The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Even today, as Kim discovers in trying to give equal time to both sides of the river, the two Buffalo Cities are worlds apart. The last ferry ran in 1949. Baxter Hurst, who remembers it well, tells Kim that his father owned the ferry all the years that Baxter was growing up. In those days, the grocery store and post office were on “the other side” of the river. “We’d go over there almost every day,” Baxter says. “This is kindly funny, but this old man, Sam Beavers was his name, we called him ‘Uncle Sam,’ he had a blacksmith shop over there where he lived, and he run the ferry for my dad. Now, my dad, who owned the ferry, had it in the deal that his family would get free ferriage. Us kids would traipse over there ever day, or some of us would go over there almost ever day, because we’d need some groceries and we got our mail over there, and, you know, that was a good reason to go, just to get the mail. And I guess we caused Sam Beavers a whole lot of trouble: he’d have to put us all across the river, free ferriage. He was a good farmer as well as a good blacksmith, and he might be out there hoeing in his corn patch or workin in his shop when somebody wanted to go across, but he’d have to stop and set us across the river.” Baxter Hurst laughs. “People needed the ferry would have to holler pretty hard to get his attention.”

  “When the ferry ceased running, in 1949,” Kim asks, “did you feel cut off? Did you feel the world got a little smaller?”

  “Why, no,” Baxter says. “By then, we were gettin our mail on the route on this side, and we had transportation to get to Flippin, so we just went to Flippin for our groceries.”

  “When was the last time you went over to that Buffalo City?”

  Baxter thinks, but shakes his head and says, “I caint recall.”

  Kim turns to Corky Craig and asks her the same question. But Corky says, “I don’t remember when I was ever in that part of the country.”

  So Kim, first giving Corky a ride back to Yellville, goes alone to “New” Buffalo City. It is not easy. Only a few hundred yards as the crow flies (or the trout swims) from Old Buffalo City, it is miles and miles by car, back up the road to Flippin to U.S. Highway 62 and eastward to Cotter, over the high bridge there on the White River. Cotter calls itself the “Trout Capital of the World” and is still a station on the Missouri Pacific Railroad, which runs through but doesn’t stop at Buffalo City. Night is coming on as Kim approaches Mountain Home, the seat of Baxter County, and she does not want to hunt for the “other” Buffalo City in the dark. There is a Holiday Inn on the highway in Mountain Home, a town that is booming with an influx of retirees from Chicago, St. Louis, and other big cities of the Midwest, people looking for the good, simple, cheap, clean, healthy life of the Ozarks. Kim decides to check in at the Holiday Inn. All of the other license plates are from out of state.

  Bright and early in the morning, she resumes her quest for Buffalo City, off the highway and onto the secondary roads and then the tertiary roads of Baxter County. The last few miles are on a dirt-and-gravel road, henna-colored. As she nears the end of it and her destination, Kim can see the river and, in the distance, on the other side, Baxter Hurst’s wide pasture.

  At the road’s end, at the water’s edge, with Stair Bluff rising steeply behind them and vapors rising from the river, sport fishermen are putting out their small motorcraft to begin a morning’s try for rainbow trout. There is a sign, “White Buffalo Resort,” with a logo of an albino bison. A cluster of small buildings, cabins or camps, stands where Jonathan Cunningham’s homestead had been. Kim observes, wryly, that whereas Sulphur City, Cherokee City, and Marble City had all aspired to become resorts but failed, Buffalo City never intended to be a resort but was reduced to one in the end.

  At the office of the White Buffalo Resort, Kim talks to the young man and woman who manage it, Darrell Rose and Elaine Watkins; they have been on the job only a few months, since the resort opened to the public after several years as a private camp. The absentee owners, two sets of them, live in Texas. The resort is so called not because of any albino buffalo who might have anything to do with it but because of the conjunction here of the two rivers, the White and the Buffalo.

  Kim asks, “Do you know anything about the history of Buffalo City?”

  “As far as I know anything about it,” Darrell says, “all I know is what I’ve been told. Because all this was before my time.”

  “What have you been told?” Kim asks.

  “Well, that it used to be a booming town. It used to be on both sides of the river, used to be a ferry. Used to be a rough town. Killings and fights and gambling. Things like that.”

  Kim has not heard of any violence here. She asks, “Do the people who come here to fish ask any questions about why it’s called City?”

  Elaine says, “They want to know where Buffalo City is. I tell ’em they just missed it!”

  “I must have missed it, too,” Kim observes. “Where is it?”

  They point out to her that back up the road she came in on, just beyond the railroad track, are a couple of commercial buildings, vacant, abandoned. “That’s it, far as I know,” Elaine says. She tells of a lady from Batesville who comes regularly to stay at the White Buffalo Resort, and who claims to be a native of Buffalo City and sometimes visits those vacant buildings. “She just sits out there and daydreams all the time.”

  Kim drives Zephyra back to the railroad track and stops to look at the vacant buildings on a rise of ground east of the track. In the early-morning sunlight, it is a scene that Edward Hopper would have loved to paint. He cherished another White River, far away in Vermont. He adored abandoned houses beside railroad tracks. Above all, he celebrated such sunlight, a lonely kind of light, if light itself can be lonely.

  This railroad, which contributed so much to the growth of the newer Buffalo City, was built as part of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern, a name revered by train buffs. Hopper would have loved that name, Iron Mountain. The track is still maintained by the White River Division of the Missouri Pacific, and freight trains still carry coal each day. Baxter Hurst told Kim of still hearing the train’s distant whistle, long and lonesome, several times a day. It was built as a passenger line, completed in 1906, one of the most spectacular mountain railroads in the nation. Six years of blasting away the sides of bluffs and carving tunnels through five mountains were required to lay the roadbed. The original plan was to run the road to and through Old Buffalo City, which helped that side of the river continue its end-of-the-century boom, but after the crews had labored to hack the path along the west side and below the treacherous Stair Bluff and into Old Buffalo City, orders came down from St. Louis that the whole roadbed, twelve miles of it from Norfork, would have to be repositioned on the east and north side of the river, just in order to raise the grade some four or five feet. Relocating the railroad spelled the death of Old Buffalo City and gave brief rise to the growth of New Buffalo City.

  But a new natural resource gave a temporary revival to Old Buffalo City and changed the name of New Buffalo City to Oredale, because it became a principal shipping point for zinc ore, mined in all the surrounding hills. Zinc, which can galvanize iron and keep it from rusting, as well as turn copper into brass, came into great demand during the years of World War I, and towns all over the Ozarks of Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma boomed because of the zinc mines. The name Oredale lasted only as long as the boom and was favored only by the mine owners; the zinc miners and the railroad men, enlivening the place with their carousing, continued to call it Buffalo City.

  Kim gazes at the two vacant buildings set back on their knoll above the railroad track, then parks her car beside them for a closer look. The white wooden building on her left was the Beavers Hotel. Over its long-opened doorway are the letters painted in red, “OPEN.” Kim is reminded of the upside-down sign in the store at Cherokee City, “WE ARE OPENED.” The backroads motorist is warned to avoid any motel with “Vacancy” painted on the side of the building: be suspicious of permanent paint. The Beavers Hotel (two guest rooms downstairs, four up) m
ight have accommodated an occasional tourist, but mostly it was where the railroad crews stayed, or the transient schoolteacher, or a lost peddler. It contained a barbershop, too. It appears to have been remodeled in comparatively recent times—a “Chicago window” upstairs, wide clapboards all over—but it has not been occupied in recent memory except by mice, owls, and cockroaches. It sits pale cheek by ruddy jowl next to the stonemasonry edifice that was Buffalo City’s last post office, last general store, and last hope for rebirth of the dead village (it carries a “for sale” notice; a Batesville realtor waits for any buyer. And waits).

  This stone store was, through most of the thirties and forties—the last days of the real Ozarks in modern times, before the coming of electricity and the dominance of the motorcar—the bustling enterprise of a man from New York City named Clarence Vance. If not a book, at least a lengthy article could be made out of his life. The stone building had been erected early in the century by B. R. “Bud” Hudson, a merchant in Old Buffalo City who left that town at about the same time the railroad decided not to go there. When Bud Hudson grew old and decided to put his General Mercantile up for sale, not simply with a “for sale” sign but with ads in newspapers that might reach a distant readership, he was approached by Clarence Vance and his wife (whose name, as best anyone can remember, was Lola), who paid cash for the building and moved in. Vance was a college-educated cosmopolitan, and his New York City manners and accent made people suspicious of him. There were other stores in town then, and they took most of the business away from him. But he devoted himself to learning the ways of the mountain people and winning their acceptance. Baxter Hurst told Kim, “He would do things just to get the feel of it and know what it was like. He’d come over here and pick cotton all day on this farm, just to know what it was like. He was that kind of fellow.”

  The best way to ingratiate oneself with the hill folk is to acquire their religion; Clarence Vance offered to teach Sunday school in Buffalo City. His pupils began to patronize his store, and in time he had a thriving business. In his spare moments he was writing a book, according to Baxter Hurst, who cannot, however, remember if the book was ever published or what its subject was. Also in his spare time, Vance was patiently marking out the form of a large white cross on the ground atop Stair Bluff, using white stones and painting other boulders white in order to lay out a great Christian symbol that could be seen for miles (and is still visible from certain spots, although Kim does not find one). If Sulphur City’s heraldic pennant was the imagined yellow banner, then Buffalo City’s must be this white cross, like a gravestone a thousand feet above the town.

  Vance became postmaster of Buffalo City and founded the Buffalo City Historical and Improvement Society, persuading some of his neighbors to join. Like Walter Lackey’s Newton County Historical Society, it had a short life, for lack of interest. During this time it contributed a few pages to Frances Shiras’s History of Baxter County, but very little, unfortunately, on the history of Clarence Vance himself, who remains largely a figure of mystery. “They left here and went to California,” Baxter Hurst told Kim. “We lost touch with them after that.”

  The little white hotel and the little stone store beside the railroad track are not the only remains of Buffalo City. There is a little brown schoolhouse someone has converted into a fishing camp, a few older houses used only as summer homes, and one used as a year-round home by a couple of old-timers who, along with Baxter and Geneva Hurst across the river, make up the only permanent population of the Buffalo Cities. Harvey and Laura Stevens, ages eighty-two and eighty-one, have lived in Buffalo City since 1924, when Harvey was hired as a crewman on the railroad.

  Harvey and Laura remind Kim a good deal of Buster and Margaret Price of Sulphur City. They have been married for sixty-three years. Harvey, a stoutish man, wears fresh bib overalls and is cleanshaven (as if he were expecting company, Kim thinks; so many of these people seem to have been waiting for her). The interior of their house is compote: there is a reproduction of the popular painting This Daily Bread, an old man alone saying grace over his humble lunch. A large china hutch contains Depression glass and a representation of the Last Supper that gives the illusion of three dimensions. From the ceiling hangs a quilting frame for Laura, a quiltmaker, who proudly shows Kim some of her work, including one with all of the states’ flowers and another with all of the states’ birds (Arkansas’s are the apple blossom and the mockingbird). Laura makes these quilts not to sell but as gifts for her children and grandchildren.

  When Kim asks who they consider the most colorful character during the years they’ve lived in Buffalo City, they both cite Clarence Vance. “Old man Vance,” says Harvey, “he drawed more people here than anybody I know about, and he put that big cross up there, and he give the Fourth of July.”

  Laura explains, “They was people come here from ever-where on the Fourth of July to his picnic. They had dinner on the grounds, and stands that sold stuff, and they come from all states here. He advertised it, you know.” Laura’s voice is sweet, almost girlish, calm and clear.

  Vance’s annual celebration of the Fourth attracted regular notice in The Mountain Echo, which announced that the Missouri Pacific Railway had ordered all of its fast express trains to stop in Buffalo City on July 4 so that passengers could alight to participate in the dances, watch fireworks “shot off from atop the majestic and awe-inspiring White River Palisades that overlook the village,” and enter the great variety of contests and games, such as hog calling, a turtle race, climbing a greasy pole, and catching a greasy pig. Prizes included a can of gasoline for the motorists who brought the most people, an inner tube for the motorist who had come the greatest distance, a sack of flour for the largest family, a pair of Big-Fit overalls for the best old fiddler, and a permanent wave for the most beautiful young lady.

  Clarence Vance was the planner behind all such details. “Why did he leave?” Kim asks the Stevenses.

  Harvey and Laura exchange glances and Laura says, “Well.” After a while, Harvey clears his throat and says, “Well, they were just givin him a bad time.” Who? “People. They never done nothin mean to him, but they just give him trouble, and he left, went back to New York, where he came from.”

  “Baxter Hurst says he went to California,” Kim tells him.

  “Does he? Well, maybe he did. I thought it was New York.”

  “He done a lot of good for the people here,” Laura says. “He visited the sick and everything. He was somebody we could be proud of, not like that Arnold Comer.”

  “Who was Arnold Comer?” Kim asks.

  Again the Stevenses exchange glances, as if trying to determine how far they can go in telling the secrets of the town’s past. Again it is Harvey who tells it. “He was just a boy. Fourteen years old. This was back in the twenties, I reckon. He killed some folks. Several folks.”

  The story of Arnold Comer is sketchy, not well documented, and subject to imperfect memories. His father, Will Comer, was a dirt-poor man with a large family. They were not one of the old, established Buffalo City families. Will Comer, not respected in the community, was sometimes disparaged for his lack of cheerfulness and inability to take a joke, tell one, or listen appreciatively. About once a year his wife left him and their children and went back to her mother’s home, across the river (in the 1920s the ferry ran several times a day, or on demand). Once, as a child, Arnold begged to go with her and was taken, but stayed one night and came back on the ferry by himself. His father beat him. Will Comer “took a stick” regularly to all eight of his children, and sometimes to his wife, but Arnold seemed to be his favorite target. The father claimed the boy had no sense, no manners, no respect for his elders, no ambition, no abilities, no goodness, and not even the redeeming boyish cuteness that some kids possess.

  There was speculation in the community as to whether Will Comer’s harsh treatment of Arnold caused the boy to become mentally unbalanced or whether Will mistreated the boy because his mentality caused him to do stu
pid and contemptible things. Arnold took to sitting on a corner of the porch for hours on end, doing nothing, lest anything he did be censurable. But if he was spotted thus by his father, he would be given a task to do, usually some feat of strength or dexterity that was beyond his resources, and, on failing it, would be thrashed severely for his mistakes.

  “Finally,” says Harvey, “he started out runnin away from home and go back over yonder in those hills, you know, to git as far away as he could.” Arnold would sometimes disappear for days on end but would eventually come home, because Buffalo City gave him at least the security of the familiar, which the woods, or wherever he went, did not. His father told him that starving himself out in the woods was the dumbest thing that anybody had ever heard tell of, and whipped him especially hard for that.

  One day in 1926, when Arnold had just turned fourteen, his tolerance (if that is the word) took leave of him, and he went berserk. Feeling himself innocent of all that he had been accused of all his life, he decided to kill the most innocent person he could find. He stole his father’s pistol and ran down the road until he came to a house where an old woman was sitting in her rocker on the porch, holding a baby, her granddaughter. He shot the woman. The baby fell on the floor and began crying. Arnold did not want to shoot the baby, too, because a baby to him was beyond innocence: to be innocent, you have to be old enough to be guilty. But the baby kept crying. Arnold snatched it up and took it with him, attempting to hush it, but it would not hush. He took a rock and beat its cries still.

  When Arnold saw himself covered with blood, he decided he needed some other clothes, and some transportation to get him out of Buffalo City, and determined to kill the first horseman he came across. Soon thereafter he shot a fur trapper, Charles Moore, off his mule, but the mule escaped, though wounded. Dressed as a fur trapper, Arnold fled to the woods. His father told the sheriff that they had better find him before he himself could get ahold of him, because if he got ahold of him first, there would be nothing left of him to bring to justice.