The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Is it really haunted?” Kim asks.

  “I’ve heard that rumor,” Diane Coleman says, although she has met very few of the other residents of Bear City. She keeps to herself, thinks of herself as a loner, and knows nothing about the history of Bear City. “If the house is haunted,” she says, “it’s not badness.”

  Nor is there any sight of the green Ambassador in the village anywhere, though Kim drives up and down the still-passable streets, Walnut and Third and Water. She tells herself she is not hunting for that car, simply taking a last good look at what’s left of the town before going on to her last interview, which is with Clarence Jewell. Just as she was warned, he is not easy to find. She has written down the instructions Dallas Bump gave her: if you look carefully across the road from Dallas Bump’s house, triangulated across Water Street from the old post office, you will see, dipping down toward Rouse Creek, the shadow of a trail, all that remains of Plateau Street, which takes its name from the fact that once it crosses the creek it rises and then levels out for the short length of its distance to a dead end at the Jewell place. It used to lead to the Lost Louisiana Mine, the “Spanish Lode,” but that way has been blocked for fifty years by Clarence Jewell’s tree farm.

  Fifty years ago, Clarence Jewell, atoning for his father’s stripping of the forests, reseeded the cleared land west of town with thousands of pine and oak seedlings, and these trees, grown tall now, make a new forest, or the tree farm of forester Jewell, once Postmaster Jewell, once chairmaker Jewell…and still philosopher Jewell, iconoclast Jewell, crank Jewell.

  Kim finds the trail and eases Zephyra down to Rouse Creek, where she is stopped by a rude bridge. Rude in both senses of crude and discourteous: it seems to be two widely spaced planks laid parallel across the stream, and Kim is not at all certain that the gap between the planks corresponds to the gap between Zephyra’s tires. Though she is tempted to abandon Zephyra here and walk the rest of the way, she has no idea how far the rest of the way might be. So she nudges Zephyra’s front wheels out onto the planks, then gets out to check that both tires are solidly on the boards, then inches the car very slowly across, expecting the bridge to give way at any moment. Safely beyond, she finds that the trail is the roughest stretch of road that Zephyra will ever have to negotiate. But before long it comes to a dead end at the house, the old Beam place, built by “Professor” Aaron Beam, he of the simulated “Beam’s Electric Process” for extracting gold from ore, and one of only two houses (the other gone) built in what was called “Beam’s Addition,” a platting of new streets with names like Montrose, Magnolia, Vine, and Louisiana, all obliterated by Jewell’s tree farm. Kim thinks it ought to be called “Beam’s Subtraction.”

  When Zephyra pulls into the yard, Clarence Jewell is puttering in his back yard, and he comes around front to challenge Kim’s intrusion. He is a very small man, much shorter than she, dressed in old khakis and bareheaded, with little hair. Though he was born with the century, he does not look as wrinkled as other eighty-five-year-olds she has met; he is, however, quite a bit testier and more suspicious. She apologizes for disturbing him, because he is clearly disturbed. She is sorry if she has bothered him, because he is certainly bothered. “Everyone,” she declares, trying to flatter him, “tells me that you know more about Bear City than any man alive!”

  He shakes his head. “Not me,” he says. “You ought to talk to Dallas Bump.”

  She laughs at the irony. “I’ve already talked to Dallas Bump. He thinks I should talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Coffins, if nothing else,” she says.

  “Coffins?” he says. “You need a coffin?”

  “No, but I understand you used to make them. I understand you used to make a lot of chairs. Once upon a time, you had a whole factory competing with the Bumps.”

  “I never competed with the Bumps,” he declares. “They sold their chairs in Arkansas, and I marketed all of mine out of this state.”

  “Do you mind if I use this tape recorder?”

  “Suit yourself.” He seems to be challenging her to ask another question, but at least he is convinced she is not selling anything or peddling any religion to replace his own strange one.

  “A woman reporter once referred to you as ‘the Henry Ford of the Ouachitas,’” Kim says. “What did you think of that?”

  “I didn’t argue with her,” Clarence says, and permits himself a wry grin.

  “Did people call you ‘C.B.’?”

  “Some names worse than that come to mind,” he says, and permits himself an actual chuckle. Then he invites, “Would you like to come in?”

  Inside the old house’s living room, adorned not with any compote but with many semiprimitive landscapes, Kim meets the artist, whom the aforementioned woman reporter described, in the 1950s, as “one of the most beautiful women to be seen in the state of Arkansas,” and who is still, at eighty, strikingly handsome. Elsie May Heath Jewell has been married to Clarence for sixty-two years; they have six children, twenty-one grandchildren, and twenty greatgrandchildren. Her landscapes, few of them done from the Bear City area, are lovingly framed in natural wood by Clarence, who has no coffins to build any more, except his own. The paintings are overwhelmed by a large quilt hanging on the wall, which Elsie explains was done by her grandmother, although the pattern is strangely modern: a trompe l’oeil juxtaposition of cubes that reverse their direction by optical illusion as one stares at them. The quilt is called Tumbling Blocks, and they do just that.

  The room is furnished with Jewell-made walnut chairs, ladder-backs, and Kim is loaned one for a seat. Her host and hostess sit nearby. “People around here don’t like me,” Clarence Jewell declares, without elaboration, or with only some mumbled exegesis. Later, after she has left Bear City, Kim will discover to her dismay, playing back the tape, that his voice is often weak, inaudible on the recording. She thought she had positioned the machine between them with practiced care; but of all the many old-timers she has interviewed, he is the least intelligible on tape. And Elsie Jewell rarely interrupts her husband.

  Besides being chairmakers, Clarence Jewell and Dallas Bump have something else in common: both went away for a while. After living at the post office for ten years, in rooms of Clarence’s construction added to the shack, near the log factory of his chair-making operation, which continued throughout the Depression and through World War II, the Jewells, like thousands of Arkansawyers after the war, went to California, and stayed there for a while; the tree farm Jewell had planted in the thirties went on growing without him. “But I despised California,” Clarence says, and they, like the Bumps, kept coming back for visits at every opportunity: “I’m just an old mountain man at heart.” Finally, in the late fifties, they moved back into the post office, where Clarence had stored all his books and papers, and they lived there until the Beam place became vacant.

  Clarence does not show Kim his library, but he has a large one. The living room contains only one book: Nancy McDonough’s Garden Sass: A Catalog of Arkansas Folkways (1975, Coward, McCann), a wonderful compendium of the state’s folklore in the tradition of the Foxfire books. The author’s father-in-law, Russell McDonough, grew up in Bear City and told her about the famous Fourth of July celebrations held there, but Clarence Jewell does not recall Russell McDonough.

  Though he has been working for many years on a history of Bear City, he tells Kim it is only about the boom years.

  “What I write about, people don’t want to read,” he says. He presents Kim with a copy of his only published work, The Inception and Ascension of Man (1977, Vantage Press—vantage as in “vanity,” the most profitable of the subsidy publishers), a thin book of modest size but immodest scope: it attempts to present a theory of evolution at great variance with both Darwin and the Bible. Until only fifteen thousand years ago, man, who evolved directly from ocean mollusks and is not related to the monkeys, lived in the sea, the “coffee-colored” waters, where he caught his prey and found his bearings
by “echo-sounding” like the bats and dolphins. Dogs took a liking for the sea creature man and domesticated him by accepting him into the social group of dogs and by devouring his feces as a sanitation system, enabling him to leave the sea and live on land. Women were intended to do all of the work of food gathering, diving for seafood, gardening, and preparing and serving food, leaving man free to think, which is what he was intended for. Survival of the fittest? Jewell writes: “In nature the weak and the stupid are destroyed by predators; only the strongest and the most intelligent individuals survive long enough to produce offspring. With the human species, under modern civilization, the weak, the stupid, and the vicious are cared for and survive to reproduce many more of their kind.” The bibliography is limited mostly to a few back issues of National Geographic, although it also lists Darwin, Freud, and Gibbon. The book is not the work of a naturalist who has closely observed the life around him in Bear City.

  But as an iconoclast, Clarence Jewell is of a gentler breed than Joe Weston of Cave City. He tells Kim again that most people don’t approve of him or his ideas, and this has forced him to become increasingly a loner, thinker, philosopher. The Jewells relish the off-the-road isolation and quiet of the old Beam place, in contrast to their former exposure at the post office in the center of town. After Peter Huber died in 1931, Clarence Jewell was postmaster for only two years, his thirty-first and thirty-second, until the notice came from the Post Office Department that the Bear City Post Office was discontinued, and that henceforward patrons would receive their mail at the neighboring village of Royal. The closing of the post office saddened the other citizens of Bear City more than it did Clarence. He felt that Bear City was already dead and that this would allow him more time to devote to his furniture factory, which he had started the same year Peter Huber died, just as the Depression was beginning to drive more people out of Bear City. The Jewell factory was not simply a family business, like the Bump factory, but employed twelve people, who produced up to two thousand chairs a month, wholesaling for 50¢ each to markets chiefly in Texas and Oklahoma. His best workers could earn as much as $3.50 a day, fantastic wages for the Depression years in the Ouachita Mountains.

  When World War II took all the able-bodied men of Bear City, Clarence Jewell closed the factory and went to work as a carpenter and craftsman for the Army and Navy Hospital in Hot Springs. He commuted from Bear City, where, in his spare time, he made coffins for the bodies of local men shipped home from the battlefields. Then came the move to California. After ultimately yielding to the homesickness that brings most far-flung Arkansawyers back eventually, he found that there was little need for his coffinmaking skills. There were few left to bury.

  “I don’t know how many coffins I’ve made in my life,” Clarence tells Kim. “Not more than seventy-five or so. I never kept count.”

  Whenever someone died in Bear City, a member of the family would hitch his wagon and ride into Hot Springs to buy the metal handles for the coffin, and cloth, usually satin, to cover the inside and drape over the outside of the coffin. It would usually be late afternoon or night before the materials were delivered to coffinmakers Fred Bump and Clarence Jewell, who would work together throughout the night to build and finish the coffin for the burial the following day. They never even thought of asking any payment for this work. Then the coffinmakers would go to the Lowe or the Cunningham Cemetery and help dig the grave. By Ozark custom or superstition, the grave was always dug on the day of the burial; leaving an open grave overnight was considered very bad luck, and might even bring on an early death to one of the dead person’s relatives.

  Superstition surrounds every movement and thought of the hill folk, but never more so than in connection with death and burial. The death itself was probably the result of some carelessness on the part of someone else: a woman who washed clothes on January 1, a man who carried a hoe into his house, a woman who forgot to fasten the door one night, a woman who sneezed with food in her mouth, a woman who swept the floor after dark, anyone who transplanted a cedar tree or burned sassafras wood or peach trees in the fireplace. The death is always foretold by a sign: a falling (as opposed to a shooting) star, a dog who howls four times (or three) and then stops, a cat who licks the door, a baby’s cradle rocking by itself, a rooster crowing in the doorway, or a hen crowing anywhere at any time. Hens do not crow.

  While the men made the coffins, the women worked on the body: it was stripped and thoroughly cleaned. If the person had died at home, the room in which the death had occurred was thoroughly cleaned and the bed ticks burned. Usually no effort was made to embalm the corpse, just to keep it fresh until it could be buried. Coins were used to close the eyelids; the hair was washed and then brushed into the style in which the person had worn it; the best clothes, or at least the cleanest clothes, were put on; the body was cooled and placed into the coffin.

  All the women in the community who had not participated in preparing the body for burial were busy at home, cooking their best recipes for the funeral dinner, the most lavish banquet that anyone would ever attend, served usually right after the funeral service.

  The coffinmakers, who helped dig the grave, had to stay to watch the last shovelful of earth thrown over their handiwork: to depart before the last clod of dirt was in the grave was likely to bring death and destruction upon the family circle, but especially upon the man who had dug the grave but did not wait to see it filled.

  Kim wonders: is Clarence Jewell waiting to see the grave of Bear City covered over? She remembers Stella Beavers’s last words for Buffalo City: all it lacks is throwin the dirt over it.

  “People in this neighborhood don’t really like me,” Clarence tells her.

  “This is the third time you’ve told me that,” she says, trying to sound polite but chiding. “Don’t you and Dallas Bump get along?”

  “Oh, Dallas,” Clarence Jewell says. “Sure. I practically raised him.” But the others, particularly the old-timers, being superstitious (which he is not), probably resented his education and his intelligence. “They just don’t approve of me,” he says.

  Y City, Arkansas

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  —Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” 1915

  She had not intended for it to be her final town. The diverging roads lead to Pike City, Hurrah City, Process City, Golden City, Webb City, Central City, Hackett City, and Carbon City, all as lost as any of those already seen, and Kim is fully prepared to explore them all, unless Zephyra has a major breakdown. But at Y City the divergent roads seem to suggest to her a choice, not between the next possible destinations of her project so much as between continuing her journey indefinitely or bringing it to an end. Every road has a Y, and it is not even necessary to take the one less traveled by. Sometimes it is better to take neither, but to stop.

  Of all these places, Y City is the only one that is not any smaller than it ever was, not a ghost of its former self, that never even aspired to become a town, let alone a city. In its history (which is long but blank), people, mostly outsiders, have suggested that, for the sake of appearance and seemliness, it ought to be spelled “Wye City,” as in the lovely River Wye in Wales and England, famous for its scenic beauty, particularly where “the valley narrows into a gorge, often wooded and often overhung with great crags of mountain limestone,” which precisely describes the gorge around the Y here. Why don’t they spell it “Wye”? They cannot say, but somehow “Wye” is affected, cultivated, possessed of a completed sophistication out of keeping with the homeliness, earthiness, and still-in-the-process-of-completion rusticity that mark the place. It is the only Y City, or even Wye City, in all the United States. Sometimes, on some road maps, the Y is put in quotes, giving it an ironic or even a sarcastic voice, thus: “Y” City. But this may be only a self-consciousness over the fact that most cities do not identify themselves by a single letter, let alone the twenty-fifth letter of the alphabet, invented by the Romans to replace the Ionic upsilon and reinvented by
highway departments everywhere to mean a splitting, forking, branching road.

  Kim is all too aware of the symbolism of the divergence, and its confusing plethora of suggestions: change, deviation, abnormality, distance, eccentricity, as well as simple separation or fanning out. Wishbone and crotch, there are two semiots of the Y: hope and sex. Furcula and groin, pulley bone and privates, desire and connection. As she and Zephyra wend through the winding valleys approaching Y City this beautiful morning, she is nervous with anticipation. The longing she hears in the Theme of the Faraway Hills (which are no longer faraway but all around) is for something she is not even sure of.

  A cursory glance at any road map gives one an idea of what to expect at Y City. How often does she, seeing a town on a map, visualize it, precreate it, often correctly. She expects Y City to be nothing more than a junction of two highways, perhaps with a truck stop on one side of the highway, another service station across the highway with a small restaurant attached, a couple of motels, and a scattering of houses wherein live the attendants of the gas, food, lodging. Thus, she has to stop and double-check her map when she arrives at that junction of the two highways and discovers that there is nothing there, nothing, that is, except a lone abandoned service station.

  Deserted gasoline stations, to the ranks of which several new ones (old ones) are added every day, are fast becoming the symbol of change in America. If the derelict, cast-off town with its dead main street and its used furniture stores is ubiquitously trying to tell us something about our heedless upward mobility, the dead gas station is trying to say something about the process of the mobility itself: it matters not how we get there, the going is no longer important, arrival is everything. Time was, we pulled into a service station for “full service”: they’d check your oil, clean your windshield, pump your gas, while you used the John or walked the dog or did whatever you liked. Now we often pump ourselves, a kind of hurried autoeroticism with the quick finish in mind, while the “attendant” attends only the cash register. We prefer to self-serve; it’s a lot cheaper and quicker, like masturbation. But the self-serving multitudes are killing off the traditional service station, which is being fast replaced by the “convenience store,” easy mart, quick stop, 7-Eleven, which offers cheap gas as only one of many unrelated products.