The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

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The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 46

by Donald Harington


  “I reckon I do.”

  Say my name.

  He said her name.

  And what relation am I to you?

  My daughter’s girl.

  And where are you?

  Right now? Back in the belly of the Landlocked Whale once again.

  But what year is this?

  He named the present year.

  Really? How can that be if you died nearly twenty years ago?

  Nothing ever dies.

  Do you know why we’re here under this rock?

  Sure. You and that foolhardy boy got yourselves into a scrape with the local yokels, and it took me nearly every punch I know to get you out alive.

  So you have been watching out for us.

  All the time, pretty near.

  Can you read the future? Do you know what’s going to happen to us now?

  What does “future” mean? It’s just one of those meaningless words. The future is past.

  Can you tell me what Day and I will do now? What will become of us?

  Even supposing I can tell you, I won’t. It would take all the fun out of finding out for yourselves.

  Do you think this is “fun,” hiding here in this hole?

  If it would make you feel any better, yes, I do. It’s exciting and suspenseful. High time, too, that something commenced happening. Things were becoming pretty dull and boring there for a while.

  You’re funny. If you know so much, can you do anything to prove that you exist?

  Holy Jehoshaphat, that’s a tall order, young lady! Can you do anything to prove that you exist?

  Well, I’m here.

  So am I. I’m here as much as you. Maybe more so.

  No, you’re just Day. You’re just a bunch of synapses in Day’s fantastic brain.

  All right, if you want to believe that. I don’t mind being anything but that. To choose between being and nothingness, I’d choose that. Some people are worse off.

  I wonder if you could tell me why Day has suddenly started suspecting that I just made you up, that I’m not really your granddaughter?

  Well, who’s to blame him? For all I know, since you claim that I don’t exist anyway, perhaps you did just make me up. It’s you, not him, who’s all full of doubts.

  I guess there’s no way at all that I could ever prove that you are real, so I might as well forget it.

  Suit yourself, girl. But I would be disappointed if you chose just to “forget it.” Haven’t I entertained you enough, so far? Hasn’t the story of my life in Dudleytown been worth your while, been worth your stay here, been worth, even, this ordeal you’ve suffered? There’s quite a lot more to my story. You’ve got only fifteen years of it. If you don’t want me to exist, then I’ll go on being nothing but synapses in Day’s brain, but that would make me terribly sad….

  Oh, Daniel, I want so much for you to exist!

  Good. Then let me.

  “Oh, I’ll let you! Go on back, then, back where we were, in 1895 or ’96. You were telling me about you and Ferrenzo Allyn….”

  Yes.

  “Did you kill him?”

  I haven’t yet.

  “Where are you now?”

  In my house. I am talking to my mother. And I remember my infancy, that heaven was told to lie about me but would not, that she did not want nor need me though she needs me now like a leech. Hopestill is still hoping, else she would die, but perhaps death is all she is still hoping for. On and on she talks of what a pretty place Emmeline has in Illinois, a white cottage, a garden of flowers, bowers and arbors and a fine carriage, an Acme Royal surrey, the latest Acme Queen parlor organ, a Gem graphophone talking machine, and plumbing in the house! Mother, why won’t you go back? Emmeline has written and asked you to. There’s more than plenty of room, Emmeline says in her letter. Because I intend to be buried beside your father, she says. But mother, you’ll live for ages yet. The wagon’s hitched, all’s to do is for you to pack your trunk, I’ll do it for you if you can’t stand, and then down to the station we’ll go. Daniel, are you trying to get rid of your poor old mother? No, but I want to get shut of poor old Dudleytown, it’s carrying me into its grave. The wind creaks the boards in Bardwell’s dead store. Moss grows on the rocks of Temple’s cellar hole. Mildew blooms on all our cloth. Spring never sprang this year. And I can’t leave you behind when I go off to seek my fortune. You could go, she says, to Illinois with me. No, that’s too far and Emmeline says it’s pretty much all flatland. I don’t like the flatland, Ma. My mother thinks, and sees in the glow of her mind the white gleaming earthenware washdown siphontrap closet bowl, with a chain to pull afterwards, instead of the old cold bailed chamber pail I have to dump each day. And she says, Where would we get the money to buy my ticket? You just let me take care of that, I say. And she thinks some more, dreaming of the bowers and arbors, and says Yes, yes, I shouldn’t wonder but what that might be best. So I pack her trunk for her and hoist her into the wagon and hoist the trunk and drive her down to the station at The Bridge, and say, Wait here. Then I drive the wagon and the team to the nearest farm and ask the man, How much for this fine team and wagon? Them horses ’pear mighty old, says the farmer. Boneyard’s not but nine and Mistress is just past ten, I tell him. Wal, he says, fifty’s the most I could ever hope to give ye and I don’t need another team anyways. Sold, I say. The ticket’s only thirty-eight, so I’ll have twelve left over as a nest egg to get me out of here. Goodbye, Mother. Goodbye, Daniel, you must be sure to come and visit. I’ll try. And Mother…I never asked you, but I’ve just been wondering, whatever become of Charity? We put her away, Daniel. In a state home. The state of Illinois has relieved us of the burden. Well, I guess that’s best. Goodbye, Mother. Goodbye, Daniel, and don’t forget, when my time comes, I still want to lay my head down beside your father.

  Now at the store in The Bridge I buy a box of .38 longs for my rifle, only forty-three cents for a box of fifty, more than I’ll need. Then on foot I hike up the mountain toward home. Dusk settles on Dark Entry Road. Who would know this was a town? The charcoal pits are grown up in weeds. In school I learned there are lost cities in Peru, lost kingdoms in the sea, an empire of the Romans fell. Here in the dirt below this lilac tree I once built villages and wiped them out. Through this grove of mountain laurel I built roads and meandering highways and drove my toy wagons through them. And here are the trees I climbed. And there is my father’s grave.

  Who would have my house? Enos Jenner, will you buy my house? Why, he says, where are you going? I’m leaving. He says, No, I don’t think anybody’d want that place. But I’ll give you five dollars for the hay in your barn.

  I close the house, taking nothing, save the clothes I wear, and my rifle. Now in the dark I lay me down in the woods across from Renz’s house. Everybody will know it was me who did it, but they’ll never catch me. I know a way through the woods northward that will get me out of the town unseen.

  One lamp burns in the house, Renz’s old mother sits alone, she bred the devil, I ought to shoot her too. But I’ll wait for Renz. He’s probably off some other place fooling with Violate. I’d halfway like to ask her to run off with me. I doubt she would.

  It is nigh on to midnight when at last he comes, carrying his lantern, so I can see to shoot him.

  I fire twice, hit him with both. He falls and dies. I don’t wait to see if his old mother wakes and comes to find him. Into the woods I run and turn northward, stumbling in the dark but making steady tracks.

  “Daniel, did you really kill him?”

  Oh, I killed him deader than a doornail!

  “But wait a minute. You said before—Let me see if I can find it, I’ve been looking for one of my tapes, and I think this is it. Listen to this”:

  …should have pounded him into the next county. Renz Allyn is a big bully who will come to no good, who will become the town’s rowdy, who will torture small animals, who will afflict old men, who will anguish old women, who will beat his wife, who will be Violate. He will beat her to death
and be sent to jail and then Dudleytown will be empty. But that is some years ahead yet….

  “That was a few months before. Of course, you said it’s not what you know but what you dream. Still, it conflicts with—”

  Who is that talking? Whose voice is that I hear?

  “Yours. Your own. When you were fifteen.”

  Where did it come from?

  “My tape recorder. Don’t you know I’m using a tape recorder? And I want to know: did Renz Allyn become the town bully and get jailed for killing his wife? Or did you kill him?”

  What difference does it make? I never saw him again.

  “You left Dudleytown that night and never came back?”

  That’s right.

  “Where did you go?”

  Upcountry. The bigger mountains. Vermont.

  20

  On the first day of September, Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker, hungry and tired and chilled, took leave of Dudleytown, Connecticut, on foot, having given up hope of Zephaniah’s returning with the Porsche, and weary of constantly dodging and hiding from the jeep drivers who returned periodically to make sure that they weren’t there. They left Dudleytown as they had found it, leaving no trace of themselves except the ashes of their tent. The mountain laurel had long since stopped blooming, but the floor of the woods still wore its carpets of ground pine and fern, though some of the ferns had faded from deep green to yellow and tan. Diana tossed a late-blooming wild rose into a cellar hole as they passed. Silence hung around them, and though they strained to hear they caught no trace of the country jig and hornpipe of the shepherds and shepherdesses. There was no wind, in the early morning; morning mists hovered above the lower trees. The road rose ahead of them in its tunnel of still trees, and they climbed the road to leave the dead town resting in its uneasy slumber. Maybe, said Diana, someday they will cover it with asphalt and make a shopping center there.

  Still, said Day, after all was said and done, it had been the best summer he’d ever had.

  And now, she asked, what are you going to do?

  Maybe it’s time, he said, that I ought to be thinking about going off to college.

  With an imagination like yours, she said, you ought to study to be a writer.

  He laughed. I would need you around to “turn me on,” he said. And laughed again. But she saw that his eyes were wet, and then that the wetness was trickling down his cheeks.

  Day, she said. Oh, Day.

  She took his hand, and held it tightly as they walked.

  I hear, she said, that Vermont is truly beautiful in the autumn. I wouldn’t know, he said. I’ve never been there.

  Boy Scout honor? she asked.

  He raised three fingers, then used them to wipe his cheeks.

  Well, would you like to see it? she asked.

  Sure, he said. Would you?

  There are lots worse things that we could do, she said.

  If you don’t mind walking, he said.

  I don’t, she said.

  The tunnel of trees opened, and let them out of Dudleytown, toward some other place.

  Second Movement

  (“The Unfinished”)

  * * *

  Vanished Life among the Hills

  People aspire to love. Their Its aspire to love. Few people ever achieve it. To put it crudely, the two-hole privy is man’s aspiration to love. As few people ever truly use two holes together as ever really achieve love together.

  —Henry Fox

  Why do lovers quarrel? It is the battle of their Its fighting down to that level from which they might spring up to loving again.

  —Henry Fox

  When I think of what you have meant to me for all these years, sometimes it’s more than I can stand not to tell you so.

  —Old Vermont farmer to his wife

  Was Eve bored? Is that why she ate the apple? Once when nothing at all was happening I asked Diana if she were bored and she told me that most women in general are going to be bored throughout their lives anyway and that as far as she was concerned she would rather be bored in this way than any other way she could think of. I thought that was a very nice thing to say.

  I always wanted to see Vermont, but my parents’ idea of a vacation was usually Atlantic City or Cape May. There are trees in Vermont that are really trees. And there are a dozen or more little ghost villages and nearly-ghost villages scattered all over the state, tucked away in haunted hollows and lost dells. I guess I picked Five Corners because it was the only one I had actually read something about—in an old issue of Vermont Life that I had found once in the library of East Passaic High School. Daniel Lyam Montross could have lived in Five Corners, for all I know. For all I know, he might have lived anywhere. Anywhere you find the right place, where a village once was and is no longer, there’s probably some trace of him he left behind. Anyway, he told us that he had lived in Five Corners, for about eight years, from 1896 to 1905. But I didn’t tell Diana that I had read something once about the place and the gold mines that were there. I hadn’t told her I had been to Dudleytown before either, but I had, during a hike that Scoutmaster Pelton took the guys on, a couple of years before, on the Appalachian Trail; we just happened to pass the place and I just spent half an hour at the most poking around in the cellar holes and wondering about what sort of town it had been. But I swear I never read up on the subject, and I truthfully did not know how to find it from Cornwall Bridge or from the public highway, because, as I say, we went into it via the Appalachian Trail. I just knew it was there.

  What if, after all, Daniel Lyam Montross is just my imagination? But if that is so, how would you account for this: when we were invaded by the “bad element,” those Jesus freaks, Zephaniah and his crowd, I thought it would be a good idea to “parallel” the past and present by concocting or fabricating some sort of “invasion” of Dudleytown by undesirable elements during Daniel Lyam Montross’s time—perhaps religious evangelists or the nineteenth-century equivalent of Jesus freaks—and I actually willed this to happen in his narrative, but for some reason he refused to include it. Most of the time I don’t think I have the least bit of control over what he is saying.

  Or what if, as far as that goes, Diana just told me that she was Daniel Lyam Montross’s granddaughter, just for kicks, or just to “play along” out of curiosity? I can’t discount this, but I have seen him clearly in my mind, usually when I’m asleep but sometimes when I’m awake too, and there is a distinct family resemblance between him and Diana. And besides, I don’t think that Diana has the talent to be a good liar. I know what kind of talent it takes. For one thing, as she said once, you have to have an excellent memory to be a good liar, so you don’t get things mixed up.

  What if, then, Daniel Lyam Montross not only actually existed—and still does, for that matter—but also that he has such power, because he’s from “the Other Side,” that he can do things like dig holes in the Garden State Parkway so that Diana’s car will hit one of those holes and have to be fixed in a local repair shop so that she will have to wait and while she’s waiting she will discover the story about me and Sedgely in the newspaper, and then come and find me, so that Daniel Lyam Montross can regain what he lost eighteen years ago when they had to shoot him to get her back from him? How about that? It’s spooky as hell, but I draw the line at just how much you can be expected to believe about “the Other Side.”

  There’s one more “what if,” and this what if is the only one which I could believe in, because it’s the only one which I can’t explain away or prove unfounded or incredulous. And that is: what if I have just imagined Diana too? If I’m crazy enough to think that I’m “inhabited” by the soul or ghost or spirit or essence of a guy named Daniel Lyam Montross, then maybe I’m crazy enough to daydream (or Day-dream) that I have met this really good-looking blonde who’s got loads of money and a fancy car (damn, I wish I hadn’t dreamed that car away; I wish we still had it), and she’s good to me sexually, better than a succubus anyway, and here I am wandering
around all alone by myself in these ghost towns that I wanted to explore, and making myself believe that I’ve got this absolutely first-rate companion and girlfriend. As a matter of fact, she isn’t the first girlfriend I’ve imagined I had. It seems like ever since I can remember, ever since my first wet dream at the age of eleven or twelve, I’ve been pretending convincingly to myself that I’ve got one girl after another. And they’re always blondes. So what if Diana is just my best “creation” after years of practice?

  Sad, in a way, to think that. But what does it matter, so long as I believe it? Whether “Diana” really exists or not (and I’ve wondered about the little coincidence that my first name, and hers, and Daniel’s, all begin with the same letter), I know this much:

  “She” went to Vermont with me.

  On foot, most of the way, although she could easily have afforded to take a bus, or even hire a taxi, or even, for that matter, buy another car. (Once when she wasn’t around, just out of curiosity I counted the traveler’s checks in her purse. And she must have God knows how much in a trust fund she inherited when she turned twenty-one—inherited from her paternal grandfather, not from Daniel Lyam Montross, who never saved a cent.) Well, if you’re going to invent a girlfriend, you might as well make her a rich one. But anyway, we walked most of the way to Vermont, because I wanted to.

  Which doesn’t mean we didn’t spend any money. We stopped at this sporting goods shop in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Diana asked for my advice in picking out two complete outfits of back-packing equipment: knapsacks and pack frames and bedrolls and a light tent and cooking gear and everything—I think she paid more for this stuff than the first time for our Dudleytown gear, and we spent most of the first two weeks of September hiking toward Five Corners, Vermont, pitching our small tent each night in some other place. That’s the way I like to travel; you can see a lot more that way, and we passed all kinds of cellar holes and some abandoned houses and stores, and two or three genuine remains of ghost villages. Every so often, Diana would make me into Daniel Lyam Montross in order to find out what route he had taken when he had emigrated from Connecticut to Vermont, and for the most part we kept to his original route. We had to stop for a few days in a ghost village called Glastenbury, Vermont, because Diana had a bad case of foot blisters and needed some time for them to heal. I liked Glastenbury, and considered the possibility of staying there, but apparently it had never been much of a village, just a scattering of houses and a logging camp. So we went on.

 

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