber as a postal clerk. Since the post office was “busy” only a few hours of each day, Peter Huber was left with much idle time. Jim Jewell would have given him a job in his sawmill, as he gave one to Fred Bump, but he couldn’t have an intoxicated man around the dangerous saw. So Peter would sit in his favorite Bump rocker at the post office and tell the children of Bear City the fictions of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, remembered from his own childhood. They requested repetitions of such standards as “Cinderella” and “Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs,” but Huber’s own favorites, which he would endlessly reinvent, were those in which gold had some central part, usually introduced by the prefatory tale “The Golden Key” and including “The Gold Children,” “Rumpel-stiltskin,” “The King of the Golden Mountain,” “The Golden Goose,” and “The Golden Bird.” The way he told these, gold was something undesirable or sinister, a bad thing. The children were too young to remember the Bear City gold rush but too old to be fooled into believing that there was any gold actually in the ground anywhere around them.

  “Sometimes, when we was kids,” Dallas Bump recalls, “we’d go down there and he’d play his harmonica for us. He had this big, old, real long harmonica, it must’ve been over a foot long. Everything he played was old German music; we didn’t know any of the tunes except from hearin him play them over and over.”

  Two photographs exist of Peter Huber. In one, a formal portrait in which he wears a white shirt, a lapelled vest, and a cravat nearly concealed by his long dark curly beard, he is still young and handsome, with deepset, brooding, Lincolnesque eyes, a widow’s peak in his dark hair above a lofty brow, and an imperfectly humped nose like a Roman portrait bust’s. He must have been at that time the best-looking man in Bear City, and a most eligible bachelor.

  “Wasn’t he supposed to be a priest?” Ola Bump asks her brother and mother. “When he came over here? Seems, the way I heard it, he was trained to be a Catholic priest back home in Germany, but he didn’t believe in it, so his people disinherited him. We used to go down there, and he’d tell us about these things. Yes, I think he was supposed to be a priest, and he never did get married on account of that.”

  The other photograph shows the Bear City Post Office in the early years of this century, stepped-gable false front and roofless porch, with a lone figure in the dark doorway: a terribly humped man on crutches, barely able to stand, peering at the camera beneath a traditional felt hillman’s hat. The long dark beard could be any hillman’s, but it is Peter’s. The man and his office: the picture speaks volumes about both.

  “He was the nicest postmaster,” Delia Bump says. “Always helpin me. Like I never did understand all that money-order and business stuff at the P.O., and if I got it wrong he’d say so, and he’d redo it for me. I never could write good.”

  When Peter Huber died, of advanced rheumatoid arthritis or alcoholism, or a lot of both, Clarence Jewell, who would immediately replace him as postmaster, built his coffin, helped by master chair-maker Fred Bump. Every community in those days had one or two coffinmakers, men who had learned enough of cabinetry to volunteer their services in the making of the coffin (a “casket” was the word applied only to a “storeboughten” coffin or one purchased from a funeral home). Depending on the person’s standing in the community, the coffin might be constructed of cheap, perishable pine or more sturdy oak. Peter Huber’s coffin was made of polished walnut.

  “How did they make the coffins?” Kim asks Dallas.

  “I guess you’ll have to talk to Clarence Jewell about that,” he suggests

  The Bump chair in which Kim is sitting is also made of walnut, the loveliest of furniture woods, although most Bump chairs are of red oak. But, walnut or oak, the seats are always made of woven splints (sometimes called “splits”) shaved by a drawknife from lengths of white oak, softer and brighter than red oak, and the weaving is always done by women (just as, in the sexual division of labor, men made the coffins but women cleaned and prepared the body for burial). Delia Bump spent most of her adult life, after marrying Fred Bump when she was fifteen, weaving the seats of chairs. How long does it take to “bottom” one chair? Delia got so good at it that she could do one in ten minutes. But of Julia Rouse, Wiley Rouse’s daughter, she says, “My mother-in-law could beat that! She was fast at any kind of work. She just grew up with chair bottoming, and she taught me how to do it.”

  Kim, who remembers all too well marrying at sixteen, asks Delia about her early marriage. Fred was twenty and worked in Jim Jewell’s sawmill. He would ride his bike after work to visit fourteen-year-old Delia, who lived two miles east of town. The visits were always carefully chaperoned by Delia’s aunt or grandmother, but the day he proposed he asked Delia’s mother for her consent. “My mother just told him that of course I had never cooked. She said to him, ‘Delia don’t no more know how to cook than you do!’ But Fred said that was all right with him.” Kim remembers that her own mother, when she learned Kim had eloped, had protested, “You can’t cook. I just wish I’d taught you how to cook.” Delia’s mother persuaded her and Fred to wait until she was fifteen and Fred was twenty-one and had saved enough to buy “a few sticks of furniture” from some people (the Hagers?) who were moving to California. “I remember I went down to Peter Huber and ordered me a little cookbook through the mail. It was an Arm and Hammer Soda cookbook and I got it through the mail and read those recipes.”

  The Bumps show Kim around the little house that was once a general store. They all apologize, saying everything is covered with dust, although Kim isn’t aware of much dust. She is shown a large framed photograph, by a professional photo-journalist from Michigan, of Delia at a younger age, weaving the bottom of a chair in the furniture shop; it’s almost a studio portrait, except that Delia looks like the last of a vanished breed of hill-folk craftswomen.

  Then, as is traditional, the Bumps and Kim say good-bye several times, and make small talk, and then say good-bye several more times before she can leave. Kim drives north out of Bear City, the way Dallas Bump had taken her. She does not stop at the “haunted” Queen Anne house, but drives on up into the hills. Several times she has to slow Zephyra to a crawl to ford small dips in the road, where gulleys of water cross the pavement. There is no sign of present or former habitation anywhere along this road until, suddenly, rounding a wooded curve at the crest of a hill, she comes in sight of the Brady Mountain Lodge and of Lake Ouachita, a sweeping expanse of crystal water ringed distantly by mountains.

  She is almost surprised to find the office/restaurant open, and to learn that she can get a room for the night; she is apparently the only guest. Her room is like a very modern motel room, though with a view not of a busy highway but of an inlet and a harbor of the lake, the waters beyond, the hills beyond—a picture. For supper she chooses from the menu, not catfish again, although it is the chef’s special, but steak. Her table, the only one occupied, has the best view of the lake. The absence of other customers gives the place an unearthly quiet. She feels an anxiety. After supper she strolls down the end of the road to the lake, the boat landing, and stares out across the water at the place where it covers the charming village of Cedar Glades.

  She would not, at this moment, be at all surprised if a bile-green Ambassador pulled up to her, or, since it doesn’t, she would not be at all surprised later, back in her room, to hear a knock at her door and open it to see the bile-green Ambassador parked beside black Zep
hyra and to look up at the face of the teller of the gold-rush story once again. She spends more than a few moments thinking about that man. It had been so dark in the furniture factory, and she had not seen him clearly at all. Could he, she wonders, have been Professor Harrigan himself, come from South Dakota to join her? Why, then, did he not join her? Perhaps, she realizes with a gnawing dread, he had wanted to “examine” her first, to look at her, to talk with her, to “test” her, without committing himself, and he had not liked what he saw and heard. What an awful thought. But where was he? Where had he gone?

  She is almost afraid to open her door and go out searching for the ice machine, to make herself a drink of Royal Crown, but eventually thirst forces her to it. She looks out; there are no cars anywhere, not parked in front of any of the other motel units, or in the parking lot of the office/restaurant, or across the road at the Texaco/grocery, which has closed for the night. She goes out and wanders around looking for the ice machine but cannot find one; there is none; she tries the office/restaurant, but it has closed for the night. She is alone in the ghost town of Brady Mountain. Back in her room, she tries a taste of tepid Royal Crown, but gives it up and goes to bed thirsty; she has trouble sleeping.

  The ghost town of Brady Mountain repopulates itself in the morning, and after a leisurely breakfast of bacon and eggs and iced diet cola, she checks out of the lodge and drives back to Bear City. This time she stops at the big white Queen Anne house, where a young woman is working in her yard. The young woman’s name is Diane Coleman, and she knows nothing about the history of the house, which she and her husband have been renting because they wanted to take the kids out to the country. The house is falling apart; she wishes the owners would fix it up. It’s a shame for such a lovely old house to be so neglected, but the rent is cheap, and there is a lot of land for a big garden.