The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  It was late afternoon. The sun would be down in another hour. Would you have to spend the night in the woods? The prospect almost elated you. More than once, you had spent the night in the woods above Lisedi, among the bear and roe deer and gazelles of Svanetia.

  But I decided I’d given you and poor I. enough exposure to the rough forest, and I arranged for the logging trail you were on to drop down from the mountain and emerge, abruptly, beside a small white church and cemetery. In shape and size, if not in whiteness, the church reminded you strongly of little Saint George’s in Lisedi. “Hey!” I. exclaimed in recognition and exultation. “That’s the Stick Around church-house!” The sweat was running down his face, almost as if he’d been carrying you through the forest and down the mountainside. “I’d like to show you the cemetery, but we’re running late,” he said.

  And then you were on a dirt road smooth enough, level enough, for you to write, Late for what?

  “We’ve got a lot to do before dark.” he said.

  Then you were in a valley filled with green pastures and broad meadows and surrounded by thousand-foot deep-forested mountains whose tops were nearly lost in scarves of mist that could have been transplanted directly from Lisedi. Dear Kat, you almost felt what I wanted you to feel. “Yonder’s Leapin Rock,” I. pointed. “But you’ve never read my novels, have you?”

  Another mile down this valley, you reached the village proper, or what was left of it: a few buildings standing but abandoned, several buildings fallen or remaining only in traces. I. gave you a quick tour without getting out of the Blazer, driving in a circle over the terrain, through a couple of creekbeds—“Banty Creek, there,” he said, “and this is Swains Creek” (both real). Here’s where the gristmill was. And here’s the tomato-canning factory, what’s left of it.

  The only building in good repair was a two-story house that had a verandah, ornately inset with carved balusters, running the length of its porch and making the place look for all the world like one of the Svanetian houses of the Dadeshkelianis. If it had only had a tower beside it, it would have been perfect. “That used to be the hotel,” I. said. “But before it became a hotel, for many years a strange woman used to live there by herself. You’ll hear stories about her. She was once the mistress of a governor of the state—who, incidentally, built this house—and was one of the town’s settlers.” This hotel/house, you’d be surprised to discover years hence, would come into your possession, even if it never came into your occupation.

  “Now, this,” he said, pointing to another building, at a fork in the road, “used to be my favorite. It was the last post office of Stick Around, and also the house of a woman”—his voice caught, snagged on some memory, and he could not finish the sentence. He slowed just enough for you to get a good look at its long porch, which again reminded you of the verandahs of Lisedi. “Our friend Sharon is going to move into this house a couple of years from now,” he declared. “Of course, she’ll have to fix it up and get rid of the cockroaches.”

  How do you know? you wrote. Did she tell you that?

  He read the card, then brought the car to a full stop and turned to you and said, “Listen, Cathlin, we’re in Stick Around now. I can hear you, and you can speak. You don’t have to keep on writing these goddamn cards.”

  But you were not able to speak. He drove on, up the eastward prong from the abandoned post office. He drove past the first apparently occupied dwelling, a two-pen log cabin with an open breezeway between the pens. There were flowers planted, and the yard seemed to be kept, and there were chickens roaming free. Even the arrangement of the logs reminded you of Svanetian log cabins. “I’m not going to stop,” I. said, as if talking to himself, persuading himself not to stop. “That’s where the woman—the last postmistress of Stick Around—she lives there. She is, by the way, Sharon’s grandmother, and she can tell you enough stories to keep you writing for years.”

  Still, you could not speak, or write, in response to that. He drove on. In less than another mile, he came to a clearing with gardens, tilled fields, and a charming old house painted yellow, the only painted building in the environs, its eaves and porch trimmed with fancy jigsaw work in the fashion of Svanetia’s quelvoni lisoque, “crazy carpenters.” The house was obviously occupied: there was a thriving vegetable garden beside it, a pig pen, a goat pen, and free-ranging chickens everywhere. “I will stop here,” I. declared. “But I’ll just be a minute. I need to borrow a shovel.”

  You watched as he got out and approached the porch, calling out, “Hello, the house!” Two dogs ran to meet him but did not bark. He patted their heads. Soon the door opened and a boy came out. Still your leaping heart, Kat; he wasn’t old enough for you. He wasn’t yet eleven, and even when he got to be twelve, he was not going to be your boyfriend. So you could put that out of your mind.

  The boy was followed by his mother, a woman you thought could have been Sharon’s sister: the same blonde hair, only longer, the same blue eyes. But she was not Sharon’s sister. Soon enough you would find out who she was, but she was not related to Sharon. Interrupted in the act of preparing supper, she was wiping her hands on her apron. But at the sight of I. she suddenly screamed his name and practically leapt off the porch and into his arms. They did not kiss, but they hugged tightly a long time, the boy standing close and touching his mother’s back as she did so.

  You watched as they talked. Wasn’t I. going to bring her over to the Blazer and introduce her to you? Apparently not. Or not yet. Soon the yellow house’s door opened again and a man came out, the woman’s husband, the boy’s father. You guessed the couple were in their early thirties. The man shook I.’s hand vigorously and slapped him on the back, and I. chatted with him, and the couple both looked out at the Blazer, in your direction, at your eyes hidden by the dark glasses. Wasn’t I. going to introduce them? Apparently not. After a while, the man went out to a shed beside the house and returned with a shovel, which he handed to I., and I. talked for just a minute longer before returning to the Blazer. He threw the shovel into the back and got in.

  You wanted to write, What’s the shovel for? but he had asked you not to write, and you remembered, “That’s once. That’s twice.”

  “The man who built that house,” I. told you, “was a fabulous old character who came originally from Connecticut, and he lived here as a hermit. He wrote some far-out poetry. I met him once when I was very young, and again…after he died.”

  The fabulous old character’s spirit arranged for I. to easily find the logging trail that led straight up the mountainside to a grove of Juniperus virginiana, a glade on the bench of the mountain, where there was a cemetery-of-one, a single gravestone in the clearing. I. stopped the car, turned off the motor, and said, “Well, we’re here.”

  Although the motor was off, and although the decrepit radio in the Blazer had not been functional for years, I managed to get it to pick up, from some far-distant college town, a station called KUAF, which began playing the Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Minor by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

  You recognized it from the first urgent calls of the keys. You were then thoroughly torn between an elation of love for the music, an overwhelming expectancy of what the music was going to do to you, and an enormous fear: this was the music, you’d written in Cathlin’s obituary, for her funeral.

  “Get out,” I. said. He took the shovel out of the rear and walked with it to a spot in the clearing, not very close to the lone tombstone, where he began digging. Listening to the Tchaikovsky, you reluctantly got out of the Blazer and moved slowly in his direction. The music’s volume increased so that you could still hear it away from the car. You arrived at a place where you could make out the inscription on the tombstone:

  DANIEL LYAM MONTROSS

  June 17, 1880–May 26, 1953

  The last Montross of Dudleytown

  The only Montross of Stick Around

  “We dream our lives, and live our sleep’s extremes.”

  You had not even brough
t your ballpoint and cards with you. “Who was he?” you asked. The Tchaikovsky had reached the passage where the piano, finding itself lost in the wonderland of strange emotions, is guided by the strings onto the right path and discovers the first glimpse of heaven.

  I. continued digging. “He was the man I just mentioned, who built that house down yonder. I wrote a novel about him once, which you never got around to reading. That girl, the blonde, is his granddaughter. Her name is Diana Stoving. But she’s also his daughter, too. And their son is named after him. They call him Danny Boy.”

  Is it possible to carry two tunes in your head at once? At least it was, for you, this time, because there beside the Tchaikovsky but not in tune to it was this, from County Derry:

  But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,

  And I am dead, as all the flowers must die,

  Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying.

  And kneel and say an Ave where I lie.

  And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,

  And in the dark my soul will wake and see.

  For you’ll bend down and tell me that you love me,

  And we shall sleep in peace for all eternity.

  “What are you doing?” you asked. “Please tell me.”

  “I was just thinking of maybe transplanting my tomatoes here,” he declared. “But I guess it’s not the best spot for it. And my hole’s too deep, isn’t it? It’s nearly deep enough to bury somebody in.”

  The look he gave you with these words sent shivers up your spine, but you weren’t sure the shivers had not proceeded from the music: the Tchaikovsky had reached the passage where the soft strings alone, while the piano is silent, attempt to tell the piano how heaven really appears, before the piano can complete the job of describing a mortal response to it.

  You knew what was coming soon. The music was building up to it. You swayed. You closed your eyes and lost yourself in the music’s losing itself in paradise; you hugged yourself and stroked your arms and took deep breaths; the tingling of your spine was almost visible to me and the goose pimples on your skin actually were visible, and your expression revealed your longing and exultation and tender aches: The full orchestra and piano were having at it for all they were worth, and then the melodic line began to buck and jerk and thrum and heave in an ecstasy that seized your whole body, and you knew that if you did not grab I. for support you would fall on the ground and have your climax there.

  You grabbed his arm. It was not simply for support during your spasms. It was almost a gesture of pleading: Don’t do to me what I think you may think you are doing.

  You reached that unfamiliar summit standing up. During the last throes of it, as you and the music subsided, he gently lifted the extravagant hat off your head and threw it into his hole. Then he removed your wig and threw it in. And then your sunglasses.

  He addressed the hole. “Rest in peace, Cathlin.” Then he turned to you and stroked your own hair, brown as the forest floor that nurtured the mushrooms that were your singular overriding interest in this life. And I, powerful and mighty there beside my grave, arranged for the forest floor all around you to sprout with the most marvelous mushrooms you’d ever seen.

  He stopped stroking your short hair and lifted your chin. “Damned if I’m going to keep on calling you Ekaterina Vladimirovna, though,” he said. “So what can I call you?”

  “I have been called all kinds of things,” you said, and he heard you. Katerinka. Katerinochka. Trina. Katrusya. Katsyaryna. Kotya. Kitti. Katrusenko. Keesa. “In camp at Ishimbay, they called me Keesa, which is a cat’s name. In Leningrad, they called me Katrina. But in Svanetia, they called me Eka, or Kati. Kati is a good nickname in Georgia, in Hungary, in Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia, in Finland, everywhere. But I think”—you paused and thought, and cast a fond glance at my grave—“I think that in this country I would like for those I love most to call me Kat.”

  “Kat,” he said, and liked it. “Those who love you most will call you Kat.”

  And thus both of you circumvented the awkward direct professing of love.

  How had he seen through your disguise? Oh, long before, he had guessed, had become suspicious of the similarities between Cathlin’s obituary and Kat’s life, had realized that Bolshakov “belonged” not to Cathlin but to Kat. Despite the extravagance, exaggeration, and outrage of Cathlin’s face and costume, she could do nothing with Kat’s nose or Kat’s neck. They were clearly Kat’s perfect nose and Kat’s long, graceful neck. And then there was that exclamation, Ot! I. wasn’t as deaf as you thought, and here in Stick Around he wasn’t deaf at all.

  “But the clincher,” he said, “was when I asked Dr. MacLean this morning what hebephilia is. He told me: an abnormally passionate interest in pubescent people. In your case, boys of twelve. And now that I’ve told you how I saw through your disguise, it’s your turn to tell me: Why did you do it? Why did you have to go to such lengths to cover Kat?”

  “I only wanted to be your student, to study to be a writer, without your knowing it was me,” you told him, which was the truth. But only part of the truth. You tried to tell him also the rest of it: that you wanted to create Cathlin, that you needed to see if you could make a woman different from yourself who could write Geordie Lad as a necktie, not a penis. And you had also wanted to see if knowing him as Cathlin might have helped you overcome your hebephilia.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” he said. “Tonight, in the bedroom that was Dan Montross’s, we’re going to have to ride and tie again, but for the last time. After you’ve gone to bed, I’m going to stay up very late talking to Diana and to Day Whittacker, her husband. Then, after you give me the bed and I get a few hours’ sleep, I’m going to take off. I’m thinking of going back up to Rolla, Missouri, and visiting some friends, and then maybe hunting for a job teaching art history somewhere.”

  “What about me?” you said.

  “You’re going to stick around here for as long as you like,” he told you, and when you looked surprised, he added, as if to persuade you, “Bolshakov could never find you here. Day and Diana will be happy to have you for as long as you want to stay…and so long as you don’t molest Danny. You could finish Geordie Lad here, although my advice, my final advice to you, is to forget Cathlin and write Dzhordzha Boy. Or, if you do it in English, call it Georgia Boy. No, wait, Erskine Caldwell wrote a novel of that title. But hell, there’s no copyright on titles. What’s so funny? Why are you laughing?”

  “Forgive. I was just thinking, or remembering: Bolshakov was always accusing me of ‘embellishment.’ He had an obsession with ‘real life.’ Do you think he would ever believe what you, and Anangka, and…the spirit of Dan Montross have done with me?”

  I. said, “But now you’re going to do for yourself. I’m not going to write about you, or about this.” His hand swept the glade of the cedars, the tombstone, the magic place on the mountainside. “Let me correct myself. I said a moment ago that tonight’s the last time we’ll ride and tie. Yes, I may never see you again, but I hope…and I think possibly Dan Montross would also hope…that you’ll like Stick Around enough to maybe write some books someday about it, about him, or maybe even about the Indians who once lived here. I can’t anymore. These people won’t let me write about them. I’ve already used them in stories, and once I do that they demand the right to be left alone. But you…you could ride and tie my country with me, picking up where I left off and creating your own characters, as you created Cathlin. It’s your turn now. Stick around. Ride and tie.”

  Dusk was fallen. The long day was over. My bag of tricks was empty, but I had you here…almost. You needed time to think about it, but both I. and I were confident you’d stay, because, you see, you had absolutely nowhere else to go.

  Riding down to the yellow house in I.’s Blazer, going off to meet his friends, who would become your friends too, you informed him, “I love the little serendipities of life, but this coincidence I like best: in Svanetian, Lisedi, the
name of the town I came from, means ‘to remain, to stay more, to stick around.’”

  Part two

  LOUDER,

  engram!

  (from the Memoir, chapters 17–25 only)

  Before death takes me to her breast, I’ll show you the Indian shelters and their little burial mounds in this glen of the waterfall. People lived here once. I was an Indian once, and so were you; our people lived here. We might live here again.

  —Daniel Lyam Montross, A Dream of a Small but Unlost Town

  17

  I

  But he actually did leave, early the next afternoon, and I would not see him again for two years. His friends in Stick Around were disappointed that he’d blow in like that, deposit me like excess baggage or castoff ballast, and take off again, without even, I was soon to learn, troubling himself to say hello to some of those who had loved and missed him most. Ingraham, as I think I’ve shown conclusively in the previous chapter, was a man with many problems, some of them beyond hope. I did not wish to become another of his problems, and thus I might almost be forgiven for allowing myself to believe, eventually, that his function in the story of my life had been simply that of a temporary assistant to beloved Anangka, who’d had her gentle hands full supervising my destiny…although, as we shall see, it was not Anangka but a male arranger to whom Ingraham was in thrall.