The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  She will never have haunted Colvin, let alone have appeared to him. But, having waited a decent, seemly length of time after the funeral, she will begin regularly to “do something” about his nocturnal erections. She will recall that information he’d given her about incubus and succubus, and she will even recall (she can tell anything that she ever said or was ever said to her) her exact words in proposing what they’d originally tried to do; “I’ll be your concubine and succubate you?” And of course she will recall as if it were only a moment ago (in fact it was) the night on Brushy Mountain she caused the sleeping Colvin to impregnate her. So it will be easy for her to begin the practice that she will continue for the rest of his life: entering his dream and giving his erection enough attention to detonate and defuse it.

  Alas, it will be my mention of this which will lead to some ultimate ill-feeling between Colvin and myself, and to my departure from Stay More. Colvin will have been continuing, on a daily basis, to sit with me on his porch and relate the end, painful though it be, of the long story he will have been telling me. Almost by unspoken consent, I would cease being his house-guest as soon as his story will have ended. My typhoid fever will have been totally cleared up, I will have been fit as a fiddle, and there will have been no excuse, really, for me to stay more at Stay More except my love for the place and my desire to hear of what will have happened to him in the years after Tenny’s death.

  But there is so much of what you have been learning that Colvin could not possibly have known: all the things that happened to Tenny on Brushy Mountain and in the sanatorium, all her thoughts and feelings that have come to us under her own point of view in the future tense. If I didn’t get any of this from Colvin, and I’m not just making it up, where does it come from? I wish I could give some “valid” explanation, such as that Tenny’s spirit visited me as I lay on that cot which had been her bed. Or that she will have told me all of this during the “visitations” when she comes to me if I close my eyes right.

  But the truth will be that Tenny can not only tell, she can also tell.

  At whatever point Tenny will have taken over the telling, and the “telling,” she will not only have made herself immortal but also have made her story not something which happened, or is happening, but will be happening, as long as she is still “around.” And believe me—or you know it, don’t you?—she’s very much around. Remember I told you how I can close my eyes to make someone disappear and be replaced by someone else? Don’t be offended, but I will be replacing you with Tenny, all the time. I will see her now.

  One afternoon Colvin and I will be sitting on the porch, and Rowena will be quitting for the day. As Rowena will walk down the porch steps and out into the road, she’ll give her fine hips a jauntier swing than usual, and when she’ll be out of earshot, I’ll banter with Doc, “Did you ever git any of that?”

  Doc will chuckle, and will blurt, “Never had no need of it.”

  “Oh?” I will say, and before I can stop myself will ask, “Because Tenny takes care of you every night?”

  Doc’s mouth will fall open, and he will stare at me, and then his face will grow very red. I will not be able to “tell” if the red is embarrassment or anger. Maybe some of both. Then he will demand, “How’d you know that?”

  “It’s part of the story,” I will observe.

  “But goshdang ye, it aint no story that I ever tole ye!” he’ll declare. “Where’d you hear it?”

  “Did you ever tell it to anyone?” I will challenge him. “Even Latha?” He will shake his head. “Then how could I have heard it anywhere?”

  “Have you been sneaking into my diary?” he will demand.

  “You never told me you kept a diary,” I will say.

  “I don’t,” he will admit. “But where in blazes did you learn about what Tenny does at night…unless you’re just making a wild guess?”

  Well sir, we will have gotten ourselves into quite a flap or row over this matter, and, as such things will, it will escalate until we’re hurling epithets at each other which we will both regret the next day. Quite possibly I will have known that my time at Stay More will have come to an end and unconsciously I will have been picking a quarrel with him in order to make the parting easier. But as it will turn out, we will even argue over his bill. He will refuse to present me a bill, and will accept nothing. I will insist upon paying at least for the medical care if not for all the room and board or “hospitalization,” but he will act as if my money is tainted and won’t touch it.

  I will not even be able to recall my last words to him, as I will be putting on my hat and lifting up my knapsack. But I will think they were: “Don’t you see, Doc? She will still be telling all of it, and always will.”

  We will keep in touch, sporadically, over the years, with postcards. Doc will never have been much of a letter-writer. I will learn over the years how he will continue his obsession with the Great White Plague. Not from him will I learn the story of how, during the Second World War, one day in the heat of August, Colvin will discover some of his free-ranging chickens acting sick, having trouble breathing. Still being a veterinarian himself from way back, he will take cultures from the chicken’s throats and after incubating the plates for several days he will observe cultures of actinomycetes developing. He will excavate the soil in which the chickens will have been scratching, and will find that the organisms are resident in the soil, and he will continue working with these cultures until he feels he has discovered enough to send them off to other scientists who are working on the problem, one of whom, named Selman Waksman, will convert Colvin’s cultures into a powerful antibiotic called streptomycin, and will receive the credit for having discovered it. Colvin will not have been interested in any credit, anyway. He will simply have wanted, with all his heart, to wipe out the Great White Plague. And his streptomycin will have done it.

  Will it be time for you to leave, now? Yes, soon; I will have only two things essentially left to say: how Colvin himself will have gone to join his beloved Tenny in the Land of Telling, which you will possibly already have known. I will forget the year; perhaps it will have been as late as 1957. They will say, as they will never tire of saying wondrous things about Colvin U Swain, that he will have had an opportunity to have done something that he had not quite been permitted to do that day on those rounds in the St. Louis hospital so many, many years before: he will restore a dead man to life. You will wonder, anyone will wonder: if he will have been capable of it, why will he not have done it to Tenny thirty some years before? We will never know. We will know only that this man, who will be clinically dead, and will have been so for a great number of hours, will be resurrected by Colvin. We will not even bother with the man’s name. The man will have meant nothing personally to Colvin; just one more Stay Moron with a terminal disease. But Colvin will have always believed: The patient need not mean anything whatsoever personally in order to receive the physician’s most devoted attention.

  Anyway, the gods or Whoever will have been angry with Colvin for restoring life, because one day not long after, while he will have been walking fast to get out of a rainstorm, he will have been hit by a thunderbolt and reduced to a pile of ashes, just enough ashes to be placed in a cannister and interred beside Tenny at that double tombstone.

  So much for Colvin. Recently, I will have written this simple note to Mary:

  “Dear Mary Celestia: The VA people will attend to all the details of my burial—undertakers, coffin, grave diggers, etc. Even the flag on the coffin, the chaplain, and a government marker for a tombstone. ALL FREE. If anybody asks you for money, call your lawyer. Wommack, isn’t it? You don’t have to do ANYTHING. If you don’t feel like going out to the National Cemetery, Don’t Go. I am sorry I have no money to leave you, Mary Celestia. I love you, as always. Vance.”

  I will not know, of course, how much more time Tenny will grant me in this future tense of hers. I might well be able to stick around for a few more years, but I’d just as soon get on over t
o the Fiddler’s Green in the Land of Telling as soon as they will be able to make room for me on the Liar’s Bench. I tell you, when I reach the Land of Telling, I intend to tell ’em a thing or two!

  But all that telling, whether we mean knowing or narrating, is as immaterial and fugitive as those breezes bearing Tenny’s song, or the imagined choiring of trees. Her future tense may never come to an end, but it will pause for now, with the realization that the only way she will ever be able to give shape and substance and heart to it will be to transmit it to me in such a way that I will be able to pass it along to you, and you will be able, one of these years, to turn it into novel, giving the reader two whole handsful of Tenny’s future tense.

  Which is exactly what I will have done, for Tenny no less than for you. Good-bye, my boy. Godspeed.

  For Fred Chappell

  old son

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Part two

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Part One

  Where children are,

  there is the golden age.

  —Novalis

  In all the wild imaginings of mythology

  a fanciful spirit is playing on the borderline between jest and earnest.

  —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

  Chapter one

  When I was thoroughly eleven, working on twelve, I first met you. You were not part of the gang that beat me up, but you watched them do it. That was the first and only thing I knew about you for the longest time: you liked to watch. Of course you also liked to listen; did you hear it when the bone snapped in my arm? I did. And that was when I suddenly knew you were there. Probably, without even knowing it, I had been waiting for you a very long time.

  Now that you were there, I was tempted to introduce my tormentors. I may as well. That was Sugrue “Sog” Alan who slammed the baseball bat down on my arm; Sog was not yet seventeen, too young to be drafted or even to join with his parents’ permission, but he was big enough, tough enough, not to have needed the baseball bat; he could’ve broken my arm with his bare hands if he’d tried. His best buddy, Larry Duckworth, was only fifteen, but already the handsomest man in Stay More since all the best-looking ones had been drafted or joined up. Maybe Larry was vain and even jealous of my nice face, for he chose not to break my arm but to blacken one of my eyes. The only one of them that I might have beaten in a fair fight was Jim John Whitter, who spelled it Witter and maybe was right but whose stupidity kept him a year behind me in school although he was a year older than me. He took advantage of how the other two had already defeated me to do something he couldn’t have done alone: kick me in the groin. I wondered if you could even imagine how that felt.

  You looked the three of them over and betrayed no disdain, though I am trying to picture them for you as villains, which they were. Then you looked at me, on the ground, whimpering in pain and grunting not your name, which I didn’t know yet, but the name of Ernie Pyle, my hero. If Ernie could have come to my cries, even though he was frail and scrawny, he could have trounced all three of them together, he could have obliterated them, with his words, if not his fists. But he didn’t come. You did. I liked to think that you felt sympathy for me, if not much knowledge, certainly not yet any affection. I wasn’t fishing for your pity, nor did I hope you could rescue me, as I had prayed for Ernie’s aid. I wasn’t even, as some would argue, simply imagining you out of the desperation of the situation. You were there, as much as I am here. You couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t protect me from those bullies, but you could, and you did, give me to know that you were there.

  That would sustain me for…a long time (I nearly said forever, but neither you nor I believe in that). You sat beside me when Doc Swain put the plaster cast on my arm. “Can you get out that newspaper of yours with only one hand?” Doc asked me. Sure, I said; it was my good arm, the right one, that peeled the pages from the press. He shook his head. “Who was it got on the wrong side of you, boy?” he asked me.

  I winked at you and grinned manfully. “Oh, just some of them,” I said. I wasn’t going to name any names, except to you.

  “Well, if they were out to kill ye, they did a right poor job of it,” he said. “I reckon you’ll live. But I was you, I’d cross the creek without a footbridge next time I seen them a-coming.”

  When I was not yet six and had just the faintest idea who you were, not enough to keep me from it, I had run away from home and was lost in the spooky woods of Ledbetter Mountain for some time. Doc Swain had organized the search party—the entire populace, some hundred-odd Stay Morons—but he had not been the one who had found me, and I suppose it had frustrated him. Now that I come to think of it, now that I’d met you and had you beside me, now that I’d speculated interminably about just who it was who’d found me, I can only wonder: was it you?

  During the exciting days following our first meeting (I was thrilled to see how readily and easily and cozily you shared my bed at night), I searched in vain for a good name for you. At school, the little one-room (white, not red) schoolhouse across Swains Creek from the village, I had sat alone since August at a desk meant for two. I didn’t have infectious cooties, not that I knew of, and I didn’t have B.O., not that anybody had ever told me, and I wasn’t the only fifth grader: Sammy Coe was also eleven, but he didn’t want to sit with me, or, rather, I didn’t want to sit with him, and he knew it. The only advantage of sitting alone was that during air-raid drills when we all had to get down under our desks, it was easier for me to get under the desk without bumping into and getting tangled up with a deskmate. Air-raid drills were ridiculous; we had never seen an airplane. Maybe Miss Jerram, a pretty but not terribly bright spinster of twenty-three or thirty-three (who could tell? and besides, any unmarried woman past nineteen was considered a spinster) had not assigned me a seatmate out of spite, because she knew I was smarter than she was. But now I could install you to share my desk, calling you, for want of a better name, Friend. Some of the other kids launched admiring glances at the white plaster cast on my arm, which would soon bear their inscriptions of good wishes, all of them except Sog’s, Larry’s, and Jim John’s, whose wishes would be bad. When Miss Jerram said, that first day afterwards, “Dawny, do you want to stand and tell us all what-all happened to ye?” I turned to my new seatmate and said to you, “Friend, why don’t you tell ’em?”

  But of course you would not, or could not. It was Jim John across the aisle who blurted, bragging, “That stinkin Jap done went and told on us in that stupid newspaper of his’n, and we whomped the soup outen him!”

  Did Miss Jerram understand that? She could not permit herself to believe that I was smart enough to be a newspaper editor, and therefore she refrained from reading my paper. Or if she snuck a glance at it she never told me. But she knew darn well that most of the student body had been divided, for going on four years, practically since the war started, into two factions, rival camps who opposed each other not only in baseball but in war games such as Dirt War and Dare Base and all-out Capture the Flag. With or without her knowledge and consent, these two factions occupied opposing sides of the schoolroom with the aisle as a divider, a demilitarized zone across which spitballs flew.

  There were the top dogs, led by fat Burl Coe until he got
drafted, and by Sog Alan in his absence, who called themselves Allies, from the privilege of feeling and sometimes being superior (most of them came from the “better” families of town, to the extent that the farms in the bottomlands were more productive than those on the mountains), and there were the underdogs, who did not choose to be called Axis but had no choice. I certainly did not elect to be an Axis, let alone a despised Jap, but it fell my lot by default. Most of the girls, except a few chosen as sweethearts or sycophants by the Allied generals, were also Axis by default. Before the war, we Axis had been required to be the redskins in games of cowboys-and-Indians, and bandits in games of sheriffs-and-outlaws. Somebody always has to be the bad guy.

  They were the in-group; we were the out-group. Whether one was Ally or Axis had nothing to do with how dumb or smart one was, or even social status as such (in Stay More there were only two social classes anyhow, with hardly any distinction between them: the poor, and the dirt poor—or, from a different perspective, since none of us were starving and all of us were fairly happy, the rich, and the feeling-rich). And just as the Civil War had pitted brother against brother (including two historically famous brothers from Stay More), opposing members of the Allies and the Axis could be found in the same family. For example, early in the war years, when the sides were first drawn, there were the triplet sons, Earl, Burl, and Gerald, of Lawlor Coe, the blacksmith, who, before Miss Jerram organized her War Effort Scrap Drive to remove all of it, had an abundance of waste pieces of iron and steel from which both the Allies and the Axis fashioned their arsenals. Burl was the dominant triplet and thus insisted on being an Allied general, leaving his brothers to be the Axis: Earl the Nazi and Gerald the Jap. Dulcie Coe, the triplets’ mother, had given Burl’s tousled auburn locks a GI haircut at his request, had slicked and combed Earl’s hair into a Hitlerian flap, which he darkened with stove polish, adding a false mustache of horsehair, and she had made Gerald’s head look like a parody of the caricatures of Premier Hideki Tojo; when Gerald’s efforts to give himself buckteeth by gripping his lower lip with his upper teeth did not do the job, his friends—two of us—fashioned him a false set from a dead cow’s teeth.