The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  The sky is red as blazes above the mountains west of Stay More. Since all this story is only in black and white, Hoppy is truly puzzled at the intensity of the red, until he realizes that it is a spectacular sunset for them to ride off into.

  Nearing his hometown, which is golden beneath that fabulous red sky, his ladylove lifts the bugle and puts it to her lips and blows. From far yonder down the road here they come again, folks, Hoppy and Sharline, the happy moving showmen of moving pitchers to show you a bunch of good’uns.

  F I N I S

  Chapter twenty

  This will all be Exit Music. You’ll be right to see “FINIS” writ on the screen right over that red sunset, with our hero and heroine riding Topper off into the distance until they’ll not be nothing but a disappearing speck. A sunset is an ending, the end of a day, the end of a story, and the reason why cowboys ride off into the sunset is so they can move from the here-and-now into the there-and-whenever.

  All of this will be whenever. All of this, from here on out, just might could happen, but it might not. We will just have to see. You know, the big difference between the pitcher show and so-called Grim Reality is that the show has to stop somewheres but life just goes on and on and on. Which is good and bad. Even though we know in our heart that Hopalong Cassidy will come back tomorrow night and the night after in more shows without end, once he has rid Topper off into that sunset at the end of tonight’s show, that’s all there is. It’s over. We might as well go home. The screen is all black, black as death, and will stay that way for all the whole sad length of the here-and-now. It hurts, don’t it? But we’re still alive, and we will have to get a good night’s sleep tonight and get up and go to work tomorrow, and we will just take for granted that we’ll keep on keeping on. If we was forced to choose, none of us would swap our bare-fact existence for the wonder and the delight of the pitcher show. But the secret of the pitcher show, which Hoppy will come to understand all by and by, is that she has a life of her own that goes on and on after the screen goes black. We can’t see her but she’s still out there and will endure everlastingly. We will even, from time to time, catch glimpses of her in the fabulous theater of our mind, which is the best theater, after all, where there are never any endings.

  So we will be able to project in that theater that our story of Landon “Hoppy” Boyd and Miss Sharline Whitlow will be never-ceasing, ongoing, and for the most part happily-ever-after. Who knows, we might could even make a whole new pitcher show out of what will happen to them during the two weeks they will spend in Stay More. There will certainly be other pitcher shows about Stay More along the line, and in fact one of them, name of When Angels Rest, will have a part of it set at the old Stapleton place, which Long Jack will have bequeathed in its rundown and abandoned condition to his grandson Hoppy, who will be staying there with Sharline during those two weeks. Some years later, during the latter part of the Second World War, a platoon of soldiers on maneuvers will use the old deserted house for their bivouac. And what they do there would make an interesting part of a different pitcher show. But of course Hoppy will have no idea that it will be put to that use eventually when he and Sharline will finally abandon it and move on into Jasper, the county seat.

  There will be problems from the moment of their arrival in Stay More, the moment that they discover the blowing of the bugle will have had no effect. Nobody will come a-running, not even kids, let alone womenfolk. Hoppy will have attempted to explain to Sharline just how exceptional this town of Stay More actually is, that it has had a reputation for being not only very hard to get to, practical impossible for some, but once you do manage to get to it, you discover that it is mighty peculiar, distinctly different from all other towns, what some might call eccentric. Things have happened in Stay More that never happened anywhere else. People have lived in Stay More who were not like anyone anywhere else. Hoppy will have given her one good example, his own grandfather, Long Jack Stapleton, but he will also have told her of the legends about Jacob Ingledew, the founder of the town, who eventually became governor of the whole state of Arkansas. Hoppy will have tried to tell Sharline why he has avoided his hometown, how hard it is to live in the shadow of his grandfather, the legendary Long Jack Stapleton.

  “It’s such a pretty town,” Sharline will remark. “It’s a sight prettier than any of the others.”

  He will have pointed out to her, after they will have hit what might be called Main Street, the old hotel, the doctor’s office, the stone ruin of the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, the big general store and the small general store, and all the homes. He will have attempted to see each of these through Sharline’s eyes, as if he’s never seen them before, and it sure is a pretty town.

  Hoppy will spot Doc Swain sitting on the porch of his house and clinic, and will pull over.

  “You folks celebrating your wedding? What’s all that bugling about?” Doc will ask. And then he will ask of Hoppy, “Say, aint you Long Jack’s grandchild?” Hoppy will know he’s only a-bantering, because Doc Swain has known him well since the moment he delivered him from his mother’s womb. “‘Roaming Pitcher Shows,’ eh?” And he will say, “We aint never had none of them in this here town.”

  “Where is everbody?” Hoppy will ask.

  Doc will chuckle. “Well, there aint that many to begin with. Town’s got mighty tiny since you lived here, Landon. Some of ’em’s over yonder on Latha’s store porch. Some of ’em’s gone to a play-party up at Duckworth’s. I reckon most of ’em’s just a-settin at home in their favorite chair a-wondering if that bugle means the end of the world.”

  They will visit with Doc Swain in the gloaming, as the first lightning bugs come out, and Hoppy’s eye will be drawn to Latha’s store porch, where, in just two more years, another pitcher show, called Lightning Bug, will be played out and seen and felt and heard.

  They will learn from Doc Swain the last of the part of this here pitcher show, The Pitcher Shower, which will involve a certain preacher called Brother Emmett Binns, who will have spent the cool night lying in the woods on a rock which will have retained the day’s warmth, and then will have somehow managed the next morning to drag his broken leg to the road, where eventually a farmer passing in his wagon, a feller named Goodfeller from up over to Spunkwater, will pick him up and bring him to Doc Swain, who will put a plaster cast upon his broken leg and will return him to Goodfeller, who will put him back into the wagon and transport him God knows where. Doc’s services will not have been paid for, and he will not be happy about that.

  No one will ever see Emmett Binns again. Not in this pitcher show, leastways, nor in any other. Heroes may reappear again and again but if you need you a real good mean villain, he has to be a fresh one. You can’t use the same villain twice.

  Since they will have come into possession of all the pitcher shows which Binns had stolen, Hoppy and Sharline will decide to set up a theater in the broad meadow which runs along Swains Creek across the road from the old Ingledew place. All the posters that Matt Spottwood had printed for them referred only to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and will therefore be useless for the showing of the westerns, including “The Painted Stallion” serial. So they will attempt to advertise their show by word of mouth, but all the mouths they talk with will tell them of various activities going on which would conflict with the showing of pitcher shows: there will be a square dance planned for one night, a coon hunt planned for the next night, a box supper planned for the next, a quilting bee for the next, and a major shivaree in the works for the next, which is a traditional teasing harassment (from the French charivari) of a newly married couple on their wedding night.

  What about the following week? Well, the town will be planning a kind of Centennial celebration; one hundred years ago Jacob Ingledew and his brother Noah arrived here to start a town, to begin the town’s one hundred years of solitude. Hoppy and Sharline, who will not have been comfortable at the old Stapleton place, with its remoteness in the woods east of Stay More,
its mildew and infestation by rodents, will decide to move on, first paying a visit to Luther Chism to purchase not one but five demijohns of his remarkable moonshine, at least a year’s supply, practically.

  But one night and one night only before they will leave town, perhaps inspired by the taste and other qualities of Chism’s Dew, Hoppy will hang his screen between two trees, fire up the delco, and show the second chapter and that chapter only of “The Painted Stallion,” just to see if it might actually produce some much-needed rainfall for this drought-stricken town. And sure enough, it will rain. Hard. All the alabastine will be washed off the screen, and it will have to be repainted. Hoppy will not have made any bets with anyone on the chance of the rainfall, because he will not have needed the money. Although he will never bother to count exactly how much of Binns’ riches they will have come into possession of, it’s more than he’ll ever need, and he will have no qualms in relieving Binns of it, because, as he will have said to Sharline, “Far’s I’m concerned, it was all ill-gotten to begin with.”

  Most people will not even realize that Hoppy’s showing of that episode of the serial is accountable for the blessèd rainfall. It will have been one more of Hoppy’s random acts of kindness, in the wake of many such throughout the Ozarks. And he will want to get on out there to all the other little lost towns all over the hills and dales of the country. But before leaving Stay More, he will check his mail box at the post office, something he will have managed to do not more than semiannually, and there amidst a stack of junk mail he’ll find the catalog for a St. Louis distributor of pitcher shows, with tantalizing descriptions of all the latest releases, including new Hopalong Cassidy shows being offered at bargain prices.

  They will head northward to the next town, Parthenon, a very pleasant place where the Newton County Academy, a kind of rustic finishing school, is still in operation (and where the makings of a pitcher show called Butterfly Weed will have transpired some years before, starring Doc Swain). Hoppy will ask the storekeeper if he thinks there might be any audience for some good Hopalong Cassidy pitcher shows. The storekeeper will point out that Parthenon is so close to the county seat, Jasper, just six miles up the road, that anyone who wants to see a pitcher show would go there to watch it in the air-conditioned comfort of the Buffalo Theater.

  Mountain-locked Jasper is the smallest of all of the state’s seventy-five county seats, but it is big enough to have an actual square with a courthouse in the center and buildings along all four sides, including a hardware store where, Sharline will suggest, they had better stop and see if it carries alabastine, since their gallon can is practically empty. There is also something Sharline will never have seen before: a drugstore, and she wonders aloud if they might carry anything that she could take for the stomach problem or whatever that will have been making her throw up in the mornings. And also there will be among Jasper’s stores a nice variety store, not exactly a department store such as they’d visited in Clarksville but a store big enough to carry any little old thing that Hoppy might like to get her for her eighteenth birthday, which will be coming up in just another week. And finally, there will be that air-conditioned stone building called the Buffalo Theater. “Could we go?” Sharline asks. “I aint never felt what air-conditioning feels like.”

  “It sure is one hot day,” Hoppy will allow.

  Along with the alabastine, Hoppy will have purchased at the hardware store a lock for Topper’s door. In a fair-sized town with lots of people coming and going, you don’t want to leave any of your valuables unprotected while you go to a pitcher show.

  On the front of the Buffalo Theater there will be a poster for the current attraction, Gene Autry in “Git Along, Little Dogies.” “Goddamn,” Hoppy will say, and will tell Sharline that he doesn’t think that he will be able to sit through a singing-cowboy pitcher show, even if it is air-conditioned. He will urge Sharline just to go by herself, and he will buy her a snow cone and will tell her that he’ll meet her in the lobby in an hour and a half.

  He will wander around the square for a little bit. He will have always liked Jasper, which is not too big of a town but not too little either. He will kill some time among the loafers on the courthouse lawn, listening to them swap windies, and even joining in their whittling. After a time he’ll go back to the lobby of the Buffalo, where there’s a bench he can sit on to wait for Sharline. While he will be sitting there, the manager of the theater will approach him and ask, “That your rig out front?” and when Hoppy will admit that Topper belongs to him, the manager will eagerly want to know all about the career of itinerant pitcher showing. He will be full of questions, which Hoppy, with nothing better to do, will patiently and gladly answer. Hoppy will tell the feller many of his more interesting experiences, omitting the business about Emmett Binns.

  After the conclusion of Hoppy’s interesting narrative on the life and travels of a roaming pitcher show projectionist, the manager, who will have paid bright attention throughout, will ask, “How’d you like to swap?”

  “Swap?” Hoppy will say.

  “Yeah, if you’d care to let me have your rig and take over your route, I’ll sell you this theater for a good price.” About that time, the show will be over, and the manager will say, “Don’t go away. I’ve got to run up and turn off the projector.”

  Sharline will come out, along with the few other folks who will have attended the matinee. Hoppy will tell her about the offer the manager has made.

  Sharline will be thrilled. “We could cool off in there anytime it’s hot,” Sharline will point out. “Also we could have us a little house with a piano in it and a garden patch out back.” When Hoppy will look as if he’ll still be having doubts about the idea, she’ll say, “And you don’t have to get me a birthday present. This theater would suit me just fine.”

  So Landon “Hoppy” Boyd will give his truelove Sharline Whitlow the Buffalo Theater of Jasper, Arkansas for her eighteenth birthday present. That will be the day that he stops hating himself, for anything. However, he will not let that manager have his Hopalong Cassidy pitcher shows, which he will intend to show here in the Buffalo. Hoppy will also remove his other belongings from Topper, including “Assortment,” but he will give the manager the can of alabastine along with one demijohn of Chism’s Dew.

  Hoppy will also retain possession of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which he will show at the Buffalo on a special night once a month, although Sharline will show it alone from time to time when she will have the theater to herself. For months and months, adjusting herself to the busy life of a lively town, she will grieve over the absence of her fairies, who will have faithfully followed her from place to place but will not seem to care for urban life in Jasper. Eventually, she will decide that all of the advantages of living in a cozy, pleasant town like Jasper with a nice little white cottage easy walking distance from the Buffalo and a sure-enough piano in it and a sure-enough garden patch out back, plus the ability to watch the fairies of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” anytime she takes a notion to, will mostly make up for the disappearance of the real fairies.

  She will have other things to occupy her life in their stead. Leaving Hoppy to run the matinees by himself, she will get a daytime job at the square’s barbershop, the only female barber there, indeed the only female barber in Newton County, a novelty that will keep her much in demand among the male customers who will shiver beneath her touch. She will earn almost as much barbering as they will earn running the Buffalo.

  Of course she will discover in due time that what will have been making her throw up in the mornings is the fact that she will be with child. She will not know, nor could scarcely guess for certain, whether Hoppy is the child’s father. If anybody will ask, and few will, she will tell them that she and Hoppy have been married for some time, and, if any proof will be needed, she will have a thin gold wedding band which she will have bought at Jasper’s variety store. Her swelling abdomen will not detract from her barbering business; indeed, her regular cu
stomers will look upon her pregnancy as further evidence of her femininity, and they will all take such a constant interest in it that when she will finally be rushed to the hospital in Harrison for the delivery, every last one of them, bearing flowers and other gifts, will follow her there and will hang around to accept and smoke Hoppy’s cigars.

  It will be hard to tell if the baby, named Stapleton Boyd but called “Stay” all his growing-up years, looks more like Hoppy than like Arlis, since the two men will have looked so much alike. But the boy’s mother will always remain convinced that Hoppy is the father, and the boy’s father will be so proud that he will, with the help of a generous libation of Chism’s Dew, offer a proposal of marriage to the boy’s mother, which she will, of course, accept, but it will be a small and private ceremony in the cluttered office of a justice of the peace.

  The boy will grow up in the double world of barbershop and movie theater, getting two distinctly different educations from each. It will always be conceivable that a pitcher show will be made out of the clever chronicle of his life, especially that part of it concerned with his favorite place for vacations, Stay More.