The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, did you ever get into a bed, or a cot, or any kind of horizontal position, with him?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, what did you do with him, for goodness sakes?”

  “Clifford—” she protested.

  Naps called to us to come in and eat supper.

  Walking into the house, she said, “This is such a beautiful home, isn’t it?” I told her I had never seen its equal anywhere. Then she asked, “Is this where we’re going to stay tonight?” Sure, if you want to, I said, giving her hand a squeeze.

  Supper was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. Tatrice answered it and said it was for Margaret. I wondered who, besides Dall, knew that Margaret was here at Naps’s house.

  Margaret went to the phone, which was in the hallway, but not quite out of earshot. “Yes?” I heard her say into it.

  Then she lowered her voice and said, “Yes, that’s right.”

  A moment passed, she lowered her voice still more and said, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t. It’s just the way I feel about it.”

  Another moment, and she said, “I can’t talk to you now.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Do we have to?”

  “No,” she said.

  “No, of course not!” Her voice rose, and she tried to lower it again: “No, I tell you. What makes you think—?”

  “But—” she said.

  “Don’t you dare—” she said.

  “Listen, I can’t talk to you now, but just wait, don’t even think about it until I talk to you. I’ll call you later.”

  “Please—” she said.

  Then, “I’ll call you. Good-bye, now.”

  She hung up and returned to the table. She was trembling. “That wasn’t your mother, I hope?” I said, but she did not answer. She stared at her plate. In silence she finished her food. We cleared the table. Tatrice motioned to Naps and they went out of the room.

  “Margaret,” I said, “was that Slater?”

  She did not look up at me.

  “Margaret, would you like for me to leave, so you could call him back and finish the conversation?”

  She shook her head. Then she got up from the table and walked into the living room. I followed her. She poured some bourbon into a glass and sat down. I made myself a drink and sat down beside her. After a while I asked, “What did he want?”

  She made up a story. Slater was writing a new play, a kind of folk piece, completely different from his previous work, and he wanted her to have a part in it. It was based on Ozark superstitions and symbolisms, the phases of the moon and katydids and love charms and so forth, and he was going to present it in some small mountain-locked community up in the Ozarks for a tryout, because he felt that the backwoodsmen could appreciate it more than the bourgeoisie of Little Rock. It was a fetching idea, she said, but she did not want a part in it, she did not want to see Slater again, she did not want to be in any more performances of his Red Shoes play, she wanted to forget him entirely.

  Then she said, “I wish you and Doyle would forget about it, too, and just leave him alone.” I told her that it was not Slater, but her, that we were interested in. She said that Dall had some kind of obsession with being a custodian of the public welfare, a pillar of strength in a town full of weakness, a vigilant and overzealous guardian spirit, and that it must really tear him up to realize that there wasn’t a blessed thing he could do for her any more now. She had told him again and again, lately, that he’d done all he could possibly do, all anyone could possibly do, and that she was very grateful to him for it, but that he was just wasting his time now.

  “He wouldn’t be wasting his time if he prevented you from killing yourself,” I averred.

  “Clifford,” she said. She just said my name in a tone of tiredness, exasperation.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” I harped. “Wouldn’t you have tried to kill yourself if Dall hadn’t come your way?”

  “All right!” she said. “But I’m past that now, so forget about it, can’t you?”

  “No, I can’t,” I said.

  But clearly she would not allow me to pursue the subject. She said we had spent too much time talking about her, and now she wanted us to talk about me. I protested that there was nothing about me worth discussing, but she said I was mistaken. “What do you want out of life?” she asked. “What are your ambitions, your dreams, your plans?” I put her off with a boring synopsis of my project for writing a book someday on the Vanished American Past. She wanted to know more about it, she wanted to know what elements of that vanished past I was most interested in, but I was in no mood for talking shop. She asked me how long I planned to stay in Little Rock. I said I was ready to leave just as soon as she was.

  “But why do we have to leave?” she asked. “Where would we go?”

  We would see the world, I said. The worldl

  What about your wife? she asked.

  To hell with my wife, I said.

  Why don’t we just stay here in Little Rock? she asked. Why don’t we see Little Rock before seeing the world?

  What’s there to see in Little Rock? I asked.

  Lots of things, she said. All kinds of things. Things you’ve never seen before. Things I’ve never seen before, in all these years.

  Bosh! I said. The world is waiting!

  You’re an incurable dreamer and wanderer, she said.

  “Besides,” she said, smiling impishly, “how do you know I would go with you? I don’t know anything about you. You won’t talk to me about yourself. You’re virtually a stranger to me.”

  “You’re really a stranger to me,” I said defensively. But I told her there would be plenty of time for getting acquainted…or re-acquainted.

  Talk to me now!” she said, and in her voice was an echo of the same desperation that had crept into my own voice on that night I met her at the movies. “Talk to me, Clifford!” she said. “Tell me about yourself.”

  But I couldn’t. Had I not written, in my Ring-Master: Familiarity Breeds Contempt? Had I not learned, the hard way, what a dangerous thing it is to reveal too much of oneself to a woman? I was not going to give Margaret the opportunity to acquire the false conception of me that Pamela had used against me. Later, maybe, I could open up a little bit. But not now.

  I had it all planned: how we would snuggle up here in a cozy corner of Naps’s vast living room with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bucket of ice and have the most intimate kind of talk all evening until bedtime, and then in the dark I would sneak into her room or (better) she would sneak into mine, or, considering the kind of broad-minded people Naps and Tatrice were, we would be put to bed together anyway. But while I was ruminating on this happy thought, the telephone rang and Naps answered it and said it was for me this time, and I should have known, should have guessed, that the Fates, in the person of people toward whom I had responsibilities, would intervene smack dab in the middle of this opportune time and rob me of all my little pleasures. The caller was my father. He sounded displeased. He said he had been looking all over the place trying to find me. Seeing as how I was in Little Rock, he said, why didn’t I visit with my relatives sometimes? How had he located me? He had phoned Dall at the police station, and Dall had told him. Now he didn’t want to seem aggervatin, he said, but didn’t I think I ought to just drop in and say hello, especially on account of Grammaw Stone coming all the way down from Parthenon just to see me? Grammaw? I said. Yeah, he said. She’s here right now, came in on the afternoon bus, and it sure did embarrass me that I didn’t know where you was or even if you was still in town or not or what. Well gee, Daddy, I—Hadn’t you better get yourself right on over here? he said. And I said yeah, I guessed I had better.

  The expression on Margaret’s face, when I told her I had to go say hello to my grandmother and would probably be expected to spend the night over there, convinced me that her plans for the disposition of the evening had been similar to mine and that she was equ
ally disappointed. I kissed her and told her I would be back first chance I got tomorrow. Naps drove me home.

  My grandmother is a rather large and sturdy old Scotswoman, much bigger than my father, although now, in her late eighties, she is spent: her hair is a plump white leghorn hen roosting upon her head, and her massive Amazonian frame is so stooped that my father and I do not have to look up to her any more.

  When I walked in the front door (unlocked and usable now that she was here) her embrace was feeble and limp; all her strength was spared for her voice: “Well, lookie who’s here! If it’s not little Cliffie!” (Nowhere but in Parthenon was I ever called Cliffie.) I told her I was awfully glad to see her—and I was—and she said, “Well, your dad wrote and tole me you was home, so I figured I’d better just hop right on the bus and high-tail it right on down here to see you.”

  Daddy said, “And she come walkin through that door this afternoon with her suitcase in her hand and without even sayin so much as hello to me her own boy she yells, ‘Where’s Cliffie?’ and be dog if I had the slightest notion where you might be at. Boy, it sure put me down on you. I was mortified.”

  My sister Cindy (who in honor of the occasion had come with her husband Victor to this house which, I had lately learned, she rarely visited these days) said, “Shamey on you, Clifford Willow Stone. If you’re only going to come back to Arkansas ever four years or so, you ought to at least visit with your own folks while you’re here, instead of running around all over town or whatever.”

  Victor said, “Yeah.”

  Cindy said, “Here you’ve been home for a week now and haven’t been to see me but once, and you sure weren’t much company that time.”

  Victor said, “Yeah.”

  Grammaw Stone said, “Well, I’m tickled to see you anyhow. I tole your dad, I said to him, ‘Now I bet you that boy is just out rompin around some’rs and cuttin up with Dall Hawkins like he used to, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he don’t come home soon’s he gets a few burrs stuck on his tail!”

  They had all finished eating except for dessert, so we sat around and divided up an egg custard pie which Grammaw Stone had baked especially for me. Something in the house was missing, and finally I realized what it was. “Where’s Sybil?” I asked my father.

  He threw me a squint of mingled panic and caution, then he glanced furtively at his mother and saw that she was waiting for him to answer my question.

  “Aw, you mean that cleanin woman that was here the other day?” he said to me in a voice catchy and too loud. “Well, I sorta figgered we wouldn’t be needin her long as your grammaw’s here.” He turned to her. “Aint that right, Momma? No sense in having a cleanin woman come around long as you’re here, is they?”

  “I can out-sweep and out-dust the best of them,” Grammaw Stone proclaimed, brandishing an imaginary broom.

  Grammaw Stone did a rare thing that night: she deferred her rigidly habitual bedtime—nine o’clock—in order to sit up with us for a long time, but I was nervous with the vague feeling that I no longer knew how to converse freely with her, so the evening was awkward and long and difficult for me. Long moments passed in which none of us said anything. Eventually she said to me, “Seems like somehow you’re not the same folksy little chum as you used to be,” then she shuffled off to bed. I looked at my father, and he said, “What’s on your mind, boy?” and I said that nothing was. He said, “Sybil told me last time she saw you, you acted like you’d seen a ghost or somethin. What’s eatin on you, anyway?” Nothing, I repeated, nothing at all.

  I watched the ten o’clock news on television—Hy Norden’s program—and listened to him offer his own opinion of the Slater play: “Folks, there’s a good movie showing over at the Arts Center theater now, called THE RED SHOES, with a great British cast, and in color and all. But the trouble is, it doesn’t have any sound, and you have to sit and listen to a couple of amateur actors sitting on the stage jabbering some nonsense. Well, I guess there are worse ways to spend one’s time…”

  Before going to bed I phoned Dall at the police station and told him about the call Margaret had received from Slater, and what she had said. I said it was about time that one of us—Dall or I—had a talk with Slater and persuaded him to leave Margaret alone. Dall agreed and said he was going to call Slater and tell him that Margaret was spending the night at his—Dall’s—house. “Why?” I asked. Dall said: I’ll see you in the mornin and talk it over then.

  Sleep for me that night was fitful, almost as bad as it had been the last time I had tried to sleep there. Perhaps I cannot sleep in this house.

  Dall came in the morning. His green lynx eyes were puffy and vacant; apparently he too was having trouble with the sandman. But before he could tell me whatever he had come to tell me my grandmother spotted him. “Well, fan my brow!” she exclaimed. “If it’s not Sheriff Hawkins Junior hisself, I do declare!”

  “Howdy, Miz Stone,” he said, smiling and removing his white cop’s cap. “Ain’t seen you for a right smart spell. How you been gettin along?”

  “Tobble,” she said, “Just tobble, thank you. Still up and about. How’s ever little thing with you?”

  “Just fine, ma’am. I’m doin pretty good. How’s each and ever one up your way?”

  “Okay, I imagine,” she said, then she moved closer to him and straightened up enough to look him level in the eye. “Dall, when d’you aim to come home?” she asked. “When air you aimin to come home and run for sheriff up there?”

  “Aw, I don’t know, Miz Stone,” he hemmed. “I sorta like it where I am.”

  “They’s not been a sheriff up there worth two hoots in hades ever since your daddy got…ever since he passed on, and we all been kinda hopin you’d come back when you got growed up, and take his place.” She put her hand on his arm as she said this.

  “Well now, that sure is a nice thought, Miz Stone, it sure is, but like as not I wouldn’t have much of a chance of gettin elected since I aint lived there for nigh on to twenty year or so, and don’t hardly know any of the folks up there well enough to get em to vote for me even if I was of a mind to try it. But I’m much obliged to you, that sure is a real nice thought.”

  She squinted her eyes and cocked her head sideways and lowered her voice. “You had any word from Rowena lately?”

  “Why no,” he said, equally quietly. “It’s been some time since I got any mail from her.”

  “Well,” Grammaw Stone said, still squinting, and a trace of a wry smile on her thin mouth, “I’ll tell you, you sure wouldn’t be proud of the way she’s been carryin on and sashayin around up there with that bricklayer Sims and everbody else.”

  Although Dall protested that it wasn’t any of his business any more, my grandmother proceeded to fill him in on all the latest antics of his former wife. He inquired after his children: “Them little boys. Anybody watchin out for em?” and she explained that Rowena’s aunt was taking good care of them but that Dall could get them back any time he wanted them, to which Dall said that he was hoping to get them when his promotion came through in September and he could afford a housekeeper or somebody to take care of them.

  Then he excused himself, explaining that he had to talk to me about something. He asked her if she was planning to stay awhile, and when she said yes he said he hoped to see her again and would like to talk about “up home” with her.

  Dall and I went outside and sat on a front step. He asked, “Did you see this morning’s Gazette?” I told him I hadn’t had a chance to look at it yet. “Go get it,” he said, and I went back into the house and borrowed it from my grandmother and took it out to Dall. He opened it and leafed through it until he found the editorial page and then he showed it to me, pointing at something which ran down a narrow column in the lower right corner. “Read this,” he said, “and see if you can make any sense out of it.”

  COMMENDATORY VERSES

  To Mr. Slater, Occasioned by the Premier of His Travesty Called How Many Times Have You Seen THE RED SHOES?
/>   Doyle Curtis Hawkins

  “It took me a moment to recognize the name at the bottom, and then I said, “You didn’t write this thing!”

  “Haw, naw,” he said, abashed. “Slater tole me he was writin some poem for the papers but he couldn’t sign his own name to it cause it was dedicated to hisself, so he ast me if I would mind if he signed my name to it, cause he don’t have no other friends, and I said, What the hell, don’t matter to me one way or the other. So he did.”

  “Looks like something that came out of an IBM computer,” I remarked.

  “Yeah, but what does it mean to you?”

  “It means,” I said, “that Slater obviously is bitter about the reception his play got, and also perhaps he is a little bitter about Margaret.”

  That’s what I figgered,” Dall said. “But you don’t think maybe it’s a code or somethin? All them three-letter words, looks to me like he might be writing a code or a secret message.”

  I read the poem again carefully and told Dall that I didn’t think it contained any secret messages or veiled allusions. “Well, anyway,” he said, and then he told me what was up. He had called Slater last night and Slater was very upset because Margaret would not appear in any further performances of his play. Dall told him that Margaret was going to stay at Dall’s house and that Dall would appreciate it if Slater would leave her alone. “You’re a married man, after all,” Dall said to him. Slater replied that such matters were no concern of Dall’s, and that at any rate Slater was no longer very fond of Margaret. Then Slater had said, “You’re on night duty at headquarters, and she’s over there at your house by herself? Do you think that’s wise, leaving her untended like that?” But Dall had said: Aw, I aint worried she’ll try to run off or anything. Now why don’t you just forget about her, okay?

  Then from his shirt pocket Dall took out a ragged-edged patch of cloth, a six-inch-square fragment of some kind of light woolen worsted material in a pale gray-blue herringbone weave; he handed it to me. “When I got home from work last night I found my dog sittin out in the back yard with that piece of somebody’s pants in his teeth. You remember that there dog Bowzer of mine, the one me and you had a little trouble with the other evenin, well, he was just settin there, kind of grinnin, with that piece of somebody’s pants between his jaws. It sort of looks like fine quality material, don’t it? I don’t reckon Bowzer ran out and tore it off of some pore nigger walkin down the street.”