“Let me think about it,” he said, and managed to cross the road and retrieve his dog and enter the woods before breaking into tears. You stood in the breezeway and, since it is very bad luck to watch someone go all of the way out of sight, you turned your face away before the moment of his disappearance, but that turned one of your ears in his direction, and you caught his first sob, and the second, and a trace of the third. How’s my French horn? “Oh, why didn’t you make me hush?” you hissed at me. Because your harmonica was really humming, love. “Damn it, I never in my life even held a harmonica!” Well, once upon a time I held a French horn, but I never blew it. “You blew it, just now,” you accused. Listen, gorgeous heart, let’s get one thing straight: I’m just recording what the eye sees and the ear hears. You folks have a life of your own. “But you know our innermost thoughts,” you insisted, “so tell me what the Bluff-dweller is thinking, right now.” He’s thinking of lost opportunities, of things that could have happened to him but did not, he’s thinking of people who went halfway to meet him but turned back, of his definition of the true hermit as he who is never approached, of his wanting to be approached, of his not minding being approached if only someone would, of someone wanting to approach him but turning back halfway, he’s thinking that the town is beyond restoration even if he wanted to restore it, and he’s thinking that he’s very opposed to the concept of reconstruction as against restoration, and above all he’s thinking that here all along he had thought that all of us are solitary figures, living alone: himself, the young moonshiner, his distant cousin “Foreman,” you, even the embalmed World’s Oldest Man, your grandson, now, myself, if he knew of me, and yet there are people here who are not alone: The Forest Ranger and his Mistress and their Son. He is thinking that he knows only what you have told him about The Forest Ranger and his Mistress but he has seen The Forest Ranger and can imagine that his Mistress is beautiful and that they love one another very deeply and no one loves him. Except you. Isn’t that right?
“It’s right, but it’s wrong,” you declared. “I love the memory of my husband more than even you could play on that horn. I love you too, but in an impossible way. I care for the Bluff-dweller very much. I didn’t mean to hurt him by telling about the idea of restoring the town. I thought it might flatter him. And if he really was interested, and the men could be persuaded, it would give him something worthwhile to do. Get him out of his cave, out of his hole.”
Why is it that we men are opposed to the restoration of the town, and you women are in favor of it?
“Are you opposed to it? You, of all people?”
At one time I would not have been. One time I would have done all I could to promote the restoration of the town. But farther along I have come to understand how any restoration, let alone reconstruction, would be artificial. As the Bluff-dweller put it to you on his comb-and-tissue, why prolong the town’s terminal illness? But my question to you is: why are women in favor of saving it, and men opposed?
You reflected. “Maybe women can’t let go of the past as easily as men.” I shook my head, forgetting you can’t see me, and then I remembered and said, No, there must be more to it than that. “Are you hinting at the fact that towns, like ships, are personified as female?” you suggested. You suggested it, dear female. I reminded you of the several occasions before your marriage when your husband-to-be was hell-bent on leaving the town and you were just as determined never to leave it. The name of the town itself, which we are not permitted to reveal, suggests that one should never leave, or that one should, in any event, remain a while longer, that there is never any ending, but there is never any going back to the beginning either. The Bluff-dweller came to realize, at one point in his life, that his native town, the capital, the town itself was the mother that he was really looking for, but in the moment of that realization he also realized that all moments pass away, and there is never any turning back. The Forest Ranger feels that this lost village is the culminating image of those lost places in the heart, his and his Mistress’ hearts, and he doesn’t wish to regain or restore them, although she would like to have them recaptured the better to remember them. Your grandson, who literally possesses the town in the sense of owning it, has, in his wisdom, come to understand that change and progress are inevitable and that there is no stopping the process of decay, although his Mistress cherishes her image of the town as it appeared in her childhood and would like to see it that way again. And Eliza Cunningham—but she isn’t here yet. She is advertising for someone to sublet her apartment, and cleaning out her office at the university, and getting new tires for her car, as well as a lube and oil change. She also has an appointment tomorrow for a haircut and styling. But when she comes, the sides will be drawn, and equal: four men opposed to the restoration of the town, four women in favor of it.
“Someone will have to change his or her mind,” you predicted.
We shall see, I said. Have a good night’s sleep.
Chapter seventeen
When he appeared again, the Bluff-dweller was dressed as a Bluff-dweller, and had his atlatl and several spears with him, and it wasn’t even dusk but only mid-afternoon. He asked if you would like to go fishing with him. How did he know that you enjoyed fishing? Give him credit for some sensitivity to the likings of others. You put on your sunbonnet and took your cane pole down from the wall of the breezeway, and dug some worms out of your compost pile, and led the Bluff-dweller to your favorite spot on the small creek that meanders into the larger creek. The German shepherd followed, as well as a few curious pigs. On the way, taking your time getting there, you paused to help him identify wildflowers, for he knew little or nothing of nature study. You knew them all: Bee Balm, Mallow, Lady’s Slipper, Bouncing Bet, Fleabane, Loosestrife, Mullein…but we have been through all this before. He wanted to pick one, but you would not let him.
When you finally reached that cove of stream with the bottomless nickname, it became a kind of contest: you upstream with your worm-on-a-hook, he downstream with his atlatl, his dog indifferent but a few pigs watching him as he speared, or failed to spear, a fish. You did not point out to him that the spearing of fish is illegal in this state, nor did you complain that the noise of the splashing of his spears was interfering with your own efforts at the catch. You caught a few good-sized sun perch. He speared a catfish and a couple of hogsuckers, which, you pointed out to him, were too boney to bother trying to eat. He gave them to a couple of the pigs, who were glad to have them, bones and all. Then out of the blue he asked you, “What is your version of the reason the old man in the showcase in the general store hasn’t been buried?”
You were taken aback, for you hadn’t given it a thought, in years. “What is my version?” you asked me, but I declined to reply, wanting to hear you say whatever could be said. “It’s a long story,” you protested, but you told him the facts: of the peddler’s almost annual coming, from the almost beginning of the town itself, selling defective clocks to the town’s cofounder, who would beget a long line of the same name, culminating and ending in your childless grandson, who will remain childless because the woman he loves gave birth to two sons by another man she was married to, and had now gone to be reunited with—forgive the double dangling prepositions, which are “stopping” of the French horn with the fist. The last proprietress of the general store, you explained, had been your competitor, after all, and had never forgiven you for winning the post of postmistress. She had insisted that the body and its showcase be removed from her store, and it had been, for a while, it had been stored in the abandoned mill, until…
“At the funeral of my daughter—she was only forty when she died of breast cancer—it began to rain very hard. Of course it is good luck, or a good omen, for rain to fall during a funeral, just as it did at my husband’s funeral and also at your father’s funeral. But the rain that fell at my daughter’s funeral was the hardest that anyone could remember, and it kept falling, so that all the creeks rose. This one was about up to here—”
you indicated your still-lovely breasts—“and the abandoned mill was about to be washed away, so my son-in-law, grief-stricken though he was, had the presence of mind to remember that the old man in the showcase was stored in the mill, and with the help of his brother retrieved the showcase just in time, just before the mill collapsed and washed away, and they stored it then in an abandoned house where a hermit had lived. It remained there for a number of years, until The Forest Ranger and his Mistress, who was that hermit’s granddaughter, wanted to move into that house. Then my grandson helped The Forest Ranger move the showcase back to its original location in the abandoned general store, where it has been ever since. I suppose ‘my version’ of why it is there is that the old peddler died on the porch of the store, and the store was where he did his last selling or peddling, and if you want some symbolic significance you would have to ask my fancy French horn friend.”
“Your French horn friend?” he said, wondering if he had heard you right.
“Yes. Listen and see if you can hear it.”
He thought you were daft, but he listened, and I tootled a bit, brassy and round, mellow and heroic, and above all, Kind. He heard me, I think, and understood, farther along, but that did not change his determination to give the old man a burial.
“Could you hear it?” you wanted to know.
He smiled uncomfortably, but it was such a rare sight to see him smile. “There sure are a lot of hermits around here,” he remarked. “Who was this hermit who was the grandfather of The Forest Ranger’s Mistress?”
“He’s another long story,” you said. “Let’s go clean these fish and get them cooked.”
After the fish were eaten, he leaned across the table and rested one of his hands on top of one of yours. “Speaking of long stories,” he said tenderly, “tell me the story of your life.”
Chapter eighteen
I was born in nineteen oh one in a cabin on the east side of that mountain yonder,” you began, and told him the whole story of your life. It took more than one sitting. It took days. He would even wake up in the mornings! The mornings, bright and glorious! He would wake up in the mornings and come and have breakfast with you. Breakfast! Which he had not eaten for years. He would come and have breakfast with you and ask you questions about your life. He could not get enough of your life! Oh, for Kind’s sake, listen to my blaring brass! He would snap his eyes open in the pre-dawn, and even though he had been up late with his jug, he would force himself up and under the icy falls for a quick shower. His dog could not understand it. His dog would dutifully wake himself and dutifully follow him down the mountain. Your cats dutifully grew accustomed to the dog and no longer molested him! Your cats would even sleep in the presence of the sleeping dog! All of us love everyone! We love your life! Your life had its ups and its down down downs, but your life was a love story. And it still is! And it always will be! Forever and ever. You will never die, my darling. If anybody is hanging around waiting to sing “Farther Along” at your funeral, they are going to collect cobwebs and dust and mold.
“You are so sweet,” you said to me, one day, and went on telling him the story of your life.
He was often angered. “Why did your sister have you committed to the state asylum?” he demanded, pounding a fist on the table, rattling the crockery.
“I was still a minor, and she had the right to be appointed as my legal guardian.”
“But you weren’t the least bit crazy!” he shrieked.
“The doctor thought I was. I must have convinced him.”
“Sonofabitch! That reminds me of a girl I knew, who…. But this is your story. Go on. How long were you in the nuthouse?
“Three years, I was told. I don’t remember.”
“Three whole years! Goddamn the world! You must have actually become a little crazy.”
“Madness would have been an escape which was denied me. So I simply withdrew. I forgot. I gave myself amnesia. Years afterward, my husband—we weren’t married yet, but just about to be—explained what had happened, with the help of Old French Horn: how he, my husband, not Horn, had made a daring rescue of me, and had taken me as far east as the capital of the next state over, where one morning I literally and figuratively ‘woke up’ to discover myself alone in a strange room of a cheap hotel, and I got out of there as fast as I could, not knowing that my hero was at that moment getting himself baptized as part of his ‘compact’ with ‘God,’ who had told him that I would come out of my ‘trance’ only on that condition. But it wasn’t actually a trance, you see. I don’t know how to explain this to you.”
But explain it to him you did, love, without any help from me. And he went back up to his cavern to drink watered-down booze and to sleep and have strange dreams and to get up early in the morning to come and hear more of your lovely life. He suspected that his booze had been watered but had no way of proving it, and, just as I anticipated, he simply drank more of it in order to reach the desired effect, or, unfortunately, he lost his ability to know precisely when he had had enough, and one night he drank the whole jug and did not wake up in the morning, nor in the afternoon, but at dusk, which he mistook for dawn.
Meanwhile, on this day that he did not appear, a green automobile pulled into your yard, and its lone occupant, a young woman, stepped out and approached your breezeway, where you were sitting in your rocker. How can I even describe her? Once upon a time when I attempted to describe you, I could only do it by comparing you flatteringly with a certain British film actress who is actually red-haired, sometimes auburn, but for that particular movie was a dark brunette, as you once were. Regrettably there is no actress to compare this lady to, which is not to say that she was more beautiful than any actress, but is perhaps a cop-out on our part, since we are not naming any names, except hers.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “I’m Eliza Cunningham.”
“I’ve been expecting you,” you said, but you were not expecting this: small, small enough for the Bluff-dweller, shorter than he, her most shapely hips and buttocks curiously low-slung, as Eliza Cunningham’s had been, and with green eyes, or turquoise eyes depending on the light, and long auburn hair unparted, more red than auburn, a smallish but most kissable mouth, the upper lip slightly protruding as if to counteract the rearward protrusion of her haunches, arched eyebrows, faultless long nose, just-right cheeks, long neck, soft shoulders, perfect breasts, et cetera et cetera. I am stopping and unstopping my horn as fast as I can, from open to brassy and brassy to open, even twisting my fist a bit to give special effects, and still I cannot do justice to her. A living doll. Her students must have been wild about her. It’s a wonder that none of the male students ever proposed to her. Or maybe they did. It’s a miracle that, at the age of twenty-seven, she isn’t married. Has she had many affairs? I can’t say. I really can’t. All I know is that she is extremely attractive, quite intelligent, unwed, very warm and caring and vulnerable, but brazenly claims to be named Eliza Cunningham. “Dr. Cunningham, I’m mighty proud to know ye,” you said, we said, we all said.
“Please call me Liz,” she requested, and we did, we did. We even forgot, in our excitement, to offer her a chair. Yet she stood not awkwardly but proudly and comfortably. Then we remembered our manners.
“Won’t you have a cheer?” you offered, pronouncing chair in that delightfully ambiguous fashion. We gave her a cheer. And another cheer. Rah, rah, siz boom bah! Our heroine is here!
“Oh, cut it out!” you said.
“Pardon?” she said, sitting.
“I have a sometimes annoying silent guest,” you informed her, “who unfortunately is not silent enough. If occasionally I seem to be talking to myself, let it go at that: a lonely old woman talking to herself.”
“You must be very lonely,” Liz said with genuine concern.
“I’m not lonely at all,” you returned. “I have constant visitors.”
“Then I hope I’m not too much for you,” she apologized.
“Not at all. You’re just the per
son I’m looking for. But is your name really Eliza Cunningham?”
“That’s what my father named me,” she affirmed, smiling sweetly.
You glanced at her car. “And are you alone?” you asked needlessly. “You didn’t bring anybody with you?” This was your polite way of finding out if she was really unmarried, but I already told you she wasn’t.
“My best friend, a woman in the English section, wanted to come with me, but I told her that if she did she might have to drive back alone, because, if you really meant your very Kind invitation, I would like to stay until I’ve worn out my welcome.”
“You’ll never wear out your welcome. But pardon me, did I hear you capitalize ‘Kind’?”
“Thank you. Yes, you did.”
“Then you know more about this place than I could have imagined.”
“There is much more still to know. I haven’t even seen the house yet. I could so easily have driven on a short distance to see it, but I turned into your road.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 32