The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Maybe Becky never had pheromones, he decided, or maybe virgins don’t produce pheromones. The next time he saw her again, at a square dance he was playing for, she was with H. T. Tucker, a big guy all of nineteen or twenty years old. Harve tried to get her for a dance, but she wouldn’t, and ole H.T. was nasty about it. However, Harve got close enough to smell her, and there was no mistake about it: she was practically covered with pheromones big as cockroaches. Harve was crushed. He couldn’t play any more. He wanted to break his guitar over H. T. Tucker’s head. He stared at Becky as if his eyes could scrub her clean of all her scents, but his heart was breaking, and once, when she caught him staring at her, she grinned at him with such a self-satisfied look that he knew she was not a virgin any more and he could never marry her.

  He dropped his guitar on the floor with a clatter and said to his fellows, “Eat, drink, and be merry, ’cause tonight I’m gonna die.” Then he ran away from the square dance, and that was the last time that any of the young people of Cherokee City saw Harve Norris alive. Rob said he would have followed him, except he had no idee what frame of mind Harve was in, and figured Harve was just steppin out for a leak or somethin.

  Of Rob’s son Elton, Kim gently and hesitantly inquires, “Do you know anything about Harve Norris?”

  Elton replies, “Well, I don’t remember him myself, but I’ve heared the folks talk about him. The best I can remember, he got mad about some gal.”

  Dovey says, “His dad didn’t want him going with this girl. He wanted to marry the girl.”

  “Do you know the girl?” Kim asks. “What her name would’ve been?”

  Elton and Dovey together say, “No. Don’t know.”

  “It’s such a tragic story and very romantic!” Kim says. “Over a girl. He was just sixteen when he killed himself.”

  Dovey says, “I doubt there’s anyone who could help. His nephew lives out here, but he’s a cousin to us. I doubt if this nephew would know anything about it, or he might not want to talk about it.”

  Through Carol Medlam, Kim tries to set up an interview with the nephew, George Norris, but George tells Carol to tell Kim that he just isn’t interested in talking about anything. This is a problem that Kim will encounter in a few of these lost cities: the respondent doesn’t respond, because either (1) he has heard every conceivable sales gimmick or pretext for gaining admittance, and is convinced that Kim is peddling cosmetics or Watchtowers, or (2) he knows nothing and therefore has nothing to say.

  Kim contacts Gordon Evans again in Gentry. Evans has heard of Harve Norris but knows nothing. “You might ask George Norris,” he says, but adds, “No, George wouldn’t tell you anything if he knew.” Kim tries Fannie Baxley of Gentry, former postmaster of Cherokee City. Mrs. Baxley, age seventy-five, has only a vague memory of the story, but remembers the Norrises fondly and still hears from the ones in California; Brandt Norris was postmaster of Cherokee City throughout the Depression and until the war, when Fannie became postmaster. Brandt built Carol’s Store in 1935, and is the son of Harve’s kid brother, James Monroe (Uncle Jim) Norris, who was himself postmaster during World War I. In fact, Uncle Jim had another son, Jewett, who ran a grocery store out there in California at one time, but came on back to Arkansas.

  Simply by checking the local phone directory, Kim locates Jewett Norris and his wife, Seritha, living in a place called Rainbow Valley east of Siloam Springs. (This town was named for the pool outside Jerusalem mentioned in John 9:7, where the blind man was healed by Christ, who “said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam [which means ‘Sent’]. He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.” But Kim has never read the Bible.) Kim is enchanted with the name Rainbow Valley, because a few years before she had become so captivated by the image and meaning of the rainbow that she began to collect them, and among her possessions are rainbow pillows, rainbow stained glass, rainbow posters, a rainbow calendar, rainbow decals and towels and stickers and candles and badges and pendants and stationery; the rainbow could so easily be compote, but it is too metaphysical to be compote.

  Rainbow Valley is scarcely a valley, just a hollow with small pastures and a man-made pond and Rainbow Valley Lodge, a pleasant but ostentatious brick ranch-style house with colonial iron gates bearing baronial lions rampant in bronze. Although Seritha Norris is wearing the same lavender slacks that so many of the other mature ladies wear, the interior of her house is not compote at all but tastefully decorated, and betrays no sign of religiosity. Jewett Norris is a white-haired man whose face suggests that at the age of sixteen he looked very much like his uncle Harve: a handsome dude, a stud, a man-about-town or, rather, boy-about-town.

  “Do you remember being told about Harve?” Kim asks them.

  Seritha answers for both: “I’ve heard Grandma—Jewett’s grandmother, that’s Harve’s ma—tell about it. Harve went to this dance down on Hog Eye, and his girlfriend, some way or’ nother, was with another guy, and it made him real despondent.”

  “Do you know her name?” Kim asks.

  “No,” Seritha says, “but he went back to Jewett’s grandfather’s drugstore—that’s John M. Norris’s drugstore, you know—and mixed this…laudanum, is it? Mixed this laudanum and drank it.”

  Jewett affirms, “Drank a full-ounce bottle of laudanum.” Seritha adds, “He was probably already drunk to begin with.” “No question about it,” Jewett says. “There was a big distill in those days in Cherokee [like many others, he pronounces this “Cherry-kee”], and they only sixteen but drank the stuff, and that night I guess Harve just got drunk enough and said, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough,’ and headed for the drugstore. ’Course he had keys to the store and all, and went in, and took that bottle of laudanum, and started up and drank every bit of it, the whole bottle, he drank it all. That night, they walked him—my grandmother told—she and my grandfather, they walked him till after daylight. Back then I guess that was about the only thing they knew to do. And as long as they could keep ’im a-movin…They said finally he just went to sleep on their shoulder till they couldn’t even walk him any more.”

  In their grief, John Milton Norris and his wife, Lidie, clung to each other for many days and nights. Later Lidie would become cold and harsh, never letting John forget that his carelessness with the keys to the drug cabinet had caused their son’s death, but in the first days and nights of her grief she clung to him, so much that she immediately became pregnant again, and less than nine months after Harve’s death she bore another son. She wanted to name him Thomas Harvey, in replacement of dead Harve, but John Milton Norris insisted that the boy be named John Milton Norris, without any “Jr.,” in replacement for himself, for the self of him that he thought had died with his firstborn son. Lidie would have two more sons in the five years left of her twenty-two years of childbearing.

  Harve was laid to rest in the Dickson Cemetery, north of Cherokee City, beside a spot reserved for and later filled by his father. Kim visits the two graves; the cemetery, like that of Sulphur City, is exactly a mile and a half away from the village, a convenient but not-too-convenient distance. Harve’s stone notes that he lived sixteen years, seven months, and eleven days, and quotes a bit of stock poetastery: “A precious one from us is gone / A voice we loved is stilled / A place is vacant in our home / That never can be filled.” The young John Milton Norris was expected to fill the place, but he filled it only in anticipation, as a town styled “city” is given its name only in anticipation, never fulfilled. Anticipating other suicides or sensational news, a newspaper was founded and issued weekly, The Cherokee City Advance. But except for national and international news received by telegraph, the newspaper was thin and had little local news. “J. M. Norris sent a load of fat hogs to Siloam Springs last Monday.” “Several of our people made the trip to Siloam Springs to see the elephant at the circus.” “J. M. Norris is building a picket fence around his garden.” “J. T. Quimby has enclosed his garden with a picket fence.” “Dr. Norris has lost several head of shoats.
” “John Yates has erected a picket fence on each side of his garden.” “John Norris went to Gentry.” “Anderson Hood has set up a picket fence encircling his garden patch.” “J. T. Quimby went to Gentry.” “J. M. Norris has returned from The Nation.” “John Yates went to Gentry.” “Mrs. Gadberry has hired the Gildersleeve boy to build a picket fence bordering her garden.” “Anderson Hood has returned from The Nation.” “Try Taylor’s Cherokee Remedy for your next cough, croup or consumption; made of sweet gum and mullein.” One event of interest did occur: John Norris’s sister Alice—sister also of Nancy Yates, Rob’s mother—had a son named Jack, older than Harve. The girl he wanted to marry was a pure-blood white, but his mother, who worshipped him and wanted him always for her own, would not hear of the match. She became so furious when Jack told her of his plan to marry the girl that she pointed a pistol at her son and told him he was as good as dead to her if he left her to go ahead with it. Jack tried to take the pistol away from his mother, and in the scuffle she was shot and killed. When he saw that his mother was dead, Jack turned the gun on himself and committed suicide more quickly than his cousin Harve had done. But John Norris persuaded the editor to leave the story of the two deaths out of his newspaper, and shortly thereafter the editor left Cherokee City and took the Advance with him to another town, where picket fences bloomed like garden weeds.

  There have been other suicides, down to the present day. The Cherokee House hotel, when Samuel Hoag died of tuberculosis in 1892, was bought by a Mrs. Haxon, who ran it for several years during the height of the city’s prosperity in the 1890s. Her husband took several shots at himself before hitting and dying; the holes of the misses remained visible in the walls and ceiling of the lobby until recently, when Elton Yates covered them with sheetrock. Kim tries to locate another old-timer, named Bill Lamphear, son of the town marshal John Lamphear who investigated several of these suicides, only to learn that Bill Lamphear had done away with himself a few months before. “He had lost his wife,” Carol Medlam tells Kim. “She was ill. I guess it was just too much for him. They found him with her picture in one hand and a gun in the other.”

  Kim decides to stop in at the “new store in town,” the Cherokee Kid Groc, sign courtesy of Dr. Pepper soft drinks (called “sody pop” throughout the Ozarks), which are one of the few things it sells other than gasoline. A very small building of unpainted cement blocks, it seems even smaller because it contains so little merchandise: candy, cigarettes, cold drinks, the bare essentials. The woman running it, Dorothy Asher, is not the owner. Who owns it? Kim asks. “Linda,” the woman says. Linda is the woman’s daughter. Kim wishes Linda were available for questions. The woman is watching a soap opera on a very loud television set. How long has the store been in business? Kim tries to hear the answer: ‘Bout five months, something like that I guess.”

  Kim requests, “Could we turn down the TV? I can hardly hear you!” The woman makes a gesture of turning it down, but the volume is not reduced. “Who named the store Cherokee Kid?” Kim inquires.

  “I guess them, own know,” the woman says. “Own know” is the way she pronounces “I don’t know” without enthusiasm.

  “Was it named for Cherokee City?” Kim asks.

  “Own know,” the woman says. “I didn’t ast no questions.”

  “Are you in competition with the other store, Carol’s Store?”

  “Own know. I ’magine. I haven’t been down there in a long time.”

  Kim asks, “Would you say this is a gathering place? Do people come here and visit?”

  “No. Just people come in and out.”

  Later Kim learns from others that the woman’s husband, Jewell Asher, died under a bridge, in his car, over across the Oklahoma line. Asphyxiated. Not a suicide, apparently, just an accidental asphyxiation. The Ashers are one of the oldest families in Cherokee City.

  Another old family, for whom the cemetery was named, is the Dicksons. Kim interviews Medea Dickson, age eighty-four, living in a mobile home (called, variously, “house trailer” or “trailer house”), spacious, tastefully decorated without compote, neat and clean. Mrs. Dickson taught school, first through eighth grades at the Cherokee City school, a two-room building no longer standing, just up the road from the present Cherokee Kid store. She has arranged for her son, Don, to visit and meet Kim. Don Dickson is a research archaeologist working professionally for the University of Arkansas. He has grown up in Cherokee City, explored it thoroughly as a boy and a man, and although his field of archaeology is the prehistoric Indian, not the modern Cherokee, he has made a hobby of local history, inventoried the Dickson cemetery, and, Kim is delighted to discover, interviewed Rob Yates before his death.

  “I didn’t use a tape recorder,” Dickson says, noticing the silent whirring of Kim’s Realistic CTR-55. “I took notes. At ninety-two, Rob Yates was as sharp as he could be, and he could remember the 1890s clearly. I tried to trip him up, but there was no way. That guy told you the same thing, every single time, from whichever direction you asked him. Because of my scientific training, I take things from different angles to see if the stories all fit together. And there was no way of tripping up Yates.”

  Kim does not have to ask questions, or even get a chance to; Don Dickson likes to talk. “I asked Rob Yates why Cherokee City declined. I told him, ‘I’ve heard that Cherokee City was a popular resort town in the 1880s,’ and I asked him, ‘Why did it cease to attract people, do you think?’ And he said that nearby towns such as Siloam Springs advertised medicinal waters for bathing, drinking, and so forth. Cherokee City had a good spring, and a hydraulic ram to pump the water from the spring up to the town, but the water was not medicinal. Then later, when the railroad bypassed Cherokee City in favor of Gentry, the town began to die. Still, it managed to support several stores before the automobile made it possible to visit Gentry easily. Before the railroad, before the motorcar, Cherokee City was much larger than Gentry.”

  Rob could remember the Indians’ fondness for moonshine liquor. (Don Dickson had not asked, and Kim does not inquire, about young Rob’s fondness for Indian maidens.) Hamp Woolridge continued to operate a corn-whiskey distillery on the south side of Hog Eye Branch, where the old town was. Woolridge had one of the better houses in town, still standing today although much altered and “modernized,” and also ran a hardware store and a trading post, selling to the Cherokees ammunition, salt, coffee, tobacco, and other staples, including whiskey, for which the Indians paid in the barter of furs: fox, raccoon, opossum, mink, beaver, and muskrat. Well into the twentieth century, Hamp Woolridge dealt with the Indian fur trade, and with the specialty of the Cherokees: deer hide. The Nation, later Oklahoma, was a refuge for deer as well as for redskins; the latter shot the former and made an art of curing and tanning their hides. The hides were tanned with the animals’ brains, which left them exceptionally soft and pliable and ideal for gloves, the best item of Indian leather goods. There are antique deerskin gloves still being worn today.

  Doc Norris gave young Rob enough calves from the Norris farm to start him in business as a stockman, and Rob pastured his herds in the open range of The Nation, where his Indian friends kept an eye on them. Rob was friendly with the Indians all his life, although he never married one. When he reached his mid-twenties, convinced that Indian girls were just fine for the physical appetites but not suited for legal matrimony, he led to the altar a young white girl named Laura Shaw and had several kids by her, among them Elton. Rob let the Indians look after his cattle while he worked as a clerk in the stores of Cherokee City, giving the Indians discounts on the merchandise; he was, according to his son Elton, “always good to the Indians.” Kim had asked Elton, “In what way? What did he do for the Indians?” But Elton could only answer, “I don’t know, other than more or less try to help ‘em in different ways.” Dovey had added, “Never had an enemy, I don’t guess.”

  There was an Indian named Wofford, first name uncertain, about whom little is known. Elton Yates had mentioned Wofford to
Kim as an example of how the Indians trusted Rob Yates and nobody else: when cattle were misplaced in The Nation, Wofford would find them and tell Rob where they were, but wouldn’t tell Rob’s brother or any other man. Don Dickson remembers his Father telling of a Cherokee medicine man named Wofford who lived to be more than a hundred, and who collected herbs from the environs of Cherokee City. Rob Yates had told Don Dickson, “Some people liked ole Wofford as a doctor better than the ones we had, like Doc Norris. Doc Norris might bleed you or give you a bag of asafetida to wear, but Wofford would give you herbs and cure you.” Kim has asked others about this Wofford. She recalls one of her Sulphur City informants, or correspondents, Marie Ball Wofford, a direct descendant of Peter Mankins, Sr., living in Jay, Oklahoma, whose husband, Dan Wofford, also a descendant of Peter Mankins, Sr. (both through Rachel, younger sister to Peter Junior), was a distant kinsman of the Cherokee James D. Wofford, a leader of the Georgia Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, and possibly the father or grandfather of this mysterious medicine man Wofford. When Kim asked Jewett Norris, “Do you remember an Indian named Wofford?” he replied that he knew a lot of Woffords but the one Kim had in mind must be “Ole Grandpa Wofford—I don’t know which one he was—he translated the Bible into the Cherokee language—he was a well-educated Indian.” (Possibly Jewett Norris confused Wofford with Sequoyah, whose “white” name was George Guess, and who was inventor of the Cherokee alphabet as well as eponym for the giant California evergreen.)