“That sure is mighty interestin,” your husband had remarked. “I always wondered how come that place to have three doors.”
“But that is just about all I know about her,” the professor had said. “I was wondering if perhaps she had left anything behind, letters or whatever.”
Your husband had shrugged, but you had said, “Our grandson searched in the attic of that house and found a whole trunk full of diaries that the woman had kept.”
“Good lord!” the professor had exclaimed. “How can I find him?”
Your husband had given directions to your grandson’s house and had warned the man not to run over any pigs en route, and the man had hopped into his car, babbling to his sweating wife or whoever the woman was, and had sped off, but had returned in an hour to report that your grandson had informed him that the diaries were locked up in his vault at the bank in the county seat, and that the grandson did not intend to show them to anyone, or rather that he was going to wait until, farther along, the “right” person came along. Could you perhaps exert some influence on your grandson to get him to show them to me?
Your husband had replied, “I couldn’t ‘exert influence’ on that boy to give me the time o’ day if he didn’t feel like it.”
The man had looked at you beseechingly.
You had shaken your head. “He’s awfully strongheaded.” Thank you, precious; I appreciate that deeply.
“Then tell him—” the man had begun, but had not finished. “I’ll try again,” he had said, but had never been seen again, nor heard of, except indirectly, as the person who, as biographer of the ex-governor’s successor, had been in correspondence with a political science professor at the branch of a state university in a neighboring state who had possibly had some conversations with a woman colleague in the history department, who now had written to you.
Chapter fifteen
First you answered the letter from your granddaughter, taking out the fancy cherrywood writing-box your grandson had given you one Christmas, which was one of his many gifts that you could put to use. You thanked her for the photographs of your great-grandchildren. They all looked wonderful, and were really growing up fast. Everybody here is well. Come back for a visit whenever you can. Likely I’ll never get out to the West Coast. Nobody seems to remember the curse that your great-great-great-grandfather put on that place. Speaking of him, I just had in the same mail a letter from a lady professor of history who wants a photograph of his house. Maybe some people are still interested in him, besides your brother. If your brother doesn’t write you more often, it’s because he’s so busy trying to learn everything there is to know. He would probably rewrite the words of the song for you, so that it would go, “Cheer up, my sister, live in the sunshine; we’ll understand it, all by and by.” No, I didn’t know that so-and-so had left that no-good so-and-so. Have you told your brother this? Give everybody my love. Gran.
Then you took up more stationery and began to write the woman who was an instructor of history. “What shall I say to her?” you asked. Just be yourself, my light, I replied, and that will be more than enough. So you saluted her, and wrote: “I was happy to receive your letter addressed to my husband and myself, although my husband recently passed away. There wasn’t much that he knew about the house or its residents that I don’t also know. I’m enclosing a copy of a photograph of the house taken about 1905 or 1906. I would also refer you to a pencil sketch of the house which appears on page 150 of the only known study of the architecture of this region, but I am sure you are familiar with this, as it also discusses the occupants of the house. You are welcome to come down here and see the house, and visit, for as long as you like. I would be happy to provide you with a room of your own, so come prepared to stay a while if you wish. On second thought, if you would like, I could arrange with my grandson, its owner but not occupant, for you to stay in that very house itself, which was later a hotel, after the woman of your same name died. Is that actually your name? I am not hard to find. When you reach the village, take the first sharp left road, at the onetime post office. After passing a couple of abandoned houses on either side of the road, you will come to an occupied dogtrot cabin on the right. That’s me. Looking forward to seeing you.”
“How’s that?” you asked. Just fine, I answered: the plot thickens, at long last. “Then I don’t want to thin it by a long walk to the mailbox,” you declared. So you made a short quick walk to the mailbox, and a deus ex machina in the form of the route carrier picked up your letters immediately and whisked them away and other deuses sorted them and sped them on their way and delivered them, and the woman historian was delighted and said to her best friend, a woman instructor of English, only half-jokingly, “I’m going away, and might never come back.”
Meanwhile, best woman, our plot thinned again against our will, and the day dragged on. You worked on a quilt, piecing tops for a Nine Patch Lover’s Link pattern. With a break for lunch (chicken salad sandwich), this quilt-piecing took up most of your day. You saw someone coming down the road and hoped it was the Bluff-dweller but knew it was too early in the late afternoon for it to be. As he came nearer, you recognized your other friend, the friend of long-standing, the young moonshiner, he of the magic fingers, the doll-fingers. He came up and showed you his left ring finger and said, “Howdy, ma’am. Nice evenin. Kin I set a spell?” Light down and hitch, you told him, for although he was not mounted this was the polite invitation. I knew what the Bluff-dweller had said about him, and thus his odd appearance did not startle me. In fact, scarcely anything ever startles me anymore, you know that, love. “Yes, I can imagine,” you said.
“How’s thet, ma’am?” he asked.
“Oh, just talkin to myself,” you said.
“You must do that purty often these days, I reckon,” he said, then coughed, and blushed, and indicating his right ring finger, which was scarred and immobile, added, “I mean, seein as how yore man done met up with Kind and all…I mean, I know what lonesome is like.”
“Yes, but haven’t you met up with the Bluff-dweller?”
“Which?”
“The gray-bearded white man playing like an Indian who lives up yonder some-ers under a rock ledge.”
“Oh yeah, him, yeah, yes’m. Right curious feller. Beatin’est oddling I ever did see. Next to me, o’ course.” He wiggled his right little finger and held it beside his left thumb.
You smiled. “You sell him his whiskey, don’t you?”
“Whiskey? I wouldn’t call it that, ma’am.”
“What would you call it?”
“Wal, I don’t rightly know. None a my folks never called it thet. My pap jist called it hooch or baldface. Most people call it The Dew after our family name.”
Ask him, darling, whatever happened to his father. “Whatever happened to your father?”
“He…he…he…” the young moonshiner was not giggling, although it sounded as if he had the dry giggles. “He lived jist long enough to teach me how to run the still, then he drunk near ’bout a gallon and laid down and met up with Kind.”
Ask him where he found out about Kind. “You’ve mentioned Kind twice already. Where did you learn about Kind?”
“Why, from yore grandson, o’course.” He held up his right middle finger, in what would otherwise have been an obscene gesture, but did not strike you as such.
“Then you believe in Kind?”
“I reckon so. I shore caint believe in no God.”
“Would you do a Kind favor?”
“Ask it.”
“I would appreciate it very much if you would put a little more water, each and every week, into the jug of whiskey that you sell to the Bluff-dweller.”
Hold on, honey! That might not work. In fact, I’m almost certain it won’t work. The Bluff-dweller always knows when he’s had enough, and he’ll simply drink more of it if it’s watered down.
Shut up, you! you thought, not aloud, and waited for the moonshiner’s answer, which was:
“I never cheated on nobody in my whole life.”
“It wouldn’t be cheating,” you declared. “You would be doing him a favor. A Kind favor.”
The moonshiner held up his right little finger, and studied it. The finger wobbled, drunkenly, as he brought up the left little finger to meet it. “Stoney Nub” was too stoned to meet “Little No Name” and tried but failed to touch her.
“She has a name now,” you said. “‘Cunning Ham’.”
“Wal, I declare,” he said, and addressed the left little finger, “Miz ‘Cunning Ham,’ how do ye do?” He touched the left thumb, “Tricky Jick,” to the left little finger.
The left little finger said, in dulcet soprano, “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir.” Apparently among Jick’s many tricks was the gift of ventriloquism. You watched his lips closely but they did not stir.
“Little lady, I’d like fer ye to meet my good buddy here,” the left thumb said, and tapped the right little finger. “Stoney Nub’s his name, but he’s kinder pickled. Say somethin to the lady, Nub.”
“Cogito, ergo sum,” said the right little finger.
“Come again, ole buddy?”
“The tissue, or not to mince the issue, toilet paper, is the sole luxury I permit myself, and that sparingly, using scarcely more at the nether aperture than at the higher, the bung than the maw, packing on—”
“That aint no way to speak to a lady, buster. ’Scuse him, ma’am. He do have a right powerful cravin fer my bootleg. This other lady here—” the left thumb introduced the left ring finger, “Mistress Way has asked me to water down his jug, gradual-like, so’s mebbe he won’t notice, and mebbe when it’s half water he’ll be fitten to talk and visit with ye proper.”
You, dear left ring finger, wedding band and all, were laughing your head off.
And you, dear person, were laughing to see “yourself” laughing, and saying, “Jick, you amaze me.”
He grinned, and the left thumb said, “Aw, shucks.” Then the left thumb gave the left ring finger a kiss, forming a circle, which the right little finger penetrated.
“What does that mean?” you asked.
“Between me’n you, we’ll save him.”
“No, we’ll just try to get him ready for Miss Cunningham to save him.”
“Is she sure enough fer real?”
“I think,” you said, and asked of me, “Isn’t she?” Yes, I replied.
“Yes,” said Jick, and nine of his fingers chorused “Yes,” and then they were gone, leaving us alone.
“Who’s the puppeteer and who’s the marionette?” you asked of me. “Or am I just a lonely, senile old woman talking to herself?”
You are the harmonica, dear lady, and I am the French horn. Hear me? I am very mellow, and very distant, but you hear me, and will go on hearing me, until…but let’s not even think about that yet. I blow my notes only in response to yours, as I always have. We play mostly in Adagio un poco mosso, both of our sounds poignant, mournful and wistful, for the theme of our music is of loss, of loss and search, of losing and finding, of wanting. I have wanted you so much, but have never found you. Once I liked to think that I was your creator, but I have never been your puppeteer, for your own will is too strong for anyone to manipulate it. I told you there was nothing you could do with your days but be. And I will be with you…until…until perhaps you grow tired of me. But am I not a lively understandable spirit? I love you, woman.
“I love you too, Kind sir, and if I were forty years younger I would marry you right this minute.”
You couldn’t. For I am lost.
“Then the Bluff-dweller is just a living metaphor for yourself?”
No. He never gets lost. It’s incredible how he finds his way around those deepest woods without a compass.
“Speaking of which, how long do I have to wait before he shows up around here again?”
Not long. First you’ll have a visit from your grandson, and neither I nor the Bluff-dweller is permitted to meet him…yet. See you later.
Chapter sixteen
Again the Bluff-dweller was obliged to wait in the woods, out of sight, until your grandson’s Chevrolet pick-up truck had backed from your yard and gone away. You sensed this when he appeared shortly thereafter, and challenged him, “Why didn’t you just come on in? Don’t you want to meet my grandson?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Remember that I’m a hermit.” His breath reeked of whiskey, his eyes were bloodshot, he could not have been awake for longer than an hour, but he was freshly bathed, his hair still damp, and he was dressed not in his Indian attire but in a Brooks Brothers sport coat and necktie: he looked almost like a chief curator of a foundation.
You said, “We were talking about you.”
“Oh? Does he know about me?”
“He’s known about you for years. Your distant cousin, after all, the man whom you first met when you came here, the man who was the only living person you even spoke to until you met your young moonshiner, is my grandson’s foreman at the pig plant. One of his—do you want me to call him ‘Foreman’ although that isn’t his name?—one of Foreman’s first duties, after your arrival, at the request of my grandson, was to fly east to the city where you had lived and worked, and compile a complete report—an ‘extended dossier’ my grandson calls it—about you.”
He was reduced to a perfect nonplus, to put it as Kindly as possible. All he could say was, “Why?”
“Because my curious grandson wants to know everything, farther along. And has more than enough money to do it with.”
“Is that why you haven’t asked me any questions about my past? Because you already know all about it? Have you seen my ‘extended dossier’?”
“No, my grandson wouldn’t show it to anyone, except to…to his…well, she’s not exactly his wife, because they aren’t married, and she’s his own cousin, but they live together and…” “What can I call her?” you asked me. Mistress, I suggested, which is perfectly properly defined either as a woman in a position of authority such as the head of a household or estate, or a woman who has ultimate control over something as in: the mistress of his heart. “She’s his mistress,” you said.
“I feel naked,” he said.
“My grandson’s mistress is a charming person. You would adore her. And she, if she didn’t love my grandson so much, would adore you. Several years ago, in fact, she suggested to me that she would gladly arrange to find for you ‘an help meet’—that’s the way she put it, she was valedictorian of her high school class and she’s almost as smart as my grandson. But the problem is…no, there are two problems, an old one and a new one…the old one is that I told her that for whatever reasons of your own you weren’t ready for a helpmate. Forgive me if I was mistaken. The new problem is that she’s leaving my grandson. You see, she was married at one time, to a no-good so-and-so who took her two sons and ran off to the West Coast when he found out she loved my grandson. She loved my grandson so much that she didn’t even miss her sons, for a while, but then she began to miss them terribly, and recently, just today in fact, when she learned that the woman her husband had been living with had broken up with him, she decided to fly out to the West Coast to see her sons again and possibly even see her husband. Your distant cousin, whom we’re calling ‘Foreman,’ has driven her to the airport, the same airport you arrived at years ago. My grandson is heartbroken. He says she might not have done it, if he had consented to a request of hers, which involves you.”
He did not say anything. Lost in his own problems, and chagrined at the thought that you, dear old lady so dear to him too, had deprived him of the chance to have “an help meet,” he could not care less about the domestic difficulties of your grandson and his mistress. He could not even fathom the depths of a mother’s love for her long-lost sons. He could only reflect that your grandson must have some serious shortcomings that would make his adoring mistress forsake him in favor of her sons.
You nudged. “Do you want to know how it involves y
ou?”
He shrugged, and emitted an unintentional belch, for which he apologized.
“My grandson’s mistress has—or had—a consuming obsession to restore this town. My grandson could easily afford it; he owns the whole place, in fact, and I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many millions his pork works has earned him. And my grandson’s mistress’ best friend—shall I call her that? or shall I call her The Forest Ranger’s Wife—you met him, once, briefly—he told you that you were squatting on U.S. National Forest land and to be sure to burn only deadwood—The Forest Ranger is my grandson’s best friend, and his wife…well, they aren’t married either, so I would have to call her The Forest Ranger’s Mistress…she’s the best friend of my Grandson’s Mistress. The four of them have argued a lot about restoring the town, both of the women are in favor of it, and both of the men are opposed to it. Coincidentally, not that it matters, both of the women are older than both of the men, not much, my Grandson’s Mistress is eight years older than he, while The Forest Ranger’s Mistress is three years older than he, making them, respectively, let’s see, thirty-five, twenty-seven, thirty, and twenty-seven, the two men are the same age, the same age you were when you first had thoughts of moving to these mountains and becoming a hermit. I know that much about you. Also, I know that you are—or were—an expert on restoration, and all four of them know it, and they have argued endlessly about offering you a very lucrative salary to supervise the restoration of the town and become curator of it. At one point, The Forest Ranger’s Mistress requested that he lead her to the location of your cavern so that she could ‘interview’ you for the job, and he led her halfway there, but turned back.” “Should I be telling him all of this?” you asked me. You are saying it, I replied. “Would you have accepted?” you asked him.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 31