The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Alexander takes Kim out onto a deck cantilevered over the bluff; the view is excellent, all up and down the valley as far as Carter’s Store, but Kim is terrified of heights and stays close to the door. Bob and Alice named their place Raheen after the bishop of Australia’s estate, which adjoined their Melbourne house; they thought it was an Australian aborigine name, but later learned it was Gaelic for “ringed fortress.”

  Alice says, “The view, the lovely view.”

  But there are compote farmhouses visible down below, and Bob says, “I think the thing that bothers me most about the area is the poverty.”

  Alice agrees, “That’s what I would’ve said next.”

  Kim asks, “Has no one ever mentioned to you the history of Sulphur City?”

  Bob and Alice exchange glances and together say “No.”

  Kim asks, “Have you heard of the Mankins family?”

  Alice says, “It sounds familiar, but no….”

  “No,” says Bob.

  Buster and Margaret Price are not impoverished, although their living room is pure compote. Kim has already asked them what they think of the Alexanders, whom they have never met. Buster has said, “Before they ever moved in, everybody around here flocked up there and looked the house over while it was being built. Everything in that house is custom-built, I mean, just built to the walls.” Kim has asked Margaret, “How do people feel about that house? Does it cause a stir?” And Margaret has answered, “I don’t think so. No envy.”

  Now, in this dream house, Kim thinks that sometimes dreams do not get broken, and she asks the Alexanders, “Is life here—the house, the land, the life style—is it a fulfillment of your aspirations? Is there everything here you need and want?”

  They think a while about that. Alice says, “That’s a heavy question. I think there’s always something missing, but in general I’d say yes….”

  “I think we’re happy here,” Bob says. “I still feel vigorous enough that every once in a while I wonder if I should be doing something more constructive than I am. There’s enough around here to keep us physically busy, but once in a while you miss the pace of the city.”

  Alice says, “We do find ourselves going often to Tulsa, for the operas, the museums, the art, you know.”

  “You do miss the pace of the city,” Bob Alexander says.

  Cherokee City, Arkansas

  I thought of driving on back to Cherokee City and putting up at some hotel there, for any town is a pleasure until you know it well enough to hate it or like it….

  —James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941

  But the one Agee had just invented out of his own head was in Alabama, the county seat of his pseudonymous county of sharecroppers (in reality, Tuscaloosa) which he and Walker Evans visited and lived in one hot summer half a century ago, when Agee was just a kid of twenty-seven but wrote the finest prose in the American English language, a prose and a book which make one of the lasting volumes of American literature, attempting “a form and set of tones rather less like those of narrative than like those of music,” as Agee within his art described his art, that rich Beethovenesque rhetoric, sonorous and orphic, that seems to find a song in the dirty fingernails of a sharecropper’s child. Our Cherokee City is a “real” one of that “real” name, without any sharecroppers but with a poverty of architecture that makes Tuscaloosa look almost metropolitan. Poor Roethke in his last days wrote the poem “In Evening Air” with its single plaintive desperate and ambitious line, “I’ll make a broken music, or I’ll die.” And then he died. Perhaps workmen of the word have no business approximating music.

  There is no hotel to put up at in the “real” Cherokee City, not now, although once there was, which is its chief difference from Sulphur City, only thirty-eight miles away as the crow flies—but what self-respecting crow would fly from the upland pastoral tranquility of Sulphur City to the flatland barren somnolence of Cherokee City? It is another world entirely, flat as the Great Plains, a warning of Oklahoma, which it closely verges upon; indeed, its name comes from the people who dominate the eastern counties of Oklahoma, which was, as late as 1905, Indian Territory, and sometimes is still locally referred to as “The Nation” because for most of the years of Cherokee City’s growing up that’s what it was, the Cherokee Nation of the most advanced of the civilized tribes of redmen.

  Whereas Sulphur City in both geography and history gives the impression of calm, Cherokee City was a wild, rowdy place. There were once half a thousand people, now fewer than twenty-five. The older people with whom Kim talks tell her that in their childhood they were forbidden to venture into downtown Cherokee City. At one time, downtown Cherokee City resembled Hollywood’s conception of the Western town, with a Main Street in which the sheriff meets the villains at high noon…although Cherokee City never had a sheriff. At high noon Cherokee City is asleep and empty, deathly quiet. But it still looks as if a town might once have been there; Sulphur City doesn’t even suggest a town. At the lone crossroads of Sulphur City is nothing but Price’s neat but empty little white store. At the lone crossroads of Cherokee City are no fewer than three stores on three corners. One of them, with a false front of an elaborate cornice, has its door wide open and a single fluorescent light burning in the dark interior, although there is nobody around and it is obviously abandoned but not empty: an abundance of debris litters the interior, and the porch is a junkyard of old tires and wheels. Another store is breathtaking in its decay, if you find beauty in ruins: its show window has been covered with a handwritten sign in large letters, “we are opened,” turned upside down as if to signify that we are not opened. One corner of the building is shaved off at an angle, perhaps once to accommodate a porch for the gas pumps of a service station long gone; the building has a side room on the right instead of the left, a side room that not too long ago, in the Age of the Automobile, stocked tires, batteries, oil, and fan belts. Brick-patterned asphalt siding covers most of the old clapboards. Tarpaper, Kim jots in her notebook, but it is actually asbestos-permeated siding that comes (or came, in the forties and fifties) in rolls, with embossing imitating not only bricks but also stonemasonry and fish-scale shingles. This “tarpaper” is the most compote of all building materials, and it was used liberally to sheathe everything in Cherokee City.

  In the absolute silence of high noon, Kim sits in her car, a sporty Datsun that she named Zephyra after the west wind; she ponders these tumbledown emporia and scarcely notices the third country store, which is not falling, and from which a woman emerges to ask Kim, “Can I help you?” This is the first time that a storekeeper has ever waited on Kim outside the building, except at service stations.

  “I’m just prowling around the lost cities of Arkansas,” Kim says.

  “You’ve sure found a good one,” the woman says, and offers, “Come inside.”

  Kim notices the small sign on the porch of the false front covered with fish-scale tarpaper: “Carol’s Country Store.” “Are you Carol?” she asks, following her into the store.

  She is. Carol Trammell Medlam, forty-seven, an Arkansawyer who spent fifteen years carrying mail in Kansas City but came home every year to Huntsville, and whose uncle happened to own the “we are opened” store across the road. If it is possible, as Kim has done, to fall in love with such a foundling store, then Carol has fallen in love with this store, which she has bought and operates. All of the stores were shut down when she reopened this one. The highway used to come through here, but then a new little paved bypass was built to the east, and there’s a new “store” of sorts just opened over there. Carol has some signs on the new highway pointing out that her store is a detour of only five hundred feet, but few travelers notice or bother.

  “Since you’ve been here,” Kim asks, “has your business improved steadily, or stayed the same, or have you had declining periods?”

  “All of the above!” Carol says. The old man who ran the store before her had let his stock run down and had given too much credit. Caro
l doesn’t give credit and she has built up the stock, but the economy has fallen off and the competition from the new store—Cherokee Kid, actually just a gas stop—has hurt her. But people don’t go to Cherokee Kid to socialize, let alone to sit down and loaf in the time-honored fashion of country stores. Carol’s store is homier and cozier, Kim observes, and it even has a checkerboard ready if anyone wants to play.

  Carol is interested in the history of Cherokee City, but she doesn’t know very much about it. She shows Kim a photograph, blown up from an 1890s postcard, showing the broad Main Street lined with stores shoulder to shoulder on each side, wooden sidewalks connecting their porches, the John M. Norris Drug Store with an Odd Fellows Hall upstairs, a post office where John M. Norris is postmaster, and the balconied John M. Norris residence in the distance. There are general stores, a furniture store, an apple evaporator, a barber shop, a feed store, a blacksmith shop, a newspaper office, a saloon or two—all gone today. The dirt road is filled with wagons and buggies, and the wooden sidewalks are lined with men in beards and Stetson hats.

  John M. Norris was the merchant prince and leading citizen of the little city in its golden age. Born in Audrain County, Missouri (Mark Twain country), in 1849, he learned the plasterer’s trade to put himself through Warrenton College. This area of Missouri is littered with cities manque: Benton City, Kingdom City, Montgomery City, Wright City, Cedar City, and even the capital, Jefferson City, one of the tiniest state capitals. After college, Norris searched for younger, fresher cities in Missouri, Indian Territory, Texas, and Kansas (he could have gone east to Norris City, Illinois, but had to go west), until in our key year of 1886 he discovered Cherokee City. There was already an empty building on Main Street, in which he unloaded his fixtures and drug supplies and remained for the rest of his life, expanding his store with the expansion of the town, serving as postmaster all through its boom years of 1888-97, contracting his store with the contraction of the town, and raising a family of seven sons. Although he wasn’t even a registered or licensed pharmacist, he knew enough about the dysfunctions that befall humankind to serve as a kind of quasi-doctor to the town, particularly to the poor and to kids who couldn’t afford the town’s regular physician, who wasn’t registered or licensed, either.

  Doc Norris, as everyone called him, sold a cornucopia of pharmacopoeia that was a little heavy on the narcotic side. There were no federal or state regulations on drugs in those days, and even the nonprescription remedies, like Mother’s Friend, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Thedford’s Black Draught, and Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery, all contained a little dope or booze. Doc Norris had a genius for knowing how much cocaine to give a woman to help her out of her menopausal depression, or how much laudanum was needed to comfort a grieving widower. Even young people, for whom Doc Norris would rarely administer the comforts of whiskey, could get their aches and pains soothed with a little tincture of some opiate. In the days before Midol, nothing was better for menstrual cramps than morphine, and in the days before aspirin, a boy’s cracked skull and wounded pride could be treated only with a smidgin of heroin. Even the forbidden whiskey could be given in a small one-time-only dose when Doc Norris was setting a broken bone.

  A genial fixer like John Milton Norris was symbolically appropriate to a town whose very existence had been based upon the power of manufactured chemistry to alter consciousness. A sluggish little stream called Hog Eye Creek (identified as Cherokee Creek on modern maps) laps past the southern edge of the village, half a mile from the Indian Line, and the first white settlers there before the Civil War operated a distillery not only for their own use but also to slake the thirst of the Indians, who needed immoderate quantities of whiskey to palliate the real and imagined injustices done to them by the white man. Hog Eye served briefly as a way station, a kind of “Last Booze Before Oklahoma” on the infamous Trail of Tears, the long, long route of the displaced Cherokee in 1838-39, when, because gold had been discovered on their ancestral mountain lands in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, they were forced to march beyond the Mississippi and across Arkansas into the flatlands of Indian Territory, where only the memory of mountains sustained them (aided by whiskey), and will go on sustaining them for the rest of their existence. The Trail of Tears got its name, naturally, from the fact that the Indians were inclined to weep along the way. Some of them discovered, on reaching Hog Eye and pausing for refreshment at the tavern there, that their tears dried up after three or four drinks, and they entered the Territory with happy smiles on their faces.

  Because by law Indian Territory was “dry,” for years the Indians kept coming back to Hog Eye (or to the saloons of other border towns like Tiff City and South West City, Missouri, which expected to achieve cityhood on the strength of their firewater trade with the Indians). Drunken Indians, like their white counterparts, tend to become mean and unruly, and Hog Eye very early acquired its reputation as a wild and woolly town. Since the word “woolly,” so often used in combination with “wild,” means precisely “having the characteristics of the rough, generally lawless atmosphere of frontier America,” the saloonkeeper James Ingle, when informed by the Post Office Department that the name Hog Eye would have to be dropped because there was already a Hog Eye in Washington County, decided to call the place Woolly City as a kind of joke, and when his dubious colleagues wondered why, he would explain that it was in honor of his predecessor as saloonkeeper of Hog Eye—in fact the first white settler of Hog Eye Creek, in the 1830s—one Jeremiah Woolly.

  If anyone asked, James Ingle could tell the entire biography of old Jeremiah Woolly, a yard wide, born on the Big Sandy River in Kentucky not far from Peter Mankins II, descended from illiterate Britishers who couldn’t spell the family name, Wolsey, as in the cardinal of Henry VIII’s time. This invented Jeremiah Woolly became so real to everyone that James Ingle had to establish a little cemetery east of town and erect a kind of gravestone for Woolly in it. The slab is crumbled and effaced today, but the little cemetery is still there and is shown on a government map, although scarcely anyone knows where it is.

  The real origin of “woolly” is just as obscure as that of “hog eye.” Anyone who has stared down a pig knows that the porcine optic is so inscrutable as to be almost invisible. A bull’s eye is a good term for concentric circles, but “hog eye” can only suggest the vacant, glazed look of a drunk staring upward and sideways (a nearly obsolete Ozark adjective, “hog-eyed,” referred to the facial expression resulting from looking upward and sideways without turning the head). Just as “wall-eyed” is another description for both divergent strabismus and drunkenness, we may assume that “hog-eyed” likewise meant either condition, or both, in the case of wall-eyed individuals who became intoxicated. “Woolly” possibly derives from the fact that cowboys wore vests and jackets made of sheepskin with the wool still on. James Ingle’s customers, Indians included, eventually suspected that he was pulling the wool over their eyes with his plan for turning Hog Eye into Woolly City. So he abandoned the memory of Jeremiah Woolly to the valhalla of fictional heroes, and called the town officially Cherokee City.

  James Ingle plotted and platted the city along pretty much the same lines the village has today; that is, the Main Street and its principal intersector, named Spring Street (a little city that names its streets intends to become a city), were in the same location as they are today, and the rest of the “city” was divided into twenty-four blocks, just like Sulphur City (but with fourteen lots per block instead of the conventional twelve).

  Cherokee City needed, in order to fulfill herself “as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2), a hotel. Sulphur City had desired a hotel, but never got one. Cherokee City got one, very early, and, mirabile dictu, it is still standing, still inhabited—although, compared with, say, the Fayetteville Hilton, it is but a tarpaper shack, or, properly speaking, a brick-patterned asphalt roll-siding shack, compoted like so many other buildings in town. In 1876, on the country’s Cent
ennial, one Samuel Hoag, born in France in 1811, built Cherokee House, sometimes called simply Hoag Hotel, which he operated until he died of tuberculosis in 1892. It was hastily constructed out of the frantic speculation in real estate characterizing “cities” sprouting like mushrooms in the American West, the same atmosphere of impatient hope that nurtured, or precipitated, all these lost cities. But the carpentry was unavoidably craftsmanlike and sound, with foot-square timbers dovetailed and joined with mortise and tenon and square nails, and the architecture was of a style we might call “hostelry vernacular.” The present owners of the hotel, having finished raising their children, have moved into a small house they built next door. Carol Medlam tells Kim that she ought to talk to them, Elton and Dovey Yates, who are “descended from everybody” and “know everything” about Cherokee City.

  Kim visits the Yateses in their living room, compotishly styled with scenic mural of sunset on water. Elton Yates, age seventy-five, coeval to stout Buster Price, is a small, frail man who smokes cigarettes constantly but asks Kim if she minds, and although she has never smoked she doesn’t mind. Now retired, Elton was once a dairyman (like Kim’s father) and has also worked as a tie hauler, service-station and ice-plant operator, and nurseryman, and in airplane factories for the air force. The stove in the living room is very hot. Dovey prepares and serves coffee, but Kim does not like caffeine. Many redbirds flock around the window, where seed has been left on the ground for them. A pet bird in a cage twitters and tweets and is heard in the background on the tape that Kim is recording. The Yateses, like the Prices of Sulphur City, have much respect and affection for each other, and, as long-married couples do, they often speak the same answers simultaneously, or repeat each other immediately, or finish each other’s sentences.