The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  For example I was currently engaged in a fascinating project called Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain), a political novel, wherein I was combining real live actual people such as Archie Schaffer, Monica Breedlove, and Vernon Ingledew with imaginary people such as Bolin Pharis, Lydia Caple, Harry Wolfe, Carleton Drew, and Castor Sherrill. Whenever I respond to the occasional fan letter I like to mention the forthcoming book in detail, in order to drum up a little advance business for it. I said I hoped that Juliana would watch for it at bookstores in another year or so, and that meanwhile she might like to read other of my previous novels (I listed them), particularly the one most relevant to the current project, called The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, which, despite its unusual title, was very much a novel, albeit a novel wherein I continued my lifelong practice of combining real and imaginary people.

  Her reply to my email was so fast that I began to imagine her sitting at her computer.

  From: Heartstays@aol.com

  To: dharingt@uark.edu

  Subject: Re: your book

  That’s the book I meant! I didn’t know you’d written so many. The architecture book. I don’t know the lost cities book. I mean the Ingledew book is the one I read. Are you sure that you spelled Ingledew correctly? It’s very easy to misspell Osage, happens all the time, but the correct transliteration for panther is “Ingthonga,” which could very easily have got mispronounced as Ingledew, just as “Osage” itself is a hideous French misrendering of Wah-Shah-She. But maybe you know this, since you appear to know so much about the Osages, at least the one you presumed to call “Fanshaw,” driven away by Jacob the Panther.

  My really big question to you now is: do you mean to tell me that Vernon the Panther is alive and real??!! If so, where? And what’s he doing in a “political” novel? Please answer right now. I am here.

  Juliana

  I replied at once that I had not realized there was an Osage word so closely resembling the Anglo-Saxon family name, Ingledew. Although several panthers figured prominently in “the architecture book,” I had not known that the Osage word for panther was so similar to Ingledew, and I thanked her for telling me that. I said I wished I’d known that at the time I’d written the book. My only sources for telling the story of Fanshaw, the Osage brave displaced by Jacob Ingledew, were the latter’s unpublished memoirs, plus a book called Indians of the Ozark Plateau by Elmo Ingenthron (whose name, come to think of it, was even closer to “Ingthonga”) plus of course the classic Wah’kon-tah by John Joseph Mathews.

  How did Juliana come by such familiarity with the Osage? It was wholly a pleasure to make contact with somebody who knew anything about them. And yes, Vernon “The Panther,” if she wanted to call him that, was at this very moment running for governor of Arkansas. Where did Juliana live? Maybe her local newspaper would carry a story about the upcoming Arkansas Democratic Primary, in which Vernon The Panther was facing several other candidates but had a good chance to win. He was still living in Stay More, still in the house described at the end of “the architecture book,” still living with his first cousin, the beautiful and brilliant Jelena.

  For the rest of the day, we exchanged several messages. My wife Kim commented, “Sounds like you were real busy in there,” referring to the fierce pecking of the keyboard in my study. Yes, I said, I was getting a lot done. Before Juliana and I discontinued our email chat for the day, I had learned some basic facts about her. She was, as arithmetic had already shown, thirty-four years old, eight at the time of the publication of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks. She lived near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, not in it but near it. Pawhuska I already knew to be the “capitol” of the Osage nation, and in fact I’d recently read Dennis McAuliffe’s gripping The Deaths of Sybil Bolton, wherein he tells the story of his search for the truth about the murder of his grandmother in 1925 during a period when several Osage women were killed in order to get the money they’d made from owning oil-producing acreage. Not only had Juliana read this book, six years before reading mine, she had, a few years before that, met and talked with Dennis McAuliffe when he was living deliberately in Pawhuska for three months to track down the story and, in the process, come to terms with his own alcoholism. Juliana had attempted unsuccessfully to befriend him, but he was, as she put it, “out of it.”

  Was she perchance therefore an Indian—excuse me, a Native American—herself? Mixed blood, she said. As I knew from McAuliffe’s book, the population of Pawhuska contained only a very few pure-blood Osages, a number of mixed-bloods of various mixtures, and quite a large number of whites of various mixtures. Pardon me for putting it so bluntly, but did she “look” Indian? Her hair was black, she said. But her skin was not particularly “red.” She could pass, and had passed, for Spanish, Greek, Italian, etc.

  In my insomnia the night after our email meeting, the sound of her name kept repeating itself in my head. Juliana Nancy Waspe. I assumed that the sound was pronounced correctly, with the last name as two syllables: WAS PEE. The relationship among the three parts of her name was more melodious and congenial than that of any other person I’d encountered since Daniel Lyam Montross, his name “three sounds bonded at two junctions of end and beginning.” The first thing I did, in my first email of the next morning, about the same moment that Vernon Ingledew was shaking hands with Dale Bumpers on the broad porch of Arch Schaffer’s house, was to ask Juliana about her name. Juliana was of course her given name, but the rest of it…. Her parents had allowed her to pick, from several appropriate sources, her last name, and “Nancy Waspe” was a rough phoneticization of the Osage which she used to disguise her actual last name, which was Heartstays, as in her aol.com address.

  Was I familiar with any of the ancient legends of the Osage? Very few, I said, although I had read V. Kelian’s Dawn of the Osage (and had to resist the urge to reveal to Juliana that I knew that “V. Kelian” was actually alive and well and living in Jacob the Panther’s old house in Stay More, Arkansas).

  Well, Juliana explained, in the story of the Great Flood, when the flood struck, some of the Osages climbed up into the tops of trees and were called Top of the Tree Sitters. Others climbed a forested hillside to its top and were called Upland Forest People. A third group saved themselves among the thorny growths on the sides of a ravine, and were called Thorny Thicket People. A fourth group couldn’t reach high ground but took refuge on the talus at the base of a cliff, and were called the Down Under People. But the fifth group, the last group, Juliana’s ancestors, stayed where they were: they refused to flee but stood their ground on the hummocks of dry land amid the swirling flood-waters. They were attached to their land and could remain contented only by staying there. Staying more, as it were. Their hearts thus were quieted, and they became known as Heart Stays People. The name is rendered in Osage as Non Tze Wath Pe, sometimes spelled Nontsa Wah Spah, which the Jesuits spelled as Nantze Waspe, and which Juliana spelled Nancy Waspe.

  How clever, I wrote. Would you rather I call you Juliana Nancy Waspe or Juliana Heartstays? Suit yourself, she replied. And then she wrote:

  So you see, you were entirely wrong about the origin of the name Stay More.

  Her words were like a slap. In my various books I had laid out all the several possible beliefs about the origin of the name, and in “the architecture book” I had conceded that while the name was indeed based upon the common Ozark polite injunction not to rush off but to stay more, the actual name of the place had been bestowed by Fanshaw the Osage in recognition of his host Jacob Ingledew’s common employment of the expression. “I have the book open before me, page eight,” Juliana wrote.

  You say, ‘Yet Fanshaw could not help but remark upon this custom to his wife because among his own people the exact reverse is the case: when a guest has stayed as long as he wants to, his host senses it and sends him packing with an Indian expression which, if translated into modern idiom, would most literally be “Haul ass” or perhaps even “Fuck off.”’ Well, excuse me, but you didn�
��t get that out of Jacob’s memoirs and you didn’t get that out of Ingenthron and you certainly didn’t get it out of Mathews’ Wah’Kon-tah. So where did you get it? How did you know what Fanshaw and his wife said to each other?

  I allowed as how that was one of many places in the novel where I’d given my imagination and my comic sense free rein. She responded:

  You also claim that Fanshaw’s basketry dwelling was portable, that—here’s another of my many X-marks in the margins of your book—page six, ‘“A gentleman and his squaw,” Fanshaw explained over the firewater, “can lift and transport their domicile over great distances where the woods are not, or, where the woods are, disassemble and reassemble.”’ Think about that. It’s wrong. Even if those basketry huts could be picked up or disassembled or whatever, the Heart Stays people never took anything with them when they left, usually because they never left!

  “Sorry,” I wrote. “You’re right. That was a stupid passage. But are you saying that Fanshaw was of the Heart Stays band?”

  “Of course he was!” Juliana answered. And then she wrote:

  Catch you later. Bending Bear wants to take me into town.

  Was this Bending Bear her boyfriend? Whoever he was, he had stolen her away from me at a crucial junction in our exchange, when I needed to confirm whatever theory she might have that Stay More had got its name because the last Indian resident of the place had been of the Heart Stays People.

  Come to think of it, the site of the Osage camp in Stay More, in the rocky meadow hard by swirling Swains Creek, waiting for Bo Pharis to explore, fit the description of the traditional locale of Heart Stays people as being right on the water’s edge.

  I rushed to locate my copy of the Ingenthron book and to look again at the Harold Hatzfeld illustration (pp. 64-65), on which I’d based my own drawing of Fanshaw’s double-dwelling (“bigeminal”). The depiction of an Osage seasonal hunting camp at the mouth of Swan Creek in Missouri shows several of these basketry beehive-shaped huts, with a larger lodge in the background, all of them spread out right alongside the waters of the creek, so that any hard rain might swamp them if they weren’t determined to heartstay. Jacob Ingledew and the Osage Fanshaw had had many conversations during the several months that they shared Stay More before the Indian’s departure, and Jacob had recorded most of these conversations in his memoirs, from an excellent power of memory that would be inherited by Vernon, but there was no mention, or none that I could recall, of any “Heart Stays People.” I must say it crossed my mind that, just as I freely admitted enlivening prosaic truth with my novelist’s imagination, perhaps Juliana herself was making a few things up in order to “explain” her name.

  Waiting for her whenever Bending Bear brought her home was my lengthy email in which I confessed something I’d scarcely told a soul and had nearly forgotten myself: my book she’d read had been intended originally as just the first volume in a trilogy. Volume Two was to have been called Interiors and would have gone more deeply into such things as whether or not the two halves of that basketry paraboloid were connected by any sort of interior door joining Fanshaw’s half to his wife’s half, and, consequently, whether or not Fanshaw and his wife discussed at any length their (his? her?) decision that she might divest Jacob Ingledew of his virginity. Volume Three was to have been called Outbuildings and Others, the double O’s of its title symbolizing the two holes of the privy, and having in its first chapter the meaning and significance of the lodge building in Fanshaw’s camp. Did Fanshaw and his squaw use it for anything? Or was it just a constant reminder that their tribesmen had abandoned the camp forever, that their hearts had not stayed?

  No doubt, I told Juliana, if I’d gotten around to writing those other two volumes, I could have “corrected” some of the mistakes she’d found in her reading. But the first volume had not fared well commercially or critically; it had been either ignored completely or dismissed as a “spoof” and there had been scant chance the publisher would have wanted to risk the other volumes in the trilogy, which remained unwritten.

  Several days went by (what “town” had Bending Bear taken her to? Dallas?) before her answer came, in the form of a list of all the mistakes she’d caught in Chapter One, involving Osage habits, beliefs, practices, and pronunciations. (Example: when Jacob and Fanshaw went hunting together, Fanshaw would not have used his bow and arrow if Jacob was using his rifle. Fanshaw, like most Osages of the time, probably possessed a rifle too.)

  Would you have corrected all of these in Interiorsor Outbuildings and Others [she asked]? More importantly, would you have revealed the name of Fanshaw’s squaw, which was Kushi? More importantly yet, would you have admitted your major misrepresentation of the truth, namely, that Kushi did not freely offer herself to Jacob but was raped by him?

  My service provider suffered one of its recurrent failures (probably from an overload of students doing end-of-semester work) and thus my immediate and vehement response to this question did not reach her until the following day: Hold on, Juliana! I wrote. Where do you get that? On what authority are you basing such a contentious and extravagant claim?

  How do I know her name, and you do not? Because she was of the Heart Stays People, who in their staying told their children all the old stories, the Little Old Men, the storytellers who made a profession of it, told everything about Fanshaw and Kushi and their idyllic life together in Stay More until the white men came and drove them out, told it to their children who told their children, and all the old stories came down generation to generation as neatly and truthfully as if they had been written in stone.

  How does Kushi translate? I wanted to know.

  The k is medial between k and g, and there is a slight but distinct suppression between the initial consonant and the initial vowel. Without that suppression, the name might be heard as “Kuzhi,” which means far away, at a great distance. “K’ushi” is hard to translate without knowing the whole folk joke behind it, but literally it means ‘gulped into the earth.’”

  Speaking of folk jokes, stop me if you’ve heard this one, I wrote. It’s from Vance Randolph’s book of folk jests, Hot Springs and Hell, which I freely expropriated in my novel Lightning Bug, the beginning of—and the key to—the Stay More saga. There was a girl had a fellow arrested for rape, and the prosecuting attorney was asking her some questions about it. She says the fellow just throwed her down and raped her, and it happened on Easter Sunday. “It’s August now,” says the lawyer. “You say he hasn’t bothered you since Easter?” The girl said a dirty word. “Bothered me! I’ll say he has! Why, it’s just been rape, rape, rape all summer, and something has got to be done about it!”

  Funny. Relevance?

  The relevance, Juliana, is this. According to Jacob Ingledew’s memoirs, and as I indicated in “the architecture book,” not only was Jacob’s sexual intercourse with Kushi, if that was her name, at the express invitation of Fanshaw himself and with the express consent of Kushi herself, but also it was repeated on several occasions. Is that “rape”?

  That is only Jacob the Panther’s perspective, and what may have seemed consensual to him was not to her.

  What I needed to do, I decided, was to quote at length to Juliana several passages of The Memoirs of Former Arkansas Governor Jacob Ingledew. But, as we’ve learned, there were only three copies in existence, the original in Vernon’s bank vault, one in the possession of the Woman Whom We Cannot Name II, and one on loan to Bo Pharis. I had seen the original when it was still undiscovered in “The Unfinished Room” of the Jacob Ingledew house, when I was a very young man. I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time its value and significance and I didn’t consider stealing it, which I could have done. Worse, I hadn’t considered copying it; photocopy machines in those days were slow, awkward, and barely legible. Now I thought of asking my good friend Arch Schaffer if he could temporarily borrow Bo Pharis’s copy and have a copy made of it. I certainly wasn’t going to ask Vernon Ingledew to copy the original in his bank vault.


  Then, when Kim and I dropped in on the Ingledew Campaign Headquarters to watch the returns come in the night of the Primary, we ran into Day and Diana. During the course of the long evening, as Vernon’s lead gradually mounted but not enough to avoid a run-off, I had a chance to speak privately with Day. I told him of my discovery of Juliana Heartstays, and of our lengthy email correspondence. He thought it was fascinating. As we’ve already seen, Day was thoroughly familiar with Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain). This certainly was not because I had allowed him to see any of it, but because of his firm conviction that he had every right to be just as aware as you, the reader, are. Now, having heard what I had to tell him about Juliana, it was Day Whittacker who first thought of something which, I’m abashed to say, had escaped my own awareness. Because I’m so hard of hearing, he even took the trouble to write it down on a note-card: You don’t suppose there’s a possibility that Juliana is a descendant of Jacob Ingledew and Fanshaw’s wife Kushi?

  “Good Lord!” I exclaimed, and we both glanced at Vernon, who was standing by the tote board watching the numbers being chalked up. I knew we were both thinking, Maybe Vernon’s got another cousin he doesn’t know about.

  I made my request of Day: since he was on such good terms with the Woman Whom We Cannot Name II (he was one of the privileged few who knew that she was also the writer V. Kelian, who had written Dawn of the Osage), could he possibly ask her to make, on her high-speed Canon copy machine, a copy of Jacob’s memoirs? And get it to me, pronto?

  Which he did, although it wasn’t quite as pronto as I’d have liked. During the three weeks that Vernon was battling the Reverend John Colby Dixon, either Day or the Woman II was taking a lot of time getting around to making that copy. My email chats with Juliana continued, but I didn’t tell her that I was arranging to obtain a crucial document to help convince her that Jacob had not raped Kushi. I did tell her about the campaign: how this extremely popular and smooth evangelist John Colby Dixon, the runner-up in the Primary, was challenging Vernon to a debate. Could Juliana’s television pick up the Fort Smith stations? Maybe she could watch the debate. But Juliana informed me she didn’t have television. Neither does Vernon, I said, but I did not posit that as evidence of their kinship. I wasn’t ready yet to put forth that Juliana was the offspring of Jacob and Kushi.