The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  From that night onward I had the awfullest time trying to decide whether or not I liked Gypsy even more than Ella Jean. In her way, Gypsy was prettier, more grown-up looking, like a movie star is pretty. Ella Jean remained just a beautiful child. Two more years and Ella Jean would be just as sightly, but meanwhile Gypsy had all the glamour.

  Thus, at that meeting Mare called to try to organize a government, when Ella Jean’s brother Willard, who may also have been developing some powerful attraction for Gypsy, suggested that we ought to do something to help the poor Dingletoons, I was the first to take a flying leap onto the bandwagon.

  Chapter four

  When Willard Dinsmore, who, as I would learn, was even more powerfully smitten with Gypsy than I was (his hormones were four years in advance of mine), made his suggestion about some sort of aid for the unfortunate and now fatherless Dingletoons, the idea inspired little enthusiasm among the rest of the Axis and none at all among the Allies. Some of us, like myself, who were “in comfortable circumstances,” that is, weren’t living hand-to-mouth, admired Willard for his altruism: if any family in Stay More really deserved public assistance, it was the Dinsmores, who, after all, were native Stay More folk, not outlanders like the Dingletoons. But most of us on the “good” side, the Axis, knew very well that if we did anything for the Dingletoons it would have to be done in strictest secrecy and anonymity, not because the Dingletoons were too proud to accept any help but because it was bad manners even to think of offering help in a land where self-sufficiency was the way of life. Those on the “bad” side, the Allies, weren’t capable of charitable works anyhow; the notion of doing something for someone else was totally alien to their belligerent, authoritarian selfishness, and they made it clear that their purpose in life was not to help the Dingletoons or anybody else but to gratify their own desires for victory, mastery, revenge, and evildoing.

  “But we ort to leastways do somethin to help ’em help themselves,” Willard argued.

  “Old Blue, their mule, died the other night,” Ella Jean informed us of tidings recently learned from her new friend, Gypsy.

  “You aim to buy ’em a new mule?” Sog Alan asked, not of her or of Willard, but of all of us Axis.

  “Has anybody got a extry mule?” Miss Jerram put in.

  None of us had extra mules, and none of us had any way of buying a new mule for the Dingletoons. “We could steal ’em a mule,” Sog suggested. It was the first constructive idea he had come up with, but his motive obviously was to recruit the Dingletoon kids to the Allied cadre.

  “Who from?” we asked.

  “Ole Dan,” Sog said, calling the strange reclusive man who lived in the yellow house by the only name we knew to call him.

  “Ole Dan needs his mule, I reckon,” I observed.

  “Not if he was locked away,” Sog said. “He ort to be put in jail.”

  “For what?” I said.

  “All kinds of things,” Sog said, and began to count them off on his fingers, naming the various wrongdoings that gossip had laid upon Dan in his mysterious past: escaping from prison; embezzling from some employer he’d worked for, maybe even a bank; killing a patient while a doctor; ruining a client while a lawyer; hiding out from the FBI; or abducting as a child the girl presumed to be his daughter. “But the main thing,” Sog said, grasping his big thumb, “is that he’s probably a Nazi spy.” He glanced around at those of us Axis who were doomed to be Nazis and added, “I mean the real Nazis. The ones in Germany. Hitler’s men.”

  “Now where would you git a notion like that, Sog Alan?” Miss Jerram wanted to know, but there was a slight tremor in her voice, as if it were a distinct possibility that had never occurred to her before.

  “Don’t you think he’s mighty suspicious?” Sog said. “He don’t never visit with nobody or nothin.”

  “But why on earth,” Willard asked, “would Hitler want to plant a spy out here in Stay More, Arkansas?” It was just a rhetorical question, but it set us all to thinking. After all, to me and to most of us, Stay More was the center of the world. If I were Hitler I’d want to keep an eye on it.

  “If we stole his mule and gave it to the Dingletoons,” Mare pointed out, “he’d just think they stole it from him, and he’d get it back.”

  “Forget the mule,” Sog said. “I think if you want to be mare and get anything done for this town before you’re called up, the best thing to do would be let’s all spy on that spy! Let’s keep a good eye on him and if we catch him up to somethin, we could get him put away.”

  “He aint no kind of a spy!” I said. “He’s just a ole feller tryin to mind his own business.”

  Sog scowled at me as if the idea was already dawning on him to break my arm at some point in the future. Then he looked around at the rest of the small gathering. “Anybody with me?” he asked. “Who wants to do a good turn for this town and help get rid of ole Dan?” All of the Allies automatically held up their hands because Sog was their boss, but even the younger Axis, the littluns like Jim George Dinsmore and Troy Chism, first-graders, thrilled by the excitement of the idea, held up their hands.

  Miss Jerram, bless her heart, rose to her feet and took a stand. “Boys and girls,” she said, “I’d advise all of you’uns to just leave that pore ole man alone. It sure seems to me that if you really and truly want to do something as a play-like government, you could do something more for the War Effort.”

  “Catchin a Nazi spy would be War Effort,” the Allies contended.

  “What more could we do?” the Axis asked. We had already collected all the scrap in town as well as stuff that wasn’t even scrap yet, we had knitted up the wool of all the sheep in Stay More, and we had collected enough grease to drown the Japs and the Germans in it.

  “The milkweed is a-going to pod,” Miss Jerram said, smiling. We wondered if her brain was a-going to pod. But then she said, “Haven’t you never tore open a milkweed pod? It’s got all this white fluffy stuff inside, like cotton, that the War Plants are using to fill life preservers with.” The blank looks she was getting from her audience made Miss Jerram explain, “A life preserver is something that a soldier, sailor, or a marine straps around his chest when he’s out on the ocean so that it will hold him up if the ship sinks.” Enough of us showed signs of understanding that she was inspired to continue, “They call ’em Mae West life preservers because wearing ’em…well, I reckon, puttin one on makes ye look kind of busty like her. Anyhow, they’re collecting milkweed pods for the War Effort, if you boys and girls would care to go out and get some.”

  In the weeks ahead, as all of the milkweed of Stay More (Asclepias syriaca, or silkweed, cousin to but not to be confused with Asclepias tuberosa, butterfly weed) reached maturity, we Axis got organized to hunt for it, each of us equipped with a tow sack (burlap bag) into which we stuffed our gatherings of pods, plucked all along the creek banks and the roadsides. This activity was some small consolation to Mare Coe, who could not hide his disappointment that the effort to organize a Stay More government had not only failed but been dismissed by Miss Jerram as “play-like.” In the next issue of The Stay Morning Star I dutifully reported, under the headline GOVERNMENT IDEA NOT SUCCESSFUL, that Mare’s efforts to organize a town government had met with “mostly indifference,” and that the only constructive thing to come out of the meeting was that we, at least the Axis faction, were now engaged in collecting milkweed pods for the War Effort and “if any of you readers has lots of milkweed on your property that we don’t know about, please let us know.”

  Mare wasn’t very friendly to me after that, and I wondered if he held it against me for simply telling the truth, that the government meeting had not succeeded. But I also told the truth about the Allies, that instead of helping us collect milkweed pods they were “starting a secret watch to gather information about a suspected undercover agent.”

  Somebody threw a rock through the window of the side room at Latha’s store where I had my newspaper office. Tied to the rock was a message: “N
ame eny names and your dead.” I wondered if Ernie Pyle ever had rocks thrown at him.

  Willard Dinsmore suggested that we Axis ought to invite the Dingletoons to join us. The wasteland of the Dingletoon property—or rather the squatting they farmed—was overrun with milkweed, and they’d be glad to help us collect the pods. The Axis took a vote and decided to permit the Dingletoons, all four of the older kids, to become Axis and to allow them to decide for themselves whether they wanted to be Nazis or Japs. Ella Jean Dinsmore reported that her friend Gypsy had said there was a strong possibility, since Ace Dingletoon was in the service and couldn’t stop them from doing it, that the Dingletoon kids might enroll in school when it started. Not that they wanted to, having never been to school before. Willard thought that the best thing we could do as a public service for the Dingletoons, if we couldn’t find another mule for them, was to get them to go to school.

  Ella Jean and Gypsy had, since that meeting at the creek when Ella Jean had shared the Palmolive, become the very best of friends, practically inseparable. They were seen together in the village, walking with their arms around each other. They spent the night at each other’s house, sharing their play-pretties, such as they were, and engaging in all manner of girl-talk, such as it was. Of course I did not eavesdrop on them, as I had snooped upon their bathing at the creek, but I could imagine, and my imagination, as you have already gathered, Gentle Reader, was beyond imagining. I could very easily hear the girl-talk of Ella Jean and Gypsy as they discussed their worries and dreams and dislikes, and their favorite subject, boys. I knew, from what Latha told me, that girls did superstitious things designed to identify their future husbands. They would put live snails in a Mason jar overnight, believing the snail would leave in a trail of its slime the initials of the man they’d marry. Or they would eat an over-salted hard-boiled egg before bedtime and have a dream of their future husband bringing them a gourd of water to wash it down with. Or they’d have a “dumb supper,” with a lot of ritual and mumbo-jumbo and spooky goings-on, during which the phantom husband appeared to take his place at the table beside the girl he’d wed.

  But I had to imagine something more interesting that Gypsy and Ella Jean did as their superstitious divination for determining who their future husbands would be. I had to hope it would be something that would tell Ella Jean she would marry me some day, and I had to imagine it was an old-time superstition Ella Jean had learned from her grandmother: a girl who wishes to glimpse a sign of her future husband has to wait for a night when it’s the dark of the moon, and then urinate on her nightdress and hang it before the fireplace and go to bed all naked. The next morning, when the gown has dried, it will carry the image of the groom-to-be! Better yet, if they do it just right, the essence—not exactly a ghost and not exactly the real substance—of the future husband will visit the girl while she’s naked in bed and give her a foretaste of what their sleepings-together are going to be like, after which he always leaves something of his behind, such as a handkerchief or a gallus, as proof that he was actually there! Latha told me all about this.

  Ella Jean was sleeping over at Gypsy’s house the next dark of the moon when they tried out this notion, not because Gypsy’s house had the requisite fireplace—the weather was much too warm for a fire anyhow—but because Gypsy’s house, unlike the two-room Dinsmore hovel, possessed an extra room where the girls could set up two pallets on the floor on which to sleep and on which to be visited by the phantoms or essences of their future husbands, if it came to that. According to the tradition, the girl is supposed to sleep alone in her own room, but that was simply a luxury that neither Gypsy nor Ella Jean, in their crowded households, could enjoy.

  The two girls waited until everybody else had gone to sleep, and then they carried a couple of kitchen chairs into their room. They took off their nightgowns and spread them out on the floor, and squatted over them. Gypsy had no trouble peeing all over her nightdress, but Ella Jean discovered she had a bashful bladder and couldn’t do it, at least not while Gypsy was there beside her. So Gypsy had to close her eyes and turn her back, and even then Ella Jean didn’t manage much of a piddle, and lost her balance while squatting, and did a clumsy job of it. The girls draped their wet gowns over the backs of the chairs, and went to bed and, before falling asleep, talked awhile about who they’d really like to see show up during the night or in a two-dimensional image on their nightdresses in the morning. They agreed that the first thing they’d do in the morning, even before looking to see whose imprint was on their nightdresses, was to discuss who, if anybody, had appeared to them in their sleep, so they could match that person’s image with whatever image appeared on their nightgowns. Then they fell asleep. And dreamt. And were possibly visited by incubi or phantasma who cohabited with them.

  “Well?” Gypsy said to Ella Jean, shaking her awake the next morning. “Did ye see ary a soul?”

  Ella Jean was groggy from sleep and from whatever activities had drained her in her dreams, but she managed to blush and to say, “I aint so sure. What about you?”

  “I hate to tell ye,” Gypsy said. “It was three of ’em, but I don’t rightly know which one of the three actually done it to me.”

  “Three of ’em?!” Ella Jean said. “Couldn’t ye tell ’em apart?”

  “Naw” Gypsy whined. “What I’m tryin to tell ye, they was all alike. Don’t ye know anybody hereabouts who’s three all one and the same?”

  “Why, Gypsy!” Ella Jean exclaimed. “You don’t mean them Coe boys, do ye?”

  Gypsy nodded, abashed, as if she’d done something very wrong. The two girls got up from their pallets and went to inspect their nightdresses, which had not completely dried, but were dry enough to bear the faint stains of some kind of design. I wanted to imagine that Ella Jean’s was a reasonably clear image of my own face, but it was an indistinct figure that might have been the head and neck of a gander or drake but on closer inspection revealed itself to be simply a large question mark.

  But Gypsy’s was clearly a face, with freckles, and pudgy. “Sure looks like Burl Coe to me,” Ella Jean observed.

  “How kin ye tell him apart from th’other two?” Gypsy wanted to know.

  “Well, I don’t know, I guess. Maybe it’s Earl.”

  “Or Jerl,” Gypsy suggested. She pondered, and then offered, “Maybe all three of ’em are gonna marry me, like your sisters done to Billy Bob.”

  Gypsy was referring to two of Ella Jean’s many sisters, Jelena and Doris, who were twins (their names were Jelena Cloris and Helena Doris, but this confused their mother when she was yelling at them), and who had both fallen in love with the youngest of the eligible Ingledew brothers, William Robert, who was living with both of them in a modest shack he’d built on the side of Ingledew Mountain, unbothered by those who frowned upon the sinfulness of this bigamy. The twins had become identically pregnant, and I had recently reported in the Star that people were making bets on which of the two sisters would have her baby first.

  Gypsy had no intention of marrying all three of the Coes. Any one of them would be one too many, as far as she was concerned. She was so upset by the outcome of her nightdress-peeing experiment that she neglected to pursue the matter of just who Ella Jean might have dreamed about or whose image lurked behind that question mark on her gown. Gypsy did not even report to her best friend a crucial fact: whichever one of the triplets had slept with her in her dream had, in the process of retrieving his britches afterward, let fall his pocketknife, which she had discovered in the bedclothes before she woke up Ella Jean.

  Soon after that, unable to banish the memory of how exciting the dream had been (the Coe boy, whichever one he was, had been exactly the kind of lover who had anonymously made love to her many times before in dreams), Gypsy got up her nerve and went to the Coes’ house and boldly asked the mother, Dulcie Coe, “Whar’s yore boys?” Dulcie informed her that Burl was off in Texas somewhere being taught by the Army how to march and salute and all, that Earl was down to the shop a
-helping his daddy, and Jerl—well, Jerl was real scarce these days, hardly even showing up for dinner or supper. Dulcie had no idea where he was. Dulcie winked and giggled and speculated that he might’ve found himself a girlfriend somewhere, although that wasn’t likely. More than likely he’d taken to brooding on account of not being able to start a government for Stay More so’s he could be mayor of it.

  So Gypsy went down to the Coe blacksmith shop, where Lawlor Coe still managed to find something to keep him busy. Because the War Effort had removed not only all the scrap iron but also all of the in-use iron, there were horses wandering around without horseshoes. Sometimes Lawlor just went to his shop to pound his anvil for the music it made. And Earl, soon to go into the service himself, kept him company there, which is where Gypsy found him and showed him the pocketknife and stared him straight in the eye as if she could tell whether he was lying or not if he claimed never to have touched her before, and she demanded, “Earl Coe, is this here yore knife?”

  He turned it over in his hand, opened a blade or two, peered close at the Barlow label on it. “Nope,” he said. “This here used to belong to ole Mare. Where’d ye git it?”

  It was perhaps the first time she’d ever heard that nickname by which nearly all Stay Morons except Dulcie Coe now called him. “Mare?” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s what we’ve took to a-callin him, on account of he thinks he’s the mayor of this town.” Earl could not suppress a guffaw.

  “Him who?” she said.

  “Jerl. But let me tell ye, this here Barlow of his’n was donated quite some time back to the War Effort. For the scrap drive, ye know.” Every man and boy of Stay More had reluctantly but dutifully contributed his personal pocketknife to that zealous scrap drive, which of course made impossible the traditional pastimes of whittling and mumble-de-peg, not to mention frog-sticking, apple-peeling, and toenail-cleaning. “Where’d ye git it?” Earl said again, more sternly, as if she’d stolen it from the War Effort.