The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  The next several months that I spent in Stick Around were among the most idyllic of my life, despite, or because of, the total contrast to Pittsburgh, where I had at least been gainfully employed and faced with the unremitting difficulties of learning the language and coming to grips with my deracination and festering homesickness, not to mention vastly diverted by that ardent sport with young Kenneth Elmore, the memory of which was going to have to suffice me for a while, because I had given Ingraham my solemn oath to refrain from seducing Daniel I. Stoving-Whittacker, the son of my host and hostess. Danny Boy, as they called him, had just reached his tenth birthday, and while he was precocious in ways that would surprise me (my solemn oath did not prevent me from spying upon him in various stages of nudity and observing his semierections), he would not be ready for his first sexual encounter until such time as I had quitted for good the room where I slept and wrote Georgie Boy, the room that had been the bedroom of Danny’s grandfather (I hesitate to complicate matters by revealing that he was also Danny’s great-grandfather as well as his father), the late poet Daniel Lyam Montross, the same complex, inscrutable figure—half hillbilly, half mystic—whose tangled life and small body of work would soon attract to Stick Around in search of answers the critic Lawrence Brace, who incidentally was the lover of my good friend Sharon Ingledew…But I am plunging ahead of my story, as I have already done frequently and inexcusably—or with the excuse that there are so many warps for my woof to cross that my shuttle jumps ahead of me.

  Too many people in a story diminish the reader’s trust in any one of them, as Ingraham tried to teach us in that class in Pittsburgh. Thus, I must give Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker a slighting scrutiny less than equal to their actual substance to me. But knowing them, as I came to do, I think they would like it this way; they were very private people, utterly devoted to each other and to their son, keeping to themselves and to the world of nature that surrounded them and loved them, cultivating their own little gardens in the best Voltairean sense, knowing home and staying at it. I will offer no details of their sex life, although, sleeping as I did in the next room for many months, I was privy to it in all its variety, frequency, and music. I will not even essay to describe them, beyond pointing out that both were beautiful and she was perhaps three or four years older than he. I am not even going to describe their son, beyond saying he was (and is) the loveliest male I’ve ever seen.

  Surely Day and Diana were not totally comfortable suddenly having a stranger as their interminable houseguest; surely their rich, cultivated sense of privacy was taxed, if not abused; surely they had some discussions between themselves about the best way to get rid of me. But they never once expressed any displeasure toward me, nor committed any lapse of complete hospitality. What could I offer them in return? Money was a subject never discussed; I had none and would soon have to think of some way to meet my minimal obligations. But the third day I was there, Anangka (or Whoever) came up with a way I could make a token gesture of repaying their hospitality with what little talent I possessed.

  The murmuring engrams of that afternoon remain audible in my mind even from this distance of eleven years. Day and Diana happened to remark, over lunch, upon the dearth of morels encountered that season. Themselves good amateur mycologists who could easily tell an edible bolete from a deadly amanita, they lamented that their favorite annual spot for picking the Morchella esculenta, a once-burned-over stand of woods up the hill, had apparently not produced any of the succulent fungi this springtime and that now it was too late for them. Yes, I said, throwing in my tiny two pennies’ worth of expertise, the season for morels lasts scarcely two or three weeks. They looked at me. “Do they have morels in Svanetia?” Diana asked. Apparently their friend Ingraham had entirely neglected to tell them that I was, by training and profession, a mushroomologist of no small merit, and I was not about to boast of my credentials. But I offered to find them some morels. It was relatively easy. Day and Diana had been correct in assuming that the most favorable habitat for morels is a burned-over substratum of woodland (because the fire tends to kill competing myceliae), but I knew that there were other conditions of the substrata (type and density of leaf rot, moisture, pitch of slope, etc., etc.) conducive to footholds for Morchellae, and I conducted Day and Diana, with inquisitive, sponge-brained woods-creature Danny in tow (even then he already matched Kenny’s eagerness to learn Svanetian, at least for tqubul, “the mushroom”), on a tour of their upper acres, where, in what was once an apple orchard, long abandoned and overgrown and carpeted with a dense leaf fall from third-growth timber, we began a search that was soon fruitful, despite the pessimism in their not having brought any containers to hold the almost full peck of the spongy delicacies I found.

  “But how did you find them?” Day wanted to know. “I just searched this spot yesterday, carefully.”

  “Both ways?” I asked, trying not to sound at all smug. “The best way to find something, morels or other, is to re-search the same spot from an entirely different direction.”

  And thus they had from me, not simply enough morels to grace our table for the next week or so, but also a handy tip that will do for life’s quests as well as for mushroom hunting. I could not resist further pointing out, to my rapt audience, that morels are of the class Ascomycete, not the Basidiomycete class, to which most other mushrooms belong, and that I subscribe to that theory of mycology which holds that Basidiomycetes evolved from the Ascomycetes; thus our porous morel was a primitive creature who had not learned how to cap or striate its spore sacs, or to manufacture protective poison, or to diminish its delectable taste. In other words, like certain people it was still innocent, naive, vulnerable, and exquisite.

  On the way home, and often in answer to Danny’s eager discoveries-and-questions, we paused to talk about many other mushrooms, and thus by the time we reached the house I had to confess, in response to Day’s “How do you know all this stuff?” that I was not simply an amateur mycologist. “But Ingraham told us you were just another novelist,” Day said, and the way he put it was not without some disparagement, as if the world were full of novelists…with their feet sticking out the windows, to use a charming Bodarks expression of overcrowding.

  They understood, my hosts, why I preferred to spend so much time alone in my room: I was indeed attempting to write a novel. My dormer window faced the dirt road (on which there was scarcely any traffic) and a splendid vista of Ingledew Mountain that couldn’t rival but could impersonate to the desperately homelorn the bulk of Mount Layla (2,300 feet versus 13,000 feet). The walls of the room, all four white plaster walls, plus the extra surfaces within the dormered gable, had been covered thirty years before with the penciled script of the poet, as a kind of open journal, a mural of erect tablets, containing his soliloquies (for I understood from his daughter, Diana, that except for a space of a week when she at the age of three lived there with him, he was entirely alone, virtually a hermit): MONTROSS, HIS BECOMINGS; MONTROSS, HIS LEAVINGS; MONTROSS, HIS NAMINGS; MONTROSS, HIS HUMMINGS; MONTROSS, HIS BLESSINGS; MONTROSS, HIS DAMNINGS; etc. Only two of these latter formed engrams in my mind. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the novel, I would have transcribed many of Montross’s words into my own journal, but I didn’t, and all I could recall were Damnings Numbers Two and Six: Wretched are they who work for wages; for the one is never equal to the other; and Wretched are they who think themselves only male or only female, for the one is not equal to the other. I had cause to remember the first because it would be a while before I could find any wages to earn, and the second because it helped open up one of Bolshakov’s matryoshka dolls that had been resisting my probes, and it prepared me for that gender switch, or gender disguise, that eventually made me famous to millions.

  It was almost as if Montross’s ghost were in that room with me. Not literally: If his ghost did indeed exist, and did indeed “haunt” his former house, he was careful never to let himself be manifest to its inhabitants, even though, on occasion, I chal
lenged him, talking to those walls, flirting with them, even teasing them. I have had experience, as I showed in Chapter Five, with summoning a lanchal back from its limbo and getting it (he or she) to prove its existence by some slight sign: action, utterance, or appearance. But nothing I tried on Dan would raise so much as a chirp or vapor out of him. I knew he was there but was keeping himself silent and invisible…Or, no, he was waiting patiently for me to understand, as I finally did, the important truth that his essential spiritual manifestation was in the Word: Words themselves are all the ghosts we need. And there were plenty of these in that room…including those that, day by day, I amassed for Georgie Boy.

  II

  One of the questions most commonly asked of me by reporters, especially those interviewing me for the more literate and literary media, is, “What books did you read those years at Stick Around?” Usually I reply, after first correcting the tenure (it wasn’t years but months), that one of the several books I read was One Hundred Years of Solitude. Diana owned a copy, along with a number of American novels by Updike, Barth, Cheever, Toni Morrison, Lee Smith, and of course, Ingraham. I was never without something to read, and Diana also had, in addition to Lolita and Pale Fire, the other fourteen novels by that Russo-American master whose life, or life style, I have been accused of emulating, and in all candor I did read most of these in Stick Around; but the one novel that remains most strongly encoded in my engrams is the masterpiece not of Nabokov but of García Márquez. Newsweek’s interviewer asked me, bluntly, “Did Stick Around remind you of Macondo?” and I told her I’ve never been to Macondo. But I was being coy. Yes, I suppose one could enumerate countless similarities between the Colombian ghost town and its American counterpart, and one should be careful to mention the essential difference: that Macondo disappeared into “a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble,” while Stick Around yet manages to survive, and always shall, as if heeding the pathetic injunction of its own name. The total population, when I was there, was not more than two dozen, and this was all outside the “town limits,” whatever those limits were. The village itself was not populated, although my friend Sharon would eventually move into the old post office/general store/house that had once belonged to her grandmother, and shortly thereafter her erstwhile lover, Lawrence Brace, would come to occupy (and nearly destroy) the old hotel for less than a year. I was told that early in this century there were over five hundred people in Stick Around.

  The only truly permanent resident (and I trust I’m using permanent advisedly) was Sharon’s grandmother, an extraordinary woman, then approaching eighty years of age, although ageless surely, whom I shall have to call, out of deference to Ingraham, “Lara Burns.” If Stick Around has the equivalent of Macondo’s Pilar Ternera, it is she, but again with essential differences: Lara was never a prostitute, despite rumors to that effect, and Lara will probably outlive Pilar, who outlived the most longevous old ladies of my Caucasus, where it is not uncommon to find a Svanetian dowager of 120 years. Lara was still youthful when I knew her, or at least I, fifty-odd years her junior, couldn’t keep up with her in mental or physical activity.

  Ingraham had pointed out to me her house (actually a two-pen log cabin), but I did not even trouble myself to wonder, then, why he would not stop to say howdy to her. I first became really aware of her when I told Danny one of my very favorite Svan tales of lanchali and he commented, “Gran Dahl already told me that one.” I thought he said “Grand Doll,” and my confusion was to continue through his several repetitions of it: “Grand Doll loves to fish,” “You should see some of Grand Doll’s cats,” and “No, but I bet Grand Doll can.”

  Finally I asked Diana who was this Grand Doll, and she explained: the widow of “Everett Dahl” (as Ingraham has shaded him), Lara Burns Dahl, the town’s last postmistress and, now, the town’s oldest native-born resident. And then Diana repeated Ingraham’s words almost exactly: “She can tell you enough stories to keep you writing for years.” How could I meet her? Diana gave me a look as if it had been a silly question, then said, “Just go up and bang on her door, if she’s not already outside, as she usually is.”

  In Original Flavor, my most recent novel, I did indeed incorporate several of the stories I first heard from Lara Burns, and I used a number of others in my one venture into so-called “nonfiction,” Dawn of the Osage, which sold well for such a work, although it was not translated into very many foreign languages. During my months in Stick Around, I probably spent more time in her company than with anyone else, not excluding Diana and Day and Danny. She was the only person I’ve ever given permission to address me familiarly from the beginning: When she asked me to call her simply Lara, I said she could call me simply Kat, and she said, “Sure thing, but I’ve got a plenty of those already,” and indicated her yard, where a variety of felines were lolling and sporting, and declared with a wink, “A cat arena.” Whenever I sat with her, one of her cats would jump into my lap, and at first she’d try to shoo it away, but I protested that I was very fond of cats, and she said, “They know it, too.”

  Of all the many things that Lara and I had in common, this is the most noteworthy: She, too, in her early twenties, spent three years in a psychiatric hospital, specifically the state asylum for the insane. Unlike me, she was not confined for political motives, and I will not pretend that our incarcerations were identical, beyond the fact that neither of us was certifiably mad: She was diagnosed as having “aphasic catalepsy” (whereas in truth she was simply so angry at those who were trying to steal her baby that she would not speak to anyone), and I was diagnosed by Bolshakov, as we have seen, as having “creeping schizophrenia,” the Serbsky’s convenient catch-all category for nonconformists. But both Lara and I had spent three years exposed to genuinely sick minds, among the doctors as well as the patients, and we could spend many an hour swapping memories of the dazzling flights of the truly possessed. More, even, than our repertoire of ghost stories, wherein we were constantly delighted to discover the kinship of the Bodarkian spook and the Svanetian lanchal, these tales of bughouse behavior cemented a bond between us. There are, come to think of it, many affinities between the lanchal and the lunatic: both have left this sorry world behind. Neither Lara nor I entertained Danny with tales of loonies, but we practically competed with each other in telling him ghost stories. It is a wonder we didn’t give him bad dreams, but if we did, he kept them to himself. The highest accolade I ever earned as a storyteller, more meaningful to me really than all the praise the reviewers have heaped upon my work this past decade, was when Danny told me that I could tell better stories than Grand Doll could…and he meant not that the content of the stories was any better (or even any different, considering the enormous resemblances between Bodarkadia and Svanetia) but that my way of telling was perhaps more deft than hers.

  We swapped, Lara and I, not only our full and frightening repertoire of specter yarns, but also the similarities (and the essential differences) between Svanetian and Bodarkadian customs and superstitions, e.g., there is a Svanetian equivalent of the Bodarkadian shivaree for newlyweds, in which much noise is made and the bridegroom has to “ransom” himself by furnishing the revelers with much food and drink. There are also in Svanetia many little habits designed to help someone who has lost something find it, such as Lara’s superstition of bending down the stalk of a mullein plant. I recall the evening, after a very warm day in late May, when Lara and I were sitting in her breezeway (dogtrot was the local name for such, but only cats trotted—or minced—in hers), and we saw the season’s first firefly hovering over A Cat Arena, the first firefly I had seen since summers agone in my homeland. Soon there were so many of them that I was transported back to the verandahs of Lisedi and lost, for a long moment, in the legendary Svanetia of my girlhood.

  “I’m sorry,” Lara interrupted my reverie. “For a while there you got to talking in your own language, and I couldn’t follow you. Is that how they say ‘lightning bug’ where you come from?”

  Yes, and t
here was something else, how in Svanetia we worship trees (as I’ve made a motif in Lamshged; or, The Shady Side of the Mountain): Trees, no less than people, are thought to possess souls and to survive after death. Trees feel and suffer and communicate with one another. Lara herself could understand all this, not because the Bodarkadians had ever worshiped trees or even respected them, but because she herself knew that trees have souls if not minds and are capable, in their own way, of speaking, even singing. One night, when the breeze died down and everything was still, except the slow drift and twinkle of the fireflies, she said, “Listen. Can you hear that?” And I strained my ears, which, long-removed from the cacophonies of Pittsburgh, had regained their discrimination, and indeed I thought I heard a sound, almost as of a distant wordless hymn or chant. Trees, Lara said.

  “Or maybe,” I offered, “the spirits of old trees long gone.” And then I asked her a question that strikes me in retrospect as pretty stupid. “Did you ever know Daniel Lyam Montross?”

  “Of course,” she said, but she said nothing more, then, by way of elaboration.

  III

  Etymologically, Bodark derives from the French bois d’arc, “archer’s wood” or “wood for bows,” the name given to that common tree, Maclura pomifera, used so exclusively by my Osage Indians for their bows that it became known as Osage Orange (the fruit resembles an oversized orange, but greenish). Other bynames for the tree are mock orange, ironwood, yellowwood, hedge, and bowwood, and other place-name derivatives around this vicinity are the lake, creek, and wildlife refuge named Bois d’Arc; the village Bozark, or Bozarth; the town Bodark; and this whole range of mountains. Lovers of fated links, or “happenchances,” as Stickarounders call them, happy serendipities, will appreciate this connection between the basic root, arc or ark, as “a place of shelter or refuge,” and my Svan, which means, yes, “a place of shelter or refuge.” The latter was deliberate, given anciently to that inaccessible region where people could cut themselves off from the rest of the world (but not, alas, from each other), while the former is just accidental, a true happenchance. Since I thought I could never go home again, it was good for me to discover that I was in a place of refuge in America.