The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Long Jack Stapleton had been a preacher, not necessarily a regular minister of any particular Christian denomination but at least a purveyor of the Word as found in the Bible, both old and new testaments. He had been a circuit rider, or itinerant, just as his grandson Hoppy was now an itinerant, albeit in black and white, a purveyor of black and white pitcher shows in a life without color. Unlike Brother Emmett Binns, the current circuit rider, he had not been out for profit or glory or gratification of the flesh. Nobody knew just where Long Jack Stapleton had come from. He was a furriner, that is, not a native of Stay More. Possibly he came from one of the selfsame towns that now comprised his grandson’s itinerary. Leaster Woodrum hadn’t heard the name before, but Hoppy had encountered the name Stapleton among some of his customers in other towns. In the middle of the coldest winter that Stay More had ever known, Long Jack had appeared, riding the biggest horse that anyone had ever seen, big enough to support not only huge Long Jack but also the girl, or young woman, clinging to his back, both of them dressed up all in fur: bearskins and coonskins and beaver skins. Because the girl’s hair was the same fiery red as Long Jack’s it was assumed at first that she was his daughter, but as it turned out she was his “baby sister,” Sirena, destined to marry John Ingledew and become the mother of the large family of Ingledews who dominated Stay More in the first half of the twentieth century.

  Their first night in town, Long Jack treated his hosts, the Dinsmores, to a sort of preview of coming attractions of his special powers, although Hoppy felt that all the stories about this had to be greatly exaggerated. It seems that somehow Long Jack supposedly had a gift of words, a tripping silver tongue that allowed his audience to visualize his narratives almost as if they were watching a pitcher show! Not simply visualize, no. They could not only see but also hear and taste and smell and touch. It was incredible, or magic, or both. According to the legends, in the beginning Long Jack had told the Bible’s love stories, the romances of Abraham and Sarah, David and Bathsheba, Jacob and Rachel, Ruth and Boaz, etc. etc., so graphically, almost like the images that Hoppy possessed on one private reel of contraband film that he showed only to himself, that the deacons of the churchhouse had decreed that the people could no longer attend such shows, and they banned Long Jack from the churchhouse. In time, Long Jack, especially after he fell in love with Hoppy’s grandmother, Perlina Ingledew, and married her and could enjoy all those salacious scenes in his own bedroom and therefore didn’t need to narrate them to his congregations, promised the deacons he would never again project an “undecent” picture and was allowed to use the churchhouse again, where his “pitcher shows” were strictly of the Bible’s action and violence, scenes of bloodshed and gore, flashing swords and decapitation, torture and pillage and scourging and mutilation. He packed the people in. People came from all over Newton County to watch his pitcher shows, and the meeting house wouldn’t hold them all, so he had to give matinées in the afternoons and candlelit productions at night. The freewill offering he collected at each performance in time allowed him to build a modest house east of Stay More for the growing family that he and Perlina had, and eventually to retire there in comfort.

  He had been retired for many years when Hoppy was born, so Hoppy had never seen him deliver one of his magic sermons. He heard about the sermons from his mother and from his uncles and aunts, who had been children themselves when Long Jack gave up the practice, or the ministry, and had not yet been born themselves when the deacons forbade the preacher from speaking any more blue movies. There were a few oldtimers who sat on the store porch whittling and spinning windies who claimed to have witnessed one or more of Long Jack’s improper shows, and Hoppy’s innocent young ears eavesdropped on their attempts to recall, almost with nostalgia, the erotic excitement of Long Jack’s depiction of Adam and Eve driven from the Garden, giving themselves over to their urges almost desperately, as if bodily pleasure could compensate for the loss of Eden.

  On the same long journey to Memphis when Hoppy had acquired his first reels of westerns for showing to his various audiences, he had met a distributor who had offered to sell him, for an indecent price, a single reel of a pitcher show which had no title, just a label, “Assortment.” After sampling a few scenes, Hoppy was compelled to buy it. He had, in the past couple of years, watched it alone too many times already. It was grainy, jerky, black and white of course, silent, and unlike his grandfather’s magic sermon pitcher shows made no pretense of having any relation to significant persons of any sort, or having any plots, or making any points other than that sex is an intensely compelling business. True to its label, it was a mixed bag of assorted combinations, men with women in several positions, including the substitution of the mouth for the genitals, sodomy, pederasty, and one brief but curiously stimulating encounter between a curvaceous lady and a German shepherd. The whole reel had seemed unbelievable the first time Hoppy had watched it, and he found himself trying to imagine what his grandfather’s spoken blue “pitcher shows” had actually sounded like. Hoppy’s reel was real. It projected—always on the secluded wall of the inside of his little mobile dwelling-place—actual albeit flickering, jumping images leaving nothing at all to the imagination…except the imagining of oneself into the position of one of the performers, as all motion pictures invite our vicarious participation.

  But for an orator to select certain words and to enunciate them in such a certain way as to make the listener actually experience what was being described or narrated—that was almost beyond the range of belief.

  Almost. Although Hoppy had buried most memories of his grandfather just as he had buried those of his childhood, he would always remember the one time that he himself had had a fleeting glimpse—a trailer, he guessed you could call it—of his grandfather’s power. It was not long before Long Jack Stapleton died, of natural old age. It was right after Hoppy (who of course wasn’t called Hoppy in those days but just Landon) had broken his ankle jumping off the barn, and Doc Swain had put a plaster cast on it, so he couldn’t get around very well, and spent a week or so in bed, and Grandpa Stapleton showed up one afternoon, saying, “Landon, boy. Heared tell you was ailing.” And sat down beside his bed. A minute passed, then Grampa asked, “Can I fetch ye anything?”

  Landon had never before had his grandfather offer to do anything for him. Months earlier, Landon had run away from home to join a circus that was showing in the county seat of Jasper, leaving home not just because of the glamour and excitement of the circus but because he truly had come to believe that nobody cared for him or cared about him, least of all his grandfather, who was an old man, his fiery red hair and beard turned snow white in keeping with the black-and-white of this story, who had so many grandchildren scattered all over creation that he really had no time for any of them, who seemed to live in a world of his own, a world hidden behind his kind, compassionate face. Now here he was, not only paying attention to Landon but offering to fetch him something.

  “I don’t reckon I need nothing,” he answered his grandfather.

  His grandfather looked sad, or disappointed, or both.

  After a while, Landon offered, “You could tell me a story.”

  His grandfather smiled. “What kind of a story?”

  “What kind of story did you used to tell folks that made them think they were really watching it?”

  His grandfather laughed, which Landon had never heard him do before, or not that he could remember. “Stories from the Bible, mostly,” Grampa said.

  “Then tell me one of those,” Landon said.

  His grandfather sighed. “I’ve done went and used up all of those. I don’t have them in me any more. But I reckon I could tell ye a Jack Tale, if ye want.”

  “Could you tell it so’s I can see it and hear it and taste it and smell it?”

  “I doubt it, but I could try.”

  Hoppy couldn’t remember just how the story went. Just as the details of so many movies once seen are eventually dissolved into the drab fabric of
our memory, Long Jack Stapleton’s recitation of that Jack Tale to his grandson that afternoon in 1919 is but a blur. But it was something about this fellow named Jack, a simple but smart country youth, who is about to marry a wealthy farmer’s only daughter, Betsy. But he discovers that Betsy and her parents are terribly silly folks, and he takes a vow to leave and never come back unless he can find in this big world three sillies more silly than those three sillies.

  Up until that point, Landon, try as he might, couldn’t really hear or see Jack, the hero of the story, let alone smell or taste or touch anything, and he thought he himself was just as silly as those sillies in the story, and so was his grandfather. But as he kept on listening to his grandfather, and the story involved Jack’s discovery of the first of the three sillies, a woman trying to capture sunlight in boxes to brighten the inside of her windowless home, he suddenly realized that he was experiencing a pitcher show, the first he had ever seen, for not even the silents had come to Newton County yet. By the time Jack encounters the next silly, a family of milkmaids who have trouble counting to five, he was so engrossed in the picture he could count the teats on the cows. And when Jack meets the man who spends hours each day trying to put on his pants, Landon was so involved in the picture he involuntarily spoke aloud, telling the man what he was doing wrong. By that time Jack is convinced that all these sillies make Betsy and her family seem positively intelligent, so he returns home and marries her.

  Landon could not swallow what his grandfather’s mere words had done to him, and he demanded to know the trick of it, just as later he would discover in all his sideshow performances of magic that served as overtures to his pitcher shows that somebody would always insist upon being told just how he had accomplished certain feats or sleights.

  “They’s not exactly any trick,” his grandfather said. “But words is little miracles, don’t ye know? If you use ’em right, you can do anything with ’em.”

  Chapter three

  Hoppy hated himself a good deal because he couldn’t do anything with words. From the time that the first customers arrived for the pitcher show until it finally got dark enough to show the show—and nowadays it was nigh on to nine o’clock before it was dark enough—Hoppy had an obligation to provide some form of entertainment for the people, a kind of sideshow to the pitcher show, and he had long since developed and cultivated two routines, neither of which required him to do much if any talking. First, during the time he was selling tickets, he juggled. Sounds difficult, doesn’t it, but it wasn’t. He had a set of six juggler’s balls (although he’d never got beyond five at a time) that he could toss up and keep in the air until the next customer came along, and he could do a bunch of tricks with those balls, clapping his hands once or even twice while the balls were in the air, and he hardly even seemed to interrupt himself to sell a ticket, and make change if need be, although if the customer had no cash but could only barter something like eggs, butter, a slab of bacon or chickens he had to do some extra juggling with the barter. Since he had to take off his black ten-gallon Hopalong Cassidy hat in order to do the fancy juggling, he just used that hat to hold the rolls of tickets and the cash and change, but if somebody brought eggs he’d have to stack them in a box he kept for the purpose, and as for live chickens he’d just put ’em under a upside down tomato crate.

  Now, on this night, Billy Millwee tried to imitate Hoppy’s juggling using green hickory nuts, but the most he could keep in the air at one time was two. It occurred to Hoppy that maybe he could hire Billy to sell tickets and collect eggs and chickens and such. But was Billy old enough?

  Just about the time folks began to get bored with even the fanciest of his juggling, which was about the time that the last customer showed up and the last ticket was sold, but there was still too much light to start the projector, he switched from juggling to magic tricks. His props were limited and he didn’t have a live rabbit to pull out of his ten-gallon hat, but he could sure make all kinds of things disappear and reappear; he could do tricks with coins and dollar bills and strings and rubber bands, he could make things float, he was a master of illusions. He might lack his fabled grandfather’s power to make words become real images, but he could make people believe they were seeing something that wasn’t there. Wasn’t that a good-enough substitute for not being able to do things with words? Then why did he have to keep on being down on himself for not mastering words? By the time he finished, it was starting to get dark, and the dark helped his illusions. If there was enough light left, why, he would even hypnotize a couple of folks and get them to do hilarious things.

  Naturally there were several customers who weren’t customers, that is, they hadn’t paid for a ticket and were hiding or sitting over on the edge of the meadow, hoping Hoppy wouldn’t see them. He saw them but knew he couldn’t do anything about them. Probably they were just so poor they didn’t have a dime or a nickel for admission, nor even anything to barter.

  He looked around and estimated the size of the audience, paid as well as unpaid, which was another of his talents, being able to tell almost to the person how many folks were there. Tonight there were seventy-nine, which was only about half a dozen short of the whole population of the township. He knew the others, the absentees, were folks who probably had to get up early the next morning to milk the cows.

  If this whole story weren’t just in black and white, even those colored balls that Hoppy juggled and the green nuts that Billy tried to juggle which had to be plain sepiatone at best, then along about now there would be some real pretty blue, which was the color all the air had got to be at the moment that Hoppy climbed up into his booth on the back of the truck, fired up the delco to generate some electricity, and turned on the projector, a 35 mm Western Electric IA which he’d already threaded in advance.

  The first thing to show up on the screen of the alabastine bedsheets was a big number “8”, and everybody started clapping, and then a “7” and a “6” and so on until there was a “0” and the clapping stopped. Then the screen showed what looked like an Indian chief atop a paint horse atop a mountain crag shooting an arrow and below that “Republic Pictures Presents.” From the loudspeaker which Hoppy had set atop the projection booth there swelled up some grand fancy music, and then it said on the screen “The Painted Stallion.” This wasn’t the main feature but just the first episode of the serial. For five nights Hoppy would show the first five chapters in the serial, each one of which ended in a real cliffhanger, and then on the last night instead of a feature he’d just show the remaining seven chapters of the serial, back to back, better than a feature in a way, although it didn’t have Hopalong Cassidy in it.

  “The Painted Stallion” is about a whole bunch of folks taking the very first wagon train out of Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe, in the year of 1820 when the western country was still infested with Indians on the warpath, as well as white bandits, who constantly try to ambush the wagon train and would’ve killed everybody except for some help from a mysterious Rider on a painted stallion who turns out, several episodes later, to be a woman. The woman is played by Julia Thayer, whose real name was Jean Carmen, and Hoppy had a powerful crush on her.

  Ray Corrigan stars as our hero, Clark Stuart, the chief scout for the train, who also is carrying a secret trade treaty from the government to Santa Fe. On the steamboat arriving in Independence, he befriends a young stowaway, a freckle-faced lad of ten or eleven, who turns out to be Kit Carson, who would later become a famous scout himself. Sammy McKim, who plays Kit and even looks a little bit like Billy Millwee, is so lovable and also heroic that all the kids in the audience are crazy about him. Although he can’t get permission to join the wagon train, he hides in the back of one of the wagons, and when he is caught and taken to the wagonmaster, played by nice old Hoot Gibson, all he can say is, “If you don’t want me, I guess I can make myself scarce.”

  And Hoot the wagonmaster says, “I guess maybe we better see the cook and get you some supper. You see, a scout for this tra
in’s got to keep his strength up.”

  “Yes, Sir!” says beaming young Kit, and all the kids in the audience rise to their feet and holler YAY!

  The first episode, “Trail to Empire,” ends with all the audience wondering if the wagon train is doomed, with the wagons circled and the furious Indians riding and shooting all over the place, and everybody wants to come back the next night to see the second chapter and find out if the mysterious Rider (who no one knows yet is a woman) is able to save the wagon train or not.

  Hoppy had watched all twelve episodes more than once and knew the ending would be happy. He also thought that the whole thing, although it had some flaws (such as repeated footage in which the same action happened twice or more) could be looked upon as if it stood for life’s journey itself, or even his own particular journey with his mobile pitcher shows in particular, encountering difficulties along the way and overcoming them, and even if he hadn’t yet discovered the equivalent of that strange Rider on her painted stallion becoming his guardian angel there was no telling but what she might show up in some form one of these days.

  He also admired “The Painted Stallion” because it wasn’t really real. Of course all pitcher shows are flights from reality but most of them try to imitate life as we know it, or life as it looks, but there were things in “The Painted Stallion” that just couldn’t possibly be. It just wasn’t possible that Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie could have been there together with the great Kit Carson as a boy. And then of course that guardian angel, a luscious white woman dressed in Indian garb with a full chief’s headdress. It just wasn’t possible.

  By contrast, the main feature was completely realistic. He started it now, and it would run for an hour and nineteen minutes and require five reel changes. In “The Hills of Old Wyoming,” somebody’s been stealing the cattle from the Bar-20 Ranch that Hopalong Cassidy and his sidekicks operate, and they suspect it might be Indians who live on a reservation nearby, so they take off towards the reservation to find out.