The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Boy, you may think I live up here by myself on this mountain without knowing nothing about what’s going on in this world. But I read the papers. And I watch the TV. And I have reached the solemn conclusion that Shoat Bradfield is a lowdown miserable eggsucking son of a bitch.”

  In not quite the same words, former governor and senator David Pryor, the best-loved former politician in Arkansas, will lam-baste Bradfield on election eve. Vernon will relent and permit Jelena to bring her little television set out from under its dishcloth in the pantry (where he will have discovered it months before while searching for a jar of marmalade) because Jelena will have heard from Cast (who will have arranged it) that the popular Pryor will be planning to make an important television appearance, not as a paid political advertisement but at the invitation of the networks: all the local affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox will broadcast the interview. “I have refrained from speaking out on this election before now,” Pryor will declare to his statewide audience, “because I didn’t think Vernon Ingledew would need any help from me, considering all the other endorsements he has had. But now it would appear that there are still a few voters in this great state of ours who plan to vote for Bradfield. Friends, you must not allow this to happen. You people know that I can be trusted, so please trust me when I tell you this: Shoat Bradfield is beneath contempt. In all my years in politics, I have not encountered a more despicable excuse for a man. He is an embarrassment to the whole state of Arkansas. He must be driven from office, and Vernon Ingledew is the man to drive him!”

  Despite this ringing endorsement, and all the commentary which will follow it, in which dozens of the state’s celebrities—solons, academics, business leaders, writers (including the Author) and a movie star or two (all recruited and arranged by Cast) will be interviewed and will be unanimous in concurring with Pryor that Shoat Bradfield is disgraceful (“He makes my flesh crawl,” the Author will comment to an interviewer at KHOG, a Fayetteville affiliate of ABC), Vernon will not change his mind about being passive in the best Taoist tradition. But he will do one thing that is active rather than passive: he will decide to vote, and, of course, he will have been persuaded by all those people on Jelena’s TV set not to vote for that wretch Bradfield.

  Because of Stay More’s declining population over the years, Swain’s Creek Township will no longer have a polling place; the nearest such will be in Parthenon, itself scarcely more than a dying village, some seven miles away. On election day morning, Jelena will prepare and serve to Vernon his favorite breakfast, Swedish pancakes. While eating it, he will read the morning paper, in which the lead editorial will call him the lesser of two evils, one columnist will call Bradfield “the more experienced of two blunderers,” while Hank Endicott will observe, “When all the mud is cleared away, Vernon Ingledew is still at least recognizable.” After breakfast, Vernon will get into Jelena’s Isuzu and allow her to drive him to Parthenon. By coincidence they will be casting their votes there at the same time as Diana and Day, Sharon and Larry, George, and Vernon’s father, the sum of eligible voters at Stay More. Eight votes right there.

  But statewide, voters will stay away from the polls in droves. Or voters will go to the polls to vote for their county judge or sheriff but will leave blank the boxes marked Bradfield and Ingledew. All of those close to him will urge Vernon to accompany them to campaign headquarters in Fayetteville for the counting and announcing of the vote totals, but Vernon will elect to remain at home. Jelena will elect to remain with him, but he will not again allow her to get that little TV out of the pantry, so the only way she will be able to find out how the tabulations will be going is from phone messages from campaign headquarters, where Monica will be busy as ever but will take a moment now and again to call Jelena and tell her that Vernon is ahead in Pulaski and Washington counties but Bradfield is ahead everywhere else.

  Throughout the evening, the vote totals will show Bradfield slightly ahead. “Maybe you were right,” Jelena will remark to Vernon at her bedtime, which she will defer. “It looks like the bastard has got it.” Just to make conversation, Vernon will tell her about De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae, and about what Harry Wolfe had said. Jelena will remember the book; she will remember Vernon’s having found it and blown the dust off it in an obscure basement bookstore in Rome, during their travels around the world. She will remember his refusal to read it and his donation of it to the Library of Congress.

  “According to Harry,” Vernon will tell her, “it was a close vote. But Vernealos lost.”

  The phone will ring several times before midnight with requests from television stations who will want to capture Vernon’s concession speech, if he will give one. He will not. “I conceded a couple of weeks ago,” he will remark, off the record, to one caller. And then he will announce to Jelena that he must get up to his study and resume his investigation of quantum mechanics. He will kiss her goodnight. She will turn on the message machine of the phone and go to bed.

  The messages on the machine the next morning she will take and collate and bring to him in bed with a cup of coffee. Bradfield will have maintained his slim lead until the absentee ballots will have been tabulated. Customarily absentee votes come from people who are travelers, and travelers are usually broader if not more intelligent than non-travelers. (“The Arkansas Traveler” is a figure of legend.) The absentees will have been nearly all for Vernon Ingledew, and will have been sufficient to elect him as the next governor of Arkansas. Briefly and quickly now but in no particular order: the Author and his wife Kim will be invited to the inaugural gala in Little Rock, and will attend, and will dance, but will not be given an opportunity to speak to the new governor himself. Arch will introduce them to Bo and to Cast, and they will overhear the three Samurai standing proudly together as Arch will remark, “The people always win,” a take-off on the state’s motto, Regnat Populus.

  Vernon Ingledew will not succeed in extirpating the public school system, nor the hospitals, nor the prisons, although the latter will be radically overhauled. His attempt to abolish or even to reform the school system will die in the Legislature, and his attempt to extirpate hospitals will languish in committee for the duration of his term.

  He will succeed in extirpating the smoking of tobacco, although it will take him his entire term to eradicate the weed entirely. He will not quite succeed in extirpating firearms, but will make the ownership or possession of a handgun virtually impossible.

  Most notable about the Ingledew administration will be that it will be so inconspicuous and low profile. In accordance with the ideas of The Tao, the less you do about governing people the better your government will proceed.

  Also, such an inconspicuous approach will allow you to accomplish things without attracting a lot of attention. Vernon will pardon Juliana and Ben from their prison sentences with scarcely any mention in the newspapers, just in time for them to return to live in Stay More in Juliana’s fabulous new mansion surrounded by Day Whittacker’s forest and there give birth to her baby.

  But that will be another story, another episode in the story that will never end.

  Acknowledgments to the First Edition

  Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain) is not purely a work of the imagination. Like its predecessor or first half of its parentheses or bookends, The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, the Acknowledgements to which began identically, this novel conflates real people and fictional characters. I have always been amused by authors’ declarations that “any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental,” tantamount to declaring the characters pasteboard and unconvincing. There are real people in this novel, and I have used their actual names and identities, to the point of my publisher’s lawyers asking me to have them sign a “character release,” the document title suggesting to some of them that I have requested their relinquishing their character, if they possessed any to begin with.

  In the Acknowledgements to The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks I bem
oaned my exile or isolation in the pastoral state of Vermont, where I lived and taught and wrote for many years, and I thanked the many people with whom I had corresponded, not one of whom I had met, and I even thanked the people who had written me appreciatively about my previous novels, only two of whom I’d met. I was consumed with homesickness for my native state, Arkansas, a situation I alleviated some twenty years ago when I came back home to live for good and marry Kim.

  Several years ago two students signed up for my evening art history course, Twentieth Century European Art: one of them was Barbara Pryor, wife of the distinguished former governor and United States senator from Arkansas, David Pryor. The other was Archie Schaffer III, vice president for public relations at giant Tyson Foods. In the course of time both Barbara and Archie became my good friends, and when I decided finally to ask Vernon Ingledew to run for governor in a new novel, I sought their advice. Archie and I discussed Vernon’s candidacy over several lunches and in the course of time exchanged dozens of emails about it, and naturally I decided, with his permission, to appoint Archie as one of the Vernon’s campaign staff. I am deeply grateful for all of his help and for his permission to use him as not just a character but a key player in this story. His daughter Eliot also signed a “character release.”

  While I have met with Arch frequently, I have yet to meet Monica Breedlove, who is just as real as he is but lives in Louisiana and hardly ever visits Arkansas again since the days she was one of Bill Clinton’s aides in the statehouse. Her expertise in politics made her a logical person for that part in the Samurai’s machinations and I thank her for her willingness to jump in and help.

  Other people in the book who are “real” include Bob Razer at the Little Rock Public Library, my longtime advocate among Arkansas readers, and of course both former Arkansas governors and U.S. Senators, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor. My colleague at the University of Arkansas, Professor Daniel Levine of the Classics Department, while he may not actually have undertaken the translation of De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae, furnished the title for it.

  One of my art history majors, Rhonda Pitman, is an Indian from Oklahoma, and she provided me with much information about her people, particularly women such as Juliana Heartstays.

  The first people to hear me describe this project were my beloved wife Kim’s parents, Micky and Jacque Gunn, lifelong observers of the Arkansas political scene, and they encouraged their son-in-law’s idea for a novel about the subject. The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, same number of chapters, same setting, also about Ingledews, but written when Bill Clinton was getting his law degree at Yale, was dedicated to my father and mother. This end of the parenthesis is dedicated to my father-in-law and mother-in-law.

  When the novel was finished, its first readers included Barbara Pryor and also Lisa Morgan, whose responses to the story are greatly appreciated. The first truly to sense the merit and appeal of the story was my editor, Tom Bissell, who did such a bang-up edit on the book that I hereby appoint him honorary Eighth Samurai.

  Just before launching the writing of the novel, at Arch Schaffer’s suggestion we held a grand picnic at Stay More (or “Drakes Creek” as its model is known), with former governor David Pryor attending, and his wife Barbara along with the wives of all the rest of us, who ate not turtles but a fabulous pot of beans and a cake furnished by the present occupant of the “Governor Ingledew” house, who is not the Woman Whom We Cannot Came, because we can name her, Jo Lewis. Also at the picnic, in addition to the President’s cousin, Roy Clinton, was my good friend Roy Reed, author of the recent biography of former governor Orval Faubus, which had considerable influence on this novel, and Michael Dabrishus, head of Special Collections at the University.

  It was a splendid occasion, for which Arch furnished the beverages, and I gave a reading from the first half of the parenthesis, the story of the idiots who gathered on the Ingledew store porch, which is still standing, and served as a platform for our picnic. The final words of the Acknowledgments for that first half of the parenthesis still echo in my ears: “Most of these structures no longer stand, but that fact makes them no less ‘real.’ They stood, and that is, like all of us, what matters.”

  There are still real buildings standing at Stay More. And there are real people in the pages of this novel. But nothing that happens in this novel ever actually took place, except in your mind, where it matters most.

  Praise for Donald Harington’s With

  “With is among the best of many fine novels produced by Harington, and may be, for all its expansive humanity, his finest yet…. With, in short, is a novel about everything that matters…. If any more life-affirming, more surprising, more beautifully written novel has been published in recent years, I've missed it. Don’t you, fellow readers, miss this one.” The Boston Globe

  “With is a joy to read…as whimsical as a paper-doll show while being deeply rooted in the earth; it gives the Garden of Eden myth a happy ending, and should find the wide readership that Harington so richly deserves.” The Washington Post

  “A sweet, lightly erotic fable about coming of age, real love and the gravitational force exerted by a sense of place…surprising, puckish, poignant…a fictive crazy quilt that accomplishes many things, none of which will leave its readers on steady ground.” Time Out New York

  “Transforming a kidnapping plot into an epic rural fable and then a touchingly poignant love story, Harington crafts a wildly imaginative tour de force…this powerful effort should further enhance his reputation as one of the great undiscovered novelists of our time.” Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “It’s sexy, funny, and reaches a splendid crescendo as Robin grows into the full power of her womanhood, becoming both an Eve conceived in innocence but elevated beyond it to knowledge, and the crucial element in what can only be called a creation myth. A key work in Harington’s one-of-a-kind oeuvre.” Kirkus, starred review

  “Imagine if Larry McMurtry somehow teamed with Laura Ingalls Wilder to craft a postmodern, magical realist fable that dropped her frontier homestead on the outskirts of his modern-day Thalia. That’'s the neat trick Harington pulls off with this richly imagined, lovingly rendered exploration of the unintended consequences of human—and animal—desire.” Booklist starred review

  “…a marvelous story of improbable growth, heroic resolve, and life-giving love. With is still a Harington novel—which is to say a work of sprightly, delightful humor. But With mixes the light with the very dark…With conjures a magic that is exceptional even for Harington.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

  “Arkansas novelist Donald Harington has tilled his corner of the Ozarks for nearly 40 years, and the soil shows no signs of exhaustion. His yarns defy classification—one reason you haven’t seen them on a rack at your neighborhood supermarket. They combine old-fashioned, down home storytelling with postmodern, Nabokovian trickery…one of America’s rarer literary sensibilities.” LA Times

  “A beautiful and terrifying story of self-reliance and flowering self-discovery…. Always a treat, Mr. Harington’s novels are stylistically inventive, warm and funny. Capturing the best in “Arkansas Traveler” mountain wit, with a depth rarely matched in modern fiction, Mr. Harington’s novels are not to be missed.” Ghoti Magazine

  “…With is many things: a crime story, a love story and a ghost story. It is a tale of survival and a homage to the natural world. It is a literary tour de force that takes readers on a wild ride—emphasis on the wild. With starts out like Lolita, then detours through Swiss Family Robinson before allowing its Odysseus to get back home to his true love. It sounds wacky and it is, but here’s the thing, here’s the marvelous thing: It works…. This is a clever, sensual, empathetic and, above all, moving book, and it should have lots of readers.” The News & Observer

  “Don Harington plumbs the resources of the novel form, from grammar and syntax—pronouns, verb tenses—to topics such as the missing father and genres such as animal fable, ghost story and Biblical myth�
�a rare entertainment…he is among our most daring Makers.” The Providence Journal

  “Harington makes the novel more and more formally playful by revealing deeper and deeper layers to the story and its narrator…burying ideas deep in the tale and only revealing them slowly and gradually, a story as striptease. As a result, the final hundred pages are as finely imagined and gorgeously whimsical as anything you’re likely to read this year.” Book Reporter.com

  “The Arkansas novelist takes us to an imaginative place where we care deeply about each personality. And the ending, oh my, the ending. Suspense story. Love story. Ghost story. Coming-of-age story. Take your pick. Each one accurately describes this Ozarkian world you’ll love to inhabit.” Southern Living

  “If you aren't considered America's greatest novelist, there's a certain cachet to being known as ‘America's greatest unknown novelist.’ A number of contemporaries, colleagues and critics have put Donald Harington on that unknown throne—and he is certainly a legitimate pretender and contender…in With, we return to Stay More for a tale that may be the author’s most magical, mystical tour.” The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “…if readers give themselves to this demanding, suspenseful and joyful novel, it will thrive in their hearts and imaginations. The success of With depends not only on readers’ willingness to go along with Harington on this perilous, inevitable, lovely journey, but on the exuberantly homely, humble and poetic Ozark language with which he fills the book. For almost 500 pages, this irresistible tide of unique talk and narration individualized for humans and animals, sweeps you along.” The Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “…will surprise and delight you…. Harington’s writing is at once playful and serious, tender, sexy, tragic, brutal and redemptive…. He never falters, and you never doubt him for a second.” Bookpage