The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Kim asks Ethel Coker the inevitable: “Have you ever visited Dogpatch?”

  “Well, I’ve been there one time,” Ethel says, “and, you know, I’d just give anything to go back to Marble City.” It seems to Kim that she speaks of Marble City as different from Dogpatch, as if she feels that Marble City didn’t simply become Dogpatch. “I’d love for it to be back just the way it used to be.”

  As Kim is leaving (and nowhere in Arkansas do you just leave, without many minutes of idle chat in leavetaking), Ethel says to her, “I’m really glad you’re doing this. It’s really nice someone is interested.” Kim’s next contact is with the oldest person she has ever seen or talked to, the oldest person Kim is to meet on her travels among these cities, and yet one of the youngest in spirit: hundred-year-old Dora Ervin Harp Curtis, who lives in a modest city house on a city street in Harrison, lucky to avoid a nursing home because she has been taken in by her eighty-three-year-old daughter, Elsie, who is also lucky to avoid a nursing home because she still has her husband, Willie McArtor, to look after her. The three of them sit with Kim in their living room on a warm sunny afternoon with all the windows closed and the shades drawn to darken the room and keep it cool. On the wall in the semidarkness is an ideal compote picture, the archetype of compote art: a 1920s octagon-framed glass-etched moonlight-on-a-lake-with-tent-and-campfire. Moonlight is the most compote of all images, Kim thinks, and realizes how appropriate it is for this darkened room.

  Dora has good hearing, a pleasant smile and ready chuckle, a seemly hairdo not fully white, and an exemplary memory. She was born in The Basin in 1885 (the year before our key year), was raised in P D Flat, but went to Marble City for “church and for the mail and all stuff like that.” Grown and married, she went with her daughter Elsie to live in Illinois for a while, in Missouri for a while, but always came back to Arkansas.

  “Were you ever homesick for Arkansas?” Kim asks.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Curtis replies. “Wherever I was at, I was satisfied.”

  “That’s a good way to be!” Kim observes.

  Daughter Elsie offers, “She don’t ever worry….”

  “You never worry about anything?” Kim asks the ancient mother.

  “I never worry about nothing,” Dora declares, “only sickness and death.”

  “Maybe I should pick up your habits!” Kim says, “I worry!”

  “Do you?” Dora says, laughing. “You just cut that out. It won’t get you nowhere!”

  They progress to Dora’s life in Marble City, the schools (“I never did go to a woman teacher, always men teachers”; but not many of them: “Tell you the truth, I didn’t get much schoolin”). Kim quickly comes out with her stock question, “Have you ever been to Dogpatch?”

  “No, I’ve never been down there,” Dora says.

  “Have you ever wanted to?” Kim asks.

  “No, I don’t want to go there! I tell ye, that used to be a nice little town, and I don’t care a thing about Dogpatch.”

  So much for that. Kim brings up Dr. Stacey. Daughter Elsie remembers him well, but, surprisingly, Dora does not. Elsie explains: “To tell you the truth, the true fact, we didn’t have doctors. Well, I guess my mother did have Dr. Stacey a few times, or, that is, my daddy would go over there and get medicine.” Elsie recalls being afraid of Stacey’s wife, Bettie—“She looked like she was part Indian, real black, and we was all afraid of her.”

  Elsie and her mother talk to Kim about the general stores and dry-goods stores and the coming of the daily mail hack, and the sawmill and cotton gin and gristmill. Willie McArtor chimes in to say that his dad bought the waterwheel and ran it for fifty years, but Kim has no McArtors in her notes and has been led to believe that Reverend Absalom Phillips owned the mill. When she asks them about Phillips, they don’t recall that he ran a mill or a gin.

  Dora says, “Was he the one that used to preach?”

  Elsie says, “He didn’t that I know about, now.”

  And that is about all we will learn, in these present days, of the hellfire-and-brimstone preacher Absalom Phillips, whose life would make a book—and no doubt will, despite his second wife’s having disposed of all of his documents, notes, journals, letters, etc. Months later Kim will get a letter from a great-grandnephew of the reverend’s, Bud Phillips, an author and a folklorist in Virginia: “When I lived at Harrison, Arkansas, a few years ago there then lived an old lady who had vivid memories of his preaching there in a tabernacle which stood near the big spring in present Dogpatch.” This old lady must not have been Dora Curtis. This “tabernacle” must have been Marble City’s Methodist Episcopal Church Assembly building, a huge shed that was part of the “permanent Methodist Assembly,” accommodating several hundred persons for both religious and social functions. Although this was erected “for the convenience of the Annual Assembly of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the State of Arkansas, which has selected Marble City as a permanent place of assembly,” it is not mentioned in the several histories of the Methodist Church in Arkansas; the author of a Centennial History of Arkansas Methodism laments, “I was unable to get much information on Newton County for lack of interest and co-operation of the people.” Walter Lackey encountered the same condition in 1961—“no interest and less co-operation.” Bud Phillips goes on to describe interviews with those who heard one of the Reverend Phillips’s sermons: “Uncle Ab would have fit well in the U.S. Senate as an orator.” In addition to his three- or four-hour sermons, he also sang solo all the gospel songs and was thus “an evangelist, not a pastor.” Union hero, postmaster of Jasper, county clerk, county sheriff, Republican bigwig, Methodist minister (as of 1886), miller, cotton ginner and hotelier, Ab Phillips was Dr. Stacey’s best friend, but Elsie McArtor and her mother know little of either. Their lack of knowledge can be explained by the fact that they were not really townfolk, and knew well only the country environs of P D Flat. They do not know how or why P D Flat is so called. “It was flat when it rained, I’ll tell you right now,” Dora says. “It was muddy and it stayed that way!”

  One of their boarders at P D Flat was a young schoolteacher named Delphie Henderson, one of the first female teachers in the county, who lives just a few blocks away in Harrison, although Dora and Delphie haven’t seen each other in years. That is what the city does to you. “I was thinking about her the other day,” Dora says. “I used to talk to Delphie very often.”

  If Dora has never had a worry, Delphie Henderson has had too many of them, and she shakes constantly. Kim goes to see her, and they sit on the porch of the little house on Stevenson Street where she lives alone at the age of eighty-six, all of her eight children grown and moved far away. Her voice shakes, too, and on Kim’s tape it is scarcely more than a high, hoarse tremolo. She apologizes to Kim for her shakiness, which could be Parkinson’s disease, though Delphie explains that her nerves are the result of a bad winter icestorm that destroyed her roof and much of the contents of her little house.

  Her name is Delphia. She says, “I was named for Philadelphia, or it was named for me, I’ve forgotten which! It’s been so long!” Like Dora, she was born in The Basin, in 1899, on a Friday the 13th eighty days short of the twentieth century. Her grandfather, Elisha Massengale, settled and named The Basin, where her father, William Thomas Massengale, lived, and where the only residents today are Massengales. (A “furriner,” or out-of-state retiree, living in the neighborhood of Dogpatch had written to Kim and suggested Hugh Massengale as a contact, but warned, “These mountain people are not too anxious to talk with strangers, and I don’t think they trust outsiders too much.”)

  “I hate that name, Dogpatch,” Delphie says. “I don’t think a place as nice as that should have that name. It’s a beautiful place.” After teaching school in The Basin and P D Flat (yes, she boarded with Dora) and for a couple of years in Jasper, she “settled down and got married.” She and her husband opened a little store in Marble City, and she was appointed postmistress just before the stock market
crashed in 1929; she was storekeeper/postmistress throughout the Depression years, when “we never asked anyone to pay for their groceries, because they couldn’t. We just did all we could for them, and we didn’t have room in our little store for a feed store or we would’ve given ’em feed, too.” The postmastership paid hardly anything, but they kept the store until they retired (“I told my husband that with the kind of customers we had, if you couldn’t run a store, you just couldn’t run a store”) and some little miracle always happened. She tells Kim of the time her son was in college at Hendrix (a private college generally recognized as the best in Arkansas) and called home for tuition money, which she didn’t have; she told him she would pray, and the next morning customers who had owed a large outstanding bill came in and paid it.

  She recalls Dr. Stacey, remembers seeing him when she was a young girl, and remembers even better his son Jim the blacksmith. She tells of being given a gallon jug that had once held Dr. Stacey’s aged whiskey and was later used to preserve medicine. “When they were empty, they gave ’em to their friends.” Delphie meditates upon this fact, remembering the doctor’s gifts of gallon stoneware jugs, each with its lower half glazed brown ceramic and a little ear for crooking one’s finger through. “I thought it was the grandest thing, you know.”

  Kim lists names, requests information about the others. Ab Phillips? He married Delphie’s father and mother, and he was sheriff, and he ran the big red mill (“but it was gone when I was there”). Jonah Pruitt? He was sheriff, too, and “I went to school to him.” Frank Carlton? “Yeah, I know Frank Carlton and all his family. I lived on one side of the hill and they lived on the other. He taught school, too.”

  Delphie takes pride in having been one of the first woman teachers, and she never had a problem with discipline. The pleasant white church/schoolhouse shown in our illustration was “her” Basin School. “I loved my children,” she says of her pupils. “When I see one of ’em now downtown, they yell at me. They act like they love me. And I love them.” Suddenly Delphie stops shaking and notices Kim’s tape recorder. “Have you been recordin this?” she asks. Yes! Kim admits. “Oh, oh!” Delphie says. “Why didn’t you tell me?!”

  Before Kim can leave, she is shown photographs of Delphie’s grandchildren. All grandmothers do this. Kim will be asked to look at photographs of grandchildren all over Arkansas. She admires Delphie’s, but wonders, to herself, how often they come to visit their grandmother.

  Next stop: the lost-in-the-backwoods, hard-to-find farmstead of Walter and Louise Mondy, east of Marble City, between P D Flat and Sulphur Mountain. Mondy, age sixty-four, who supplements his farming by building furnaces and heaters in his own little shop out back, was born in “downtown” Marble City, where his grandfather Luke Mondy had been one of the first settlers and had operated one of the general stores. “I could probably give you more information,” Mondy says to Kim, “by bein down there and goin around and showin you where this and that used to set, you know. Where the ole blacksmith shop used to be and the store and the P.O. and all that stuff, you know.” The busiest place in town, next to Jim Stacey’s blacksmith shop, was Delphie Henderson’s store. Luke Mondy used to own all of Marble City east of the spring branch, Mill Creek, and lived in a house that was later the home of “a fellow name of Frank Carlton.”

  “Who was Frank Carlton?” Kim asks.

  “Well, he mostly got around, and dealt in land and stuff that way.”

  “And traded,” says Louise Mondy. She asks her husband, “What was his nickname?”

  “Well, I don’t want that on her tape,” Walter says, indicating the tape recorder. Instead, in the background on the tape is the sound of hail. It is very late in the afternoon of Kim’s second day here, almost suppertime (or maybe the Mondys have already eaten); they are sitting on the long front porch of the farmhouse, and the driving rainstorm has changed temporarily to hail, the stones as big as marbles. Walter Mondy has not always stayed here on his farm; the search for opportunity has taken him, like many Arkansawyers, far afield—to California, to Canada, to Detroit, “following” welding and machine-shop work over the years. “I’ve been from east to west as far as you could go,” Walter says. “We lived in Hartford, Connecticut, for four years.” They are thus among the few Arkansawyers to live for a while in New England.

  “You were homesick?” Kim asks.

  “Lord, yes,” Walter says. “This is the only place in the world that your neighbors cares about you. Only place. I’m an Arkansawyer. Born and raised here.”

  Kim smiles at that, loving his use of “Arkansawyer”: so many modern, educated, but ignorant and insecure Arkansawyers make such a thing out of calling themselves “Arkansan,” as if it were genteel.

  She consults her notebook and asks one of her stock questions: “What scandals or crimes do you remember? Any suicides or murders?”

  “Not over there at Marble City,” he says. “That was a peaceful town. I never knowed of anybody gettin into trouble or anything.” Kim considers how radically different this is from Cherokee City.

  “How did P D Flat get its name?” she asks.

  “Never did know,” Walter says. “Only ‘poor damn’…” He laughs.

  Louise laughs, too. “Just Poor Damn Flat.”

  “You mentioned Frank Carlton,” Kim says. “You’re not going to tell me his nickname?”

  “No,” Mondy says. “I wouldn’t want to tell that name.”

  “All right,” Kim says, and asks her big one: “Have you been to Dogpatch?”

  Mondy’s face actually becomes red, and his neck muscles tighten. His words come rapidly and angrily: “Yeah, I’ve been down in there one time, made me so mad a feller had to pay to go in it and look around and see what used to be, and they got it all messed up now, it makes me so mad. I used to run all over that thing barefooted when I was a kid, and then to have to pay ’em seven or eight dollars to go down in there…”

  Louise offers, “See, he’d like to see it back the way it used to be.”

  “Hell, yes!” Mondy says. “It used to be, anybody wanted to go down there and have a picnic or whatever, they could. If the kids wanted to get out there and play, they could. Why, Lord-a-mercy, you could ride your horse down in there, and tie it up. You knowed everbody, and you could talk, and you might have a little trade or somethin or other. You could enjoy it. And there’s nothin you can enjoy over there now.”

  “You don’t like the name Dogpatch?” Kim asks.

  “Hell, no! It oughta be called Marble City!” Mondy is standing now, and gesturing. “Go down there and tear all them ole crazy buildings down, and put some decent roofs on ’em and put ’em all on there straight instead of all humped-up—like—you know—why—good gosh!”

  It is too late in the afternoon for any more interviews, so Kim decides to take a different route back westerly toward Dogpatch and perhaps stop in the park again for one last look around. She drives the back roads across P D Flat (the name was “Piss Diddle,” but the Mondys couldn’t speak this onto her tape), taking the woodsy, bucolic eastern approach to Marble City, past Fodderstack Mountain, on the same trail that Dr. Stacey rode in his buggy at least weekly from his farm into the village. On Zephyra’s tape player she runs Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, one of the few classical cassettes she has. She drives very slowly, watching for ruts and potholes. There is no gate at this end of Dogpatch. The eastern side of the “theme” park dissolves into the woods and into this old township trail that she is on, and that Stacey traveled so often. As the trail nears the end of the woods and is about to emerge into the park beside the falls, she sees, on a ledge beside the road, the remains of a wagon: the oak spokes and felloes and staved hubs, the shafts and singletree and tongue and sideboards of a decaying wooden wagon. Seemingly in the process of dissolving into the ground, it reminds Kim of the skeleton of an animal. It is pointed eastward, away from Marble City, as if someone had long ago escaped from the town in that direction and the wagon had broken down and be
en abandoned. Thus the wagon, ignored by the Dogpatch management, serves as a true symbol of Marble City itself, the only thing authentic and original in the park.

  Just across from it is the terminus of the West Po’k Chop Speshul Train, its narrow-gauge rails making a U-turn around a ramshackle outhouse-size hovel to head back toward the falls and the “civilization” of the village of Dogpatch. This little train runs on the only track that was ever laid in Newton County. Of all Arkansas’s seventy-five counties, only poor Newton never had a mile of railroad track, although the developers of Marble City courted all of the major and minor railroad companies in hopes of a connection.

  But the “real” railroad in the “real” Dogpatch of the “Li’l Abner” cartoon did not make safe round trips like this one. It ran straight up a mountainside to a point where it always fell back with a crash, killing all the passengers. Al Capp had an obsession with death and once declared, “Man is exhilarated by the thought of death. That’s the basis of all the adventure in ‘Li’l Abner.’ It is always a flirtation with death; it is always a triumph over something that we all know will eventually triumph over us.” When he died in 1979, his comic strip had been buried two years before, it and he suffering from terminal unpopularity. Ten years earlier, perceiving already the decline of his strip, he reluctantly consented to the establishment of the Dogpatch theme park in Arkansas and even went there, briefly, for the dedication ceremonies, where Orval Faubus appeared, no longer governor of Arkansas but now actually president and general manager of the Dogpatch corporation. Al Capp made a speech here. He stood on a platform with Faubus and looked around him at all these gimcrack buildings that have only the most superficial resemblance to the “real” Dogpatch of his mind and his drawing board, and he thanked all the local people like Doyle Harp who had made his “dream come true,” and he said, “No one from either coast could have done as good a job…. I’m extremely pleased…. This is Dogpatch!”