The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  The Grandson’s Mistress returned from California, without her children, and both the Dying Man and I were charmed to find her all that the Woman had said she is: enormously intelligent, knowledgeable and wise, but without any airs or condescension nor even any self-consciousness about her exceptional beauty. But whatever fantasies I had held of laying claim to the Grandson’s heart were totally scattered by her: I wouldn’t have a chance to compete with her in any department.

  She made no secret of her chagrin that the Dying Man had decided not to restore the town. She actually berated the Dying Man, but her lover the Grandson came to his rescue and adroitly laid out the main argument, that there is no going back. So everything will have to be a matter of going forward. The Grandson’s Mistress said that it was some consolation to her to have been able to return to this town in its present faded condition after having spent some time in California, where everything is marching on relentlessly.

  But what of the historian, namely, me? If there is never any going back, is my whole career misguided? I brooded about this point at such length that finally the Dying Man had to pull me up out of the depths by a reasoned argument that we can always go back to the past in our minds if not materially. Like a good work of fiction, he said, the past can offer us temporary refuge from the dross of contemporary life. The Dying Man encouraged me to undertake (oops, to set about) organizing and editing First’s diaries with a view toward eventual publication of selections from them. My appreciation for his encouragement is not compromised by my suspicion that he simply wants to keep me busy while he is engaged in his own work, which is the organization and editing of his notebooks with a view toward eventual publication as a sweeping indictment of modern American life.

  We are both busy, Linda, in the day-by-day humdrum of these labors, and I regret that I may not have anything further in the way of dramatic events to report. The people hereabouts are not doing anything that would belong in a fictional narrative. We have no gossip. Nothing newsworthy, only the further gradual decline of the population and its buildings. The other day the Woman invited me to go with her to a yard sale, one of those sad events when a family—or in this case a lone man—is planning to move away, usually to California, and is getting rid of all their belongings to lighten their load and pay for the trip. This particular yard sale was just up the road a piece at a decrepit home belonging to a retired state police officer. The Woman told me that he was a disgrace who didn’t deserve to be alive, and we found nothing in his crummy belongings that we wanted, except the Woman made an offer for a handsome davenport, but the man said it wasn’t for sale because he’d sold it. Already taped to his door was a hand-lettered sign, “Gone to California.” The Woman said it was good riddance if she’d ever heard of it.

  “Not everyone in the history of this town was noteworthy or even interesting,” the Woman said. “For a town of its size, I suppose you could say that it ought to furnish enough material to keep a good novelist busy all of his or her days, but even that novelist would begin to feel deprived of significant source material and would perforce have to start contriving and inventing.”

  So I am obliged to inform you that there isn’t really much more to say. Day by day I feel less and less like Second, let alone First, and I have made no further efforts to dress like her or speak like her. The Dying Man seems to have given up all thoughts of his previous Bluff-dwelling existence, and the Harrington is collecting dust. Sometimes—can you imagine?—we play Scrabble. Or we just go to bed earlier, now the days are beginning to shorten. This is the time of year when I’m always worrying—and having nightmares—about the beginning of the fall semester, and trying to keep my students entertained as well as informed, but you know I told the Dean it wasn’t likely I would return and I’m sure that in today’s glutted job market he has already found a suitable replacement for me. I will miss the campus as I will miss you. No, I will miss you more than the campus, and as my work on the diaries permits I will find time to write to you. But for now, I’m sitting here writing you with one hand and fanning myself with the other in this August heat. My fan is from the past: an old-timey fan from some funeral parlor bearing the legend “Rock of Ages Monuments. Let us give your loved ones a proper setting.” I trust that we, all the instruments of this trio, have given our loved ones a proper setting. It does matter. It is important. There couldn’t possibly be more. And there aren’t any geese, only a lone swan. I want to—

  Much love,

  Liz

  Chapter thirty-three

  Saturday

  Dear Linda K.,

  And that is all she will have to say, for now.

  The hammered dulcimer is no longer hammered. But the harmonica—or is it only the wind soughing through the trees, or even the trees themselves?—will want to breathe a few more lines before going silent. You will notice that I will be using the future tense, which the old French Horn determined should be the proper form for any conclusion—not end because, as he blew all too loudly, there is never any end, but just a closing, for now. One of the nicest things about the future tense is that it need not be sequential, chronological. One of the nicest things about all of our days to come is that they will come when they will, and will never cease often to surprise us. I will never be surprised when I hear the French horn playing at night, somewhere out there across the meadow toward the creek. I shall never be able to forget the way he spoke of me in the conclusion of his first effort about this town: “the woman…who gave her name to the story, who gave her life to the man, and who gave her love to the boy who will become her lover and creator.” You have virtually memorized those words yourself, and used them in your essays on that book. Now you will unlock the triple mystery of the change from past into future tense, the problem of simultaneous going and staying, the problem of The Story That Has No End, by quoting to me again from Tennyson, the two lines from his early “Recollections of the Arabian Nights”:

  The tide of time flow’d back with me,

  The forward-flowing tide of time…

  That will be our real secret, dear friend. But how will it be a secret if you reveal it? Because you will reveal it, will you not?

  And I will forward to you this one last little story of my own, which will be true, and which no one else knows, and Kind forgive me for having let it become known:

  The Hermit was the great-grandfather of Second.

  It happened like this, not as one of those concatenated Canny Coincidences that you and our friend Liz collect like stamps or pet rocks or letters from famous authors, but as a natural sequence that makes a parenthesis large enough to hug us all: as a young man, as we know, the Hermit, when scarcely more than an adolescent, less than one in fact, in that Dying Town Back East where he was born, accidentally impregnated his idiot sister (she was not, we must now realize, an idiot but only autistic), who was sent away to a state neighboring this one, and to a “state” neighboring this one, where she gave birth to a child, a son, not defective despite the consanguinity of his parents nor the autism of his mother, who was raised by the mother’s sister, the mother having been committed, as I was, to a state asylum, where she spent the rest of her short (mercifully) life, and the son grew to manhood and fathered the father of Second, that father who, catching on the bounce whatever malformed genes missed his father, became a criminal, and fathered Second on an unsuspecting “moll,” which rhymes with “doll” and perhaps explains how I came to know all of this.

  The point is, or will be, if there is ever any point, or ever will be, farther along, that our hammered dulcimer, who has revealed only a fraction of her hammerings (did she ever talk to you about her childhood?) has come to be, now, and will continue to be, the “tie” that binds us all together: herself to me, myself to the memory of the Hermit, herself to the Hermit’s granddaughter and daughter, the Forest Ranger’s Mistress, who is therefore…? Will you see what I will be driving at? You will take me, yes?

  You will take me, and keep me. And whe
n you will be my age, you will perpetuate this story, which has no end.

  And verily I say unto you, Linda, that will be just a beginning.

  Love, in Kind,

  The Harmonica, now quiet

  For Latha

  “In the next place, I attentively examined what I was and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.”

  Descartes, Discourse on Method, IV

  “Take the boy to you: he so troubles me,

  ’Tis past enduring.”

  Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale II, 1

  “All lovers live by longing, and endure:

  Summon a vision and declare it pure.”

  Roethke, “The Vigil”

  Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Chapter twenty-six

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Chapter thirty

  Chapter thirty-one

  Chapter thirty-two

  Chapter thirty-three

  Chapter thirty-four

  Chapter thirty-five

  Chapter thirty-six

  Chapter thirty-seven

  Chapter thirty-eight

  Chapter thirty-nine

  Chapter forty

  Chapter forty-one

  Chapter forty-two

  Chapter forty-three

  Chapter forty-four

  Chapter forty-five

  Chapter forty-six

  Chapter forty-seven

  Chapter forty-eight

  Chapter forty-nine

  Chapter fifty

  Chapter one

  My daddy died on a day in January so cold, colder than a banker’s heart, that he lay preserved from spoilage for nearly three weeks before he was discovered. It was his miserliness that saved his body: he’d had a habit every night before bedtime of turning off the furnace and keeping himself covered with several old quilts. So he hadn’t yet begun to stink of death when he was found. George Dinsmore, driving along the road a good ways down the mountain from Dad’s place, happened to look up and notice that no smoke was rising from the furnace’s flue pipe, and he drove up there to investigate. Nobody hereabouts locks their doors of a night, so George had no trouble getting into the house, where he found my daddy smiling real big but clearly of a bluish pallor that could mean only one thing: His old friend Hank Ingledew had taken leave of this life. George whipped out his cell phone and called the governor’s office in Little Rock to speak personally with the governor, my brother Vernon, and tell him that his father was no longer alive. And then, instead of phoning me, he drove on down to my house, in the heart of what’s left of the village, where I’d been living for several years with my husband Larry, to tell me face-to-face the solemn news. “Eighty-six is a good age to go,” George said. “I just hope I can last that long.”

  For the rest of the day I was busy making phone calls, keeping busy in order to keep from feeling guilt or shame because I hadn’t been to visit my daddy once in the three weeks he lay dead, or for that matter the three weeks before; I hadn’t seen him since Christmas, when Larry and I stopped by his house to give him his present (one more shirt) and listen to his same old poor excuse for not wanting to join us or anybody for Christmas dinner. I am the only one of his six kids still living in this town, so it behooved me to make the funeral arrangements and, once a date had been set, get in touch with my four sisters, scattered around the country, mostly California, and then to call my brother Vernon, Governor Ingledew, and let him know the date and time. I made a few more phone calls, to the few residents of the town and county who might be interested, and only after I had called everyone I could think of did I realize that I hadn’t called the most important resident, my grandmother, who was my daddy’s mother-in-law. Why hadn’t I called her first? Because it was no secret she’d never lost any love on her son-in-law? Because I was afraid she might even express gladness over his death? Because I didn’t want to bother her, to make her have to get up and answer the phone? Surely not because I had simply forgotten her? No, after discussing my negligence with Larry, I decided that I was simply reluctant to give Gran this memento mori. After all, she had held out for a hundred and six years and, although she had been known to declare that she would outlive us all, she didn’t need to let her thoughts dwell on the demise of the last Ingledew of his generation, and he the last male Ingledew except for his son Vernon. But when I phoned her she took the news well, without any great expression of either sorrow or elation. I offered to give her a ride to the cemetery. “Sharon,” she said, “I can walk.”

  Which she did, although it was a couple of miles, and still so cold she had to bundle up in her best coat and scarf. The funeral was fairly well attended. The newspapers had given the obituary unusual space, not because my daddy was important or even historic (he had installed the first television sets in the county) but because he was the father of the popular Democratic governor. During the Second World War, he had been an officer in the U.S. Navy, so there were military honors at his funeral, with a flag draped over the coffin, and some sailors firing off their rifles. Vernon was just a little late, riding up in a state trooper’s car. In front of everyone he gave me a hug, first, before he gave hugs to his other four sisters. We six children of the deceased huddled for a while to argue quietly, because Patricia, who had joined the Pentecostal church in Kansas City, had imported a minister from Harrison and had been up all night preparing the basic facts for the eulogy, and she wanted to be sure that we approved of the selections of scripture for him to read. Eva, the second oldest, had joined a Church of Scientology in Van Nuys, California, and said that since Daddy had already entered a new life, her creed didn’t believe in funerals, only in memorial services. Latha, the oldest of we sisters, named after our wise, ancient grandmother, and like her in many ways although she’d moved to San Francisco and married a Buddhist thirty years before, and was dressed all in white because the Buddhists believe the family should wear white to funerals, reminded us that Dad, like all the Ingledews of every generation running back as far as anyone knew, maybe even into the seventeenth century, did not believe in God, and therefore would not want a Christian service. June and Vernon and I nodded our heads in solemn agreement, and Vernon said, “But he didn’t believe in Siddhartha Gautama either.” Vernon, in his political, persuasive voice, suggested that we might as well let the Pentecostal preacher go ahead and deliver the eulogy,
since Patricia had put so much trouble into it, and that he personally had no objection to the singing of the religious hymn, “Farther Along,” in fact it was to be expected, but that there should be no other religious ceremony at the graveside, no prayers, no preaching.

  So that was it. The Pentecostal minister unfolded some sheets of paper and read aloud the bare facts of Daddy’s life: John Henry Ingledew was born in 1920 in Stay More to Bevis Ingledew and Emelda Duckworth Ingledew; he was known to everyone as “Hank,” and attended the Stay More public school. At the age of twenty, he married Sonora Twichell and to them were born the following children, etc. His wife had preceded him to glory by forty-five years. He made no mention of Daddy’s running away from home at the age of ten to join the circus, or of his keeping company with the legendary peddler Eli Willard at the time of Willard’s death or of Willard’s gift to him of the magic chronometer wristwatch to keep for his son who had not yet been imagined, let alone conceived or born. Such fanciful facts of Daddy’s life, and there were dozens more—I wondered if Patricia had mentioned any of them to the preacher—seemed to belong to a time and a way of life that no longer existed in the modern world, and this preacher’s eulogy made Daddy appear dull and ordinary and safe. Finally the man folded up his sheets of paper, and looked at me and said, “Sisters, and Your Excellency, don’t mourn for your father. He has gone to a much better place. God has called him home.” He was about to go on, but I had raised my finger to my lips, and so had Vernon, and so had June. The preacher stared at us silently for a long moment before it dawned on him why we were shushing him. Then he looked pained, and was uncertain what to do next. There was a long silence. It was Gran who began singing first, but it took only the second syllable of “along” before most everybody else joined in, and sang that hymn which has been sung at so many funerals in this cemetery that it might as well stand as the civic anthem for the town, or what is left of it. There isn’t much room left in the little cemetery but I do believe that when my time comes there will be room for me near that double headstone of Daddy and Momma, and that if anyone at all is remaining, having not failed to heed the injunction to stay more, they will raise their voices in song to express the certainty that farther along we’ll know all about, farther along we’ll understand why.