“Ignore what I say when I’m stoned, Diana. When I’m stoned, I reduce myself in my own eyes to nothing, and therefore nothing I say can matter. But tell me, you said your story has a ‘happy ending.’ Do you mean your story has already ended?”
“Well, yes, in a way. I mean, we’ve found the right place and we’re settled now, and it’s almost time for what you might call the very last chapter in Daniel Lyam Montross’s life. Just as soon as Day comes back—”
“And when, may I ask, will that be?”
“I told you, I don’t know. It’s up to him. Listen, would you like to walk down to the post office with me and see if today’s letter from him has arrived? Maybe it will say when he’s coming.”
“I’ll drive you in my car,” you will offer.
“No,” she will say. “It’s just a mile. And you need the exercise, don’t you? Last night, when you were pretty far gone, you started telling me about what your doctors had said. Are you really dying, G? Don’t you think that if you got a lot of exercise, and took off some weight, and stopped drinking and smoking so much, and—”
“Please, Diana,” you will protest. “I know that. It’s etched in acid on my heart. But all right, I don’t mind walking to your ‘post office’ with you.” So then the two of you will set out on your hike to the post office, this fine May morning with wild flowers all along the way and the singing of birds you cannot hear because of the tinnitus of fiddles, real or imagined, playing one of the eight John Playford dances. You will notice the letter she is carrying, her reply to the “letter” she’s supposedly got from him the day before, and you will say, “I should think that two people who have been seeing as much of each other as you and Day have supposedly been doing would eventually run out of things to say to each other.”
“Oh, no!” she will protest. “That isn’t true at all! I wish I could let you read one of his letters; then you’d see what I mean. One of the things Daniel Lyam Montross learned when he was a young man, from that Henry Fox I was telling you about when you were getting so woozy last night—maybe you don’t remember, but one of the characteristics of love is that two people will share themselves completely and therefore never run out of things to say. Does your mind ever run out of things to think about, G? No, I didn’t think it could. Day tells me everything that’s on his mind, and it’s always interesting.”
“And you?” you will ask. “Do you tell ‘him’ everything that’s on your mind?”
“Well, I don’t think—and I’m not just trying to be modest—but I don’t think my mind is anywhere near as interesting as his. But yes, I try to tell him everything. At least, I never keep anything from him.”
“In other words,” you will attempt a clarification, “you would consider yourself to be genuinely in love with ‘him,’ according to Henry Fox’s definition?”
“Of course!” she will say, as if you didn’t even need to state something so obvious. You cannot help feeling madly jealous, and you will feel that it is even worse to be so jealous of someone who doesn’t exist. And you will realize that it isn’t going to be as easy as you thought to get “him” off her mind.
You will arrive at the post office, and go into the building with her, watching her as she puts her letter into Box 28. The first thing you will notice is that there are no footprints in the dust except her own, the small prints of her canvas sneakers. But now she will open Box 47 and find there a “letter” which, you will notice, is enclosed in an envelope identical with the one she has put into the other box. You will crane your neck to observe the handwriting on the envelope, which will seem very similar to the handwriting on the other envelope. “Busybody!” she will say, laughing, and move away from you to open her “letter” and “read” it. Several passages of the “letter” will cause her to laugh, but she will not pretend to share them with you. For a moment, you will even feel jealous again of “him” for making her laugh. You will be tempted to snatch the letter from her and look at it yourself, but you are afraid that you won’t know quite what to say to her if the paper proved to be blank.
“Well,” she will report at length, “he doesn’t say when he’s coming back, definitely, but he says he doesn’t think he can stand to miss me so, very much longer. And he’s nearly finished seeding the mountain.”
“Doing what, pardon me?”
“Seeding the mountain. He’s carrying on some work that Daniel started but couldn’t finish before his death. You see, or maybe you know, don’t you?—that the loggers back in the thirties and forties brutally cut the timber out of the forests around here and never bothered to plant seedlings to replace it, so that a lot of scrub wood took over the forests. It’s the first thing that Day noticed when we got here, how ugly these woods are in contrast to the magnificent forests of North Carolina. It made him sorry that we had left Lost Cove. But Daniel had felt the same way, and, instead of brooding about it, he got busy and started cutting out the scrub woods and transplanting seedlings of pine and such. Almost all of the thirty-year-old pines that you’ll find on Lingerfelt Mountain are ones that he planted. But there was a piece of about forty acres that he never finished before he was killed, so Day has been finishing that piece for him.”
“Good boy,” you will comment, but again feeling green with jealousy as well as feeling the absurdity of envying someone who doesn’t exist. “I’m most eager to meet him. Do you happen to know when he usually brings his letters to the post office?”
“Are you thinking of trying to waylay him?” she will ask with a smile. “I don’t know, really. Every morning I’ve been coming here at just about this same time, and his letter is always there waiting for me. But I don’t know whether he comes before me, in the morning, or after me, in the afternoon. Or at night, for that matter.”
Diana will retrieve the letter she has posted in “his” box and ask you for a pencil. You will give her your ballpoint. The envelope is sealed, but she will write something on the back of the envelope and then show it to you to read: “P.S. He says he is ‘most eager’ to meet you. So hurry, darling, please. And don’t forget the tablets.” She will return it to Box 28.
“Is he taking medicine?” you will ask. “What are these ‘tablets’?”
“Oh, those are his writing-tablets, the notebooks he kept when we were living in Five Corners, Vermont. In the letter, I told him that we ought to let you read it. It’s much better written than my diary.”
“You kept a diary?” you will ask.
“Yes, and ever since you arrived yesterday I’ve been debating with myself whether or not I ought to let you read it. If you’re really serious about doing a book about me—about us, I mean—then you ought to read it. Of course, some of it is very personal. But it might help you understand my point of view. Are you interested?”
“Am I interested?” you will exclaim. “I’m perishing with interest!”
“Oh, really?” she will say skeptically. “But last night when I was trying to tell you my story, you got drunk and I don’t think you were even listening, or trying to listen, most of the time.”
“I’m sorry. But don’t you think that in your telling of the story you were inclined to, shall we say, censor a bit? I mean, after all, a boy and girl alone together in the woods….”
Diana will laugh. “Oh, I get it!” she will say. “I left out the sex, is that it? Well, I’m afraid my diary doesn’t tell everything. Day’s notebooks are ‘hotter’ than my diary. But if you want the real spice about Daniel, you’ll have to hear the tapes and poems.”
“Tapes and poems!” you will exclaim. “Good lord, we’ve got quite an archive on our hands, haven’t we? Incidentally, if you’ve been missing one of your tapes, I’m returning it to you. I found it underneath your lean-to at Five Corners.”
“Oh bless your heart! That must be Henry Fox’s ‘love’ tape. Did you listen to it?”
“Unfortunately, I can’t hear well enough to listen to a tape recorder. I was hoping you could be my ‘ears’ for me.�
��
“I will! Oh, I’m so glad you found that tape. It’s our most important tape, Henry Fox’s last tape, and I wondered what had happened to it. It was one of our last tapes in Five Corners, before—”
“Yes, before?” you will prod. “Before what?”
“Before we had to leave.”
“Why did you have to leave?”
“Well, that part of the story was finished anyway. Daniel Lyam Montross himself left Five Corners right after hearing that last monologue from Henry Fox. Get the tape. I’ll read it for you.”
You will fetch from the car the cassette recorder with the tape in it, and she will play it, stopping it after each sentence to repeat back to you my version of Henry Fox’s last great sermon in definition of love. How the sharing of privies leads to love. You have wanted to know for years, G, what love is, so that you could better understand why you’ve never had any. If that is all you will have wanted to know, your search will now be over.
“Beautiful,” you will say when she finishes. “That privy metaphor of Fox’s is positively enchanting. But tell me, if you and ‘Day’ have actually attained a state of love that fits Henry Fox’s definition, why don’t you share your privy?”
“How do you know we don’t?”
“Forgive me, but I couldn’t help but notice that your privy, Diana, has only one hole.”
She will laugh, and say, “Oh, my.” She will sigh and say, “You really are a detective, aren’t you? What am I going to do? At this rate, you’ll know all of my secrets pretty soon.”
“The sooner the better,” you will say.
“It’s still going to take a while,” she will declare.
17
It will take a while, all right, G, more than a while, before you will learn the whole story. The sheer size of her archives will overwhelm you: her thick diaries, Day’s tablets, my collected poems, not to mention the voluminous aural documentation, her collection of over one thousand hours of cassette tape recordings. She will offer to select the more important ones, and, since you cannot hear them, she will offer to listen to them herself and then speak slowly to you so you can understand her, as she repeats my words recorded on the tapes, beginning with my childhood and boyhood in Dudleytown. These tapes will indeed be “spicy” enough for you, and the novelty of hearing my bawdy words on the lovely lips of this girl will be an erotic entertainment such as you have never experienced before. What a delightful evening you will have! My first “priming” with Violate Parmenter will arouse you so much that you will be tempted to ask Diana if she would like to reenact the scene with you, but, since you will have promised her that you won’t drink quite so much this evening, in order to be more attentive to the story, you won’t have the nerve the drink would have given you. Nor will you, when bedtime comes, have either the nerve to invite her to join you in bed or sufficient drowsiness to enable you to sleep. Your evening routines, old Groove, had long since fixed themselves into such a pattern: no drink, no sex; no sex, no sleep; no sleep, much drink; much drink, no sex. When she will yawn and announce that it is past her bedtime, all you could do will be to explain that you can’t sleep without another drink or two. You will hope, of course, that she will suggest an alternative soporific, but she won’t. All she will say is, “Well, as long as you’re staying up, you might as well have something to read.” And she will give you the first volume of her diary. And peck you a quick wet kiss on your forehead before running off to bed.
Old Gullet will keep company with Old Grand-Dad and the young confessions for the next two hours. Her diary does not, as she has said, contain much sex. She seemed often to be more interested in what she had to eat. Obviously, during the latter stages of the Dudleytown episode, she and this Day Whittacker had frequent sexual relations, and, as she confessed to the diary, she had shared herself with the hippies or Jesus freaks or whatever they were, which disturbed you greatly, old Grudge, but, by giving you a picture of a girl who was “mixed up” enough to do such things, prepared you in advance for the far more muddled happenings in Five Corners, the oral things, the voyeuristic things, culminating in this strange and disoriented entry:
December 4
Now why did he have to go and do that?? Oh what a horrible child I’ve been! But oh how immature and impulsive he was! I don’t know which was worse, my shameful self-centered wickedness which drove him to it, or his self-pitying melodramatic overreaction to my badness. Was it such a terrible request for me to make? Just to watch him play with himself? Is that so abominable? I’m so confused I don’t have any values lately; I can’t judge how wrong or innocent something is. I think perhaps he really wanted to kill Daniel; that’s what he was trying to do. But the funny thing is that he couldn’t, and didn’t, kill Daniel. Daniel is still very much alive, and with me, and I had a long long talk with him, in which I told him I’d love to write his poems for him in Lost Cove. I want to get to Lost Cove as soon as I can. This place has driven me crazy. I’ve been here too long. It’s time to go some other place.
You will close the diary then, and close your eyes for a moment, fighting off an involuntary shudder, and with the help of another belt of Old Grand-Dad you will formulate your Great Guess: poor self-pitying Day Whittacker had indeed hanged himself, unable to cope with the rich skeins of Diana’s efflorescent personality, and she, poor thing, had been totally unable to accept the fact of his death, and had, despite burying him in Five Corners, gone on believing that he still exists. She had gone on alone to Lost Cove, the very place itself symbolic of her lost and deluded state, and now has come to Stick Around, still alone, but waiting, waiting for Day’s resurrection. In time she will realize, perhaps, that such a resurrection is never going to occur, and then, G, you could take his place, and have her for your own, and help her find her way out of all the lost places of her mind.
How ironic that you will no longer be bent on proving whether or not I ever existed, but instead determined to help her realize that Day Whittacker no longer exists.
Now it is late, and that fiddle music in your ear will be giving you trouble. It will be too late to listen to another one of the eight Playford dances. Before going to bed, you will stand for a moment in the doorway of Diana’s room, peering through the darkness at the form of her body curled into sleep. You will want very much to go and touch her belly, to find out if there really is a solid bulge of flesh there, if she really is pregnant, or if she hasn’t simply been wearing a pillow or something beneath her dress. But you will know that even a solid bulge of flesh would not necessarily prove anything; you know of the phenomenon called “false or imaginary pregnancy” in which women actually swell up psychosomatically in their conviction of being pregnant. So you will not touch her, now. But you will feel a great wave of compassion for that poor, lonely, confused creature, and it will be all you can do to force yourself to go to your own bed. “I’ll take care of you,” you will mumble aloud before falling asleep.
It will be late, as usual, when you will wake up, and find that the house is empty. She will not be in the garden or yard either. You will be pleased to notice, in the kitchen, that she has left for you, on the warming shelf of the old iron cookstove, a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon with a slice of toast, and there is a pot of coffee on the stove. While you have your breakfast, you will uneasily reflect that it, the breakfast, might be her parting gift for you, that she might have fled, that she might have had misgivings about letting you read her incriminating diary, or that she might be afraid that you are going to get all of her secrets out of her.
After breakfast, you will set out, on foot, for the post office. That will be your intention, your destination, anyway, to see that there are no new footprints in the dust by the boxes and to see, and possibly open, any new “letter” from “him.” You will be a bit surprised, then, to meet her on the road, coming from that direction.
“Where have you been?” you will ask her.
She will show you the bouquet in her hand. “Oh, just out picki
ng wild flowers along the road,” she will say.
“You haven’t been to the post office?”
“Not yet,” she will say, but something in the tone of her voice will make you believe she is lying. Then she will ask you, “Where are you going?”
“Oh, I was just looking for you,” you will say, and reflect, Here we are, brazenly deceiving each other already.
“Well, shall we walk to the post office?” she will ask. “First, I’ll have to go and fetch my letter at the house and put these flowers in a vase. But you walk on, and I’ll catch up with you.”
So you will walk on, at a fast clip, but she, young thing, will soon catch up with you, and, showing you her envelope, which is not yet sealed, will say, “I’ve decided that if I can let you read my diary I might as well let you read my letters…if you’d care to.”
And you will care to.
Dearsomest, darlingsomest Day-O,
Boy, you’d better come on back, P.D.Q. I miss you, I do, I do. Our little “experiment” has gone on long enough, don’t you think? You miss me, I miss you, we miss us, us miss we, so let’s cut out all this missing, hey love? Besides, I’m beginning to suspect that G thinks you don’t even exist.
You do, don’t you? Sometimes I wonder. Your letter yesterday was wonderful, and I’m tickled to pieces to hear about that raccoon you found, but sometimes it seems as if your letters come from another world. Sometimes I find myself disbelieving that you really are just somewhere around here in the woods. Where are you, Day? Please at least tell me that, just so I can think, when I think of you (as I do all the time, you know it, old Love), just so I can think of where you are. Lingerfelt Mountain? Hardscrapple Mountain? South Bench? Butterchurn Holler? I promise I won’t go and try to find you, if you don’t want.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 73