The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Are you a good friend of Vernon the Panther? asked one of her emails.

  Hardly, I answered. I’ve met him only once, seen him only twice. As you may have gathered from reading “the architecture book,” and as you’d know conclusively if you’d read my other books, I have never been overly fond of the Ingledews. Growing up in Stay More, I was taught to think of the Ingledews as—well, I suppose as the Osages might think of their clan chiefs—you venerate your chief and obey him and all that but you don’t necessarily love him. Stay More never had any class distinctions but the Ingledews always had a sense of being leaders.

  She repeated it back to me.

  A sense of being leaders. So now Vernon the Panther wants to be the leader of the whole state of Arkansas.

  He might be a good one, I allowed. He’s enormously intelligent, and has some visionary ideas, and he has a sense of what people want and a sense of what they don’t need even if they want it…like cigarettes. You don’t smoke?”

  I quit.

  Good for you. So did I.

  Did you quit drinking?

  I gave up the hard stuff. But I have a beer now and then.

  You’re a writer. Can you put into words what Vernon looks like?

  The best I could do was tell her to imagine her favorite movie star, or, better, all of her favorite movie stars rolled into one, and be sure that he was suave, impish, about six feet five inches tall, about 215 pounds, with brown hair that looked sunbleached, and blue eyes.

  I hate him, Juliana declared. “I don’t care what he looks like, or how smart he is, I hate all the Panthers and would kill them if I could.

  It took me a while to digest this. Trying to pace my flourishing acquaintance with Juliana, I had not yet told her an important fact about Vernon: that in his sixteen-year program of autodidacticism, he had devoted six intense months, right after spending six months on the occult, to the Osage, their whole history and culture, even their language. Eventually I intended to ask Juliana if she knew her neighbor James Big Eagle, the Pawhuska mixed-blood who had come to Stay More for two months to teach Vernon the Osage language. I questioned my own motives in wanting to dispel Juliana’s hatred of the Ingledews, but I was determined to do it.

  At the Ingledew Campaign Headquarters the night of the run-off, as Vernon’s lead over the Reverend Dixon became indisputable early on, I saw Day Whittacker again, and he delivered into my hands at least a ream of copy paper, bound with a yellow bandanna, containing my request. He apologized for not having got it to me sooner; he hadn’t wanted to trust it to the US Mail, and had hoped to see me again at this function: the celebration of Vernon’s victory in the run-off. “And now,” Day said, “you can deliver it, if your trust of the US Mail is as weak as mine, into the hands of Juliana Heartstays.”

  I laughed, then realized he wasn’t joking. Driving home late from the victory party, I told Kim that I had to go to Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a distance of about three hours or so, in order to do some research on Jacob Ingledew.

  “One,” she said, “what has Jacob Ingledew got to do with Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain)? And two, what has Jacob Ingledew got to do with Pawhuska, Oklahoma?”

  I tried to explain that Fanshaw and his squaw, pregnant with Jacob’s child, had eventually rejoined the rest of his clan on the Osage reservation in Pawhuska, and that the early career of the man who was Vernon’s ancestor as well as a governor of Arkansas was an important “subtext” in the novel. But Kim and I have rarely been separated for an entire day, going separate places. I offered to take her with me, but I knew she had errands of her own to handle that day, and would decline the offer. I promised to try to get home before nightfall.

  In my red Jeep Cherokee I got away from Fayetteville before 7:00 a.m. and taking the Cherokee Turnpike reached Tulsa by 9:00 and turned northward on State II to Osage County, the largest of Oklahoma’s counties, larger than the state of Delaware. I was mindful of all these Indian names, and of the names of every town large and small I passed through, concluding with my destination, which was named after Paw-Hiu-Skah, or “White Hair,” a chief of the Little Osages, which included the Heart Stays People.

  It was a hot day—my Jeep’s external thermometer would register between 92 and 97 for most of the day, but of course I had air-conditioning. And Diet Cokes on ice. And a sense of excitement which even permitted me to fantasize, as thousands of email correspondents have done, about the charm of the unseen “other,” and what might transpire when two correspondents actually meet for the first time. I knew that she’d find nothing particular charming in me, thirty years her senior and a Paw-Hiu-Skah myself. But the manuscript, still in the yellow bandanna in which Day (or V. Kelian) had wrapped it, would be delivered into her surprised hands, and I might be invited to lunch, and that would be that: enough.

  The drive was not interesting; Oklahoma falls far short of Arkansas in attractiveness. I made mental note of an occasional interesting road sign such as “Little Dog Threasher Creek,” which might furnish topics for conversation. Although I was prepared by Dennis McAufliffe to find Pawhuska itself unglamorous—he had used words such as “run-down,” “god-awful,” “hellhole,” “deserted,” and “dump”—I was still unprepared to see what an ugly place it was, and I couldn’t imagine my Juliana being imprisoned there. As in small towns all over America, most of the downtown buildings were either abandoned or had been converted into uses far removed from their original intention. One of the few busy buildings with any trace of modernity was the supermarket, called “Homeland.” The name struck me because I had originally intended to call Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain) by that name.

  I stopped at Homeland to look at a telephone book. I can’t use the telephone, but if Juliana was listed it might give her street address. It was a yellow Southwestern Bell book for “Bartlesville Area,” including Pawhuska, but there was no “Heartstays” nor “Waspe” nor “Nancy Waspe” in it. I drove up the town’s one hill, called “Agency Hill,” and parked at the Osage Tribal Museum and Library, which really was not much more than a souvenir shop. I asked the lady running it, herself obviously an Indian, if she knew Juliana Heartstays or Juliana Nancy Waspe, and got only a blank look.

  Did she know anything about the band of Indians called Heart Stays People? Where had they lived? My poor hearing failed to catch several of her words, but I heard enough to understand that she really didn’t know anything. She suggested I might try the Osage County Museum, which was in the abandoned railroad station, and was not much more than a junk shop and used book store, and where the couple who ran it, both of them at least mixed-blood Indians, could not tell me anything about any Heart Stays people or anybody named Heartstays or Nancy Waspe.

  I was beginning to suspect that my email correspondent had just invented herself and her location. It was lunch-time and I missed the chance to be invited to have lunch with Juliana. I ate at the town’s lone remaining family restaurant, where I got a decent cheeseburger. The waitress, a thoroughly non-Indian blonde, had of course never heard of anybody named Juliana. While eating, it occurred to me to try the public library, which I did. The white librarian, a very polite and helpful lady, said she couldn’t reveal any information about library patrons, and thus couldn’t tell me if they had a patron of that name. “But couldn’t you tell me if there’s anyone by that name living in this town?” I begged. I think there could be, she said. But she had no idea where the person might live. “Have you ever heard of any band of Indians called the Heart Stays People?” I asked. No, but let me check, she said and disappeared into a room marked “Osage Materials.”

  While waiting, and waiting, I had nothing better to do than check the card catalog to see if they had any of my books. Nothing, of course. The librarian returned with a popular picture-book called The Osage, by Terry P. Wilson, and there was a map, “Osage Reservation Around 1900,” which showed Pawhuska on Bird Creek with five little dots upstream representing “Heart-Stays People.”
How far is that from here? I asked her.

  “There’s nothing up that way any more,” she said, and got a U.S. topographic survey map to show me how an “unimproved” (dirt) road led northward through a valley, between Bird Creek and Mud Creek to the area where the hummocks or “lenticular bottoms” (as John Joseph Mathews had called them) had led the Heart Stays People to pick a “permanent” campground reminding them of those sites they’d had to leave behind in Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. There were no habitations indicated anywhere in the area, just abandoned oil wells and an old railroad grade.

  “Is this road still passable?” I asked. The nice lady said she hadn’t ever been up that way.

  The road started near the Pawhuska cemetery, a sprawling necropolis suggesting that most of the Osages, like their oil reservation, were underground. The road cut through a ravine, stopped being blacktop, and continued on as a decent gravel road that meandered through thickets and straightened out onto the suggestion of a prairie, took a couple of sharp right angles, then roughened and weedened and climbed a hill and meandered through woods for quite a ways. At least there were tire tracks to suggest that the road was still in use, and I stayed on it for a couple of miles until finally it dropped down into a bosky dell alongside Bird Creek where I caught a glimpse of what might be those hummocks or lenticular bottoms, and where, finally, having seen no signs of human habitation yet, I came to a mailbox.

  It was an RFD mailbox beside a trail, and on the side of the mailbox was a red heart, but the heart was sideways, that is, it was resting on its side, it was sleeping, or it was staying, it was a Staying Heart. I turned into the trail, which wandered through the woods a ways and then emerged onto the lenticular bottoms where stood the most fabulous house I’ve ever seen. It gave a first impression of being thrown together by a horde of hippies on peyote, but on closer inspection was obviously the work of a trained postmodern architect who knew pretty much exactly what he was doing and had at least a million dollars to spend: it was a kind of vast enlargement of the same structure that I had illustrated in Chapter One of “the architecture book” as Fanshaw’s dwelling: a basketry paraboloid beehive, or rather a giant pair of them closely conjoined with several buttresses or protuberances or annexes. It hadn’t been built yesterday; it looked as if it had been there for several years at least, and thus Juliana could not have used the illustration of my book as her inspiration, not if she’d only discovered the book recently. It was a huge place, actually larger than Vernon’s double-bubble (which of course I had never seen but had had a good description of from Day and from Arch Schaffer), to which it bore a kind of kinship, in its bigeminality and its singularity, the principal difference being that Vernon’s house was on a mountaintop and this was right beside the banks of Bird Creek. Juliana was going to have a lot of explaining to do, about her extravagant house.

  I sat in the Jeep, transfixed by the palace, for a long time, long enough for Juliana to become aware of my presence in her driveway. Then I got out, toted the manuscript of Jacob Ingledew’s memoirs, and boldly approached the house’s huge oak door, and rang the doorbell. She answered at once.

  She was a great disappointment: round. Many Indian women seemingly settle into a general rotundity as they mature: their faces apple-shaped and almost swollen, their waistlines disappeared. Not fat necessarily but just circular. And her dark-skinned face beneath the thick, braided black hair was nothing at all like I’d fantasized. She was homeliness personified.

  “Juliana Nancy Waspe,” I said, trying to keep my chagrin out of my voice. “I am Donald Harington.” Whatever she replied was not clear enough for my deafness. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I should have told you that the only way we can communicate is by email…unless you want to use my note-cards. And I offered her my ballpoint and my pack of note-cards. But she would not take them.

  “Gone,” she said, raising her voice. And I could hear it. “Not here. Gone.”

  I perked up. “You aren’t Juliana?”

  The woman shook her head, and tried to shape her lips carefully: “Housekeeper.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” I said, beside myself. “So where’s she gone? When will she be back?”

  “Homeland,” she said. “Gone Homeland.”

  “The supermarket?” I asked.

  The woman laughed. I was glad to see that Indians have a sense of humor. The previous Indians I’d met that day had never even smiled. “Not that Homeland,” she said. “Not grocery store.” And then she pointed generally eastward, the way I had come, the way Fanshaw and Kushi had also come, and said carefully, “Gone to find her grandmother’s homeland. She and Threasher and Bending Bear. Left this morning.”

  “Who’s Threasher?”

  “Her dog.”

  “Who’s Bending Bear?”

  “Her chauffeur.”

  Chapter twelve

  Hoo Lordy it was hot as blue blazes and George was cussing hisself for not doing what Boss told him to do, take a few days off, which was what all the others was doing, Bo just a-cooterin around up yonder in Jelena’s garden patch and Arch a-floatin the Mulberry River and Lydia gone down to Pine Bluff for something or another and Monica gone home to Louisiana, and God knows what had become of Harry and Carleton, although if George looked hard enough he could probably find Cast, who was somewheres hereabouts, George had seen him earlier this morning down at the swimming hole on Swains Creek. Bo said they all needed a little spell of rest to catch their breath before gearing up for the big campaign that would run all the rest of the summer and into November.

  George doubted that Boss hisself was taking a break, but at least he’d gone back to his big easy chair in his office up under the dome of that puffball house of his, and although he was probably a-settin there reading books on how Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy got theirselfs elected, he was just a-lollygagging around compared with what he’d been doing for the past three months.

  But George didn’t rightly know how to take it easy, and here he was in his Explorer running all over God’s creation taking care of these razorbacks. He’d spent the morning rounding up and castrating the shoats—he allowed himself a smile, knowing what symbolism was and knowing there was a kind of symbol involved here—the rest of ’em all taking a lull to get ready and castrate that Shoat Bradfield and George with his trusty knife (there were others at the plant who could do it but not as quickly and painlessly as George) snipping off the balls of these just-weaned piglets.

  He’d also had to track down a boar named Schoonover, an old pal of his who’d somehow missed out getting castrated when he should’ve, and had taken to roaming the high hills of Juberaw or wherever, and George had spent most of the afternoon wearing out the Explorer and a-calling and a-calling old Schoonover (couldn’t nobody call a hog as good as George) and then finding him and sweet-talking him and sticking him with a anesthetic and slicing off his nuts, apologizing while he did it, and Schoonover hadn’t liked it one bit. A young pig didn’t seem to mind, or didn’t even seem to know what was happening to him, but an older hog sure did hate to get deballed. It didn’t happen often, but it was one of the few drawbacks of Boss’s idea of giving the hogs their freedom, which years ago Boss had explained to George, or tried to: you can’t pen up a hog without getting inferior meat. You’ve got to keep the animals from ever feeling that they belong to you. You’ve got to turn ’em loose. He knowed in reason that a free pig is a happy pig, and he’d understood that being happy truly makes the meat more tasty (Boss had tried to explain to George stuff about glycogen depletion and lactic acid build-up in stressful pigs, but George had taken his word for it).

  Now he was tired and dirty from wrassling with Schoonover and he was itching to get on home and take a shower and have a drink. As he passed the old Governor Ingledew house, however, he stomped on the brakes, for there in front of the house, parked, was a sleek black vintage automobile of some kind, and a real big fellow polishing it with a chamois rag. George hadn’t seen a car that old
in Stay More since Doc Swain passed on, and for a moment he felt himself transported back in time. He knew that the strange woman who lived here—he’d met her many a time and to himself called her “Cat”—was a rich writer-lady who was hiding out from the world, and Boss had made it clear that George and everbody else in Stay More would do whatever they could to protect the woman and her privacy. So who was this giant dude with the fancy antique auto and what was he parked here for?

  George got out of his Explorer to take a better look. The man had a dog, a mongrel setter or something, and the dog commenced barking at George, which he didn’t like, because he had more right to be here than the dog did. The man gave George just a glance and said to the dog, “Shush,” and then resumed polishing the fender with the chamois rag, but George gave the man a thorough scrutiny. He was plumb nearly seven foot tall and broad as a corncrib door and was a-wearing one of them Hawaiian sport shirts, but on his head he had a black uniform cap, like a hired driver would wear. As George got closer, he saw that the man had dark reddish skin and dark hair, and by God if he sure didn’t look like he was some kind of injun! George had known only a few injuns in his life, mostly boys in Vietnam, good soldiers but hard to know. They’d all been of a average size, though, not overlarge like this feller.

  “Howdy,” George says politely but warily.