The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Kim begins with a standard question: whether they have lived here all their lives. Never left? Elton says, “Oh, yeah, I’ve went off, then come back, then go off, come back.” Just what is it about Cherokee City that keeps bringing him home? Elton chuckles and shakes his head. “There was plenty of meanness around here when I was a kid—drunks and fights. I’ve seen ’em ride up and down the streets and fire guns up in the air. And they used to come to the old hotel here to gamble. Fact, they’s bullet holes up there in the ceilings of that old house yet.”

  Cherokee City was born as a drinking and gambling town, then. But did it have any other attractions? Efton says, “Yeah, they was several springs here people came for—had different kinds of water in it.” What kind of water? “Well, I just really don’t remember, only, the iron, and the…hell, I’ve forgotten now what the other ones…” Dovey puts in: “They’ve done away with all those springs.” Elton: “Don’t remember what was in the other ones, but they was two or three springs that had different types of water in it.” Sulphur? “No, they were no sulphur here, that I know of.”

  Why did the town start dying? Well, it was surveyed for the Kansas City Southern Railroad track, but then they decided to put the track through the town of Gentry, six miles to the east. Did the bypassing of the railroad hurt the town? Killed it. And has the bypassing of the paved highway killed it a little deader? Yes, but Elton and Dovey like it better the way it is, and gladly gave the Highway Department the right-of-way, because vehicles used to go around the corner so fast they’d spray gravel all over the porch.

  Did the highway shift affect “downtown” Cherokee City? Yes, two of the stores there—groceries, Dawson’s and Gordon Evans’s—went out of business. Where do you shop for groceries now? Gentry, six miles to the east. What happened to Dawson? Moved to Gentry. What happened to Gordon Evans when he closed his store and turned the “WE ARE OPENED” sign upside down? Moved to Gentry.

  Kim drives to Gentry, six miles to the east. The railroad tracks still run through it, and sometimes a freight train runs through it, but downtown Gentry City, as it was known until recent times, is in pretty sorry shape itself, the shops lining Main Street turned mostly into secondhand-furniture stores. All over Arkansas, perhaps all over America, the deserted downtowns have shops that were once department stores or drugstores or hardware stores or firsthand-furniture stores but are now secondhand-furniture stores, some of them claiming to sell “antiques” but others publicly admitting that they sell only “junque.” One Gentry store says, “Used and Abused Furniture.” Kim reflects that cities are used and abused, that towns are secondhand. She pauses to watch the destruction of the Elberta Hotel, once a large white rambling hotel. Now there is only one small motel on the highway, whose proprietor is Gordon Evans. Signs on the door of the motel say, “We will charge you $10 if you knock to ask for directions or to borrow jumper cables” and other testy cautions directed at the various abuses of the motel business in a place like Gentry, Arkansas. Gordon Evans, however, is a gentleman, coeval to Elton and Buster, soft-spoken, cordial, unassuming, the model of the genial country storekeeper, and seems out of his element running a motel.

  “Did you enjoy having that store?” Kim asks him.

  “You had better believe I did!” Gordon Evans replies. “Had it for twenty-one years.”

  “What did you enjoy most?”

  “Gettin acquainted with people,” he says. Gordon’s wife, who is Carol Medlam’s aunt, remembers the old-timers who came to the store to sit around on nail kegs, or loafed on the benches of the porch. But Gordon remembers best the Indians. “I had a big Injun trade from over in Oklahoma, and they’d come for miles over to my store. I got along real good with ’em.” Any trouble at all? No, and in the winter Evans would buy their fence posts, which they made and hauled to him by the thousands, and which he resold to customers from as far away as Texas and Kansas. He had a good business, as well as a DX service station connected.

  “Do you miss it?” Kim asks.

  “Yes,” Evans admits. “I wouldn’t go back to a country store now, but when I had it, it was good. I thought I could make a livin at it, and I did. I wouldn’t be afraid to go out there and do it again, but I wouldn’t!”

  Robert Yates, Elton’s dad, called Rob by everyone, died fifteen years ago at the age of ninety-two. John Milton Norris was his mother’s kid brother; therefore Doc Norris was Rob Yates’s uncle. Nancy Norris, Doc Norris’s sister, had eloped at a young age with Billy Yates, a mule trader, a tall, tough man with red hair and red beard, who impregnated Nancy every two years until ten children were born biennially between 1863 and 1882. Rob was the eighth of these, born in Texas while Billy was driving a herd of mules to Dallas to sell. Billy usually took his mules to market in St. Louis, and spent much of what he got for them on whiskey. Nancy hoped they could get so rich in Texas that he couldn’t spend it all on whiskey, and sure enough he made so much money he took the family back to Missouri and built a house with his Texas profits, which, however, were still enough for much more whiskey than he could safely consume. It wasn’t his drinking itself that bothered Nancy so much, but when he drank he became mean to her, and abusive to her and the children, and the only thing good for him was to let him take her so many times that she would be with child again. After two more, when she learned that her dear brother John Milton was moving to a nice new town called Cherokee City down in Arkansas, she wrote to him and told him that she didn’t know how much longer she could put up with Billy’s drinking. John Milton wrote back and told her to leave Billy and come to Cherokee City. She didn’t have any money for the trip, but the next time Billy drove a herd of mules to St. Louis, she sold their cows and their pigs and took her ten children to Cherokee City, and none of them ever laid eyes on Billy again. Rob was nine years old, and he missed his father although his father had beaten him; he kept asking his mother when Billy would come to Cherokee City. But Nancy never told her husband where she was, and Uncle John, who owned the drugstore and a big farm that Nancy and her children lived on, was very nice to Rob, treating him almost like his own son, whose name was Thomas Harvey. Cousin Harve was only two years older than Rob, and Harve and Rob grew up together like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the adventures of the former published the year that Harve was born.

  Harve Norris, John Milton’s firstborn, missed having his birthday on the Centennial of the United States by only one day: he was born on July 5, 1876, which was just as well, because the celebration of the Fourth each year was such a big event that his birthday would have gone unnoticed. As it was, he got all the leftover pink lemonade and pies and cakes, if there were any. Some years he got leftover fireworks, if there were any, but there usually weren’t. There were two events, contests, that he and Rob always entered during the big picnic on the Fourth: climbing the greased pole and catching the greased pig. Or trying to. The greased pole was a twenty-foot cedar trimmed of all its branches and sanded down to the slickness of a pencil, then coated with hog lard. You wrapped your legs and your arms around it and tried to shinny to the top, where a silver dollar was waiting for the winner. It was a rare Fourth that any of the kids could climb that high, but Rob Yates generally always could, and he always gave the silver dollar to Harve the next day as a birthday present. Shinnying the greased pole was terrible on your crotch and your nuts and peter, nearly raising blisters on the latter if it got stiff from all that rubbing. Catching the greased pig wasn’t so hard on the privy parts, real soft by comparison with the pole. Harve could outrun Rob, and he usually got to the pig first and locked his legs and arms around it, but the way the pig squirmed and squealed always made his peter so thick he was afraid it would show through his pants, though only Rob seemed to notice and laugh behind his hand. One year, the year Harve turned thirteen, he got such a hard-on from wrestling the slick pig that anybody would have noticed, but the prize for winning was a cheap guitar, full-size enough to cover Harve’s belly and haunches. He pretended to play it while letting
his erection subside, and in fact began learning how to play it, picking out tunes by ear, discovering that strumming the strings was a pretty good public substitute for beating his meat.

  In time Harve became an accomplished public guitarist as well as an accomplished private peter-player; his stringed instrument and his fleshed instrument became the same in his mind and in his fingers. The differences between Harve and Rob were as great as those between Tom and Huck: the one a town boy, the other a farm boy; Rob was tone-deaf and couldn’t play a note and, being only eleven, didn’t seem interested in masturbation yet, but he knew a whole bunch of cuss words and dirty words that Harve had never heard in town. In town, Harve didn’t have the opportunities to watch farm animals copulating on a daily basis, and he didn’t understand that the reason Rob didn’t play with himself was that Rob had already found a country girl or two, particularly half-breeds or purebloods, who kept him supplied with plenty of openings for his rising manhood. Harve liked to boast to Rob of what he was going to do when the time came for him to diddle a girl; Rob smiled and didn’t tell Harve the details of his steamy young life. Rob respected Harve, who was, after all, the oldest son of Uncle Doc Norris, postmaster, druggist, merchant, quack, shaman, and landlord of the farm where Rob’s mother raised her kids. All the girls in town and at school adored Harve, and when he played his guitar at picnics and square dances and play-parties, all the girls watched him with entranced faces and came close to swooning. Of course, these were good girls who never fornicated; half-breeds and purebloods didn’t go to the picnics and square dances and play-parties, but did go to the Norris barn when they wanted Rob to mount them.

  Harve was not popular with the other boys, except Cousin Rob. The other boys envied and resented the girls’ adoration of him, his fancy clothes, his speed in catching the greased pig, and above all his ability to play the guitar. Like him, they could pick and fiddle their peters, but that was all, and their envy made them shun him or goad him into fights. Every Saturday afternoon all of the hot-blooded youths of Cherokee City and environs would congregate at Big Rock on Hog Eye Creek in order to swap gossip, tell dirty jokes, exchange taunts and teasing and insults, create disputes, start fights, argue with their fists or by wrestling in the dirt, throw rocks at one another, sometimes draw knives and use them, sometimes even fire pistols. Someone or two was always getting hurt, and would have to go to Doc Norris for bandages and dope and Doc’s own simple brand of psychotherapy, which Doc called simply “mendin feelins.” Doc was very good at mendin feelins, and always made a point of being available at his drugstore on Saturday afternoons when the fights were over, though much of the rest of the time he was gone. In a free-for-all fight, Harve could depend on his tough cousin Rob to take his side. Harve wished he could sneak some of the dope out of his dad’s drugstore and distribute it among his fellows; that would guarantee his popularity. But his father kept all of his strong medicines, the ones with belladonna and laudanum and cocaine, under lock and key. Even when, at fourteen, Harve went to work for his father as the main clerk in the drugstore, John Norris wouldn’t trust him with the key to the dope cabinet. If a customer came in and wanted something that had belladonna or laudanum or cocaine in it, Harve had to go find his father. And often Doc Norris was hard to find. If he wasn’t gone on business to some distant town, or overseeing one of his several farms, he would be paying a house call as a “physician.” These house calls were mysterious to his wife, his son, and his customers who needed some dope but had to wait until Doc Norris returned, because sometimes he would be gone for two or three days. He never talked about just where, or how far, he had driven his buggy to the patient’s house, but usually he had to stay with the patient overnight, or two nights, or three; sometimes the patient died anyway, and sometimes the patient lived, but always Doc Norris was gone away from home and from his drugstore and mercantile business and farms for days at a stretch. If a customer needed a fix of dope very badly and couldn’t wait for Doc Norris to come home, he or she would just have to go away off to Bentonville for a drugstore.

  Since Doc Norris lost some of his customers because of this, both he and Harve were glad when Harve achieved the age of sixteen; Doc Norris interrupted his healing of injuries sustained on the Fourth long enough to observe the Fifth and present Harve with a birthday present in the form of keys to the strong-dope cabinet. “You’re a big and reliable young man, now,” Doc Norris told Harve, showing him the various bottles. “Don’t let anybody have more than an ounce of this one, four ounces of this one, a gram of this, or a pinch of this one.” By this time, Harve was no longer interested in impressing his peers or ingratiating them with dope. All he wanted was girls, or a girl.

  Tom Sawyer has his Becky Thatcher, whom he dearly loves and for whom he will do anything, risk anything, sacrifice anything. Harve Norris had his…we will have to call her, for want of her real name, Rebecca Scratcher of West Cherokee City, Arkansas. She was beautiful beyond description, sweet sixteen, and like Harve a virgin, which was rare for a mixed-blood, as she was. She herself did not know how much or how little Indian she had in her; not half, certainly, for neither her father nor her mother was an Indian or even half an Indian, but one or the other of them had one parent who had given or received Indian sperm, or half-Indian sperm, scant traces of which still were noticeable in Rebecca: her cheekbones, perhaps, or her dark eyes. There was not enough Indian in her to exclude her from the dances or play-parties, but there was enough Indian in her so that, when Harve informed his parents that he would do anything, risk anything, sacrifice anything for Rebecca Scratcher, they laughed at him and told him that she wasn’t worth it because she was from a “no-account family.” The other girls of Cherokee City also, the ones who worshipped Harve for his guitar and his looks and his clothes, but whom he spurned in favor of Becky Scratcher, spoke among themselves of how low-class Becky was. They envied her the beauty that had won Harve’s heart, just as the boys had envied Harve his popularity. Both Harve and Becky were outcasts of a sort: pariahs to their peers, ostracized because of their superiority; at the dances and play-parties they were ignored, except by faithful Rob, always Harve’s friend.

  If Harve noticed this ostracism, it didn’t seem to affect him, because he was too busy trying to think of some way to persuade Becky to let him do more to her than dance with her and hold her hand and steal a quick kiss now and then. To his loyal sidekick, Rob, Harve would complain, “I jist don’t know how to git ole Beck to take down her bloomers.” Rob, experienced as he was with Indian girls and half-breeds, didn’t know what advice to give Harve on the seduction of octoroon Injuns. For Rob it had never been a matter of verbal suasion; he had never had to ask a Injun girl to take down her bloomers for him. Rob did not know how to explain to Harve his Theory of Apocrines and Pheromones. Of course he did not call them apocrines or pheromones, which had not been discovered yet or given names. Both were simply a matter of different smells. Just as you could tell the difference between a honeysuckle and a rose from the way they smelled, you could tell the difference between an Indian girl and a white girl. But also, on account of the pheromones, you could also smell the difference between a girl who wasn’t the least bit interested in having you fool around with her and a girl who would begin to feel like screaming if you didn’t do something real quick to stop the itch in the place where babies come from. This, more or less, is the way Rob tried to explain apocrines and pheromones to Harve.

  From then on, whenever Harve got the chance, he would lean over toward Becky and take a deep sniff. Sure enough, he could inhale some of the apocrine that clearly indicated that Becky was at least one-thirty-second and maybe even one-sixteenth Indian. But he couldn’t detect any pheromone. He wasn’t sure exactly what a pheromone would smell like. He asked Rob, “Jist what kinda stink is it?” Rob couldn’t explain it or describe it, other than by comparing it to certain things like “your sister’s breath when she’s been eatin mud-turtle soup” or “a whiff of jimsonweed when the mornin de
w’s not yit offen it” or “a crawdad if you drop a rock on it.” Harve’s nose could not perceive any of these scents coming from Becky. Rob decided that the only way to help his friend learn how to detect the exact aroma of a pheromone would be to introduce him to it in the form of one of the Indian girls who came to the Norris barn when they wanted Rob to mount them. When Rob invited Harve to the Norris barn one evening, Harve was all excited, but he hoped his cousin was not just pulling a prank on him. “What do I do, what do I do?” he kept asking Rob. “You dont do nothin,” Rob assured him; “you jist do what she shows ye she wants.”

  They did not have to wait long. An Indian maiden came into the gloom of the barn’s interior. Rob gave Harve a little shove, and he went to meet her, and that was all. She took him down into the hay. There was a very clear and a very strange and sweet and exciting fragrance to her; she reeked of something that was not at all like crawdads or jimsonweed or turtle soup but much spicier and more penetrating, and it grew stronger the longer Harve penetrated her. He would never forget it as long as he lived.

  But the Indian girl knew that he wasn’t Rob; even if she hadn’t recognized him in the half-light of the hayloft, he had his own apocrines and pheromones, which she identified, and these pheromones of his were still lingering upon her body later when she met that snooty Becky Scratcher and bragged that she had gotten a full load of jism from Harvey Norris. Becky knew the girl wasn’t lying, because she could identify Harve’s pheromones, too, and she pulled the girl’s hair and scratched her face and would have scratched her eyes out if the girl hadn’t broken loose and run away.

  Now that Harve could easily recognize rutty pheromones, he couldn’t wait to get another sniff of Becky, but when he did she sniffed back at him, and the two of them just stood there getting snootfuls of each other until Becky scratched at his nose and would have torn it off if her own nose hadn’t started running so much because she was crying and angry. She ran away from him, and he was left holding his nose and wondering what had gotten into her. His nose hurt him so much that he had to go let himself into the drugstore, open up the dope cabinet, and take a pinch of something for the pain.