Vernon himself was valiantly trying to combat the attack, by temporarily abandoning his stump speaking rallies with their ham feasts and bands and singers and cheerleaders, and going instead to any church that would accept him (he hit seven the first Sunday morning, but three of those were Unitarian) and professing his profound knowledge of the Bible and his abiding faith in the existence, if not the divinity, of a Savior.
It would be three weeks before Vernon would get a chance to return to Stay More. When Day saw him again, he was stunned to see how haggard Vernon was. Day had always admired and envied Vernon’s indefatigability, but now here Vernon looked as if he couldn’t get out of his chair if he wanted to, which was good, because he didn’t want to. So he just sat and told Day of some of the rough encounters he’d had with ministers and church elders and one woman churchgoer who had spat in his face and called him Satan. And then, Diana not being present, Vernon confided in his best friend, telling Day that he was hopelessly in love with Juliana. He began with a question, “Day, old friend, do you think it’s possible for a man to be equally in love with two women?” Day, who was in love with Jelena himself but not as much as he was with Diana, perhaps for the simple reason he’d never gone to bed (or the shower) with her, had protested that he couldn’t really answer the question since he’d never had any experience along that line. He said he supposed it would take great powers of concentration and greater powers of feeling, and, above all, supreme powers of diplomacy in the event that one woman found out about the other.
“Does Jelena know?” Day asked.
“Not yet,” Vernon admitted. “I mean, she doesn’t yet know that I’m crazy about Juliana, although she probably suspects that we’re fooling around.”
“No wonder you’re all worn out,” Day observed.
Vernon laughed. “Not from that. Although I’ve got to tell you…” And then he described, in intimate detail, not one but two sexual encounters he’d had with Juliana, the first three weeks ago, the second just last night. Day was just a bit uncomfortable listening. Vernon had never once told Day anything about his sex life with Jelena. Now he was being erotically frank in describing just what he and Juliana had done. Not boastfully, not lasciviously, but just matter-of-factly as if he were recounting not his own adventure but that of Jacob Ingledew and Kushi a hundred and sixty years before. As a matter of fact, whether by design or by disposition—whether she was trying to imitate her ancestor Kushi or whether that was simply the way she was—Juliana had at the moment of climax unclasped her legs which were around his back and had straightened them out and then her whole body had arched itself into a long quivering arc: a bow, a soft but taut arch that held him suspended up from the ground for a long moment until he had his own stupefying climax. That was a nearly exact duplication of the orgasms of Jacob and Kushi as described in his memoirs.
Vernon also spared Day no amplification of the various sexual supplements that enhanced Juliana’s sensuality, things she’d done that Jelena had never known. “I’ve suspected that Indian women simply have a greater repertoire of sexual turns and tricks than white women. At least my reading into American Indian customs has led me to believe that. But Juliana claims it isn’t true. She says Indian women have stronger libidos, and that’s all there is to it: where there’s the appetite, there’s the inventiveness.”
“Apart from her prowess in the sack,” Day said offhandedly, “what do you see in her?”
“Oh, come on, Day!” Vernon chided him. “She’s exotic! She’s gorgeous! And she’s dynamic!”
“But how on earth can you keep your mind on the business of running for governor?”
“Now that is a problem,” Vernon admitted.
Day congratulated himself, later, that he had not even hinted around the possibility that Jelena herself might be enjoying a sexual adventure. But Vernon’s brief stopover in Stay More was accompanied by the Samurai, who were holding a planning session to get ready for Bradfield’s week-long assault on the matter of Vernon’s thirty-year relationship with his first cousin Jelena. Once again Day and Diana had overnight guests in Lydia and Arch; Monica and Harry were staying with Sharon and Larry; Cast was staying with his girlfriend Sheila, and Bo was ensconced in his familiar guestroom at Vernon’s house, where, presumably, when Vernon sneaked away to visit Juliana, he would sneak with Jelena out into the secret garden, or use the shower again, or the king-sized bed.
Diana and Day were happy to have houseguests, and they genuinely liked Lydia Caple and Arch Schaffer. But Day was not at all amused by the irony that Stay More, long a ghost town, was beginning to fill up with characters and their intrigues. Even apart from the Samurai, who appeared to love the town so much they might as well have set up their campaign headquarters here (which Monica had actually suggested at one time, a not altogether frivolous or wistful idea), and even apart from the newsmen and television people who prowled around in search of local color—or scandal—there seemed to be a steady rise in Stay More’s population which abnegated its charm as a ghost town.
When Day and Diana had first arrived here at the beginning of the Seventies, they had the whole place practically to themselves. Then Larry Brace had come to town, and Sharon had joined him, and then Ekaterina, and as the ham works had expanded its employees had bought up the outlying abandoned houses. Nobody was keeping count, but it seemed Stay More had as much occupancy of dwellings as it ever had, even in its heyday. And now here were the two Indians, apparently considering themselves permanent residents or reclaimants of their ancestral lands. The house of Day and Diana was still at the end of its road, and still enjoyed abundant privacy, yet Day sometimes found his sleep troubled by the thought that there were in the neighborhood dozens of other humans sleeping—or having exceptional sex.
But the population was going to be reduced by one. The planning session of the Samurai, apparently, did not come up with any better counter to Bradfield’s intended attack than to suggest that Jelena ought to start accompanying Vernon on his campaign tour. Was that Bo’s idea? Did Bo think it would permit him to see more of her? No, it was Vernon’s idea, who argued thus: if Bradfield was going to call public attention to the “illegitimacy” of Vernon’s relationship with Jelena, the public was naturally going to be very curious to see her. Keeping her hidden back in Stay More would just make it look as if he were trying to keep his relationship secret. So why not put her on display? Let the world see what a lovely lady she was. Somehow Vernon (perhaps with an assist from Bo) persuaded the reluctant Jelena not only to do this, but also to buy herself a new wardrobe of smart summer separates and suits, and to visit a hairdresser, and to appear at a number of rallies looking like what Vernon proudly introduced her as: “the next First Lady of Arkansas.”
For the whole week that the Bradfield campaign was attacking her—or attacking the idea of her as an unmarried consort and cousin of the candidate, Jelena diffidently but boldly appeared with Vernon at rallies all over Arkansas. Monday night, anyone who watched reruns on television would repeatedly see a commercial consisting of footage of Jelena (not in her First Lady garb but taken by some paparazzo who’d caught her in unbecoming dishabille) superimposed with the letters “P.O.S.S.L.Q.” and a voice-over that asked mockingly “People of Offensive Sexual Situations Living Quietly? Partner Opposing Safe Sex Laughs Queasily? Perhaps Occupants Shouldn’t Save Leftover Q-Tips? Please Omit Such Sinful Life-styles Quickly?” And then on Tuesday, at a rally in Jonesboro, thousands of people would turn out to see her waving and smiling to the crowd, and then affectionately holding Vernon’s arm. All of their head-shakings and “tsk tsk”s and their disapproving sneers and scrapings of one forefinger with the other would dwindle and disappear as a barbershop quartet from Vernon’s Vocalists would serenade her with a rousing take-off on “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”
She was a drawing card, there was no question of that, and the idea of flaunting her instead of hiding her began to plant an idea in Day’s mind. Nobody had asked him for any adv
ice on the campaign, and he certainly had little interest in, and less knowledge of, politics, but this whole contest between albatrosses and foo birds was beginning to seem absurd to him, although he understood that it was what people expected in any sort of political campaign. He had given a lot of thought lately to how to put a stop to it, and Jelena’s public humiliation—if that was what it was, and he knew she hated every minute of it—made him determined to come up with a solution.
Before he got any opportunity to offer his unsolicited advice to Vernon’s people (he chided himself for that excluding expression, as if he himself were not the utmost of Vernon’s people) he was solicited to give advice in his field of expertise. One day in August he arrived home for lunch (he’d been thinning some stands of cedar in the nearby Ozark National Forest) to find on his message machine (Diana had gone shopping in Harrison for the day) this throaty message: “Hi, Day, this is Juliana Heartstays. I didn’t have much chance to speak with you during the turtle banquet last month. When you get a chance, could you drop by the wigwam? Or, if you prefer, or if I’m not there, could you drop by Ekaterina’s?”
Day smiled. For a brief moment he allowed himself the fantasy that since Vernon had been gone for a while Juliana’s notorious Indian libido was acting up and she needed a substitute for Vernon. After lunch and a shower Day drove his Jeep Cherokee to the wigwam; one good thing about being your own employer is that you don’t have to return to work after lunch if you don’t feel like it. She came out of the wigwam (wasn’t it awfully hot in there?) and sat in the Jeep beside him. He left the air-conditioning running.
“Vernon tells me you’re a forester,” she said to him.
My God, up close she was breathtaking. And her simple words in that deep vibrant voice were as if she were professing her love for him.
“I don’t live in the forest,” he said. “Not at night, anyway. Maybe ‘dendrologist’ would be a better word.”
“What’s that?”
“A student of trees.”
“Exactly why I want to see you,” she said, and there was the pinprick in the bubble of his fantasy. “Can a dendrologist look at a piece of land and tell what kind of trees used to grow there? I mean, for example, this pasture was cleared by white settlers at one time. Would you be able to tell me what was growing here originally?”
“That’s easy,” he said.
She got out of the Jeep and came around to the driver’s side and opened the door and took his hand. “Come,” she said, and his fantasy leapt into his vision again, full-blown. But she didn’t lead him to the wigwam. She led him to a spot between two hummocks of earth, and pointed at the turf. “Here, for example,” she said. “What was growing here two hundred years ago?”
“Right where you’re pointing,” he declared, “nothing grew, because one of your ancestors had cut down an elm tree to make room for another wigwam. But here—” he pointed to a spot just to the west of where she’d pointed “—there was a giant maple.”
“You’re good,” she said. “Now my question is, would it be possible to put that giant maple back? Or one just like it?”
“Do you mean transplant a mature maple to this spot?”
She nodded and he hedged, “It would be awfully complicated. It would require some heavy machinery—backhoes and a truck-mounted tree spade and a huge flatbed hauling truck—but it could be done.”
“When can you start?”
He laughed. “I don’t normally contract heavy equipment, and in any case you’d have to wait until the cooler weather of autumn to do it.”
“Day,” she said earnestly, in her throaty voice, and sweeping her hands to encompass the whole area, “whenever you can do it. And not just the maple, but everything. I want to make all of this look as it used to look before the white men came. I want to restore this piece of earth to its original appearance.”
“It would be terribly expensive,” he pointed out.
“That doesn’t give me a moment’s thought,” she said. “Can you do it? I know it may take you a good bit of time just to do the planning, and deciding what goes where, and finding the trees and all, but I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
“Have you asked Vernon what he thinks of the idea?” Day had a suspicion that Vernon might not like the idea of a drastic reshaping of this part of Stay More’s landscape.
“I don’t need his permission,” she said. “He has given the Heart Stays site back to us. My lawyers have drawn up the papers. The only permission I need is yours.”
Day knew he could do it if he had to. It would be a challenging assignment, to determine what large trees had originally grown all over the pasture when it was forest, and to replace them, and to turn the entire site into a kind of laboratory where he could watch a climax forest coming into contact with humanity.
She raised her eyebrows. “Do you think it’s preposterous?”
“I think the idea is radical but it’s feasible, and even exciting. As the old song goes, ‘If you got the money, honey, I got the time.’”
“I would have just one requirement,” she said. “I would want you to hire Bending Bear as part of your crew. Well, I mean, you wouldn’t have to give him a salary; he’s already got one. But I want him to participate, and he needs some busy-work, because he doesn’t have to do much driving for me anymore.”
“Be glad to have him,” Day said. He liked Bending Bear. He knew that the big fellow was a deviate; Day and Vernon had joked about Ben’s crush on George, who didn’t know what to do about it. But Day couldn’t imagine that Ben’s sexual orientation would create any problems on the job of moving trees.
“So back to my question: when can you start?” she asked.
“Might as well start now,” he said. “Let me get my notebook from the Jeep.” He got his notebook and his pencil and began making a sketch of the site. “You’ll have to let me know where your property lines are,” he told her.
She laughed. “Osages don’t believe in property. But if you can simply tell by looking at the land where the trees were, can’t you tell where the encampment was?”
“I’d say it included both sides of the creek.” He squinted toward the west. “Possibly from yonder bluff—” he pointed to the rocky banks beyond a meadow on the other side of Swains Creek “—to just about the edge of the road up there. And from where the old Duckworth place stood, to the south, on up to just this side of where the canning factory used to be. Maybe about thirty acres, all told.”
“You’re good,” she said again. “You really are very, very good. Especially by including the other side of the creek. Because that’s where I’m going to build my house.”
“Oh?” he said. “The wigwam’s not big enough for you?”
She laughed. “The wigwam’s a playhouse. For now, it’s just a playhouse.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said.
She gave him a look, and then remarked, “You’re Vernon’s bosom buddy, aren’t you?”
“We go way back,” Day admitted.
“Has he told you about us?”
“Jacob Ingledew had already done that,” Day said.
She poked him in the ribs. “Day! So you’ve read the memoirs too? I hope you don’t think I’ve just been trying to relive the past. Osages believe the past is past and gone, that change is inevitable, that the course of history can’t be reversed.”
“Then why do you want the trees back?” he asked.
“If anybody asks, tell them that I value my privacy.”
And that was that. Day spent another hour by himself, tramping around the former location of the Indian encampment, making notes in his notebook. A great oak stood here. A cluster of elms here. There was a green ash, and a stand of white ash, there were several swamp chestnut oaks, along with cherrybark oaks, hickories, black-gums, and winged elms. Day took pride in his ability to be a tree, to think like one, to know where, for example, if he were a sassafras, he would want to stand. When the time came to give each of these trees a personal
name, he’d have to ask his “client” for actual Osage names.
Juliana had briefly returned to her playhouse, stayed there a while, and then, as Day was concluding his inventory of the former arboreal citizens of the campsite, she came to him briefly to say she was going on back to Ekaterina’s house. “I neglected to ask,” she said, “and it’s not even important and you don’t have to tell me, but what should I be paying you? Could I give you some sort of retainer now, or should I start a salary, or what?”
Day decided that if she didn’t yet know that he and Diana had no need for remuneration, she would probably find out, soon enough. Day hadn’t worked for wages since he’d bagged at a supermarket at the age of seventeen. The U.S. Forest Service had sent him periodic checks for the services he was rendering on government lands and he had simply forwarded them to Diana’s team of accountants, who spared him from ever having to think that he was gainfully employed. Diana herself had no interest in money. Neither of them had ever bothered to estimate her incredible net worth, and neither of them ever discussed the subject or gave any thought to it. Day knew that Juliana too was fabulously rich, but probably not as much as Diana. The mention of the subject gave him a headache. “Let’s not discuss it,” he told Juliana. “I’ll just let you know what my expenses are, when they occur.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 130