The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  In what year did you go to Arkansas?

  ———Eighteen or nineteen years ago….

  What year was that?

  ———Thirty-one, I reckon. His voice seemed to have changed.

  Where are you now? What is the name of the town?

  ———Don’t live in town.

  No? Then what is the name of the county?

  ———Isaac, it is.

  Diana realized that she was beginning to breathe hard and audibly. She put her hand on her chest and took a deep breath, then asked her next question:

  What is the name of the nearest town? Where do you do your shopping or trading?

  ———I don’t do any shopping or trading.

  But what is the name of the county seat? Do you know the name of the seat of Isaac County?

  ———That would be Jessup.

  Diana gave Mr. Sedgely a stare and shook her head. She was shaking her head in incredulity that he should know this, but Mr. Sedgely thought she was denying the accuracy of the answers she was getting, and he spread his hands and shrugged. Diana fought to control her voice for the next question

  What is your wife’s name?

  ———Haven’t got one.

  What? You don’t have a wife?

  No.

  Diana looked at Mr. Sedgely again and he leaned toward her and whispered, “Maybe he isn’t married yet. I’ll move—”

  “No,” Diana said. “He has to have a wife. Unless…” She asked another question:

  Were you ever married?

  No.

  But haven’t you ever fathered any children?

  She waited a full minute and then asked again:

  Didn’t you ever father a child?

  ———Yes, once, maybe.

  How long ago was this?

  ———Oh, twenty years or more, back in Carolina.

  Carolina?

  Yes.

  What was it, a boy or a girl?

  ———It was a girl.

  Where is she now?

  ———I don’t rightly know, sister, tell you the truth. She left me.

  Diana leaned toward Mr. Sedgely and asked, “Could you move him up again?”

  “How far?” Mr. Sedgely wanted to know.

  “Well—” Diana said, trying to calculate.

  “How about up to the day of his death?” Mr. Sedgely suggested. “That’s customary.”

  “Well—” she was reluctant and nervous. “All right.”

  Mr. Sedgely said to Day, “Now it is later, you will go on, you are going on until your last day on earth. This is the last day you live on earth.” To Diana he whispered, “Ask him what you like.”

  She asked:

  Did you ever find your daughter?

  Sure did. And hers too.

  What is your daughter’s name?

  Annie.

  Where is she?

  Out there.

  Out where?

  Somewhere. I don’t know. Just out there.

  What is she doing?

  Looking for me, I suppose.

  Why is she looking for you?

  Because I’ve got her little girl.

  Diana closed her eyes and slowly inhaled. Exhaling, and opening her eyes, she asked:

  Why do you have her?

  I intend to bring her up right.

  How old is she?

  Reckon near about three or so.

  Can she talk?

  Some.

  Diana was firing the questions rapidly now.

  Is she there with you right now?

  Yes.

  Ask her what her name is.

  She says it’s “Dinah.”

  What is she doing?

  Just sitting on a rock.

  Is she frightened?

  Not a bit. She’s laughing.

  What are you going to do with her?

  Already told you. I’m going to bring her up right.

  What do you mean by “right”?

  To give her a self of her own. To teach her how to read nature. To show her how to feel, and how to keep her mind away when it’s not wanted. To protect her from—Hark!

  For the first time the boy’s immobile face registered an emotion, an expression of intense concentration. His eyes remained closed, but suddenly his brow twisted, his mouth twisted, and a low moan came from him.

  Ow!

  he said, and clutched his shoulder with his hand.

  Winged me!

  “Stop it,” Diana said to Mr. Sedgely. “That’s enough! Wake him up!”

  “I can’t, just yet,” Mr. Sedgely said, “but I’ll do this:

  “It’s later now, you feel no pain, it’s later, an hour later now, and you feel no pain.”

  Then Mr. Sedgely asked him:

  Where are you?

  Floating.

  Can you see yourself? Mr. Sedgely asked him. Where is your body?

  Flat out on the ground.

  Does your body feel anything?

  Nothing.

  Are there people there?

  Yes. Officers, deputies, state troopers. What are they doing?

  Just standing around, looking at my body.

  Is the little girl still there?

  No. They’ve taken her away.

  What are you going to do now?

  Hang around and watch them bury me.

  Then what?

  I don’t know. Maybe I’d like to come again.

  “Any more questions, Miss Stoving? Anything else you’d like to ask?”

  “No. Not now.”

  “Very well.” He turned to Day and said, “Then on the count of three, you will be back to the present time. One…two…three.”

  Day opened his eyes and smiled and said “Hi” at her and then he looked at Mr. Sedgely and asked, “What time is it?”

  “Fifteen after twelve,” Mr. Sedgely said.

  “My gosh,” Day said. “I’ve got to get home. I’ll catch heck from my mother.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Diana offered.

  Seven

  A Conversation Is Had, Which Diana Finds Interesting

  “I saw them only once after that,” Mr. Sedgely related, when I questioned him in March of the following year. “It was the next afternoon. They came together, and she asked me to teach her how to hypnotize. I told her, of course, that hypnosis was not easy to learn, and, since she seemed to be impatient, it was certainly nothing she could learn in one quick lesson. But—and I assure you I did this without any inkling of what ultimate use she may have made of it—I told her that if it was simply a matter of putting Day into a trance, I could condition him through posthypnotic suggestion to go into a trance any time she simply said, ‘Go to sleep, Day.’ I made sure that he himself agreed to that, and then I gave him the posthypnotic suggestion, and invited them to keep in touch, but that was the last I saw of them. I must confess, sir, that I was very curious, and hoped they would keep me informed of their further researches. Imagine my disappointment when I never saw either of them again. Blame me, if you wish, for having rediscovered Montross in the first place in the person of Day Whittacker, but I can hardly be blamed for whatever two impetuous young people take it upon themselves to do with their lives.”

  Diana, after spending the night restlessly in a Passaic motel, kept her rendezvous with Day Whittacker the next morning—away from his home, away from his mother, at a park overlooking the Passaic River. Before meeting him, however, she visited several service stations until she found a road map of Connecticut. But she couldn’t locate Dudleytown on it. She then went to the Passaic Public Library and asked to consult some detailed atlases of Connecticut. Again she found no Dudleytown. She was unable, after her sleepless night, to accept without much skepticism the information she had learned from Day during his trance of the previous evening. Although he had revealed facts which only her grandfather could have known, she was far from being a gullible girl.

  So when she met Day in the park later that morning, the fir
st thing she said to him was, “There is no Dudleytown in Connecticut,” and the second thing she said was, “When were you last in Arkansas?”

  He responded to these in reverse order. “I’ve never been west of Washington, D.C….if you can call that west.” Then he asked, “And what is this Dudleytown?”

  “You don’t know?” she said. “Don’t you remember anything you said last night?”

  “I never remember. I was ‘unconscious’ in a way, you know.”

  “Aren’t you ever…aware, consciously I mean, of being Daniel Lyam Montross?”

  “Oh, occasionally he talks to me.”

  “Talks to you?” she said. “How can he talk to you if he’s supposed to be you?”

  “Well, I don’t know, I guess it’s like, you know, somebody talking to himself, only with him it’s more like he’s my father or someone, giving me advice.”

  “What does he say?”

  “It’s…it’s…well, a lot of the stuff he says seems like platitudes. ‘Happy are they who’ve lost their expectation, for they shall not be disappointed,’ and ‘Wretched are they who want more than they have, for the one is never equal to the other.’ Stuff like that. But sometimes he kind of lapses into this country dialect and says things like, ‘A perkin’s not for jerkin but for ferkin.’ What does that mean?”

  “Well—” Diana hesitated, and giggled.

  Day blushed deeply and said, almost inaudibly, apologetically, “Uh, I thought I didn’t know what that meant, but maybe….” He quickly substituted another example: “When I was at the senior prom, a few weeks ago, he seemed to be there with me, and he was disgusted, or maybe I was disgusted and thought it was him, but anyway, when I was looking at all the girls and trying to decide which one of them to ask for a dance—I can’t dance, anyway—I heard him say, ‘The topwaters are a-shoaling but n’er a hoss in sight.’ I didn’t know what that meant, either, but somehow I had the idea that he didn’t consider any of those girls worth dancing with.”

  “Day,” she asked, “do you honestly believe in all this? Do you really think you’re…well, possessed?”

  He opened his palms and pushed them up to the level of his shoulders as if he were raising a weight. “I don’t know,” he said. “But sometimes I’m awfully uncomfortable about it. I won’t say scared, but close to it—no, not even that, because it’s as if he were protecting me, you know? And let me tell you about something else: last fall I had this little hickey on my finger here”—he showed her the side of his right index finger—“a wart, I guess it was, and I had had it for several months and couldn’t get rid of it, once I even cut it off but it came back. Well, one night last fall I was lying in bed at night, before going to sleep—at least I was certain that I hadn’t fallen asleep yet, although it did seem sort of like a dream—but anyway I had my eyes open, and I saw…I know you’ll think this sounds crazy, but I saw him, Daniel Lyam Montross, sort of lift himself up out of my body and sit on the edge of the bed. Then he spat on his fingertip, and rubbed it around and around on my wart, saying, ‘What I see increase, What I rub decrease,’ then he lay back into me and I went to sleep. The next morning the wart was gone. Not a trace of it, not even a scar. See?” He thrust the finger right under her nose and looked at her as if defying her to find any trace of a former excrescence. “And that’s not all he did for me,” Day said.

  “But I wonder,” Diana said. “If reincarnation, or possession, or whatever it is, is an actual fact, why did he choose you?”

  Day laughed. “It is strange, isn’t it? that I’m not like him much at all. From what I gather, Montross was a big, brawling sort of man, always in and out of trouble. We’ve discussed this in the group—Mr. Sedgely’s group—and it might have something to do with karma. Do you know what karma is? No? Well, the Indians—the Indians of India, that is, the Hindus and Buddhists, who believe in reincarnation like it was a simple fact of life—they think that what you do in this life is going to determine the kind of life you’ll have next time around. What it boils down to is that Montross is being punished, you might say”—Day laughed again, self-consciously—“for the wrongdoing of his life, by being forced to be me. He had no choice. He didn’t choose me. He was…sentenced to be me, condemned to be me. I am his damnation!”

  Diana laughed too. “It’s so fantastic,” she said. “To think that you might be my grandfather….”

  “Did you know him well?” Day asked.

  “Barely. I was only three years old when he was…when he died, and I have just a vague memory of him. My family never once mentioned him. He has always been a figure of mystery to me.”

  “So now you want to know the truth?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s incredible, but some of the things you said last night…I don’t see how you could have known them, unless…unless you were reading my mind. I would much sooner believe in telepathy than I would believe in reincarnation.”

  “Me too,” he admitted. “But you don’t think I would be deliberately hoaxing you…?”

  “No, but…” she said. “Other things…for instance, there is no Dudleytown in Connecticut.”

  “What is Dudleytown supposed to be?”

  “That is where you—or he—was born.”

  “How do you know it doesn’t exist?” he asked.

  “I checked several maps.”

  “Old maps or recent maps?” he said. “What if it once existed, and doesn’t, any more?”

  “That’s possible, I suppose….”

  “One of the things he said to me, once,” Day declared, “was this: ‘All my towns are fallen.’ That’s what he said, like a lament, like he wanted my sympathy. ‘All my towns are fallen.’”

  Eight

  Two Impetuous Young People Take It upon Themselves to Do Something

  Dudleytown does, in fact, exist, though fallen. It waited for them. Even though it has not appeared on any map for seventy years, and then appeared only under the last of its fragmentary cognomens, Owlsbury, it is still there.

  Driving northeast out of New York on Interstate 95 the next morning, Sunday, the middle of June, Diana noticed that her passenger was chewing at a hangnail on one finger. “Nervous?” she asked him.

  He stopped chewing at it and dropped his hand to his lap. “Not about that,” he said. “I was just thinking: right about this time I’m supposed to be standing in my robe in the choir of East Passaic Methodist Church.” In an excellent tenor, he roared:

  What a friend we have in Jesus!

  All our sins and griefs to bear…

  “I’ll probably be excommunicated or something,” he said. “If not that, my parents will do something punitive, like cutting off my allowance or forbidding me to go to Scout camp this summer.” He began chewing his hangnail again. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  She saw that he was genuinely nervous. “Go to sleep, Day,” she said. And he did, at once.

  She left him like that until they had crossed the state line into Connecticut. After slowing down for a toll booth and tossing a quarter into the hopper, then resuming speed, she said, “You are going to go back, oh, eighty years, until you are a boy, back home in Dudleytown, Connecticut.” She tested him: “Are you there?”

  He nodded.

  “Well then,” she said. “Where is Dudleytown? What part of Connecticut is it in?”

  He took a long moment before replying. “The country part.” The voice was high, thin.

  “Which section of the state?” she asked. “East, west, south…?” Again she had to wait for his answer, which was, “Par’me, teacher, please, I dunno.”

  She sighed. “How old are you, anyway?” she asked.

  “Nine, ma’rm,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Then you are going to become older, you are older now, you are…fifteen. You are fifteen years old now. What section of Connecticut is Dudleytown in?”

  “The hill country, ma’rm,” he replied. The voice was deeper, older. “That would be the wester
n part, would it?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’rm.”

  “What is the nearest city?”

  “Never been there, ma’rm.”

  “The nearest village, then?”

  “That would be Cornwall Bridge, ma’rm.”

  “Good.” She reached into the glove compartment and drew out her road map. Driving with one hand, she unfolded the map and consulted the index of towns, and found Cornwall Bridge, on U.S. Route 7, in the northwestern part of the state. “Which direction from Cornwall Bridge is Dudleytown?” she asked.

  He thought a moment, then said, “To the east, ma’rm.”

  “How far?”

  “Just a few furlongs up the sound end of Coltsfoot Mountain, ma’rm.”

  “All right, Day, you can wake up.”

  He did not wake.

  “Wake up, Day!” she said loudly to him. Suddenly she realized that although Mr. Sedgely had given her such a simple formula for putting Day into a trance, he had not bothered to tell her how to get him out of a trance, nor had she thought to ask. She slapped herself on the brow. Thinking of rumors she had heard about the danger of a badly hypnotized person sleeping forever, she drove the car off onto the shoulder of the turnpike and stopped. She turned off the ignition. She stared at Day. “Wake up, Day, please,” she said. Lightly she slapped his cheeks. He did not wake. She lifted one of his eyelids and looked at his eye. It stared unseeingly at her; when she released the eyelid it snapped back over the eyeball, covering it again. She shook his shoulder. “Wake up! Wake up!” she pled.

  A cruiser pulled in behind her and a Connecticut state trooper got out and approached her. “Having trouble?” he asked.

  She tried her best to sound calm. “No, we were just resting.”

  “No place for that,” he said. “Stop only at the rest areas.”

  “All right,” she said and started the ignition. “I’m sorry.”

  The officer was staring at Day. “Your friend all right?” he asked. “Yes, he’s just sleeping one off,” she said, trying to sound cool. She drove away.

  She decided that she had better stop at the first telephone and try to reach Mr. Sedgely and ask him how to waken Day. She didn’t want to bother Mr. Sedgely again, though; and what if Mr. Sedgely told her she would have to bring Day back to his house and let him do it? She couldn’t do that; if she turned around and went all the way back she would never get started again. “Oh, Day, damn you, wake up!” she said.