The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Well, how are things with you these days?” I asked him, as Sybil poured the second round of coffee.

  Stirring his spoon in his cup slowly, he answered, “I got no kick. It’s a long ways yet to bedrock, and I can still get my pecker up, huh, Sybil?”

  “That aint no way to talk in front of your own boy,” she said.

  “Why Lord, Syb, you oughta of seen the poetry this here boy used to write on the bathroom wall when he was a kid. Tell her one of em, Clifford.”

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “Go on, Clifford, tell this holy whore one of them poems of yours.”

  “Never mind,” I said, gingerly avoiding the subject. I could never maintain the nonchalance with which my father profaned his speech in the presence of females. Besides, I had forgotten the gist of those brashly pubescent verses. “How’ve you been doing at work, and all?” I asked him.

  “Just hunkydory. They give me a good raise ever so often, and I got it made.” My father’s job in the phone company home guard was all day to wire and rewire the intricate innards of switchboards and other equipment, his hand semipermanently soldered to a soldering gun. “How about you? They payin you well in that line of work?”

  “I get by,” I said.

  “You never write much. I never know,” he complained, remembering his umbrages.

  It was true. I love my father, I think I am very close to him, but I was no longer able to sit down and write him a decent letter. Voice to voice we could always somehow reach each other, through the tangled briers of our private solecisms; but letter to letter we were Babelites exchanging gibberish the other could not fathom: his brief newsy postcards packed with innuendoes, my long gushing shrifts which, confessing ultimately their own senile worthlessness as the hermit talking to the wind finally senses he has no audience, at last stopped coming. Avoiding the subject, I asked, “What’s new around this old town?”

  “Nothing much. She gets bigger all the time. Nobody goes downtown any more because they got all of them new shoppin plazas out on the west end.” He shoved his empty coffee cup aside. “Now I’m a hunerd percent for progress, but I don’t much care for the way the whole damn town keeps slippin and slidin westwards, like it was tryin to get as far away from itself as it could. Course it’s no skin off my ass where they want to put them plazas—God, aint that a word? Plaza! like as if we was in Mexico or somewheres—but afore long Main Street’ll be a goddamn ghost town.”

  “You think Faubus has got anything to do with it?” I asked, trying to draw him out on his favorite subject, the ifs and ands and buts of our beloved ruler.

  “Well now, I just couldn’t say. Old Orv seems to like it over there in the Governor’s Mansion on Center Street, and I guess as long as he stays in the middle of town there’ll always be somebody who won’t move to the west end, but I just couldn’t say.”

  “You haven’t lost your admiration for Faubus, have you?”

  “Me?” He made a face. “I’m still straddlin the fence, son. Always have. Just straddlin the fence.”

  “All right,” I said, giving it up for the time being. “Say, I saw a copy of yesterday’s Gazette with Dall’s picture in it. When did he get himself promoted to sergeant on the force?”

  “Oh, four or five years back, I reckon. You know ole Dall, keen as a whip. His daddy had more gumption than any other sheriff we ever had up there in Newton County. Matter of fact he was just a little too foxy, else he’d still be alive and kickin today. But I imagine your old buddy Dall tended to take after his daddy. You fixin to hunt im up this time?”

  “I thought I might.”

  “Good. He’s called over here two or three times the last couple of years to see if I knew when you’d be comin home again, so I reckon he’d be awfully pleased to see you.”

  I allowed as how I would be pleased to see him too. Then I mentioned another old friend. “Saw that Hy Norden’s a television announcer now. Has he—”

  “Crad.” My father mocked a spit. “Thinks he’s Mr. Little Rock hisself or something, the one and only. Got his own ten o’clock news show, Channel Eight, ever night. ‘Hi out there, folks, here’s Hy!’ he says, fruity-tooty. Big splash.”

  “I think he’s cute,” Sybil offered. “Reminds me of Van Johnson.”

  He scowled at her. “I think you oughta go brush your teeth maybe.”

  “Well I never…!” she huffed, got up from the table and disappeared.

  We talked for a while about other old friends of mine. I would mention a name and he would bring me up to date. “You remember old Sarah Farnley?” I asked him. “Whatever happened to her, I wonder?”

  “Her folks moved away two, three years ago, but far as I know she never got married. Last I heard she was a clerk at Woolworth’s.” He gave me that notorious Stoney squint, and his upper lip, always imminently about to smirk, curled upward fiercely. “You gonna tomcat around while you’re here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe.”

  My father never laughs, but he made a sound as close to it as he ever gets. Then he said, “How come your missus wouldn’t come with you, did you say?”

  “I didn’t say, but you know how she hates this place.”

  “Yeah, I remember. You and her doin all right? I mean, you’re not bustin up or anything?”

  “Oh no. It’s just that…well…Daddy, she doesn’t treat me right, sometimes.” I grinned, sheepishly I guess, at this blurted confession.

  He popped the almost-laugh again, and said, “Well, a man needs to get away from his woman ever so often, aint that right?”

  “That’s right,” I agreed.

  “How long you thinkin of stayin?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Three or four weeks, maybe longer.”

  “Fine and dandy, I’ll have Sybil fix up your old room for yuh.” He turned his head over his shoulder and yelled, “Hey, woman!” Sybil returned to us, smelling faintly of Gleem. My father put his arm around her waist and pressed his jowl against her breasts. She smiled. He looked up at her and said, “Honeybunch, rig up that side room for Clifford, will you? He’s gonna be around a while.” She nodded her head and patted his shoulder and asked us if we wanted any more coffee. He asked her if she could see the clock. She craned her neck and said it was half past seven. “By Godfrey!” he said and rose from his chair. “I’d better be gettin a move on.”

  He went to the bathroom to shave and dress, and I had one last cup of coffee. Sybil sat across the table, watching nothing through the window. The wakefulness of last night’s dreaming caught up with me: I was suddenly somnolent. I yearned to yawn and sleep. “Ho-hum,” sighed Sybil, my glassy-eyed clairvoyant, tapping her fingernails idly on the table top. I yawned emphatically, sucking in an obbligato of noisy air. Her eyes shifted from the window to me, became unglazed. “Didn’t sleep much on the train,” I explained. “Gnhph,” she responded absently, looked off again across the neighbor’s yard, and scraped between her teeth with the nail of her little finger.

  “How’s my dad really getting along these days?” I asked, not just for small talk.

  “Just fine, just fine,” she said. “Not a worry in the world, far as I can see. He feels right pert and full of beans.”

  “Does he give you much trouble?”

  “Aw, not much,” she said and stood up. She started to scratch again but thought better of it. Shuffling out of the kitchen, she added, “He’s a pretty good old boy, your paw. We get along fine. It’s all a bowl of cherries.” She threw me a backward glance, for emphasis, and said again, “Just all a big old bowl of cherries.”

  I was in my room, unpacking my suitcase, when my father emerged from the bathroom. His jowls smooth, his sparse hair neatly parted, a freshly ironed gabardine shirt on his back, he looked much better. “Well, I reckon I’d better go punch the clock and earn me a few more nickels and dimes,” he said. “What you plan on doin today?”

  “At the moment I’m thinking of crawling in for a couple of hours. I didn’t get any
sleep on the train. Afterwards I guess I’ll make a few phone calls.”

  “Give Cindy a buzz, why don’tcha?”

  “Sure,” I said. Lucinda was my older, married sister, whose husband worked for the Little Rock post office. I rarely wrote to her either.

  “Will you be here for supper?” he asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “Be seein you then, Clifford. Glad you’re home.” He went away.

  I finished unpacking, hanging my one suit, a tropical seersucker, carefully in the closet and arranging my socks, handkerchiefs, and underclothes neatly in the top drawer of my old bureau. The last item out of my bag was a new Ring-Master notebook. From some other part of the house Sybil was singing something about “I want to hold your hand,” her voice pitched high and piercing, and yet turned in on itself. I closed the door of my room, dimming her song. Then I fell down with my Ring-Master on the bed, and there, the glad scene of so many old evenings when like young Lincoln before his fire I had lain me down to the feast of knowledge, I opened it to the first page and wrote “LITTLE ROCK” in the center and then flipped to the second page and prepared to begin, pausing first to absorb the nostalgic effulgence of that setting, that very room where in the late evenings of pubescent loneliness I had first looked with tingling senses into Gibbon’s Decline, snatched in a pellucid abridgement from an obscure shelf in West Side Junior High School’s library, and into Ridpath’s Popular History of the United States, and even into Headley’s Life and Travels of General Grant, and others, more than I could remember, whose substances long ago became rootlets far below the surface of the ground from which the tree of my mind thrives upward. It was there that I first discovered, in Gibbon, those words which would be my private motto, subconsciously for years, quite consciously of late—he quoted the Italian Gothic historian Nicola Rienzi, that Ultimus Romanorum, who, looking backward on the glory of antiquity, had been provoked to exclaim, “Where are now these Romans? their virtue, their justice, their power? why was I not born in those happy times?” To a fourteen-year-old boy shut away on his bed with a book, trying to forget the serial round of little aches and larger agonies which are the lot of that age, those homeless words quoted by Gibbon were a rallying cry spoken thunderously from some craggy summit, palliating his pain with the knowledge that others too had been dissatisfied with their own warped worlds. The difference between the idealistic fourteen-year-old and the cynical twenty-eight-year-old is that the boy believed that somehow he could return, bodily, toto caelo, into a bygone era, whereas the man, while pragmatically denying the possibility of such a miraculous transmigration, hoped that somehow some elements of the past, les neiges d’antan, might be recaptured. I stretched out full length, my feet no nearer the footboard than they had ever been, my jaw cradled in my left hand, the elbow of that arm sunk deep into the mattress, and my ballpoint poised hoveringly in my right hand, while I reminisced. Then I lowered the pen and bestowed a title for that page:

  THE SINS OF THE FATHER ARE TO BE LAID UPON THE CHILDREN

  I paused again and studied a calendar on the wall, left over from 1954 but kept, I suppose, because my father wanted to preserve my room in its original appearance. The calendar was worthless, but its picture was not: a large full-color print of George Caleb Bingham’s “Raftsmen on the Upper Mississippi,” the four of them posed calmly and simply, but with a feeling of lost majesty about them, in the hushed and sun-drenched splendor of the watery wilderness. Outside my door the perpetual, transient voice of Sybil was singing “Shimmy shimmy to and fro…” Then I tried to write for a while.

  But I was too tired. I got up from the bed, closed the notebook and put it beside my wallet on the bureau, undressed to my shorts (the morning was quite warm, almost summery, by then), lowered the shades, and crawled in under the top sheet of the bed, having pulled the spread away.

  On my back, I clasped my hands behind my head, stared up at the acoustical tiles of the ceiling (an old innovation installed—futilely as it turned out—in hopes of muffling my constant jabbing of my wall-hung punching bag), and thought for a few moments more of where I was, why I was there, and what I was going to do. I was still not completely home, it would take me a few more hours to become so. Such a drastic change, leaving Boston and everything connected with it entirely behind and returning to a place where I had lived more than eighteen years of my life, could not be made too easily. Perhaps it could not be made at all, because there are always limits to how much of the lost past one can consciously recover. I felt a slight anxiety, not dread but just my usual nervousness again, over the question which was foremost in my mind: What, or who, am I really looking for? Who, or what, has lured me to this trivial city? Perhaps I would find nothing, because I had changed too much or, what might be worse, the town had changed too much and I too little. Possibly the Vanished American Past was as vanished here as anywhere else, if not more so. But I gave some credit to the chance that my advanced wisdom could discover something in the town, some delightful places or persons, which the schoolboy had never been aware of. It was this latter possibility, trolling a melodious amabile descant in my head, to the exclusion of Sybil’s loud but tuneless “She loves you, yeah yeah yeah; she loves you, yeah yeah yeah,” which put me finally to sleep, determined to burst in full bloom upon the town as soon as I awakened.

  Chapter seven

  Those few hours of midday slumber were characterized only by a singular, moon-splattered dream I had, which any amateur psychoanalyst might interpret in whatever way he liked. As is true of all dreams, it probably required only a few minutes of actual time, but, again like all dreams, it was longer than a double feature at the drive-in. I hesitate to call it a nightmare.

  I am a lawyer in a little frontier settlement called Lewisburgh, no more than a clump of mud-chinked log houses, twenty miles upstream from the flourishing territorial capital which is called, variously, Arkopolis, La Petite Roche, or Little Rock. My cronies in the adjoining shanties call me John Linton. I am passionately fond of raw corn whiskey, which helps me dissolve the specter of my sad background—a shattered love affair in Maryland, no, Virginia I think it was, a short but debasing term in the penitentiary, and a law practice which was spectacularly unsuccessful despite an intelligence which, at least when thoroughly greased, can spout Latin phrases like the most practiced priest, and claims the mythological heroes and heroines of classic Greece as constant silent companions. In territorial Arkansas, although I have no clients to defend nor courts to defend them in, there is an abundance of that potent beverage around which my happy life revolves.

  It is night and I am sitting on the doorstep of my cabin, halfway through the first jug, when a rider appears out of the dark road, followed by his servant. He dismounts, shakes my hand, asks me if I am John Linton. “I believe that is correct, sir. Ave!” I answer. “Ave, yourself,” he says. “I’m Gen’l Sam Houston, fresh up from Tennessee by way of Little Rock back yonder.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder in the direction from which he had come. I am taken by surprise, all the more so because the eminent General Houston is rumored to be six and a half feet high, while this stranger is no taller than I. But he seems to be a gentleman, and in these parts one takes a gentleman at his word. “I’m honored, sir,” I say. “What can this worthless barrister do for you?” “Wal,” quoth he, “I’m tired and weary and a mite put out by that farewell party they gave me in Nashville, and it’s rumored hereabouts that you’ve got some of the finest drinkin whiskey in these parts, so I was just wonderin…” “Of course! Come right in. Post equitem sedet atra cura.” I usher him into my humble home and pour him a generous amount of my finest sour mash. In the dark I cannot see his face clearly, but he sounds the way Houston ought to sound. “How’s that?” he asks. “I’m a bit dull on my Latin.” “Oh, just a remark of Horace’s, meaning that even the rich man on horseback cannot escape his cares,” I explain. He says, “That’s me all right, but I aint so rich any more.”

  We thereupon proceed
to get ourselves merrily potted. Houston’s servant stands darkly in the doorway, watching, without comment. It is not civil, these days, to offer a drink to a servant, especially if the servant is, as I suspect this one is, either Indian or Negro.

  “Prosit!” he says, downing his third glass.

  “Prosit tibi!” I respond, and up goes mine. “Venia necessitati datur. That’s a nice way of saying we can drink all we want to, so long as we got a good reason.”

  “I don’t know about your reason, Mr. Linton, but I sure as hell have got a couple of damn good ones,” Houston says.

  “Benedicite!” I say. “Down the hatch.”

  We pour another round, and another. “Sure is mighty fine white mule you got here,” Houston proclaims.

  “Glad you like it,” I say, and then, stirred by our good fellowship, our rich conviviality, I am provoked to utter, shaping my lips carefully: "οlvοs ‘Αφροδι′της γα′λα!"

  “Great Caesar’s ghost!” Houston exclaims admiringly. “I missed that one altogether. What’s it mean?”

  “A maxim of Aristophanes: Wine is the milk of love. In this case, whiskey.”

  “Godalmighty, I sure do admire a scholar,” Houston applauds. “Maybe if I’d of been one, I’d still be governor of Tennessee.”

  His encomiums prod me onward to greater heights of grandiloquence, and make of me even more a laudator temporis acti. “Tell you what, Sam,” I say, pouring our sixth round. “I think we’re going about this all ass-backwards. What we oughta do is make a libation to the good old god Bacchus.”

  “Sure nuff!” Houston agrees heartily. “What’s a ly-bayshun?”

  “Sort of a sacrifice,” I explain.

  “That’s the spirit!” good old Sam bellows. “Got to make us a sacrifice to Bacchus afore we can have another snort.” Whereupon he stands up, removes his wide-brimmed hat, and throws it into the fire. “There ye go, Bacchus!” The flames catch it and it blazes up immediately, smelling rankly of burning sweat. “Yore turn,” he says to me.