The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  “How much?” he said to Emelda, gesturing at the cornhusk doll.

  “Huh?” she replied, never having suspected that anyone would attach a cash value to a cornhusk doll, any more than to a human life.

  “That,” he said, clearly aiming his index finger at the doll. “It. Whatever. You sell? Me pay.”

  “I never sold one afore,” she informed him.

  “Fifty cents? A dollar?” he bargained.

  “My lands,” Emelda said, “it aint but some cornshucks and scraps of flour sacks.”

  “Harry!” called the woman from the car. “Louise says that she wants one too!”

  “You got any more of them?” Harry asked Emelda.

  “Aw, shore,” Emelda admitted. “House is full of ’em. You want a he-doll or a she-doll?”

  “Louise,” Harry called to the car, “do you want a boy dolly or a girlie?”

  “Oh, get one of each, Harry!” Louise said, and the other woman said, “For me too!”

  Harry held up four fingers to Emelda; she went into Bevis’s room and got two male dolls, then into her room for another female.

  “How much?” he asked her again.

  “Whate’er ye think they’re worth,” she said modestly.

  “Four bits apiece?” he offered, and laid two one-dollar bills in her hand.

  “Thank ye kindly,” she said, and Harry took the dolls to the Sports Phaeton and gave a pair to each of the ladies.

  The ladies examined their dolls and one said, “Aren’t they the cat’s meow?” and the other said, “Aren’t they the bee’s knees?” Then both told Harry that nothing would do but that they must also get a pair each as gifts for their friends Maxie, Lila, Isadora, Nikki, Maisie, Lydia and Stacia, and maybe they shouldn’t forget Winnie and Daisie.

  Harry returned to the porch and said to Emelda, “Make me a wholesale offer. Whaddayasay three for a buck? Gimme eighteen.” She fetched the dolls for him, loaded his arms with them. He packed them into the trunk of the Sports Phaeton, then gave Emelda six more dollars, and the tourists drove away. As they passed back through the town, the women were seen to point together at the hotel sign on Drussie’s hotel. Drussie watched the car slow down. The women seemed to be pleading with the men to stop at the hotel, and Drussie hoped the men would agree to stop, but apparently they did not, for the Sports Phaeton went on out of town and was not seen again.

  Emelda Ingledew, however, had eight dollars, which was more money of her own than she had ever held in her hand before. She ran all the way to Willis’s store, where Bevis and the boys were loafing, and, forgetting herself, spoke aloud publicly to Bevis for the first time, showing him the money and saying, “Lookee what them tourists paid me for a passel of cornshuck dolls!” Bevis was extremely embarrassed on several counts: he was embarrassed because a female was speaking to him, because she was publicly displaying money, because she was admitting that she made corn-husk dolls, and above all because he did not believe that tourists would pay eight dollars for any amount of cornhusk dolls, although, since he could read her mind, he knew that she was not lying to him. Together, and with the help of their four sons, they went into Willis’s store and bought eight dollars’ worth of Corn Flakes, Quaker Oats, Vienna sausages, sardines, sody crackers, coffee, flour, and fistfuls of Hershey bars, O Henrys and Baby Ruths. The latter items were not good for their teeth, and they all developed cavities which the dentist, Bevis’s oldest brother E.H., refused to treat for less than cash money. They resigned themselves to letting their teeth rot until they fell out, but they were saved from this fate by the arrival of a letter at the post office addressed simply to: The Dollmaker, Stay More, Ark. By then, everybody knew that Emelda made cornhusk dolls, and they didn’t dare laugh at her since she had sold eight dollars’ worth of them.

  Postmaster Uncle Willis delivered the letter to her. It was signed by a St. Louis woman named Isadora Lubitschi, and it said: “Dear Madame: My good friend Louise Goldstein recently returned from a delightful tour of the woodsy mountains and presented me with a pair of dolls which she had purchased from you, if you are the person in question who manufactures these items, which consist of some sort of dried plant material covered with bits of cloth in the fashion of women’s long dresses and men’s working overhalls. If you are the person in question who manufactures these charming curios, I would be pleased to inform you that I am in the business of middleman, or middlewoman, to the trade in objets d’art, and I am able to quote you an offer of $36.00 (thirty-six dollars) per gross for whatever quantities of such items you can supply. Please ship them parcel post to the above address.” Emelda was dumbfounded. She did not know what “gross” meant, unless the St. Louis woman considered her cornhusk dolls coarse, vulgar or obscene. Emelda asked Bevis telepathically what “gross” meant, but he had only heard the word when Jim Tom Duckworth spoke of “gross injustice” in court. So they asked Uncle Jim Tom what it meant and he said it meant something so mighty awful or misdone that it can’t be pardoned. Emelda showed him one of her dolls and asked him for his opinion, but he opined that as far as his taste was concerned, the doll might look pretty awful but it wasn’t so gross that it couldn’t be pardoned. He, for one, was willing to pardon it. Emelda showed him the letter from the St. Louis woman. He read it, and called her attention to the structure of the phrasing, “per gross.” “That’s a gross,” he said. “It means how many of something, but I disremember the figure. Why’n’t ye ask Uncle Willis. He orter know.”

  They were reluctant to ask Uncle Willis, because nobody ever believed anything that Uncle Willis said, but they had nowhere else to turn, so they asked Uncle Willis and he told them that a gross was a dozen dozen. They thought that was unbelievable, but they sat down on the store porch and counted up on their fingers, trying to figure out what a dozen dozen were. Since they each had only ten fingers, it was difficult to count up to a dozen, and get another dozen on top of that. Uncle Willis watched them for as long as he could stand it, which was pretty long, and then he took from his storeroom a cardboard carton marked “One Gross, White Thread” and gave it to them and told them to count the spools, which they did, finding that there were 144 spools. Emelda and Bevis went home and counted the dolls, and discovered that there were 432 male dolls and 432 female dolls. They divided these into piles of 144 each, and discovered that they had exactly six gross of dolls. Emelda hated to see them go, but she could always make more. They shipped the six gross off to St. Louis and received in return the woman’s check for $216. Although John’s bank had failed and he could not cash the check for them, he decided to reopen the bank and let them deposit their check and draw upon it as they needed. John had never given up hope of reopening his bank; he still subscribed to and faithfully read The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly; I doubt if his conscience was troubled at all by the fact that he was enabled to reopen his bank by a deposit from the same son whom he had denied permission to withdraw his savings years before.

  Bevis Ingledew took his wagon and drove around to all of the farms in Stay More, buying cornhusks for 5¢ a bushel. No one thought him crazy, because word had quickly spread of Emelda’s talent for converting cornhusks into money, and most of the other women were dying to learn her secret, but Emelda pulled down all the shades in all her windows and arranged her four sons into an assembly line, and together, with Bevis guarding the exterior of the house to ward off peepers, they turned out cornhusk dolls by the thousand, and shipped them off to St. Louis, and made a fantastic lot of money, more than they knew what to do with, so much more that they were easily persuaded by John, whose bank they practically owned now, to invest it. John faithfully read The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly, and he had dreamed for years of dabbling in securities analysis or becoming a “Customer’s Man,” but he had no potential customers until his own son Bevis had more money than he knew what to do with. He took Bevis’s surplus money and sent it off to a brokerage office in Little Rock and invested it in those issues which The Bankers’ and Inv
estors’ Weekly recommended as growth stocks, and sure enough they grew and grew. It mattered naught that their growingest stock was General Electric although they had never seen electricity and did not believe in it. They made so much money in the stock market that John’s commissions from this one customer were enough for a full salary, and John was thinking of renovating his bank, while Emelda telepathically pestered Bevis to build a larger and finer house for them. John began to pay attention to those issues which The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly classified as “high risk speculative ventures,” investment in which was practically gambling, but John began to gamble, and to win. One stock in particular, Poupée Industries Inc. of St. Louis, was particularly attractive, and John bought more and more shares of it, and it continued to rise, until it was one of the highest priced stocks on the under-the-counter market, and Bevis and Emelda owned practically all of it. A lavishly printed annual stockholders’ report was mailed to them, and they discovered that Poupée Industries Inc. was merely the distributor of quaint dolls “which consist of some sort of dried plant material covered with bits of cloth in the fashion of women’s long dresses and men’s working overhalls and are manufactured at a secret location in the enchanted Ozarks.”

  Then the stock market crashed. It wasn’t John D. Ingledew’s fault any more than it was John D. Rockefeller’s, but the latter survived while the former didn’t. A small headline in the Jasper Disaster noted the fact: “Stay More Stockholders Wiped Out in Panic of Wall Street” and a small editorial said simply “We hope some lesson has been learned from all of this.”

  Bevis Ingledew was always cheerful and full of blood, and he took the bad news in good part, but John D. Ingledew took to bed, and stayed there, looking gloomier and doomier than he ever had, if that were possible. Doc Colvin Swain was called in. Doc Swain was not only the best of Stay More’s physicians, but he was also the seventh son of a seventh son (who was Gilbert Swain, Lizzie’s seventh), and a seventh son of a seventh son has the power to cure any sickness known to man except the frakes. But even with this power, Doc Swain could not cure John D. Ingledew, and John D. died. Doc Swain was so puzzled as to the cause of death that he asked for permission to perform an autopsy, expecting to find perhaps a broken heart, but John D.’s heart, when Doc Swain finally succeeded in finding it, was not broken but only atrophied, severely.

  At the funeral, Brother Long Jack Stapleton discovered that he was unable to show the eulogy. Something had gone wrong with his power; it wouldn’t work. The show would not go on. He tried and tried to turn it on, but not a single image appeared. So he said a short prayer and they sang several choruses of “Farther along we’ll know all about it” and Brother Stapleton went home, wondering if farther along he ever would understand why he had lost his power to show. He never did, and he never regained it, and some folks said that the loss of his power was the reason he himself died, not long after, leaving Stay More without a resident pastor for the rest of its life.

  Chapter fourteen

  When John Henry “Hank” Ingledew was ten years old, he ran away from home, to join the circus. The year before, he had grown mighty tired of making cornhusk dolls. Making cornhusk dolls all day long leaves the mind idle to think idle thoughts, and although Hank was pretty good at thinking no thoughts at all, he could not help but continue to speculate upon the fact that he probably did not exist because he could not have been born if his mother and father did not sleep together and were not even on speaking terms with one another although they did seem to cooperate at least in the making of cornhusk dolls. Other boys his age did not have to make cornhusk dolls, and that was one more reason for feeling that he did not really exist but was only imagining things. His reasoning was that if he did not exist he might as well not exist someplace else instead of here in Stay More. The trouble was, he couldn’t conceive of someplace else, until one day in the late summer of his tenth year, when a billposter in a bow tie and a straw boater, driving a Ford truck, came into town and received permission to glue an enormous circus bill to the side of the barn that had been built by Denton and Monroe and was prominently located in the center of town. Hank Ingledew, along with all the other children of Stay More, gazed in awe at the poster, which showed in garish colors pictures of ferocious tropical animals, women in tight clothes standing up on the backs of prancing horses, acrobats leaping through the air, and announced that Foogle Bros. Three-Ring Shows would play at Jasper, Ark, three days only, Aug. 24–27, with a Grand Midway.

  It occurred to Hank that a circus was a someplace else that would beat hell out of not existing in Stay More, even though he wasn’t required to make cornhusk dolls anymore since the stock market collapsed and people out in the world were spending their money on apples and pencils instead of cornhusk dolls. Hank began to hatch a plan: he would sneak off to Jasper in time to be there when the circus arrived, and he would get a job with the circus, so when his folks showed up to attend the circus they would see that he already had a job, and might even be proud of him, and they wouldn’t make a big fuss when the circus moved on and took him with it. So on the eve of August 24th, when nobody was looking, he “borrowed” one of his father’s mules without telling anyone and rode it bareback into Jasper, where he found to his dismay that the circus had already arrived in town and was being erected, by the light of strings of intensely burning glass bulbs. Jasper had not yet received electricity, but the circus had its own portable generator.

  Hank could do nothing at first but stare with fascination at all of the light bulbs, until one of the workmen said to him, “Show aint open yet, kid. Come back tomorrow.” Hank told the man he was hoping to get him a job of work. “See the punk pusher,” the man replied, and directed him to a tough-looking man in a teeshirt, who was supervising a bunch of local boys, many of whom Hank recognized. “No cash. Free ticket only,” the man said to him. “Go help those punks hold that rope.” Hank said that he wanted to join the circus for keeps and do something important like impossible stunts. The man laughed at him and asked what kind of impossible stunt he could do. Well, Hank said, he could touch his elbows together behind his back. He demonstrated. “Hey, that’s pretty good, kid,” the man remarked sincerely. “Come with me.” The man took him to a trailer where another man in a teeshirt was just sitting in a canvas chair, doing nothing but smoking a cigarette. “Hey, Cholly, get a load of this,” the first man said and told Hank to repeat his impossible stunt of touching his elbows together behind his back. Hank did. Cholly pursed his lips and stared at Hank through squinted lids. “He’ll do,” Cholly said and took Hank and fitted him out with a clown suit and showed him how to tie a rubber ball over his nose and put white and purple paint on his face. Then Cholly took him to another man in a teeshirt and said, “Phil, watch the kid,” and as Phil watched Hank touched his elbows together behind his back several times in quick succession. “What else can he do?” Phil wanted to know. Hank said that he could also pat his stomach while rotating his other hand on top of his head, and vice versa. “Great,” said Phil. “Can you juggle?” Hank couldn’t, so Phil took three oranges and began to show him how. Hank was getting sleepy, but he kept practicing until he could not only juggle the three balls but throw them all up in the air, touch his elbows behind his back three times, and catch them as they came down.

  The putting up of the circus was finished, and all the other local boys were run off the grounds, but Hank was allowed to stay. It must have been close to midnight, but none of the circus people seemed to be sleepy. They sat around and played cards and smoked cigarettes and told dirty jokes. Phil said to him, “Well, let’s meet some of the finkers and geeks,” and he took him around and introduced him as “the new joey” to several of the circus people: the other clowns, acrobats, horsemen, and even to the sideshow people, who made him uneasy: a bearded lady, a very fat lady, a midget, a man covered with tatoos, another man who seemed normal but Phil whispered into Hank’s ear that the man did an act of biting the heads off of chickens, and a man
who was very, very old, who Phil said was billed as “the World’s Oldest Man.” None of these people showed any particular interest in meeting Hank, but the man who was the World’s Oldest Man seemed to be studying him keenly behind his wrinkled eyelids. The old man’s eyes seemed to be still working, although none of the rest of him looked like it would work; Hank doubted that the old man could speak, so he was surprised and momentarily disbelieving when the old man asked him a question, “Where are you from, Joey?” After Hank had persuaded himself that the old man’s mouth actually had moved and that he had spoken, Hank answered, telling him that he was from Stay More, which was a small town about ten miles south of here. He was required to repeat himself, loudly, for the old man was nearly deaf. Then the old man nodded his head almost imperceptibly and spoke again: “You’re an Ingledew, aren’t you? I would recognize an Ingledew anywhere, even behind that rubber nose and that greasepaint.”

  Hank went away wondering how the old man had known he was an Ingledew, but he decided that anybody as old as that man was probably knew everything that was to be known. And then the magic electric bulbs were going out, and Phil told Hank that he would have to do a star pitch. When Hank looked puzzled and asked what a star pitch was, Phil laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’ll have to learn the circus lingo, kid. A star pitch is sleeping out in the open, on the grass.”

  Hank slept on the grass, sleeping fitfully, having dreams of performing his stunts in his clown suit in front of a whole bunch of people, many of whom might recognize him behind his rubber nose and his greasepaint, as the old man had done. When he woke and rose up from the grass, he discovered that nobody else in the camp was awake even though the sun was well up in the sky. He figured that people who stayed up so late at night probably slept late in the morning. He smelled coffee a-making somewhere, and tracing it, found a trailer with the back end open and a man inside cooking up a bunch of flapjacks.