The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Then she began preparing breakfast. Bent over the cooking fire, brushing smoke and her hair out of her face, she wondered: Was I unkind? And decided: Yes. And then wondered: Why? and tried to ponder this ambivalence: that it was the same body, that it was Day’s body, but that the person she had fallen in love with was not Day but was in a sense imprisoned in Day’s body. And thinking of bodies, she abruptly realized, with some surprise, that she was going about the business of getting breakfast ready, still clad only in her panties, nothing else. It was a warm morning, and the air felt wonderful on her body, and the sunshine. She felt a kind of freedom, a liberation, but then a twinge of self-consciousness. Was Day staring at her from the tent? Well, let him.

  She had finished the bacon and was cracking eggs into the frying pan, when his voice came from the tent, mock-ominous, almost light, “If you don’t put some clothes on, I’m going to come out there and rape you.”

  She laughed. Then she said, “You couldn’t.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “I’m busy. You won’t get any breakfast if you rape me.”

  “I’d rather have you than breakfast.”

  “Then come and see what happens!” she challenged him.

  He emerged from the tent, his silly penis leading the way. He formed his hands into claws, and warned, “You’d better run.”

  She stood her ground. He came on toward her, and grabbed her shoulders. “Go to sleep, Day,” she said.

  But as soon as he did, she brought him back, and said, “See? You’re helpless against my weapon:”

  “That’s not fair!” he protested.

  “My one defense,” she said. “What’s a poor girl going to do to protect herself out in the woods alone with a lecher like you?” She turned back to her cooking.

  “You’re mean,” he said. “You’re heartless. And I know why.”

  She looked at him. “Why?”

  “You don’t want to make love with me again because I disappointed you last night.”

  Now that might be true. But she shook her head, and said, “No, I don’t want to make love with you because I’m still sore and you’ll just have to wait until it’s not sore.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “An hour? A day? A week?”

  She sighed. “Maybe tonight.”

  “Promise?”

  She thought about it. It was…oh, it was like being unfaithful to Daniel. But she decided that was silly, because Daniel didn’t know it was her. What was sillier was that she felt jealous of Violate and Hattie Rose Pearl. The relationship was not an ordinary “triangle.” It had begun as a simple dyad, Day and herself, and then become a triangle, and then a quadrangle, a quintangle, a sexangle, a—

  “Why are you counting on your fingers?” Day asked. “Are you figuring how long I will have to wait, or enumerating your lovers?”

  “I was just trying to count our dramatis personae,” she said. “It’s getting complicated.”

  “Oh,” Day said. “You’re thinking of him.” He said this with jealousy, as if he were referring to her other lover. Come to think of it, he was.

  “Let’s eat our breakfast,” she said, “and then get on with the story.”

  11

  The birch lashes down into the bed I sit on, SNOCK! Missed me by a foot. “THIS’LL LEARN YOU, YOU SCUM!” my father shouts. Again he raises the birch. Again he misses me. On purpose he misses? In a quiet voice, behind his hand, he says, “I told your Ma I’d chastise ye. Holler, why don’t ye?” I holler. “WENCHING IN THE SIGHT A GOD!” he yells at me and smacks the bedclothes with the birch again. “Ow! Stop! Don’t!” I holler. In his low voice he says, “Din’t ye have sense enough to git her outen the barn afore cockcrow?” and then yells, “GITTIN TOO BIG FER YUR BOOTS, YOU VILLYUN!” and whops the bed with his birch. “Quit! Help! Leave off!” I holler. “How’d ye like it?” he asks. “Is that Bardwell gull a fair funicle?” “Oh, fair enough,” I allow. “I’LL LEARN YE TO PESTLE AROUND AT YOUR AGE, YOU BLACK SHEEP!” and whops the bed. “No! Ouch! Let up! I’ll never do it again!” He says, quietly, “I’ll wager ye made a woman of her. Was it heavy sleddin’?” “No, I had a right soft time of it,” I tell him. “FER SHAME! YOU SINFUL DEVIL! FIE UPON YE!” He whops the bed several times, SNOCK! WHUMP! THRICK! “Now mark me, Dan’l,” he says, low, “you want to be tendin’ to what you’re about. You could git a gull with a come-by-chance, don’t ye know? You wouldn’t have no use fer siring a come-by-chance at your age.” I tell him, “She said it twa’nt the time a month fer that.” “NOW HOW’S YER HIDE FEEL, HUH? THAT’LL MIND YE TO MEND YER WAYS!” He gives the bed a few more blows. “Well, good,” he says. “That’s a careful lad. But another thing. You don’t want to let ole Bardwell git wind a this. He might could cut off our credit, ye know.” My father laughs, and winks. Then he says, “Now dab some spit around yer eyes, to make ’em look wet, and go out a here holdin’ yer bottom.”

  Passing my mother in the buttery, I whimper and complain, “He whomped the whey outen me.”

  “Sarves ye fair!” she cries, and clutches herself for support. “My soul and body! Don’t ye ever let me catch ye at that again!”

  I go on out. She has said it. I will never let her catch me, I will never be caught, again. If what I do is wrong, I will never be caught at it.

  But soon it is known, to all in the Oatsowers and the SS alike; Hattie Rose Pearl has bragged there to the other girls, I have bragged here to the other boys.

  Zadock doesn’t seem to mind.

  Renz taunts him, “You going to jist stand there and let Danny git away with it?”

  “I don’t care,” Zadock says.

  “You don’t care,” Renz says. “Haw. How come ye don’t care? Aint ye able to do it to her yourself?”

  Zadock blushes, but says, “Don’t matter anyhow. I’m leaving. Pa says we’re leaving bright and soon tomorrow morning.”

  “Huh?” says Renz. “How come ye’re leaving? Where you going?”

  Zadock shrugs. “I guess out westwards where it’s flatter. Pa says fifty acres could stand a family in the flatlands but not up here in these hills.”

  “What’s the world coming to?” Renz says.

  “I won’t see Hattie Rose Pearl ever more,” Zadock says. He begins to cry. “So I don’t care what she does.” I have never seen a big fourteen-year-old boy cry before. “She can funicle all day and night for what I care.”

  “What’s the world coming to?” Renz says.

  One of my first jobs of paid work is taking apart Zadock’s house. Nobody else’s gonna move in, I guess, my father says, might as well salvage the lumber and nails. All day, for weeks, I remove nails from boards, and straighten the nails and save them. I am paid eight cents the hour. My hands become too raw to hold Hattie Rose Pearl.

  “Did you hear Zadock’s gone?” I ask her.

  “I heard.”

  “What’s the world coming to?” I say.

  My work takes weeks, and when it’s done there are four cellar holes in the village now. I made one of them. It seems like making a grave. Zadock’s ghost lies there, but is not buried; the grave will not be filled. We miss him, for all that he was my rival. I’d give up Hattie Rose Pearl to get him back.

  She misses him too, and once when my perkin longs for her vale she denies me, saying she can’t help believing that Zadock left on account of what we did. Aw, I protest, it was Zadock’s dad who did the leaving, not him.

  Still she denies me. And it doesn’t matter, long, for soon, in the waning of summer, she is the next to go. Bardwell closes his store. There is no business, he says. Bardwell is a cousin of Mary Cheney, who left Dudleytown and married Horace Greeley, who said, they say, Go West. Bardwell is thinking about that.

  Bardwell goes west, taking Hattie Rose Pearl.

  She says she will write, and I say I will follow. But she doesn’t, and I don’t.

  There is no store now in the village. We have to walk or ride to
The Bridge if we want something.

  Violate says to me, “I guess I’m all you’ve got in the way of a girl now.”

  I study her face to tell if she’s joshing. “You’re still Renz’s girl,” I say.

  “He can’t last as long as you,” she says.

  “Is he leaving too?” I ask.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she says.

  What she means, I find, in a field atop Dudleytown Hill one fine brisk Indian summer afternoon, in a dell of the field out of sight of all but autumn birds, for beyond an hour and then beyond another hour, is the way it takes me, the way I stay, and the way I can recur.

  Dear me, she says, dear her.

  Wake up, she says into my ear, in the fading light. You’re not tired, are you?

  No, just resting. Her eyes are green; I had thought they were brown. She rumples my hair and puts my hand upon her breast, inside her dress; the hard nipple is like a perkin funicling the vale of my fingers.

  She pulls me onto her again. How many, she says, so far? Three, I say, You? Five, she says.

  But I must have lost it all, there seems to be none left, she’s taken all the quid there was. Six, she says. I keep on, but can’t get there.

  My hips ache from their constant speed. I slow, but when I do she hurries.

  Seven, she says, and then: Do you like to kiss?

  I never have.

  Then kiss me.

  I do, and the feel of her soft wet mouth against my mouth gives me my fourth, along with her eighth, and that’s more than enough for today.

  She says, I’d like to have a baby. I’d like to have a hundred.

  You’d better not, I say.

  Then someday can we? she says. Pretty the way she puts that, then someday can we? Sure, I say. A hundred? she says. All you want, I say.

  Now school days are upon us again, although Miss Fife is not. She has gone too, there’re not enough pupils to keep her here. First day of school we stand and sing the school song, “Happy School, Ah, From Thee Never Shall Our Hearts Long Time Be Turning,” beautiful, but it is not Miss Fife who leads us. It is a mother. The mothers are taking turns doing the school.

  The schedule is the same, with two quarter-hour recesses, one at ten-thirty and one at two-forty-five. Violate and I go to the woods each recess, although fifteen minutes is scant and hurried.

  But one recess, Renz follows us and catches us at it.

  “I’m going to kill you, Dan,” he says.

  “You’ll have to catch me first,” I say.

  And he can’t. I can outrun them all.

  12

  One afternoon in July, driving home from a trip to the liquor store in Cornwall Bridge, Diana passed an old man, walking along the highway. She stopped and backed up, and asked him, “Can I give you a lift?”

  He raised his craggy wrinkled face and stared at her for a moment, then said, “Just up the road.” Did he mean that she could give him a ride just up the road, or that it was not necessary because he lived only a short distance away? He was a very old man, perhaps in his late eighties or early nineties.

  “Get in,” she offered, “and I’ll take you.” She opened the door.

  “Thank you,” he said, and got in. “Right hot day, aint it?”

  “It is,” she agreed. She drove on. Then she asked, “Have you lived around here very long?”

  “Long enough,” he said. “I cal’late nigh onto ninety years.”

  “You were born around here?”

  “Right up in Calhoun Corner,” he said.

  “Where is that?”

  “Just up the road, way you’re heading.”

  “Oh. Where Route 45 branches off?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I didn’t know it had a name.”

  “’Taint much of a place, is it? Never was. But it’s Calhoun Corner, and here we be.” He pointed. “Second house on the left, yender.”

  She pulled off the road beside his house and turned off the motor. “Have you ever been to Dudleytown?” she asked him.

  “Sure I been there. Not lately, though. Aint a tormented thing left of that place.”

  “When you were young,” she asked, “did you know any of the people who lived there?”

  “A few.”

  “Did you know anybody named Montross?” she asked.

  “Montross, ye say?” He scratched his head, and wrinkled his brow in concentration for a long moment. “Might’ve,” he said. “I’ve knowed so many people in my life their names have fled my mind.”

  “Daniel Montross would have been about your age, maybe a few years older,” she said.

  “Daniel Montross,” he said, and became silent again for a while before continuing, “now, that does seem to kinder ring a bell, but I jist couldn’t say.”

  She tried out other names she knew: “Ferrenzo Allyn? Violate Parmenter? Hattie Rose Pearl Bardwell? Zadock Savage? Reuben Temple?”

  “Where’d you hear all them names?” he asked.

  “I’m doing genealogical research,” she said.

  “Well, I was only a kid when that town died out, and that was a mighty long time ago. But Bardwell, now…wasn’t he—?”

  “The storekeeper?” she suggested.

  “Yeah, now, mebbe you’re right. I seem to reckerlect there was a store there, run by a man named…well, yeah, I guess it could’ve been Bardwell.”

  “Do you remember any definite names?” she asked.

  “Well, I knew the Jenners,” he declared.

  “The Jenners?” she said, and tried to recall if “Daniel” had ever mentioned the name, but could not.

  “That was one of the biggest families still there when I was a kid.”

  She made a mental note of the name, and then she tried a different tack, “Do you know what a whiffletree is?”

  “Whiffletree?” He looked at her. “You wouldn’t be meaning whipple tree, would ye?”

  “Like on a wagon,” she said.

  “Sure, that’s a whippletree, ’cause it whips back and forth. It don’t whiffle.”

  “Nobody around here ever called it a whiffletree?” she asked.

  “Wal, mebbe them east Connecticut folks might call it that, but I’ve never heard that anywheres about here.”

  She tried another word, bravely: “What is a perkin?”

  Did she detect a hesitancy, a slight look of embarrassment? “Oh, there’s lots of Perkinses between here and Litchfield.”

  “No, not a family name, a common name. You don’t know what a perkin is?”

  “No, I do not, I’m sorry,” he said, and seemed tired. Was she annoying him?

  She tried one more, one last: “What does funicle mean?” and watched him closely for any suggestion of a blush.

  But he was only annoyed. “Herod all handsaws!” he exclaimed. “Is this some kinder quiz contest? Thunder, no, I never heard of no funicle.”

  She had heard that “Thunder, no,” from Daniel, but she had not heard the other. “What does ‘Herod all handsaws’ mean?” she asked.

  “It just means you’re pestering me no end,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. I’m just interested in Dudleytown and trying to find out some things.”

  “You ever been up there?” he asked.

  “I just came from there,” she told him.

  “Huh?” he said. “You did?” He began shaking his head back and forth. “A young thing like you, all by yourself? Crimus, don’t you know there’s a powerful curse on that place? Don’t you know it’s haunted?”

  “I’ve read something about that,” she admitted, “but it didn’t scare me.”

  “Well let me tell you—” he began, and he told her all he knew about modern manifestations of the Curse of Dudleytown. At one time early in this century there was only a single resident remaining, a Pole, living by himself at the old Colonel Rogers place, but even though he was a strong man, sturdy and stolid, not easily frightened by anything, his constant s
ubjection to the weird noises of the forest broke him down and forced him to seek out human company in some other place. He was followed by an Irish laborer, who with his wife and two sons took title to one of the abandoned farms on Dark Entry Road because he liked solitude, and because, being Irish, he was no stranger to fairyfolk or little people or whoever habited and haunted the place. He pastured sheep on the hillsides, and kept losing lambs without finding out to what or to whom. His sons became outlaws and were chased out of the country by the local constabulary. His wife took over the sons’ work, and overworked herself and died of consumption. He himself stubbornly clung to the place, like the lonely Pole before him, fortified by his pride and the courage of his race that could not be daunted by the dreadful hooting of banshee owls. Patrick, as he was called (but not by the villagers of Cornwall, who gave him wide berth when he occasionally came into the village, in his rags), lived from one year’s end to the next without seeing a living person in Dudleytown other than his own reflection in the millpond. To get him out, the fairyfolk—or fiends or whoever—had to burn down his ramshackle house, on a wild night in August. He tried to save the house, or at least save his clothes and meager possessions, but he was denied even this. No one knows where he went.

  Nor was he the last. There were two more (before the two of Diana and Day); these were city people, a professor of medicine from New York, Dr. William C. Clarke, and his wife, who knew nothing of the Curse and were attracted by the wild woodland. With his own hands the professor chopped a home site out of the forest, then chopped hemlocks and hewed them to make a cabin. He wondered why he was unable to hire any people from the village nearby to help him. When the owls hooted at him he knew what they were and was not frightened. The Curse must have been dormant, for it permitted the professor and his wife to come every summer for several years and live happily until autumn. But one summer he was called suddenly to New York on business and had to leave his wife overnight, and when he returned he found his wife had gone mad; soon she took her life, and he moved to some other place.

  “Consarn it, you couldn’t pay me cash money to get me to go into that tormented place,” the old man concluded.