The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “I found it in my bed,” she declared. “I don’t reckon you could tell me whar Jerl is off to?”

  “For all I know, he’s done already gone to Californy.” As I had reported in that week’s issue of the Star, Mare had finally received his notice; he was to report to the marine office in Fort Smith, and would be sent to Camp Pendleton in California for his training. But he had not left yet.

  Gypsy wandered around the village, asking anybody she met if they had seen Jerl, or Mare. She didn’t like the nickname because it suggested a female horse, and while her phantom lover may have been pudgy, freckled, and homely, there was nothing unmanly about him. He was a real man. The more she thought about him, defending him from his nickname in her mind, the more she liked him. Besides, what was wrong with wanting to be a mayor? She wasn’t quite sure just what a mayor was. None of the many, many towns or townships she had lived in during the Dingletoons’ peregrinations from one squatting to another had anything like a mayor, nor even a head man. Who, after all, was the head man of Stay More? Doc Swain? Doc was the Justice of the Peace, a seldom needed position, and he was everybody’s friend and healer, but he wasn’t the boss. Did Jerl Coe really want to become the boss of the town?

  If so, she decided, it might be useful to get to know him better. But hadn’t she read something in that little paper that Dawny put out to the effect that Jerl had been drafted and would be leaving soon? And hadn’t Earl said something about California? She’d better find Jerl pretty quick.

  She did not wash that nightdress she’d peed on, but carried it to bed each night without putting it on, preferring to sleep with the image of Mare beneath her or above her or beside her, as her position in bed may have dictated. I could easily see these positions in my mind’s eye.

  Chapter five

  When fourteen-year-old Gypsy Dingletoon and eighteen-year-old Mare Coe actually and spontaneously became lovers, I did not need to use my mind’s eye, because I was there. Nor were they the first couple I’d ever watched. They were, however—and this is what excites me most about it—practically strangers. They may have seen each other in the village, but as far as I know they’d never spoken. Apart from watching some of the baseball games in which Mare had pitched the Axis to victory over the Allies, she had scarcely noticed Mare before. Or, rather, since all three brothers were boring and practically invisible, she hadn’t seen them. Actually—as she had confided to her best friend Ella Jean when they were making girl-talk about boys—if she had her choice she would have chosen as a romantic interest Larry Duckworth, not exactly a handsome prince but certainly much better looking than Mare. Larry was the youngest son of Oren Duckworth, owner of the canning factory, which had been Stay More’s only industry before the war, shut down now on account of the tin shortage. But Ella Jean had been constrained to inform Gypsy that Larry, despite being such a dandy-looking feller, was one of the leaders of the Allies, the despised mob of rowdies who thought that Stay More belonged to them.

  Although Gypsy and Mare were virtually strangers, I knew from careful observation that throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, male and female conjoin on the spur of the moment without prior intimacy or knowledge of each other. Any diligent student of nature, of the animals as well as the plants inferior to us, knows that mating happens everywhere from some built-in urge, without preamble or to-do, and certainly without the fuss and bother, the gifts and cajolery, that seem required to promote man’s fumbling efforts to find release of his natural inclination and hunger. While Mare and Gypsy were only the second couple I’d ever witnessed coupling, I had seen it happen more times than I could count between bull and cow, horse and mare, dog and bitch, rooster and hen, not to mention stamen and pistil everywhere.

  You will prepare yourself to believe that I wasn’t deliberately out to watch any of that, that it all came to me as a passive, accidental spectator, just as I was not deliberately peeping on Mare and Gypsy, certainly not the way that the Allies had begun to spy on ole Dan and his daughter.

  It just happened. The Dingletoons joined the Axis and began to help with the milkweed pod campaign. One evening after supper Gypsy took her burlap tow sacks and went out along the upper reaches of Banty Creek to gather milkweed pods. Ella Jean had to help her mother, so Gypsy was alone, except for me. Believe me, I wasn’t following her, and she didn’t know I was there. I was just out gathering milkweed pods myself, which was a patriotic thing to do, and besides I kept thinking of Mae West, since Miss Jerram had mentioned her. I wasn’t trying to keep myself hidden from Gypsy or anything, she simply didn’t see me. Believe me. She’d already filled a couple of the sacks, her nimble fingers real good at plucking the pods, and I’d scarcely filled one of my sacks. Before long, she just happened upon Mare Coe, who was sitting on a tree stump right alongside a deep hole of water, one of Banty Creek’s best fishing spots. He wasn’t fishing, though, nor had he heen collecting milkweed pods. He was just sitting there, lost in thought. From a distance I couldn’t hear what she said to him, so I had to try to creep up closer.

  When I found a good spot where I could hide and listen, I could see that she was holding out that pocketknife to him, and I wondered if she had been carrying it around with her all the time just in case she came across him. Girls don’t have pockets. Like all the girls of the time, she was wearing simply a dress, a plain, faded gingham dress, with a hem just above her knees.

  She was saying, “I found it in my bed when Ella Jean and me was havin a little magic test the other night…” Although these were the first words she’d ever spoken to him, she had seen him so often in her dreams and on that nightgown that he must have seemed to be an old friend of hers, or, better yet, a long-standing lover.

  “Why this here’s Ole Stickum!” he exclaimed, turning the knife over in his hands. All of us had given affectionate names to our pocketknives, which made it even harder to sacrifice them to the War Effort. I sorely missed Ole Dirk. “Where’d ye say ye found it?”

  “In my bed,” she said. “You must’ve dropped it that time you came and slept with me.”

  He stared at her as if she were demented. I knew his mind well enough to know that he was wondering, since he didn’t know any of the Dingletoons, if the whole family might be retarded. “Well, gosh,” he said. “That wasn’t me who done that.” Then he added, “I mean, I couldn’t’ve dropped a knife I never had no more, but besides that, I couldn’t’ve dropped it even if I did have it in a bed I wasn’t never in, to start with! So it must’ve been somebody else, but I don’t know how he got ahold of my knife.”

  “Are you certain, Gerald Coe?” she said, staring him in the eye. And although his eyes were kind and gentle, they were not totally innocent. The truth of the matter was that Mare had actually had a dream or two, or maybe half a dozen, involving an activity with pretty Gypsy Dingletoon that he had never experienced in waking life.

  “Not that I rightly know of,” he hedged. The times he’d lain with her in his sleep had never been on an actual pallet in the actual spare room at the actual Dingletoon house.

  She put her hands on her hips and drew back her shoulders. “There’s only one way to find out,” she declared boldly. “I reckon you better jist love me, Gerald Coe, and I can see if you do it jist like ye done it in my dreams.” And she reached out and put her hands on his shoulders.

  “Right here?” he needed to clarify a point. There was no misunderstanding just what she meant: “love” in these here parts, alas, invariably was a transitive verb referring to intercourse, not a noun or verb of grand passion.

  “Right here and now,” she said.

  The very day after Gypsy and Mare had consecrated the sandy banks of Banty Creek, she went to Ella Jean to report that indeed he had done it the exact same way that her dream lover had done it. Ella Jean listened eagerly to her best friend’s account of the whole episode. She had to know all the details. When they did it, did they do it standing up with him behind her in order to keep from having a baby? No? Well,
were they lying on the actual sand at the water’s edge? Or was it gravel? Did it hurt any? What did they talk about, if anything, during the act? Did he say sweet things to her? How long did the whole thing take? Did she have shivers and jerks and goose bumps? Afterwards, what did she do to keep from getting pregnant? Jump up and down repeatedly? Drink some ergot? Or take a douche with sody pop?

  For three days running, Ella Jean kept thinking up new questions to ask Gypsy. When Gypsy had answered all the questions about the act itself, she began to narrate the hours afterwards, just hours, long after she’d finished jumping up and down to prevent pregnancy, when they had talked and talked way into the night, so that they had to find their way home by the light of the moon. By then they had told each other everything about themselves. He had talked at length about his wish to one day become mayor of the town, and his great sadness that the meeting to start a town government had not accomplished anything. She had talked about her wish that she might never again have to keep moving from place to place year after year but could settle down for good in a nice little town like Stay More. When they finally parted, it was almost a spontaneous agreement of theirs—at least neither of them could remember who proposed the idea first—that they ought to join forces, unite against time and the world and fate, and enjoy forevermore that closeness and pleasure they’d just had on that creek bank.

  “But I have to tell ye, Gypsy hon,” Mare said to her, “I’m due to light out for Californy next Monday to start boot trainin for the marines.” He said that it would make him a little money, which he never had before, and when the war was over and they had licked the enemy and he could come home, he’d have a nest egg to get him started as the town’s mayor…and as her husband, if she’d have him. Oh, she’d have him, all right, she said.

  “No tellin, though,” he observed, “how long it might take me to git back home.”

  Gypsy’s nocturnal dreams were not all erotic; like all the children of Stay More whose fathers had gone Overseas, she had recurrent nightmares involving monstrous mayhem and the weapons in action, things she had never actually seen: howitzers, cannons, missile launchers, airplanes dropping bombs and cannonballs and elephants, catapults and crossbows and constant explosions mutilating the men who were falling down everywhere with their heads missing or huge holes in their chests. Now she had a synoptic flash of all that destruction, and she could not help but ask, in alarm, “But Gerald my darlin, what if ye don’t come back?”

  “That,” he declared, “is percisely how come I caint ast ye to marry me afore I go, like all them other fellers is doing.” Mare referred to the fact that everywhere across this great land of ours the brave boys of our armed forces were wedding their sweethearts before they went into combat, just to be sure the girls would be waiting if they came home from the war. Hearts were breaking everywhere, and Mare Coe had the gumption to realize that his failure to come home would break enough of her heart without breaking the whole thing if he left her a widow.

  As Gypsy narrated it to her, Ella Jean understood this part easily. A woman without a man is not a woman. She had been fatherless from her earliest memory, at the age of three, when Jake Dinsmore had just briefly paused at her bed to kiss her good-bye before running away to California, his last words to her “Gimme a li’l kiss, sugar.” She was just barely old enough to sense, if not to understand, that “Pa” means the pucker of the kiss to father. Just as everywhere “Ma” (or mama or mater or Mutter or mère or madre or mother) is the purse of the mouth to suck the breast, everywhere “Pa” (or papa or pater or pai or père or padre) is the peck of the puss to put on Paw’s profile. For nine years since, Ella Jean had been looking for a man to kiss. Her brothers, though there were many of them, would not suffice. Her doll—well, each of her four older sisters had owned it and used it before it came down to her, and although she renamed it Johnny and made pants for it, it no longer had a head, and she could only imagine Johnny’s face and Johnny’s mouth, which, however, she often imaginatively kissed. There had been a lot of men in Stay More, but now, with the war, one by one they had all been taken away. Ella Jean could not share the nightmares of monstrous destruction that all of the kids whose fathers were Overseas were having, because she had lost her father not to the service but to California. But she had an exceptional longing for males (which led me to have hope for myself), and when one of them came of age, like Mare Coe, and kissed not her but her best friend, and not only kissed her but also….

  It was almost as if Mare belonged to Ella Jean too. Thus Ella Jean had to have Gypsy tell her everything that he had said and did on that creek bank that night.

  But there was one thing Gypsy could not tell Ella Jean because Mare had made her promise to tell no one. Even though Ella Jean was not only Gypsy’s best friend but the only good friend she’d ever had, and even though you can prove your friendship to somebody by keeping nothing secret from them, Gypsy knew that her beloved had told her how awful it would be if anybody found out what he was telling her.

  He had told her this, it seems, as a way of consoling her, or reassuring her that he would come home. He confessed to her that he harbored no animosity toward the enemy. He didn’t have a bellicose bone in his body. He explained to her the history and existence in Stay More of the Allies and the Axis, and how the latter were divided into Nazis and Japs, all for the sake of contests, baseball, war games, the play by which we find ourselves in the process of finding each other.

  And then he said to her, “I been a Jap for years.” And waited to see if she would frown or scowl or pout or maybe even run away.

  But she just smiled and said, “Then I’m one too, I reckon. Didn’t ye know us Dingletoons has joined the Axis? We aint decided whether to be Nazis or Japs, though. My brother Joe Don wants to be a Nazi. But if you’re a Jap, then I’m a Jap.”

  “What I mean, though,” he said, “is I aint a bit sure I could kill a real Jap if they tole me to. Don’t you never tell a soul I said this, but I reckon Japs has got as much a right to this earth as anybody else. They may be smelly and slant-eyed and mean and yellow and caint talk plain, but that aint no reason to hate ’em. I used to have me a ole dog who was smelly and slant-eyed and mean and yellow and couldn’t talk atall, but me and him was the best of friends, I’m tellin ye, I never liked ary creature more than him…until I met you.”

  “You’re a good man, Gerald Coe,” she said. “Maybe if you don’t kill any Japs, they won’t kill you either. And then you can come home to me.” She kissed him once more.

  Chapter six

  When Mare Coe left Stay More for Camp Pendleton to be inducted into the marines, the Axis were without a leader and in danger of ultimate defeat by the Allies. Joe Don Dingletoon, Gypsy’s Nazi brother, was a pretty fair pitcher but he couldn’t shut out the Allies, let alone pitch a no-hitter the way Mare could do. And he wasn’t very good at all in war games, in defending the village against the sneaky attacks by the Allies. Gypsy herself learned to play third base and would’ve been a great fielder except that occasionally she’d start crying and a ball would escape between her feet. Maybe I was the only one who observed that she’d start crying before she committed the error; everybody else supposed she was crying because of the error.

  Ella Jean knew why Gypsy was crying, and I did, of course, but nobody else knew. The secret of her romance with Mare remained locked in her heart and his (Ella Jean and I had keys to the locks). Nobody else really cared why she was crying, except when she’d make a fielding error that would cost us a run or two.

  Ella Jean’s big brother Willard was the natural candidate to take over as commander of the Axis, at least in terms of military strategy, if not baseball, where he remained our best slugger. But he was a reluctant leader. Not only did he lack the charisma that leaders must have (albeit Mare himself had none of it) but also he was not able to convince himself, let alone anyone else, that it was his destiny to replace Mare as chief of the Axis. In all his fifteen years, Willard had not yet encoun
tered a sure manifestation of whatever was supposed to be his portion of fate, although for at least a dozen of those years he had known that he was foredestined to certain completions or closures that would represent his purpose in life. He knew for example that in three or four more years, somewhere around 1947 or 1948, he would be drafted into the armed forces to join Our Boys Overseas and help bring a conclusion to this bothersome war. But was that his destiny?

  Willard had not shared Mare’s notion that Stay More needed a civic government, although Mare had offered to appoint Willard as vice mayor. Willard believed that government was a form of meddling. Government was the imposition of unnatural controls over things that ought to be left to their own devices. If you just leave everybody alone, they’ll somehow manage. No point in trying to manage them for them. If they wanted any help, they’d ask for it. Let well enough alone. Live and let live. “I reckon I don’t keer whether school keeps or not,” he told me when I interviewed him for a Star story about Mare’s replacement as chief of the Axis, and I quoted that in my story, but he wasn’t referring to school so much as to life itself.

  The way to Willard’s mind was in a straight path through his stomach. If there was one thing that preoccupied Willard more than his destiny, it was his appetite. When he was three years old, Willard got into serious trouble stealing cornbread from the dogs. He had been doing it for some time before he was caught. Selena Dinsmore always made plenty of cornbread, cooking it in her one big black iron skillet at every noon dinner, where her man Jake and her ten kids enjoyed sopping their gravy with it and pouring honey or sorghum molasses over it for dessert. Often that was the only lunch they had. Corn at least was plentiful, if nothing else was, and there was always enough cornmeal left over after Jake took the most of it to his still to be converted into whiskey. Selena always made enough cornbread to feed not only the twelve people in the family but also the baby chicks, the pigs, and the dogs, who gobbled it with gusto.