The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “The last Christmas the woman was too ill to give it any sort of celebration, and I had to give her morphine for her pain. She told me to take her best dress as a present, but I wouldn’t have it. She told me the ‘statute of limitations’ would expire in the springtime, and I would be free to go. She said she hoped to die before then.

  “In time, the chauffeur used up all his savings on prostitutes. Later I learned that, just as I had been carefully saving my salary in order to find my way home and establish a general store, he had been saving his salary to buy a farm. But he spent it all on whores. It was as if he had become addicted to them, and, like drugs, they were an expensive addiction. And then he tried to borrow money from me! Spring was coming and all I could think of was that any day now I would be free to go. I refused to loan him any money. We were standing together on the front lawn of the mansion, and I said, ‘Of course I won’t loan you any money, you fool.’ And then he said, ‘Then beg me for my cock!’ There he was, begging me to beg him. It was almost akin to fantasizing his fantasies. He was standing there on the lawn pressing down on my shoulders and shouting, ‘Get down on your knees and beg me for my cock!’ when the woman, feeble though she was, came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder and called him by name and said, ‘You’re dismissed. Leave at once.’ He struck her. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking, or had no idea of his own strength, but a single backhanded blow from his hand hit the side of her face with such force that it broke her neck. I knelt over her and tested her pulse, which fluttered and stopped. ‘You’ve killed her,’ I said. He looked at her body, crumpled like some rag doll dropped behind, and then he looked wildly around, as if there might have been witnesses. There were no witnesses. Except me, of course. It was the cook’s day off. And when this dawned on him, he whipped off his belt, threw me to the ground, and bound my hands together behind my back. I screamed at the top of my lungs, but the property was so large that the nearest neighbor was far out of earshot. And when I tried to scream again, he wadded up his handkerchief and stuffed it into my mouth. All of this was painfully familiar to me, because…because when I had been raped ten years before, my non-hero had bound my hands behind my back with his belt and had stuffed his handkerchief into my mouth. And now I thought: He is going to rape me. But at that moment he didn’t have time. He dragged and shoved me into the front seat of the automobile, and with a piece of rope he tied my ankles to the underframe of the seat. He took the gag out of my mouth and asked, ‘Where’s your money?’ When I wouldn’t tell him, he told me, ‘That cash aint gonna be a bit of use to you if you won’t tell me where it’s at.’ ‘What are you going to do with me?’ I asked. ‘If you’ll tell me where’s your money, I’ll take you anywhere you wanta go. If you won’t tell me, I’ll kill ye too.’ So I had no choice but to tell him: it was inside a cloth toe-sack inside a dress inside a coat hanging in my closet. He put the gag back into my mouth and went and got my sack of money, which he tossed into the rear seat of the automobile. And then he dragged the woman’s body up underneath the verandah. Then he began pilfering the house, loading silverware into the rear seat. He took the gag out once again and asked me, ‘Do you have any idee where she kept her money hid?’ In the bank, probably, I told him, because I had no idea. He put the gag back into my mouth, and returned to the house again, and I could hear him ransacking it, tearing open doors and drawers and boards, and he was taking such a long time about it that I began to hope a visitor might arrive and see me and save me. But the woman had had so few visitors. I began to cry for that, not that she was dead, which was perhaps a mercy, but that she had had so few visitors in all those years I worked for her. I sat there on the front seat of the car, my hands painfully bound behind me with his belt, my ankles tied too tightly to some underpinning of the seat, and I cried and cried, not for myself, but for all the visitors who had not come and would not come now in the hour of most need.

  “But then…then…”

  You were crying again, my beloved, as you told this part, and you lifted your wet eyes to wherever you might find me, although you could never find me with your eyes, and you whispered, “Horn?” and I said Yes, and you said “Dear old Horn, could you play this part of it for me?” and the Bluff-dweller looked at you and listened to you with compassion, one of the rare times in his whole adult life that he had experienced genuine compassion, not pity that you were a dotty old woman talking to yourself or to me, but that you needed help, that you were in a fix, a predicament, the remembrance of which forced you to turn to me for help, and I, too, felt such compassion, which is the deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another in the inclination to give aid or support, and you were asking for my aid or support, so I took a very deep breath, perhaps the deepest breath I have ever taken, and gave a firm “whistling embouchure,” a true kiss, to the mouthpiece of my instrument and let it resound, so that even the Bluff-dweller surely heard it:

  Your sobs. Your weeping, this no-longer young woman, past thirty now but still beautiful, always beautiful, your flood of tears, not for yourself but for the visitors who never came to see the old woman and would not come now in the hour of most need. But there was The Visitor. You lifted your face, streaming, and could see only the outline of him approaching, only the blur of him, and of an infant, a girl-child, he held in his arms. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said, “but I was wonderin could I git a drink of water fer my baby.” Oh Great Kind! Could he get a drink of water for his baby??? If she didn’t mind the salt, she could have all your tears. But then he noticed, at once, that your shoulders heaved, your face was drenched, and there was a red bandanna stuffed into your mouth. He opened the door of the car and with his free hand, the hand not holding the child, he pulled the handkerchief out of your mouth and said “What’s the trouble, ma’am? What in tarnation is a-gorn on?” As he asked this, he noticed that your hands were bound behind your back, and he quickly unbound them.

  “My feet—” you said, and he noticed how your ankles were tied, and he untied them. You stepped out of the car, wiping away your tears and getting a good look at him and his girl-child—a man in his fifties, old enough to be the baby’s grandfather, the little girl a pretty blond in her second year of life. You pointed at the house. “There’s a man in there, who just killed the woman who owns this place. He’s trying to find her money. I work here. I used to work here. I don’t do anything anymore.”

  At that moment the chauffeur emerged from the house, carrying a pair of expensive brass andirons. The Visitor held out the child to you, saying, “Hold my baby, ma’am.” You took the child, who seemed frightened of you, and cuddled it to you.

  The chauffeur came up to The Visitor and said, “Who in hell are you?”

  The Visitor replied, “Sir, I’m jist a passin wayfarer tryin to git a drink a water fer my little gal. Who in hell are you?”

  “None a yore business. Git all the water ye want. The lady is a-gorn with me.”

  “Supposin let’s ask her if she keers to do that,” The Visitor said, and then asked of you, “Ma’am, do you aim to go with him?” You shook your head vigorously. “Well, then,” The Visitor said to the chauffeur, “I seem to git the impression that she don’t particularly keer to go with you.”

  The chauffeur yanked the baby from your arms and thrust it at The Visitor, who took it. The chauffeur took one of your arms and tried to force you back into the car. The Visitor sat the baby down on the lawn, and pulled the chauffeur away from you and struck him a blow that almost broke his neck. But the chauffeur got up, and lifted one of the brass andirons high above his head and brought it swiftly down toward The Visitor’s face. The Visitor ducked, simultaneously throwing a punch into the chauffeur’s stomach that nearly ruptured his kidney. Another punch to the chauffeur’s chin chipped four molars and dislocated a bicuspid. A punch to the chauffeur’s shoulder cracked the collarbone. A punch to the chauffeur’s chest broke three ribs. A punch to the chauffeur’s face broke his nose and collapsed two sinuses. Another punch to the ch
auffeur’s stomach crushed his diaphragm. A final punch to the chauffeur’s jaw caused brain damage and unconsciousness.

  “Can you drive the car?” The Visitor asked. “Reckon we’d best go and fetch the sheriff or somebody.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” you said.

  “Me neither,” he said. “Well, you stay here with the baby and I’ll hoof it back into town. I don’t think he’ll wake up, but if he does, hit him on the head with one of them andirons.” He turned to go, but turned back. “And please, ma’am, give my baby some water.”

  You gave water to the girl-child. The chauffeur never regained consciousness. Two hours later, three vehicles from the County Sheriff’s Office arrived, one of them bearing The Visitor. The unconscious chauffeur was placed into the rear seat of one of the vehicles and taken away. Several men asked you several questions. Then they asked The Visitor a couple of questions. A hearse arrived for the body of the woman. The men roamed around the house, and one of them took some photographs.

  You invited The Visitor and his child to stay for supper, and then, when you learned that he was homeless, having hiked already some five hundred miles from his previous home, you invited him to spend the night.

  The statute of limitations, if there ever was one, had passed.

  The woman had left a will, and in the will she had deeded her house to you, but you did not know this, because, before the will was read, you had started out on foot for your long hike home, accompanied by the homeless Visitor and his daughter.

  Chapter twenty-two

  One afternoon when you were visiting with Eliza Cunningham at “her” house (she seemed to have settled in for good), the Bluff-dweller arrived at your house, eager to hear the story of how The Visitor, whose little girl, by the way, was destined to grow up and become the mother of the Forest Ranger’s Mistress, traveled with you all the way home to this town, where he decided to stay and build a house for himself and his daughter, the same house now occupied by the Forest Ranger and his Mistress and their Son. When the Bluff-dweller found you absent, he sat down in the breezeway to wait, and waited almost two hours before giving up and heading back up the mountain toward his cavern. Along the way, however, he ran across the teenaged moonshiner, and although they didn’t have a jug to pass back and forth, they hunkered on their heels and visited for a while. And then the young distiller did an uncharacteristic thing: he invited the Bluff-dweller to his dwelling. “Keer to come go home with me?” was the way he put it, out of the blue. The Bluff-dweller said he would be delighted, and off they went, way off up over the mountain and down and up a higher mountain. Not even the sheriff and all his deputies could have found the place. I couldn’t find the place myself. It was not an exposed cavern on a bluff face, but a curious rock formation in the deepest forest, with a spring of purest limestone water gushing up near it. There was no room for a corn patch. The Bluff-dweller learned that the moonshiner did not grow his own corn. Several farmers grew it for him, in return for the finished product. These were the same farmers who grew corn for your grandson’s pigs in return for the finished product.

  The moonshiner introduced the Bluff-dweller to Ursulie. The female bear, fully grown now, was somewhat demure toward the Bluff-dweller, who was the first human being she had ever seen, if we don’t count the moonshiner, and we can be forgiven for not fully counting the moonshiner. The Bluff-dweller’s dog kept a respectable distance away from the bear, who tendered him a couple of growls. The Bluff-dweller was surprised to notice that she was not collared, shackled or tethered, and he commented upon this.

  “Aw, she don’t wander fur,” the moonshiner replied. “There’s enough hereabouts to hold her interest.”

  A raccoon dropped out of a tree and with a loud oath landed upon Ursulie’s thick neck, which he began biting. She swatted him off with one swipe of her paw, and came after him, but he hid behind the moonshiner’s legs. “This here is Robber,” said the moonshiner. “Will you look at the size of that butt on him?” The Bluff-dweller commented upon Robber’s enormous fundament.

  The moonshiner produced a stoneware jug unlike the others, fancier, with blue embellishments, and offered the Bluff-dweller a swig. “That there is sure-enough eight year old. At least eight year old. I wouldn’t sell it fer any amount of cash money, but drink all ye lak.”

  The Bluff-dweller and the moonshiner hunkered on their heels and passed the jug back and forth between them. The Bluff-dweller greatly appreciated the taste of the aged whiskey.

  “How old is what you’ve been selling me?” the Bluff-dweller asked.

  “At least fifteen minutes,” said the moonshiner. “Sometimes a half a hour.” He rose up, and took the Bluff-dweller on a tour of his “works”: three 55-gallon oak-stave barrels wherein the corn mash was “a-workin,” the large copper still itself, wherein the worked mash was further worked into steam by a fire of oak chips beneath it, the steam “a-workin” itself into a long copper “worm” that coiled out and down and around into a barrel of water which worked the steam into liquid by cooling and condensing it, and worked the liquid out into a Mason jar which caught it, spurtle by spurtle. The Bluff-dweller had never seen a still before. Neither had I.

  “May I ask you a very personal question?” the Bluff-dweller announced, “Have you been watering my booze lately?”

  The moonshiner blushed crimson, and instinctively his left ring finger, which stood for you, stood, and you said, or his ventriloquistic voice caused the finger to say, “I asked him to.”

  “Why?” the Bluff-dweller wanted to know, of him or his finger or you.

  “To taper you off,” the finger replied.

  “Well, it’s not working,” the Bluff-dweller declared. “I simply have to drink more of the stuff to reach the desired effect.”

  The left thumb, “Tricky Jick,” stood up and said, “Awright, I promise ye I won’t do it no more. I never shoulda said I’da do it in the fust place, but she ast me to.” The left thumb tapped the left ring finger.

  The two of them were joined by the left little finger, who had been “Little No-Name,” but now had a name which was not revealed to the Bluff-dweller. This little finger said, in her sweet voice, “Nothing can replace the booze except me.”

  You, left ring finger, admonished, “Try not to sound so conceited.”

  “You mistake confidence for conceit,” returned the little finger.

  The Bluff-dweller took another lusty swallow from the eight-year-old jug.

  “Well, I hope you succeed,” said you, the ring finger.

  “But right now I’m much more interested in him,” said the little finger, indicating the right middle finger, who towered above them all, proud and handsome, your grandson.