The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  This attitude makes a lot of sense. I don’t think anyone is capable of discovering all the secrets of SOP. TRP., of seeing what informs its various narrative feints and dodges, in a single reading. It is much wiser, as well as much more generous, to be open to the possibility that there is more to be learned than it is to feel that the failure to understand a work of art immediately means that the work must be muddled. So it muddled you; so what? Doesn’t that, on the whole, just make it more interesting?

  Something like this reasoning caused me to visit my local library and withdraw the Jonathan Cape edition of the book I was too poor to otherwise obtain. I read it over a couple of days. Certain parts of the last hundred pages, I read two and three times. I was under no illusions that I understood everything about Harington’s novel, yet I felt enriched by it. The book seemed luminous to me. About eighteen months later, I bought a copy of the mass market paperback, tricked out to suggest that the book was a horror novel. That misleading little edition endured three or four more rereadings over the next two decades. Then another publisher brought out nice trade paperback editions of the Stay More cycle, and I bought and read it again. Finally, Don and Kim Harington appeared on my doorstep on August 4, 1998, and Don surprised and moved me by presenting me with an inscribed first edition of the book. The next day I saw something new in a jacket I had looked at dozens of times previously: In Wendell Minor’s gorgeous jacket painting, the grain of the canvas is visible through the orange and green of the trees, the yellow-green of the marshy grass, and the glowing red of Diana Stoving’s red Porsche 911E. Through the ravishing representations of the imagined world hangs the pebbly texture of the painter’s ground and medium. The visibility of the underlying canvas is a steady, omnipresent reminder of the fictionality of the images. This reminder only makes them more beautiful. They are simultaneously real and imagined, and the dichotomy/dialogue between these two irreconcilables speaks of a lost, more perfect world.

  The central, most famous paragraph in the novel, which Harington knew by heart and can be seen reciting, in his late-manner deaf man’s accent, on YouTube a few years before his death, poses the issue more directly:

  “Oh, this is a story of—you know it, don’t you?—a story not of ghost towns but of lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul, oh, this is not a story of actual places where actual people lived and dreamed and died but a story of lost lives and abandoned dreams and the dying of childhood, oh, a story of the great host villages of the mind, a story of untold stories, oh, of lost untellable stories, of a boy who loved a girl whose villages had been abandoned, of a boy who took a girl on a long outing to the town of lost dreams, of a boy who wanted to help her find her hidden It, oh…”

  He then drops down a line to complete the long sentence in a new paragraph the length of a single phrase:

  “…a story of a boy who tried but then lost her.”

  Well, in a way; but as you will see, what was lost is also forever held, contained, and protected. Toward the end of this novel, just at the moment Harington moves, as he always did, into the future tense, SOP.TRP.’s long-deceased but still lively main character interrupts the narrative to turn to the sorrowful life of Harington, his author (now “G”), recently alerted by his doctor to allergies involving dust, mold, weeds, trees, dogs, cats, brunettes, book paper, bananas, and babies (though not, alas, bourbon), and that he has achieved a condition “like a town… on the verge of becoming a ghost town.” Thereafter, he is sent spinning off to the Bodarks in search of his lost heroine, Diana Stoving. After he finds her, she miraculously recognizes him as the author of Firefly and recounts to him, step by step, the entire story of the present novel. At that point a mystery occurs: Through the voice of the dead poet Daniel Lyam Montross, whose entire Selected Poems takes up a long, central portion of the novel, SOP.TRP. itself begins to speak to “G” and explains the connection between Montross and the until-now unexplained rescue of the lost child-G, or “Dawnie,” from the forest at the end of Firefly/Lightning Bug.

  And everything else, too: for everything else worth explaining is contained in that story. Donald Harington lived by stories—rich, humane, emotion-freighted stories that touch our deepest chords. More than that, he knew that we live by stories, too.

  —Peter Straub

  For Matthew Miller

  Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter one

  Coming into a town, he would blow his bugle. Although he knew only the one tune, or melody, it was another of his several talents, another thing he could do, as protection against feeling that he wasn’t worth nothing. He could have just honked his horn, but the horn was a common thing that said, “Cow, get out of the road,” and his bugle, a different sort of dented horn, said, “From far yonder down the road, here he comes again, folks, Hoppy Boyd, the happy moving showman of moving pitchers to show you another good’un.” That’s more or less what that tune or melody was trying to say, although it sounded to him less like a reveille than a taps and seemed to speak of the nameless wistful nightfall reaches beyond these hills.

  He drove the truck easy with one hand so’s he could stick that bugle out the window and give it all those toots that let everybody know he was back again. And as usual they came a-running, even the grown-ups and womenfolk. This was his favorite part of the whole six days he would play this town, the jubilation that grabbed everybody when they first learned he was here. Yonder was Billy Millwee jumping up and down beside his little wagon, which he’d somehow painted white just so’s it would look like Hoppy’s truck, the only white truck in the Ozarks, an ordinary old ton-and-a-half flatbed Chevy whose back end he’d carpentered himself to make a little house, a combination projection booth and traveling home, with his bed and kerosene stove and all. And Billy had done more or less the same to his little wagon, and even rigged up a play-like projector out of tin cans and spools and junk. Hoppy had named his truck “Topper” after the real Hoppy’s fine big white horse, and little Billy Millwee called his wagon “Topper-Too,” and Hoppy was so pleased with him he’d offered to let him in free to the shows, but Billy was a proud little cuss who had him a rat terror named Jack and went around to henhouses catching rats for five cents per, the price of a kid’s ticket to the pitcher show. Now here was Billy acting like it was Christmas and his birthday and the Fourth of July all rolled together, and Hoppy stopped blowing his bugle long enough to wave at him. Billy was even wearing a cowboy hat, a black one like Hoppy’s, not a ten-gallon of course because his head was so small but leastways five gallons.

  “Hi yoop!” Billy hollered.

  “Hi yoop yoreself,” Hoppy hollered back at him.

  And over yonder shading her eyes from the evening sun even though she had on a big sunbonnet was Birdie Woodrum, Leaster’s woman, who was yelling her head off. Hoppy couldn’t make out the words because she talked so fast but not faster than the noise his truck motor made. He knew what she was saying: she was inviting him to stay to supper, so he hollered “Much obliged, ma’am” back at her. He could count on a handsome table at the Woodrums. Leaster was a tie hacker, that is to say, he’d made a fair living hewing oak logs into railroad ties with a broadax, but the last train to Pettigrew down the road had stopped hauling out the ties the year before and Hoppy had tried to persuade Leaster to try his hand at making chairs, which Leaster had done but hadn’t made any money at yet. Birdie rai
sed gourds in her garden and made some mighty fine gourd dippers which she found a market for. Hoppy had one in his water bucket, which he’d swapped her three shows for, and he can tell you, even though he might not know much else in this world, that water drunk out of a gourd dipper tastes a right smart finer than what’s drunk from a tin dipper.

  Hoppy brought his truck to a stop beside the gas pump at Tollett’s General Store, and that gave all the kids and dogs who’d been a-chasing him a chance to catch up with him. Everybody, including the grown-ups and the womenfolk, was raising a hullabaloo like he was quite a shucks and Santy besides, even though he was still several years short of thirty, and his hair, unlike the ghost-white of the real Hopalong Cassidy’s, was just a sort of dirty yaller. But he wore his big black ten-gallon just like Hoppy’s, and that covered most of his hair anyhow. Thinking of the real Hoppy, he couldn’t offhand honestly recall a single Hopalong Cassidy pitcher show in which everybody had been so glad to see their hero as they was to see him right now. He had to keep his arms at his sides because if he lifted them everybody would rush into him, the dogs too.

  Ewell Tollett came down off the porch to fill Topper’s tank and get himself six straight free shows into the bargain. “Don’t reckon it will rain tonight,” he had to shout conversationally over the ruckus everybody else was making. “What’s a-showing first?”

  Everybody hushed their racket so they could hear Hoppy’s answer. “It’s called ‘Hills of Old Wyoming,’” he announced.

  Ewell looked doubtful. “Has it got Hoppy in it?”

  “Of course,” the fake Hoppy said. “Don’t they all?” Hoppy had learned long since, and from all the different towns along his route, that first of all, everybody wanted to watch a rootin-tootin shoot-’em-up, and, second of all, any giddyapper that didn’t star William Boyd as Hopalong wasn’t worth watching. One time last season his distributor had sent him by mistake a movie called “It Happened One Night,” which had not one single horse in it. It starred Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert falling in love on a country bus trip. Hoppy watched it and greatly enjoyed it, and felt satisfied with himself and the world afterwards, but that was one of only two times that his audience had demanded a refund, the other time being when his projector broke down completely.

  Now, on the porch of Tollett’s store, having already negotiated with miller Handy Tharp to use the broad meadow alongside the mill for the setting up of his mobile theater, young Landon “Hoppy” Boyd smiled at the mob of kids, grown-ups and womenfolk who surrounded him on all sides of the porch as if he were The Second Coming and he wondered if they worshipped him because of himself or simply because of the treat of entertainment that he provided. He might never learn the real answer to that, but there was a bigger question that haunted him and would occupy his hours during the time he sat in the back of the truck operating the projector to provide that treat of entertainment: did he hate himself so much just to balance out the way these folks adored him?

  Because he did hate himself. That seemed to be the only thing he knew for sure. He lacked the easiness to get close enough to somebody else and ask them, “Do you ever hate yourself?” and thus he did not know, nor could he scarcely imagine, that just about everybody, at one time or another, searches their soul and comes to the conclusion that they did something, or failed to do something, that they feel real sorry for.

  He didn’t hate himself for any one thing in particular he’d done but just for all kinds of reasons. He even rued that this story here, like all the movies he showed, was all in black and white, every bit of it, although it deserved to be and there was no way that color could improve it. Several of his customers had never seen even a black and white pitcher show before, let alone knew that there was such things as color pitcher shows, which cost a lot more, not just to make but to get in to see. In Memphis one afternoon last winter he had seen a pitcher show in color himself, but once his eyes had got adjusted to the loudness of the color he had determined that color doesn’t do anything for a story. Good stories, whether they are the ones we hear from our elders or the ones we invent in our own dreams, are never in color. At least we don’t remember them as being in color. Color doesn’t have any connection to suspense or building a climax or even to spinning a yarn. No, the shadows and flickers of black-and-white are a good story’s meat and bones. You can take it home with you and remember it. Black is the color of the night. And the page of your mind, like this page right here, is white. One without the other is nothing.

  But he didn’t feel sorry about taking their money. That was one thing that he could live with that might have given him some regret at one time or another during this so-called Depression but not any more, not since he’d had that argument with that circuit-riding preacher, Brother Emmett Binns, who had accused him of robbing these poor folks of their pennies during a period when times were hard and nobody had any money…except that preacher, who still managed to take up collections at every little town he preached in the Ozarks, although his collections had dwindled somewhat because of the sum the folks spent at the pitcher show, which was the real reason the preacher had got into the squabble with him, and the reason he’d decided he had no call to hate himself for taking folks’ money.

  “They just have to make a choice,” he’d told that preacher Binns. “You claim that they have to drop their nickels and dimes into the collection plate so they can buy their way out of their miserable life with a ticket to heaven. My claim is that their nickels and dimes can buy a ticket out of their miserable life for a little while right here and now.”

  No, he didn’t feel any shame for taking their nickels and dimes. And his admission prices were reasonable, a bargain compared with the Stigler Brothers, who ran the route east of his and charged twenty-five cents for adults and a dime for kids; those prices were also charged by Captain Thomson, who ran the route west of his. He’d had a run-in with Cap Thomson, a big feller who’d accused him of trying to steal some of his towns and also of charging too little, just a dime for adults and a nickel for kids. But he never reproached himself for his admission prices, up or down.

  He hated himself for other sundry and assorted reasons: for his unreasonable fear of heights, which made travel on the high roads a terrible ordeal; for his inability to laugh, in contrast to the real Hopalong Cassidy who laughed all the time when he wasn’t shooting desperadoes; for his weakness in not being able to follow the same kind of backbreaking work that earned other folks their nickels and dimes in these hard times, like picking strawberries at two cents a quart or tomatoes at five cents a bushel, or hacking ties at twenty cents each, or scrubbing laundry on a rub board at fifty cents a day. He was too soft to bend over all day long picking strawberries or tomatoes, or swinging a broadax, and too impatient to pick enough berries—a hundred quarts a day—to earn any real money, and nobody was buying railroad ties any more anyhow. He refused to chop cotton, let alone pick it. He couldn’t plow behind a mule. One thing he had in common with the real Hopalong Cassidy who he was going around pretending to be was a dislike for horses: supposedly William Boyd the actor who played Hopalong had to have somebody do his fancy riding for him because he plain and simple didn’t like horses and didn’t know how to ride one. But he had that mighty handsome pure white horse named Topper, who was just as important to him as Silver was to the Lone Ranger, and was the inspiration for this here truck being named Topper.

  Hoppy rolled himself a cigarette but didn’t have to light it because three or four people had their matches lit under his nose before he could even stick the cigarette in his mouth. There were other things the two Hopalongs had in common, besides their last name and their white means of transportation: they never drank nor smoked nor cussed in public, ole Hopalong was clean on the screen, but they sure did a lot of each in private, and Hoppy considered Tollett’s store porch pretty private. The screen Hopalong got his name from the fact that he’d been wounded and walked with a limp; our Hopalong the traveling movie showman had jumped of
f a barn at the age of nine, thinking to see if he could really fly, discovering he could not, and breaking one ankle so badly he still had a limp much worse than the screen Hopalong, who in some of his later pitcher shows forgot that he had a limp anyhow. Neither Hopalong ever wore cowboy duds, not even a hat, when off the job…although the other Boyd supposedly liked to dress up really fine off the job, fancy suits and all, whereas Landon Boyd would just as soon wear a plain pair of overalls and a cotton shirt with the top button buttoned. And even when he was on the job, pretending to be Hopalong because everybody expected him to, he never wore the full outfit of fancy black duds with six-shooters in a holster and silver buckles and a silver longhorn clasp on his bandana; he wore the black ten-gallon hat, that was all, but that was enough, the peak of that hat moving through the crowd was enough to send shivers of delight up the spines of all the kids and maybe even throbs of the heart to some of the girls, although it wouldn’t get him anywhere, because the worst thing he had in common with the cowboy Hopalong was that they never enjoyed any pleasure with the ladies. The real Hopalong could save the gals from villains and restore their loss of life’s savings and rescue them from cliff edges and roaring trains, but he always had to ride off into the sunset without ever enjoying their fleshly favors. He never even got to kiss one. Nor did poor Landon Boyd, who was only half the age of William Boyd, young enough to be his son, and hadn’t yet kissed anybody. Now right here on this store porch was a bunch of gals who’d jump and quiver if he offered to kiss them, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t, to save his soul. His whole experience with the opposite sex had been limited to a few times previously when he was still a teenager and he had attempted what he supposed could be called intercourse with two different gals, neither one of whom had enjoyed it, owing to his ignorance, which was one of the main things he hated himself for and still kicked himself for, although it had been five or six years now since he had last embarrassed himself in that fashion.