Orval Faubus grinned his famous grin, although he did not like Al Capp. Orval Faubus was a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool Ozark hillbilly who faithfully read “Li’l Abner” but had no use for its creator, although Capp and Faubus were surprisingly alike. They were born just three months apart, Capp in September 1909, Faubus in January 1910, and they even looked alike: high foreheads with receding dark hair, and big mouths. But Faubus was born into the poverty of Greasy Creek, Arkansas, whereas Capp was born into the poverty of New Haven, Connecticut, a completely different world. In their teens, both of them ran away from home, Faubus to become an itinerant fruit-picker and hobo, Capp to have his first and only contact with real mountain people in eastern Tennessee, where he remained only a few days, long enough to be impressed by the fun-loving backwoods characters but not long enough to learn to depict accurately their manners, mores, and least of all their dialectic speech, which was always terribly misrendered in his comic strip.
In 1934, the same year Faubus got his belated diploma from the vocational high school in his hometown, Huntsville, Capp was inventing and marketing his first “Li’l Abner” strips. While Orval managed to become postmaster of Huntsville and editor/publisher of the weekly Madison County Record newspaper (circulation 1,227), Al Capp was reaching a daily and Sunday circulation of twenty-seven million with his Dogpatch saga. By 1954, when Faubus, through some strange flukes of Arkansas politics, got himself elected governor, Al Capp’s comics were being compared to Gershwin’s achievement in jazz, D. W Griffith’s in the movies, and John Steinbeck was promoting Capp for the Nobel Prize in literature.
Then, in 1957, Faubus focused the attention of the world upon himself and upon a place called Little Rock, whose name is still universally evocative of race hatred and the problems of integration.
In the sixties, Faubus kept on getting re-elected to his six terms as governor, while Al Capp gave Li’l Abner hippie-length hair in concession to the youth culture, although his own politics or ideologies were becoming increasingly conservative and he finally lost his college audience completely by proclaiming, “The martyrs at Kent State were the kids in National Guard uniforms.” Faubus was finally defeated by Winthrop Rockefeller, retired, but kept attempting unsuccessful comebacks into politics, and accepted the figurehead directorship of Dogpatch to earn his keep.
The deserted grounds of Dogpatch are growing dark again. Kim pauses only briefly at the village “square,” beneath the equestrian statue of Dogpatch’s Confederate General Jubilation T. Cornpone, who fought in twenty-seven Civil War battles and lost every one, and was decorated by the Yankees for his contribution to their cause. Quite possibly Garcia Marquez was one of the many international fans of Al Capp, and modeled upon General Cornpone his Colonel Aureliano Buendia of Macondo, who fought thirty-two battles for the Liberal cause and lost every one of them.
Into the square comes another automobile, and Kim’s first thought is that it is the park’s watchman coming to run her out. She will explain that she came into the park from the east, where there is no gate. But the car, an old Chevy, does not look official, as if belonging to a Dogpatch security guard. Her second thought is that its lone occupant, a male, is the professor and novelist recently in South Dakota who has come to join her on her quest to Arkansas’s lost cities. The car stops alongside Zephyra. The man gets out. Although she has never laid eyes on the professor/novelist, she would hope that he is younger than this man, who is quite gray, craggy, stooped, and has a nose like…She recognizes the nose, the famous face itself. She has met this man before, although she was only nine or ten the last time she saw him face to face, at the foot of the great staircase in his mansion at Little Rock. He had paused to shake her hand and that of her sister Michelle, and little Michelle, six or seven, had declared, “I will never wash my hand again!” Their grandfather, Julian Hogan, was standing proudly to one side, his hand across Kim’s shoulders, where he rarely placed it. Julian Hogan, the father of Kim’s and Michelle’s mother, Jacque, was a big man himself, the director of the budget, a career employee, not a politician, but still one of the most powerful men in the capital, a man whom, Kim will discover in just a few more months, the Arkansas Times magazine considers one of the 50 Most Influential Arkansawyers of All Time.
The old man is wearing a necktie with a kind of country-western zippered jacket, black, and one can almost see the bulge of the pacemaker beneath it. “Howdy,” he says. “Looks like me and you are the only visitors, this time of year.”
To forestall his introducing himself, she says, “I’m the granddaughter of Julian Hogan.”
“Is that a fact, now?” he says, smiling. “Your grandpa was one of the finest men I ever knew, a great and dedicated public servant. He helped me shape my whole administration. How’s he doin these days?”
“He’s OK,” she says. “He’s in a nursing home.” She has not seen her eighty-three-year-old grandfather for five or six years; her mother visits him regularly and reports that he is “beyond senility.”
Kim has covertly switched on her tape recorder. She asks, “You don’t work here any more?”
He laughs. “No, I’m just on my way up to Harrison to have supper with some friends, and thought I’d drop by and see what they’ve done to the place. Hasn’t changed much.”
They are standing directly beneath the statue of General Cornpone, who fought and lost his twenty-seven battles. This old man fought twenty-seven political battles and won them all…except the last two.
“Do you come to Dogpatch often?” she asks. She does not slur the word.
He looks around him, at the great emptiness surrounding them, as if searching for himself among the invisible crowds of people, the tourists who recognized him and crowded in on him, calling his name and yelling, “Howdy, Governor!” Is this the first time he has ever been in Dogpatch all alone…except for Kim? Oh, this is the story of—you know it, don’t you?—not of lost cities but of lost people, who rose and stood their allotted time upon this earth, and then sat down again. “I was here early last year,” he says, sitting on the fender of his car. “The new manager invited back some of us who had worked here before—sort of a reunion, in a way. So we came here and they had dinner for us and we just visited.”
“If someone wrote a book about you,” she says, “and no doubt someone will, how much would you like to see devoted to your time at Dogpatch?”
“About a paragraph!” he says, laughing. “Just to say that I was president of the corporation and general manager of the operation during the time I was here.”
“When Dogpatch was constructed, was there anything left of Marble City at all? Any remains?”
“No,” he says, and points north. “Perhaps a small building or so there at the fish hatchery, and that was all.” He points south. “There wasn’t anything down at the falls. It was just the falls and the remnants of an old mill that had been there years and years before. I think they’re restoring it now.”
“Did you ever read ‘Li’l Abner’?” she asks.
“Oh, yes, I read that comic strip all the time,” he says. “It was one of my favorites!” She asks him why. “Well, the philosophy expressed in it: here they were, these independent, benighted mountaineers, up against the federal government and the rest of the world and that sort of thing. It wasn’t too authentic for portraying mountaineers, but it was humorous as a fantasy.”
“Was there a dialect, a language that the employees of Dogpatch were expected to learn?” Kim wants to know. “Did they have to learn a language to portray the characters?”
“Oh, they mimicked the language and the phraseology used in the Al Capp cartoon. They were given some training. It wasn’t difficult to learn a few words and phrases. And most of the people who were hired here—or many of them—were mountain people. They didn’t have to affect any language.” At this point the governor reaches into his jacket pocket and brings out a package of peanuts in the shell, opens it, cracks open a peanut, and pops the nuts into his mout
h. He doesn’t offer her a peanut.
“Did you ever meet Al Capp?” she asks.
“He came up to Dogpatch when they had the dedication, and I was with him off and on for two or three days. ’Course, Mr. Odom was there, and he was the owner, so Capp spent most of his time with Odom, not me.”
“Did you like Capp?”
“Oh, I liked some of his philosophies. You know, he once remarked to the press, ‘The trouble with Faubus was, he was prematurely right!’” The governor chuckles, then frowns. “But he was a very crude, rude individual.”
Kim sweeps her arm in an arc and asks, “Do you think these buildings are crude and rude, too?”
The governor studies the architecture as if really looking at it for the first time. “Yeah, they are a bit extreme, just as the cartoon was extreme. Those sway-backed roofs there, all that stuff. A mountaineer erecting a building—even if it was just a log cabin, it would be better constructed than that. These buildings exaggerated the defects that you might find in houses, just as the cartoon exaggerated defects that you might find in people.”
“Are there any displays in these buildings that tell of the history of Marble City, so that tourists could be aware of the history of the town?
“No, but that’s one of the things I thought we should’ve had. I would’ve liked to have seen a sort of museum here, with authentic tools and household items that were used by the mountaineers in pioneer days, not just in the Ozarks but all through the country.” The governor gets a visionary gleam in his eye. “Because that’s disappearing. A museum like that could provide a great deal of interest and entertainment for the old people who could remember it. Grandparents bring the kids in here and the kids can keep busy all day, but the older folks run out of anything to hold their interest.”
“How much do you know of the history of Marble City?” she asks.
“Pretty little, I guess. First time I saw it, many years ago, there was nothin here but the big spring comin out of the mountain, and a fish hatchery.”
“Governor, do you have fond memories of your time here at Dogpatch?”
“They’re mixed memories. I had some very unpleasant things to deal with here, but I also had some pleasant ones. It’s a happy occasion when you get out and work with young people, because young people are still honest. They haven’t learned deceit. They haven’t been disillusioned by experiences. I used to teach school, you know, and the happiest and most satisfying period in my life was when I was teaching. So dealing with these youngsters at Dogpatch was a pleasure for me.” He pauses to crack and eat some more peanuts. “And those tourists, coming through here by the thousands, and many of them would recognize me and come up and talk to me, and some would come by my office on purpose to see if I was there and get acquainted with me…. That was quite pleasant. I’ve been working with the public and working with people all my life. You excuse me for eating peanuts!”
He says this not as a request but almost as a command or simply an observation, and pops a few more into his mouth. Kim asks another question: “Did you find that handling your subordinates at Dogpatch was any different from doing so while you were governor?”
“Well, I had a little better control as governor!” he says, laughing, but meaning it. He seems to believe that perhaps Kim will be one of his biographers, and he begins to talk about his career as governor, his real accomplishments neglected in the shadow of the Little Rock integration problem. Confident that her tape recorder will get it all, she is only half listening to him. “…the state park system, rebuilding the state hospital, building the Children’s Colony, those things you just don’t get done all at once….”
In just another month, less than a month, the newspapers will carry the story that Faubus’s estranged wife, Beth, will have been found dead, strangled in the bathtub of her Houston home and beaten to a bloody pulp for some senseless reason by a paroled convict attempting to rob and rape her, and that Faubus will be taken there by the police to view the scene and will say to the press, “How in the name of God can people do things like that to other people?” And Kim will cry, wondering how much the old man will have to bear, having borne the suicide of his only son.
Now she listens to him tell the story of his dreams that worked out and his dreams that failed. When he is finished, she asks him, “Governor, how would Arkansas be any different today if the whole Little Rock integration crisis had not happened?”
He thinks about that. Then he declares firmly, “It wouldn’t. Everything went ahead just as I had planned it. I did what I had to do, and life goes on.”
“What about your own life?” she asks. “What are you going to do now?”
He returns to his car and sits behind the wheel. “Well, first of all I’m going to go eat with those folks who are waitin for me. Then”—he grins that famous politician’s grin one last time—“someday I’d like to write a book about the Ozarks. You know all these books like Foxfire? Well, I’ve read them, and everything in there was just a part of my natural life when I was growing up—we didn’t think anything about it, that was just the way we lived, and now everybody thinks it was remarkable. I’m going to write a book. A writer who’s a friend of mine told me, ‘All you have to do is just describe the way you grew up!’”
Buffalo City, Arkansas
Rise up to me, my dearest dear, and present to me your hand,
For I long to take a journey to a far and distant land;
And it’s ladies to the center, and it’s gents around the row;
We’ll rally round the canebrake, and shoot the buffalo!
—Old Ozark song
Yes, butcher those buffalo in that canebrake! At the very end of Nabokov’s most appreciatively read novel, the plaintive double Humbert turns away from contemplation of his own and his nymphet’s death and waxes terminally poetic: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.” The auroch is, of course, the European bison, Old World Humbert’s smaller version of the American buffalo. The auroch is the creature who most inhabits the durable pigments of prehistoric cave painting. The buffalo sustained European man in his rise to art, just as it sustained the Indian in his stewardship of the American earth while awaiting the arrival of the European who would cultivate it and wipe out the remaining buffalo as well as the stewards.
“Buffalo” is a misnomer. So is the eponymous “city” (or two of them, twins) that took its (their) name(s) not from the animal but from the river, which the National Park Service has designated America’s first “National River,” a spectacular, remote, bluff-locked cascade down the middle of the Arkansas Ozarks, immortalized in Kenneth Smith’s The Buffalo River Country. The American buffalo, so-called, is not a buffalo but a bison—in fact, so much a bison that the taxonomists have labeled it officially as Bison bison, a reduplication that we ought to honor by calling our next destination Buffalo Buffalo City and letting it go at that, instead of trying to sort out the schizophrenic distinctions between the two lost sister towns that are separated, not by the Buffalo River but by the White, which joins the Buffalo a few miles on down. Even the handful of residents remaining on the opposite shores are sometimes confused by the historical attempts to distinguish these places into Old Buffalo City and New Buffalo City, or West Buffalo City and East Buffalo City, or to rename the latter entirely by calling it Winnerva or Toney or Oredale or Sticker City, as it has been known at one time or another.
Buffalo City is the loneliest and most inaccessible of all our destinations, possibly because it is also the most beautiful physically. Beauty is not accessible; aestheticians speak of a requisite “distance,” which in a nutshell means we cannot know and savor beauty up close, too close; we have to keep a space between our ordinary selves and the truly beautiful, lest our judgment be bedazzled by it. Beautiful people often give the erroneous impression of distance in the sense of aloofness or chilliness of manner, when in fact this is our own distancing from them; we cannot ge
t too close to them, or we become aware of our own lack of their qualities. The same with cities, or with places; nobody wants to populate Buffalo City, because it is just too gorgeous, and remote, and dreamlike. Dreams are a nice place to visit, but we wouldn’t want to live there.
Trying to anticipate getting lost in her attempt to find this lost city, Kim had made a special trip to see Ken Smith in his home at Fayetteville after she had interviewed Chris Yates of Cherokee City. Kim had read The Buffalo River Country and knows its lovely photographs by heart, but, apart from locating Buffalo City in its section maps, it has nothing to say about the place. So Kim had gone to see Smith, a shy, late-forties bachelor, and asked him, “Have you ever been to Buffalo City?” When he hesitated in his answer, as if trying to recall, or perhaps reluctant to discuss this Shangri-la, she declared, “I’ve asked several people about it, but nobody’s ever heard of it.”
“Yes,” he said, at length. “I’ve visited or at least passed both Old Buffalo City and New Buffalo City, but there’s not much to see in either place.”
“How could you leave them out of your book?” she asked.
“They’re not exactly in the Buffalo River watershed, and I limited myself to that.” Ken Smith talked to Kim about the times he had landed his canoe near the sites of the Buffalo Cities and examined the few remains, scarcely ruins, of each. He had been more impressed by the natural, rather than man-made features: Stair Bluff, named simply because it rises like steep steps a thousand feet above the water; Laffoon Creek, which tears through Hathaway Hollow, past the lost and private cemetery of the long-gone Laffoon family. “Laffoon?” Kim asked. “Yes,” Ken said. “Unusual name, isn’t it? Laffoon.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 107