The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  When I am very sad, McPherson snatches my Indian Chief and fiercely begins a new page: “(7) The Story of the Lost Glen of the Waterfall, including (a) how Bluff-Dweller Indians inhabited it for generations; (b) how Sewell Jerram was assassinated there in 1914; (c) how Nail Chism hid out there following Jerram’s assassination; (d) how I myself was lost there at the age of almost six; (e) how the samurai under Chui McPherson successfully hid themselves there at the conclusion of the War Games, and (f) whatever else may yet happen there in years to come.” Then on another page he writes: You don’t have to be able to hear to write about all of that! Nor do you need to have a newspaper!

  Then he tells me that he must go. The jeeps are ready, the trucks are loaded, all of the soldiers are set to go back to Chaffee. McPherson writes that all of us are probably glad, or should be glad, to see them go. We may never know, he writes, if it was one of us, but it might as well have been. We are the anonymous instruments of death. He tells me that I have been the only real friend he’s ever had, and that he is going to miss me terribly, and that he will write to me from wherever he is, and that he will always hope, against hope, that he will survive the invasion of Japan and be able to come back to Stay More, where he will stay more and marry Annie and be my friend forever. Then he gives me a big hug and writes one more thing: I have arranged for Gypsy to keep Jarhead. That strikes me as very funny, and I laugh, the first time I’ve laughed in a long long time. Then he takes a stick and scratches deeply into the dirt the four figures that make up the word sayonara in Japanese letters. He says the word aloud, though I cannot hear him.

  But I cannot say sayonara to him. Not because I cannot hear myself. Nor because I cannot tolerate the thought of good-bye. But because it was the last thing I said to Ella Jean, and is hers alone. So I try to smile. He salutes me, at full attention. He executes a smart about-face and is gone. Gone.

  I have already decided this, I have already thought about this a lot and have made up my mind: I will watch the evacuation of Stay More from the vantage of Leapin Rock. Though I have never been atop it before, I know how to get there, where the trail is, and I go there now. Now I sit on Leapin Rock, not too close to the edge but close enough to look over and see how very far it is to the place where Ella Jean’s sisters landed. I wonder which is worse, hitting the earth from this height or being raped and strangled. I open my Indian Chief and on the page where I had written “(4) The History of Leapin Rock,” I write a few things, I write several things while watching the jeeps and the trucks far below like mindless bugs doing whatever they have to do, lining up to leave town. I write a note for Latha. I really have loved her more than anyone.

  I flip back a page to “(3) What’s the picture on Ella Jean’s nightie?” written in her own lovely hand, asking the question about the Question Mark, which will always remain that, Whoever killed her, or Whoever was meant to be her lover but never got a chance. The jeeps and the trucks are moving along the road to Parthenon, heading north out of town. From this height I cannot tell which ones have McPherson and his samurai in them. I write a few things for Ella Jean on that page, and finally I answer aloud her question: “It was me in that picture on your nightie, Ella Jean! And here I come!”

  I stand up, and need only a moment to decide whether to keep my eyes open or to close them. Probably with them closed I can see her better.

  Two hands clamp my shoulders and jerk me away from the edge. It is McPherson. He is talking up a storm but then remembers that I cannot hear. He shoves me into a sitting position far from the rock’s lip and sits down beside me and takes the Indian Chief and begins writing. I notice there is something different about him: the silver bar on his collar has doubled. He’s a captain now.

  He hands me what he has written: I suspected I’d find you up here. And it’s a good thing I did, isn’t it? Well, I’m sorry to interrupt you but you’re needed for a few more jobs in this world. One is that you’ll have to sit at the Press table during the ceremony for the posthumous awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honor to Mare Coe. It looks like I’m going to be around for several more days at least. And you’re going to be around for many more years.

  “I thought all of you were gone,” I say.

  We almost were, he writes. We were all set to stay no more in Stay More when the radio message came from the brass at Chaffee telling us that the big brass in Washington want us to stay more. And we’re all mighty proud to do that.

  Chapter twenty-five

  When will the soldiers leave Stay More? A second invasion will happen, not just by the army but also the navy and marines and press corps and politicians. I will not reveal to anyone, not even Captain McPherson, my suspicion that the memory of Mare Coe and his heroism at Iwo Jima will be given such recognition because the army will be trying to cover up or at least apologize for its rape and strangling of a young girl. Throughout the days of this second invasion, Captain McPherson will give everyone to think that he is my personal aide-de-camp, as he will have written yet another French military expression. He will hardly ever let me out of his sight, not, he will assure me, because he will fear that I would run back up to Leapin Rock, but because he will want to make absolutely certain that my deafness will not prevent me from knowing everything that is going on. I think he will not want me to be left alone with all of the reporters who will have come to town.

  McPherson and his samurai will no longer be wearing either their Japanese combat uniforms or their army fatigues, but full dress uniforms, which will have been brought to them by a truck sent from Chaffee, the same truck which will have contained an item Captain McPherson will have obtained through calling in a favor owed him by a supply lieutenant: an Underwood upright typewriter. McPherson will spend too much of his time trying to teach me to use it, when he himself will have known only the hunt-and-peck system, whose rudiments, however, I will pick up sufficiently to pretend to be using when McPherson will set the Underwood up at my place at the Press table, facing the rostrum set up out in the schoolyard.

  Other tables all along one edge of the schoolyard will be covered with the best linen tablecloths, upon which all the ladies of Stay More (and many other parts of Newton County) will have deposited innumerable sumptuous dishes, just as if it will have been a funeral feast, or at least a dinner-on-the-grounds: huge platters of fried chicken and such pies and cakes that even the sight of them will have brought to the mouth of poor starving Willard Dinsmore the first smile he will have managed since the recent tragedy. His hands will itch. But Miss Jerram will have appointed herself to the job of standing guard over the tables, with the assistance of Sergeant Rodney Harris of Wisconsin, and they will keep kids and dogs away from the tables until the ceremony will be all over.

  My colleagues at the Press table will include reporters from the Jasper weekly, the dailies of Harrison, Fayetteville, Fort Smith, and Little Rock, and even one from Kansas City, as well as several photographers. Although they will have attempted to tease me in the beginning because I am so young and small, they will quickly cease their teasing when they notice how deferential the army captain standing behind my chair will be—or maybe he will have told them to lay off. Once, one of them will attempt to pass me a note with a question on it, but my captain will intercept it, and I will always after wonder if it sought to question me about Ella Jean.

  My captain will hand to me a prepared typescript of the main part of the ceremony: the actual awarding of the medal. After the navy chaplain will offer the benediction, after Every Dill as the closest thing to a local preacher will offer a brief obituary of Gerald Coe, after Doc Swain will speak a few words in support of this boy’s character, after United States Congressman J.W. Trimble will be introduced longwindedly by County Judge Will Jones of Jasper and will give a long speech (my captain will hand me a note: I’m not writing any of this down for you because none of it is very important), finally a colonel of the marines will summon Lawlor and Dulcie Coe to stand before him, and the colonel will present Lawlor wi
th medal after medal, which my captain will explain for me: The Purple Heart, the Presidential Unit Citation with an Iwo Jima star, and the Asiatic-Pacific Area Campaign Medal with an Iwo Jima star. Then the colonel will hold up a medal in the form of a golden star as big as the sheriff’s badge with the fanciest blue silk ribbon anyone has ever seen. He will hand it not to Lawlor but to Congressman Trimble, who will present it on behalf of President Harry S Truman and the United States Congress, while the colonel will read the citation, a typescript of which McPherson has placed before me so that I can follow it: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty…in action against enemy Japanese forces during the seizure of Iwo Jima…he boldly defied shattering Japanese machine-gun fire and knee mortars as well as small-arms fire…the colonel will read on and on, covering in detail Mare’s throwing back all those grenades at the enemy, killing an estimated sixty Japanese before he was mortally wounded…. His dauntless initiative, unfaltering courage, indomitable determination during a critical period of action, and valiant spirit of self-sacrifice in the face of certain death reflected the highest credit upon Private First Class Coe and sustained and enhanced the highest tradition of the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his comrades and his country.

  Squeezed into the overpopulated schoolyard, there will be a band of musicians, a small but loud marine corps band of buglers, saxophonists, and drummers, and they will strike up a rousing number that I will not hear. My captain will write for me: It’s just as well you can’t hear them. They’re playing some nonsense about the halls of Montezuma and the shores of Tripoli.

  Lawlor Coe will receive the fancy medal on behalf of his son, thanking Congressman Trimble and thanking the colonel. They will direct him to the microphone but he will say only a few words. My captain will write them down for me: He was a good boy.

  A cannon will be fired—the very last shot in the occupation of Stay More. The smoke from it will take a long time to drift out of the valley.

  While we all will be filling our plates at those groaning tables, my captain will hand me another note: Excuse me a second. Burt’s trying to beat my time again. I will watch as he goes to rescue Annie from the attentions of Captain Burton Stoving, who, although his tank companies will have returned to Chaffee, will have insisted on staying more in Stay More, possibly because he will have become smitten with the hermit’s daughter, or possibly will just want the challenge of taking her away from McPherson. I will not be the only one interested in watching them. Everybody will be curious because this will be the first public appearance of Annie. And of her father too.

  McPherson will never get me to agree to interview ole Dan, even with his help. I will somehow not be able to banish the image of him as the first to appear after Ella Jean’s death, and that unreasonable prejudice will further contribute to my fall as a newspaperman. McPherson will insist that I allow him to help me put out one more issue of The Stay Morning Star, devoted almost entirely to the Medal of Honor ceremony, but with a small box in one corner: IN MEMORIAM, ELLA JEAN DINSMORE, 1933–1945.

  My captain will fail in his good-intentioned effort to persuade me to continue the newspaper. A journalist without ears, I will have to tell him, is like a doctor without hands. Let others do the reporting, he will suggest, on a final page of my Indian Chief. You could just be the editor. “What others?” I will want to know. “Nobody but Ella Jean was ever interested in helping out around here.” Trying to cheer him up and let him know that I will not be a totally hopeless case, I will say, “Well, she once told me I ought to just make up the news. And I did, sometimes. But that’s not such a good idea, is it?”

  No, that’s not allowed, he will write, but nobody’s ever going to stop you from writing things that don’t pretend to be news. Besides, news gets old. News never lasts. Good writing stays new and lasts forever.

  And that will be practically the last thing of consequence that he will write in that Indian Chief, which will be filled up anyhow. There will be just a few other words written there, attempts to say goodbye. I will tell him how I can’t say sayonara because that is only for her. So he will tell me there is simply ja ne! which means just “See ya!” I will, you know, he will write, I will see you.

  But he will be wrong about that too. I will not watch the jeep carrying him away from Stay More; there is a superstition, old as the hills, that you should never watch anybody going out of sight; to do so is to doom them.

  I will never see him again. He will not be killed in the invasion of Kyushu, because that invasion will never occur. I will no longer be able to listen to the radio, but I will have outgrown those silly shows, Captain Midnight, Hop Harrigan, and Terry and the Pirates, and will no longer have any use for the news, but if there is anything important on the air that she thinks I ought to know, dear Latha will write it down for me. It will be in her handwriting, in August, that I will learn that an incredible bomb, made from atoms, unimaginable in its power, will have been dropped on a city called Hiroshima. So many people will have been killed that, when another bomb like a deathly echo is dropped on another city, Nagasaki, the Japanese will surrender. While I will be stunned and will share with Latha her sorrow and her tears over the senseless deaths of all those hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, I will be rapturous that the worst war in the history of mankind is finally over—and that McPherson’s samurai will not be needed after all.

  In time, McPherson will write to me from the Kyushu city of Kagoshima, where he will have been promoted to major and will be serving as the chief interpreter for the occupation of Kyushu. I will imagine that he will be as polite and kind to the Japanese people as he had been to us, but I will not imagine that he will meet and befriend a twelve-year-old Japanese boy who edits a newspaper. Later he will be promoted to colonel and established in the occupation headquarters in Tokyo, where he will remain for several years. He will mail to me a photograph of Yoshino Hijiya, a beautiful girl he will intend to marry. Perhaps because of his love for her, I will not hear from him much anymore after that. I will eventually get a letter from Rutland, Vermont, where he will be working for an American publisher, Charles E. Tuttle, who specializes in the printing of Japanese books and will soon be sending him to work permanently in the Tokyo office. There will be a photograph of the two children born to him and Yoshino.

  One samurai will return to Stay More after the war, and one Yank. Using a map he had drawn on the flyleaf of his Bible, Rodney Harris will find his way back here to persuade Estalee Jerram to accompany him to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to meet his family. She will argue with him over her desire to stay in Stay More, and they will spend a month here, and a month there, and a month here, before finally settling for good there. I will regret that, for throughout the sixth grade Miss Jerram will have helped me avoid being sent away to Little Rock to attend the Arkansas School for the Deaf, as my aunt and uncle will have tried to make me do. Miss Jerram will write things down for me, and make it possible for me to stay in the Stay More school. When Miss Jerram will move permanently to Wisconsin, her replacement as Stay More schoolteacher, a young woman named Jane Harrison from Valley Springs in neighboring Boone County, will write in my Indian Chief on my first day in the seventh grade, “(8) The Story of How Boone Harrison Became the First Schoolmaster of Stay More.” She will write He was my great-grandfather, and you don’t have to have ears to learn the history of Stay More and write about it, and besides Estalee Jerram wrote me a long letter about you and I cant tell you how glad I am you’re going to be my pupil. Between Latha and Miss Harrison, I will learn enough to write the first story in my book called Stay Morons, which will never be published but will serve as the wellspring for many that will.

  Burton Stoving will not be as bright as Rodney Harris, and will not have a Bible with a flyleaf map showing how to find Stay More. Just as it had taken his tank battalion forever to find us in the first place, he will get lost several times and will go back t
o Little Rock in frustration. But he will be nothing if not persistent, which is why he will be a rising executive in the insurance business. Burton Stoving will no longer be trying to steal McPherson’s girlfriend because he will not know that McPherson will have a Japanese wife; he will only be trying to steal a girl away from her hermit father, and he will succeed, like Rodney Harris reducing the female population of Stay More by one more. Not without considerable trouble. Ole Dan will not like Burton Stoving. Ole Dan will never have liked Burton Stoving. And, now that Burton Stoving will no longer be in a captain’s uniform but just civilian clothes, I will wonder why Annie likes him. He will be good-looking, and rich. He will drive a nice car. I will have to wonder if McPherson will have written Annie to tell her that he will be marrying Yoshino. As always, I will know nothing about Annie. And I will write in the Indian Chief: “(9) Why Did Annie Elope with Burton Stoving?” It will be years before I get around to learning the answer to that.

  Annie will spend the rest of her life in Little Rock. But nearly everybody else in Stay More will move to California. A very few of them, like John Henry “Hank” Ingledew, will come back, but there will be so many other Stay Morons in Orange County, California, that the towns of Fullerton and Anaheim will have colonies of Stay-Morons-in-exile.