The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “I meant, where do I go next?”

  “And I meant, you go in Zephyra. Wherever you want to go.”

  “There are no more lost cities?”

  “Oh, there are lost cities everywhere. But when we finish Y City, we are done with this book.”

  “When we finish Y City?” she will ask. “Aren’t we finished yet?

  “Not quite. You haven’t seen the cemetery, and you haven’t talked to Susie Rogers.”

  She will sigh. “If I have to be shown one more photograph of some old lady’s grandchildren…” She will sigh again. “If I have to stand at one more door spending fifteen minutes just saying goodbye…”

  “This will be different, I promise,” he will promise.

  On the way to Susie Rogers (she is a sister-in-law of Granville Rogers), Don and Kim will stop to photograph the only church in Y city, which is not a church any more and is scarcely used, except during elections, once in two or four years, when it becomes a polling place for the community. Pat Heinen had told Kim, “Last time I stood at the pulpit and filled out my ballot, I felt as if I have become a part of the place.” The sign in the pediment says: “Y-CITY UNION CHURCH WELCOMES YOU.” The white building was donated to the community by a wealthy person whose name no one can recall, and was intended, like the Garland City church, to be nondenominational; there, however, the similarity ends. In style this last church in the book might be compared with the first church in the book, that in Sulphur City: both have the bared rafter ends of the 1930s “Craftsman” style, both have six-over-six windows, and both are of white wood. But the Y City church is true gable-end temple form (although a much later addition spoils the symmetry) and is thus a country cousin of the white churches at Cherokee City and Marble City, without the belfry. Possibly because the unusually large bell needs support stronger than that afforded by a wooden belfry, it is mounted not on the roof but on a sturdy metal frame planted in the churchyard. Its rare ringing can be heard for miles. The air conditioner protruding from the bare front wall recalls the Masonic lodge of Arkansas City and, like that lodge’s unit, seems to be a nose on a face, admitting oxygen.

  The little-used white building stands “just this side of” (as they express directions hereabouts) Susie Rogers’s house, which is on the opposite side of the highway. Otto Rogers, who was one of twin older brothers of Granville, built this modest but “modern” house thirty-four years ago, when almost all of the houses and buildings of Y City were still made of logs, and planted it square in the middle of the broadest “valley,” or wide hollow, of the town. Two years ago, Otto Rogers died suddenly of a heart attack, and Susie Rogers, in her own words, “went to pieces”; in the words of her neighbors, she hasn’t been the same since.

  Don and Kim will find her yard protected by dogs, too, but these are not ill-mannered mongrels like those they encountered at the Miner house; rather, they are a pair of ginger-colored registered Doberman pinschers, who are excellent sentries, performing their duties with the efficient authority of Pinkerton guards. Don and Kim will feel that they are not being set upon by hooligan curs but politely interrogated by uniformed police.

  Susie Rogers will come out into her yard, and the police will become silent. Two months later, Kim will play back her tape to verify the facts, and, sure enough, Susie Rogers’s year of birth is 1909, but she will not look anything like that. The tape will also verify that she has had twelve children.

  “I like to be friendly, but I don’t like to be pushed,” Susie Rogers will greet them. “You have a free right to your beliefs, but I have a free right to mine, and I don’t buy none of that Jehovah’s Witness stuff.”

  “We aren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Kim will insist.

  “What are your dogs’ names?” Don will ask.

  “This one is Gretchen, and this one is Zack,” Susie will say.

  To Kim, Don will say, “Z is for Zack.” This will be on tape. Then, to Susie, he will say, “We aren’t selling anything. And you were expecting us, weren’t you?”

  “Please come in,” Susie will invite, and, sure enough, the compote clutter of her house will look as if it has been hastily tidied up, if not dusted, in expectation of visitors. “I’m a bachelor woman now,” she will say, by way of apology for the unkempt interior: clothes are neatly folded but stacked in piles on a sofa and chairs; there are no lamps, just a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling; a clothes line across the ceiling is hung with overdue bills and letters attached with clothes pins; six goldfish swim in a small bowl, and one small parrot shrieks in its cage. The wall contains three pictures of Jesus in compote attitudes and a reproduction of an unknown picture that is the most thoroughly compote art that either Kim or Don has encountered: in blue and purple pastels, a big eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer is barreling down a wet highway in the night, in the worst storm imaginable, above the imprinted title Jesus Saviour Pilot Me.

  The only buildings in Y City when Susie McCullar was growing up were the gristmill (which did not grind flour but only cornmeal), a little general store, and the post office, which was not called “Y City” but “Chant,” after an early family. Susie attended a little school up on the hill where Midway Park is now, which had an enrollment just large enough “for the boys and girls to play a game of baseball,” using a stick for a bat and “a ole wore-out sock for a ball.”

  Her grandfather Robert Shaddon was a country doctor, or at least he practiced medicine without benefit of medical school, carried a black bag, “rode a horse, and doctored all around,” delivering babies, dispensing his own medicine and drugs from an office at the gristmill. Doc Shaddon’s first wife was Susie’s grandmother, but he married eight more times after her. Eight? Yes, and his last wife, taken when he was seventy-five years old, was Susie’s best friend and playmate, a girl fourteen years old. “Me and her kept on playin together even after they was married.” They fashioned dolls out of “a strip of cloth wrapped around a corncob.”

  Susie herself married at fourteen, “but we didn’t make a go of it.” After marrying Otto Rogers when she was nineteen, she settled into a hard life of raising twelve children and trying to make ends meet during the Depression years. “These hills, I tell ye, you don’t know how many steps I’ve took in these mountains and hills, a-scroungin for my family.” She scrounged for wild fruit, picking huckleberries, muscadines, and blueberries, which she sold. The fruit had to be canned first, put up in jars; she “set up till midnight cannin, then struck out the next day to pick some more.”

  Her father, G. B. McCullar (“Now, honey, I caint begin to tell you when or where he was borned”), had predicted Y City would become a city. Her father liked to tell how things had been, in contrast to how they would become: his father had driven oxen and made a nickel box of matches last a whole year. “They didn’t have nothin but wood heat to keep warm and for cookin,” Susie will say, with wonder; she has bottled gas to run her space heater. But this is a relatively recent convenience, and her life has been hard. “You see, we didn’t live out of a paper sack from a store. If we didn’t have it, we didn’t have it, and we did without it. But I aint the only one. That’s the way everbody was here, back then.” Susie’s frown will go away, and she will smile. “But it’s been a good life. Seems like we were happier back when we didn’t have nothin than when we did.”

  “It’s beautiful around here…” Kim will say, as if the beauty of the natural setting might have compensated for the harshness of the way of life.

  “I went out to California once, to visit,” Susie will say, and she will fetch a framed photograph, blow the dust off it, and present it for Kim and Don to admire. It will be the last photograph of grandchildren that Kim will ever be required to look at. But it will be different, as Don had promised: not just somebody’s anonymous, sweet-faced adolescents, but a quartet of strikingly handsome young people, the son and three beautiful daughters of Susie Rogers’s California son, whom she hardly ever sees any more. Kim will wonder if these beautiful kids have ever
visited the Arkansas of their roots. Susie will declare, “There was only one thing I liked about California, and that was the flowers. The rest I hated, the mad rush, the mad rush of the people.”

  Also, as Don will have promised, the good-byes will be long but different. Of all the people Kim has interviewed, Susie Rogers will strike her as the one most in tune with her natural surroundings, almost a part of the landscape, and the best personification of the community in which she lives. Susie is very lonely, still grieving daily for her dead spouse, and somewhat bewildered that her own body and mind are beginning to fail her.

  In the yard, moving slowly toward Zephyra, they will go on talking. Susie will say she wishes she could be of more help, but there just isn’t much to tell about Y City. Don will comment on what a beautiful pair of Dobermans she has, and what a nice beginning of a garden. Kim will assure Susie that she has been of more help than anyone else in town.

  Susie will smile and say, “I want to believe that years later on you’ll still think about me.”

  Nowhere near the Rogers house, or the white union church, or the junction itself, but north, beyond the Midway, north toward home, is Chant Lane, off 71 to the east, and Chant Cemetery. The name Chant Lane sounds more like what one would find in England, whence all these families came. The place is enchanted. Of all the cemeteries Kim has seen, this one, the last, will seem to her the most beautiful. The hills around it, the morning sunlight, the verdant trees now in springtime’s full leaf (as a penultimate gesture of magic, Don will cause every twig of wakefield crud to vanish from the grounds). Kim and Don will spend several minutes wandering among these graves while Zephyra and Bunker wait tail to head beside the highway, pointed north, their ultimate direction. Some of the headstones are primitive home-fashioned markers: slabs of poured cement embedded with brightly colored marbles, children’s agates, forming names and legends. One headstone has the deceased’s favorite bent briar pipe, without which he was never seen, embedded in the cement. Some of the women’s names reflect the originality of hill-folk christening: Arria, Othelana, Icevinda. The family names, too, are unusual: Tephentaylor, for instance. But here are the graves of those whose living kin we will have met: Rogers, Miner, Shaddon, McCullar.

  Otto Rogers’s grave is still bare of grass, as if only recently filled in. Kim will wonder how often Susie comes here. (Susie had told her, “I drove a car since I was fourteen, but when Otto died I was afraid to take hold of a steering wheel.”) Kim will hear again Susie’s parting words, and she will speak them aloud to Don: “I want to believe that years later on you’ll still think about me.”

  And he, as if to prove that he will not have been deaf to everything that Susie said, will repeat to Kim the words Susie spoke that seem to him the best motto for any town that aspires to be a city and doesn’t make it, or any person who aspires to greatness and fails: “Seems like we were happier back when we didn’t have nothin than when we did.”

  And then the magician will perform his last act of magic: from all around in this lovely Chant Cemetery will come the voices of every last one of us chanting the refrain of that good old Ozarks funeral hymn:

  Farther along we’ll know all about it,

  Farther along we’ll understand why;

  Cheer up, my sister, live in the sunshine,

  We’ll understand it, all by and by.

  Epilogue and Acknowledgments

  Cities, like men, are embodiments of the past and mirages of unfulfilled dreams.

  —Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man, 1968

  In the drought year of 1886, when creeks and springs were drying up all over Arkansas, a man dug a well. In a broad valley of the Ouachita Mountains south of Booneville, less than forty miles north of Y City, he was digging a well on his farm when he excavated some stones with yellowish flecks in them. He sent a sample to Little Rock to be assayed. Within days, his meadow held a hotel, several stores, and a post office, called “Golden City.” The events and excitement occurring at Bear City happened simultaneously here (and at faraway Five Corners, Vermont, and undoubtedly several other remote spots all over the globe). Sooner than the Bear City boom fizzled out, the Golden City hopes and eager anticipations died abruptly: it was revealed that the man’s son had “salted” the stones with gold dust from Colorado. Strangely, the new town was not abandoned; it continued as a small but active community for many years. Although the village was finally deserted in modern times, it still appears on maps as Golden City. Kim and Don will stop by. Not to research the place, not to interview anyone (there is no one to interview), not even to photograph it (except for a faded sign pointing toward it), but just out of curiosity and because it won’t really be out of their way, on their journey to where they are going.

  They will not stay long. Leaving Zephyra parked in Booneville (the roads to Golden City are all dirt and rough), they will ride in Bunker, whose already defective exhaust system will be submitted to further dents, twists, and snaps. They will find a couple of empty houses, not of architectural interest. There is a defunct brick schoolhouse, not really old. The cemetery is small and unremarkable. “Well,” Kim will say. She will reflect that Golden City was worth the detour for the sake of helping her “taper off” from her travels and her search. She will not have to “quit cold turkey” but will be able to remember Golden City as a sort of mildly interesting place, worth a visit but not of more than forty-five minutes’ duration.

  All of the rest of their lives, which will be spent together, Kim and Don will never pass up a chance to take a look at a lost city. Kim will suggest, “Why don’t we put at the end of the book a list of all the places called ‘City’ in America?” And Don will think that is an excellent idea, and they will do it. Long as the list will be, it will be confined only to the cities of America, and they will come to realize, and to see, that the surface of the earth is covered with towns that wanted to be cities.

  Their first objective will be to find a real city, not one called “City,” to provide for a while a few advantages: the city’s visual pleasures of orderliness (squared blocks, kept lawns, trimmed hedges); the city’s conveniences (supermarkets, garbage pickup, newspaper delivery); and the city’s advantages (good libraries, bookstores, newsstands). It will also be nice if the city’s square has an 1886 building that once held the doctor’s office (upstairs) of Don’s grandfather, and also the state university that is his alma mater. And a few old friends who will help them settle.

  All blurred will be the line between story, which will have no end but only epilogue, and acknowledgment, which will give not simply credit but perpetual thanks to those who will have helped make the book possible.

  Kim and Don will be indebted, most of all, in gratefulness and love, to those of whom this record is made, the good Arkansawyers who people these pages, whose names are rendered large in the text. They will need no further mention (but one of them shall have it).

  One of the first things Kim and Don will do, after settling temporarily into an old house in the historic district of Fayetteville, will be to apply for assistance from the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities. Jane Browning, its director, will inform them that they have received a grant, and Sharon Reel, the assistant director, will handle all the phone calls to Kim and letters to Don concerning the application for and administration of not only the grant, but also a subsequent pair of “minigrants.”

  In order to have applied for the grants, they will need to have a sponsoring organization, and the Ozark Institute, which later will become a lost city itself, will sponsor them, through its director, Edward A. Jeffords, and its assistant director, Barry Weaver.

  It will not hurt that both Jeffords and Weaver will be very old friends of Don’s, the latter his college roommate. Both will also serve on an advisory committee for the project.

  The advisory committee for the purpose of the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities grant will also consist of several professors at the University of Arkansas: Walter Brown, Ernie Deane, James J
. Hudson, Marvin Kay, Cyrus Sutherland, and Elliott West; two professors at the University of Missouri, Rolla, who are old friends and advocates of Don’s: Michael Patrick and Larry Vonalt; and three Fayetteville friends: Ellen Shipley of Special Collections at the university library, Peter Tooker, and Robert Besom, director of the Shiloh Museum of Springdale, which will become the project’s sponsoring organization when the Ozark Institute follows Edd Jeffords into limbo (or Waco). Tom Dillard, director of the Department of Arkansas Natural and Cultural Heritage, will also agree to serve on the advisory committee.

  Anne Courtemanche-Ellis of Newton County will greatly encourage the project in its inception and early stages.

  Those at the University of Arkansas library who will also help in the research will include John Harrison, the director, and Larry Perry, Steve Chism, and Debby Cochran; Michael Dabrishus, director of Special Collections, and his staff, especially Ethel Simpson and the aforementioned Ellen Shipley, who will assist Don and Kim in many ways other than mere research.

  Bryan Gammill, their landlord and friend during those months in the historic district, will lend Don his Canon AE-I camera, with which most of the photographs in this book will be taken. They will be developed and printed at Fayetteville’s The Camera Shop by Thomas E. Tiller and David Schick.

  In October, on a gorgeous Saturday, the Messrs. Gammill, Weaver, Besom, Tooker, and a few others on the above list will look odd, attired in their conceptions of the dress of the old-time Ozarker, attending a special Ozark wedding, officiated by Justice of the Peace Steve Anderson, an old friend, and featuring a backyard pig roast, or cochon de lait, whose chef will be the father of the bride, Micky Gunn, assisted by his wife, Jacque. Speakers at the nuptials of Don and Kim will include the aforementioned Professor Mike Patrick, Professor Mike Luster representing the deceased Vance Randolph, and Professor Donna Darden of the University’s sociology department, who will also, throughout the length of this project, provide many other kindnesses too numerous to catalogue.