The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  I carried two of the boxes, and Margaret carried the other, and we took them to Dall’s house. She thanked me and kissed me and then she asked, “How are you going to spend this next day? Are you going to lie on your bed and stare at the ceiling and meditate? Or are you going to go out and walk through these streets in search of some grace?”

  “Nothing so idealistic as that,” I said. “I have to be practical. I’m going to look for a job.”

  Chapter forty-two

  Again dusk is falling, the fiery day-star has slumped into those pine forests west of town as though that cacodemon Slater, lurking still at large somewhere out there in those woods, is sucking the sun down out of the sky and casting a pall of twilight over the town and over this cemetery in which I am sitting. What am I doing here in this cemetery? Well, I am not deceased yet, of course, but mainly this seems to be a convenient place to sit and sip from my half-pint bottle in semi-seclusion. I have bought this bottle because I am tired and a little sad, and that seems reason enough. I am not going to get drunk, I am simply trying to relax. Mt. Holly is not any mountain, hardly even a knoll, and it has been swallowed up completely by the city: Broadway traffic raises hell a stone’s throw away, houses are aligned along Eleventh and Twelfth streets, the new dormitories of the Negro Philander Smith College are visible across Arch Street, but if anybody is watching me I don’t know it. In an open little bell house I am sitting, an old gingerbread Gothic relic of white wood and a cypress-shingled roof; the view of the cemetery is good from here: all around me the swarthy granite pillars, the white marble crosses, the quaint cenotaphs, the proud mausoleums jut up out of the ground in a cluttered, eclectic congregation of memoria. Here reposeth the remains of ten state governors, three United States senators, five Confederate generals, twenty mayors of Little Rock, and one Pulitzer Prize poet, among others, but this impressive assortment of engraved names is not particularly interesting to me at this moment. I did not stop here to be among the famous native dead, but because, as I say, this is a nice cool place to sit down and rest my sore feet and take a nip or two from this half-pint bottle. I didn’t find a job.

  Naps loaned me a suit, a fine blue tropical worsted which really made me look like some suave executive, and he drove me down to the Rock, where, luckily, I recovered my elevator shoes. And that’s not all he did. He offered to give me a job if nobody else would. He said that if I had any talent for selling books, or for keeping an eye on the stock market, he could guarantee me a minimum of seven thousand dollars per annum. That was very nice of him. I am thinking about it. I am sitting here in this cemetery resting and thinking. But I know next to nothing about the stock market, and I’m afraid that my efforts at book setting, especially religious-book selling, would only disappoint his confidence in his friend. Still I am thinking about it. It’s good, it’s comforting, to have that dernier ressort, that last card up my sleeve.

  This morning I went out to Little Rock University and had a talk with a fellow in the History Department. Too late, he said. Should’ve contacted them earlier, three or four months earlier, when they were looking for a man to handle American History. Still, if I would send them my vitae, my résumé, perhaps next year…I hate those words, vitae, résumé, and I hope I never have to have one. Later this morning I went to the School Board office and sat for an hour, to be ultimately told that without Education courses my background was inadequate. Then I went to the Arkansas History Commission and listened to a sad story about how low their budget is. Then I went to the Arkansas Gazette offices and uncomfortably laid bare my plight to a sympathetic editor who told me I was too old to begin at the bottom as a sixty-dollar-a-week office flunky. Finally, after filling out futile application forms at an insurance company, an advertising agency, and the Parks & Recreation Department (which controls the museums), I wound up in a lowly line at the State Employment Office, where they gave me a typing test and a mechanical aptitude test, and then a personnel officer, a kid of twenty or so who was impressed with my background and boasted that an uncle of his had also been to Yale, gave me the final word: “Gee, Mr. Stone, I just don’t know what we could do with somebody like you.”

  Now I am in this cemetery. My feet ache, my head aches, my pride is wounded, I think I have made an ass of myself, and, oddly enough, I even feel a strange resentment toward Margaret, as if she suckered me into this ridiculous quest, as if the last trick she could play on me would be to send me out on such a silly job-hunt and make me the laughingstock of every sadistic personnel director in town. This bourbon helps, but also it reminds me of the last time I was required to resort to it, in shock against that girl, and I decide: Really, I am no less lost than before. No more near discovering myself. This cemetery helps; although it is surrounded by the city, it has a certain placeless tranquillity, a universality that removes me for the moment from any definite time or space. Here in this grave of stone shafts I will dispassionately evaluate the route of my tomorrows.

  In the taupe light of this gloaming the clustered flowers of tall black locust trees are a vault of pale stars gently swaying. Out of one of these trees come two sparrows, and I am so motionless that they alight on the ground near my feet and begin procreative maneuvers: face to face they smite each other with their wings, they rake their wings together, they thrust their beaks into each other’s mouths, they join their bottoms together in a frantic dance. In the dim light they merge into one fluffy feathered mass fluttering constantly in a frank fervent twitter which is a graphic symbolic orgasm, a figurative fuck. They are so near me I can swing out my foot and kick them…if I wanted to. A long time they keep at it, and then, sated, they return to the black locust tree. I take another pull at my bottle. Sex is everywhere, I muse. They have reminded me of one of the reasons why I came to Arkansas, a reason not any more fulfilled than any of my other reasons: I was going to relieve the hunger in my groin, I was going to have myself a little commerce or two. Maybe I could become a rapist. Do I have what it takes? In dark alleys and back yards and upstairs hallways I will exact final retribution from this city.

  Time passes. Another swig at the half-pint: I am not going to get drunk, I am simply trying to relax. Maybe there is some answer. I might, if I could borrow the capital, open a good first rate antique shop somewhere around town and build it into a thriving business. Or I might persuade a group of affluent Arkansas citizens to establish a Museum for the Preservation of Southern Antiquities and get myself appointed curator. Or I might apply to some national philanthropic foundation for a research grant large enough to support me and Margaret while I finish my VAP book, and once my reputation is established the world will beat a path to my door. Little Rock is as good a place as any, I suppose, for writing a book, or books, on the Vanished American Past. Or maybe I could run up to Petit Jean Mountain and have a chat with Winthrop Rockefeller and convince him that he could find some good use for a man of my…of my what?

  Now in the dull dusk I perceive a dog approaching, trotting with a bouncing wolflike lope, his head low and his tail flailing the air behind him. It occurs to me that he is coming up through the graveyard by the same path I had followed, and that perhaps he is on my scent. Probably he wants to use my knee as a surrogate bitch, and I must be prepared to fend him off. Laying my bottle aside, I pick up a rock and cock my arm. Nearer he comes with that jaunty lope, and then he stops and sees me, woofs once, and bounds toward me. I fling the rock; it whizzes cleanly between his tall ears and grazes his tail; a bad aim: I stand and he rises and clutches me, but he does not begin to misuse my knee. He woofs and thrashes his tail and holds me in a tight but civilized embrace. Old Bowzer, I cry aloud. Good old Bowzer. Sit down, fellow, and tell me what you’ve been up to.

  We sit on the grass side by side and I nuzzle and coddle him, as of old. Lost all these days, he rejoices beneath my friendly familiar hand. Obviously Slater didn’t harm him after all; probably he just wandered away from home because his master would not return. How far is Dall’s house from here? Nine or
ten blocks, at least. A long way to wander. He looks up at me with an adoring expression on his face. We sit content. I offer him a slug of my bourbon, but he declines, shaking his head. I drink his drink for Him.

  I bring him up to date, telling him what has been happening, how his master was hospitalized but is all right now and might come home again in another week or so, and how his master’s house is now occupied by Margaret, and so on and so forth. Bowzer is a good listener, better than a lot of bartenders.

  “So now,” I tell him, “I have paused here at Mt. Holly, as evening cometh, to find myself, for my time runneth out.”

  “I see,” he says understandingly. “You have only another hour or two to make up your mind, but you can’t make up your mind until you know who you are, is that it?”

  “Precisely,” I reply. “And that is a large order, a big question.”

  “Actually, we are not anything much at all,” he observes philosophically, “that is, what we were is more important than what we are, because all of the present is so firmly anchored in the past.”

  “Indeed,” I agree. “So then the question is: Who was I?

  “You were an Ozark backwoods boy in the summertime…” he coaches.

  “Yes. Yes I was, in fact. I’ll admit that. Not so Ozarky, nor so back-woodsy as your master, though, even if for a long time I could talk just as hillbilly as Dall or anybody else and I wore a straw hat and fished with a bent pin and all like that. And my girl friend was a feisty barefoot gal in a floursack dress and her name was Bertha Jo and she was as plain as a black-eyed Susan. Lord, how long ago that was! I can’t even think of it as me, I mean I—”

  “It was you,” he avers. “But also you were a town boy who worked on weekends as a caddy at the golf course and you ran around with a little colored boy named Naps and you were a sort of white nigger.”

  “Right. And I remember once when Bob Hope came to Little Rock, and he played out at the golf course, and although I didn’t get to caddy for him, I cornered him before he left and asked for his autograph and he took out his pen and poised it but I didn’t have anything for him to write it on, so I offered him the back of my shirt collar—I’ve still got that shirt collar somewhere, and it says “To Nub Stone with the warmest best wishes of Bob Hope”—and after he wrote it for me he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ and I answered, ‘Bob Hope.’ But I didn’t, did I?”

  “No, you didn’t,” Bowzer says. “You missed it by a mile. One reason was that you became a pugilist and took up running around with my master.”

  “Yes. Maybe one or the other, the pugilism or Dall, deadened my wit. But by then I didn’t want to be Bob Hope anyway. I wanted to be Sandy Saddler, who was the toughest of them all, who won the crown from Willie Pep at Yankee Stadium in a fight so rough that both of them got suspended for violating the rules. That was me. I wanted to violate rules. And another feather weight I admired, more than Saddler eventually, was Davey Moore, and something he said once upon a time still echoes in my sad old head: ‘Call me a come-in fighter. Call me a counter-puncher. Call me anything you want. You really want to know what I am? I’m a street fighter, man, the best you ever saw.’”

  “And that, too, was you,” says Bowzer, “but not any more!”

  “Not any more,” I admit. “Although once there was a time when I could lick any guy on the street. Personally, just between me and you, I can still lick any guy on the street. But I don’t. Why?”

  “Because you know it doesn’t accomplish anything,” he rationalizes. “You had to go off to Yale and learn something useful. So you did.”

  “I did, and then I became a scholar, a Boston pedant, and I didn’t like that at all, so now I have come back to Little Rock because maybe I would like to be a street fighter again.”

  “You can’t earn a living that way,” he counsels.

  “You take me too literally,” I protest. ‘What I mean is that I want to get involved in something, I want to fight again, if only to fight against the evils and corruptions of this world.”

  “Have you thought of evangelism?” he jests. “There’s always room for another Billy Graham.”

  “The evils and corruptions to which I refer are not so much moral as social. I refer to the sinister forces which have corrupted our society and caused the lovely American Past to Vanish.”

  “Perhaps” he insinuatingly suggests, “you only want to recreate that lost past so that you can live in it.”

  “Smart dog.”

  “Probably what you need to do,” he tells me, “is to build that wilderness log castle you keep dreaming about, and live that rustic life. Walden Three.”

  “You’re a very keen-witted animal,” I compliment him. “If I build my log castle, will you come and live with me and be my dog?”

  “Thanks” he says, “but I’m already committed to Dall. Sorry.”

  “Well, I wonder if Margaret would come live with me in my log castle.”

  “If you build it in Little Rock, she might,” he says. “But who ever heard of a log castle in Little Rock?”

  “Alas. You know, I wonder, if she were a dog, would you consider her a fine bitch? I mean, seriously, would you be attracted to her, caninely speaking?”

  “Unquestionably” he says.

  “What kind of dog would she be? That is, what breed?”

  “An Irish water spaniel, man, the best you ever saw.”

  “Ah. And I—?”

  “A Boston terrier,” he says, with a ttnge of disparagement in his voice.

  “So,” I sigh resignedly and dispatch the remainder of the half pint. “Do you see the quandary I’m in? Do you see what an imbroglio I’ve got myself into?”

  “It shouldn’t happen to a dog,” he consoles me.

  Dark now has set in, the black-locust blossoms are no longer visible, the cars on Broadway are wearing their headlights. I could sit here all night in this cemetery and be no better off. If these souls laid to rest here could rise up by the light of the moon and take a look at this new city and tell me how it seems to them in contrast to the old, that might help. But I don’t believe in ghosts, and Bowzer is restless, he is pacing back and forth. I will take him home.

  Now through, the night streets we go toward Dall’s home, where she is waiting for my answer. Bowzer lopes jauntily, eagerly at my side, matching my swift stride; he knows we are going home. Now down little worlds of old sidewalks we go, across a vast and endless firmament of concrete, of cracks and humps familiar as home to any wagoning child, of dips and swells in little worlds a universe in themselves, of, under the street lamps, the circular signs stamped into the cement: grady garms, old Mr. Grady Garms the god who has created this cosmos of sidewalks and curbs and steps, this small world changing subtly from block to block, past house and house, past hedges all of a different kind, clipped privet and unclipped privet, barberries and cotoneasters snuggled into by children and cats in search of a small natural house or hiding place, and the profuse honeysuckle and forsythia, and the buckthorn and quince, which now in the evening dapple these cement promenades with wild shadows; and past the walls, low smooth brick walls, ashlar walls and flat stone walls which children walk atop to take the high road above the sidewalk; and all those lawns, and those ladies, and those lavender shadows. I would like to linger longer and look for those redeeming microcosms that Margaret spoke of, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. Besides, I have walked down these streets a thousand times before. I don’t think I will again.

  Part three

  Bridge Burning

  Julia and I did lately sit

  Playing far apart, at Cherry-Pit:

  She threw; I cast; and having thrown,

  She got the Pit, and I the Stone.

  —Robert Herri

  Chapter forty-three

  “Your grandmother called,” Margaret said. “She thought you might be here. She said she wanted to tell you that the Missouri Pacific
people called and said they’ve found your suitcase.”

  Ah. “Timely,” I mumbled, “timely.”

  “What? Oh. Then you mean you are—?”

  “Yes.” I said. “Yes I am.”

  “Then I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” she said ruefully. “I shouldn’t have told you they found it.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “That’s the causa finatis, but I’d already made up my mind.”

  She took both my hands in both of hers and said, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” I stoicized with a stiff upper lip, “that’s the way the ball bounces, or the Stone rolls.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” she said.

  “No,” I responded. “I am sorry for you.”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “It’s you, in the long run, who will be unhappy.”

  “You think so?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “You’ll have to keep going out into the world, moving from place to place, trying to find yourself, until finally you’ll come back here again and again. As the saying goes, ‘a man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.’”