“Jobs,” Pat Quails tells her. “We need jobs in this town. We need an industry. Who doesn’t? Without jobs, nothing else will flow. Businesses won’t do business. The empty houses will stay empty.”
“I guess a lot of people here have to drive to Jonesboro to work, don’t they?” Kim asks.
“Jonesboro.” Pat Quails nods. “Also Trumann, Monette, Blytheville, anywhere. There aren’t any jobs in Lake City. A woman came in this morning to see me, a sixty-two-year-old woman, and she said, ‘I’ve gotta have work. If I don’t find a job, I’m going to California.’”
“But your population is growing….”
“Yes, it’s doubled since 1970, when the census showed nine hundred seventy. We’ve got twice that now. And I’d like to see it get really big, say to about five thousand. If we could get jobs, everything else will take care of itself.”
“Then you would be a city.”
“And behave like a city. One thing I’ve found is, the people here don’t want progress. They want it like it was fifty years ago. They want to dump garbage in their back yards! When we instituted mandatory garbage the first year I was mayor, I got all kinds of criticism over that!”
Kim asks, “Whom should I interview? In your opinion, who is the most colorful or interesting person in town?”
Mayor Pat says, “That’s a tough question. Offhand, I would guess Cotton Taft. But maybe he wouldn’t talk to you. What you’d probably need is someone who knows him to take you down there and introduce you to him. Let me make a couple of calls.”
Mayor Pat tries to reach her husband, who is a good friend of Cotton Taft’s, but he isn’t home: out watching for a tornado, probably. She makes another call, without luck. And then a third. This time she reports to Kim that another man, by coincidence another “Cotton,” Cotton Williams, might be able to arrange for her to meet Cotton Taft. She gives Kim directions on how to find the Senior Citizens’ Center, where Cotton Williams works. Kim is impressed that the mayor has been so helpful, and she thanks her profusely.
(A few weeks later Pat Quails will be appointed by the governor of Arkansas to the three-member Public Service Commission, will be given a salary higher than the governor’s and an enormous power over public utilities and their regulation, and will be continually in the news for her tough but fair-minded decisions on the commission, doing battle with the electric and gas companies. She will be quoted as blaming the utilities for the lack of jobs in Lake City. “Why would an industry come to Lake City when it could go west to Jonesboro and have lower utility rates?”)
Kim decides to have lunch at the Riverfront Café, the town’s lone eatery, located in the same mailed “new part” that contains the city hall. She hasn’t even seen the real Lake City yet. “Riverfront” is a misnomer for the café, since it isn’t on the river, but the menu does include catfish. Kim orders a cheeseburger. All the other customers are men wearing farmer’s bill caps who are observing her appreciatively.
A police car stops outside, and an Arkansas state trooper gets out and comes in. He points a finger at one of the customers and says, “Hiya, Hambone.” He shifts the fingerpoint to another man and says, “Whattayasay, Watermelon?” All of them call him “Plug.”
The state trooper notices Kim. He looks at her, and then at Zephyra parked outside. He walks to Kim’s table, looks down at her. He jerks his head in the direction of Zephyra. “That your car?”
Yes, she says, but realizes the words haven’t come out. “Yes,” she says aloud. “Is something wrong?”
He shakes his head. “Pretty,” he says. She doesn’t know whether he means her or Zephyra. Is he flirting? He is not a tall trooper or a spare one, but looks something like Dick Tracy gone to seed, or Dick Tracy with a double chin instead of the chiseled jaw.
She makes a show of pushing the “RECORD” button on her tape recorder. “Why are you called Plug?” she asks. “Do you shoot a lot of people?”
He laughs, then sits down at her table, studies the tape recorder for a moment, laughs some more, and addresses the tape recorder: “Naw, I’ve been called Plug since I was a little kid, too young to remember who called me that or why.” Then, from behind his hand, avoiding the tape recorder, he whispers to her, “What’s this gonna be printed in?”
“A book maybe,” she says, and she tells him her name and explains her mission in as few words as possible. “Do you know anything about Lake City?” she asks him.
“A little,” he says. He sips the coffee the waitress has brought to the table. “What do you want to know?”
“Has there ever been any crime in Lake City?”
Corporal Plug chokes on his coffee, inadvertently spitting a bit of it out in holding back a laugh. Then he swallows, clears his throat, and laughs. After getting control of himself, he says, earnestly, “Kim, honey, you came to the right man.”
She has indeed. Arkansas State Police Corporal Hershel L. “Plug” Eaton, age forty-six, grew up in Lake City, and has spent all of his spare time and holidays for years researching the history of his hometown. Every lawman has a hobby. Some off-duty police collect butterflies or injustices, breed dogs or flies, raise gardens or rackets, play golf or dead, or simply polish their arsenals. When State Trooper Eaton is not in the line of duty, he is on the track of the years, preserving the past for his personal pleasure, and is the author of a thin but unique pamphlet, History of Lake City, Arkansas.
As soon as Kim finishes her cheeseburger, he says, “Let’s go,” and he takes her out and puts her in his cruiser—not in the back seat, where the felons and drunks go, but in the passenger seat beside him. The car is white with a dashing blue stripe and a toplight and siren. She has never been inside one of these as prisoner, suspect, or violator of road laws. Nice to ride in one as a friend of the force.
Trooper Eaton (he is taking the afternoon off, she learns) drives her all over what’s left of the town, a tour guided and narrated by the most knowledgeable historian she could hope to find.
“Might as well start here,” he says a couple of blocks east of the Riverfront Café. The first abandoned building, looking like some forlorn warehouse, was the town’s ice plant, erected after years of bringing in ice by train to pack out by train the river’s enormous daily catch of fish. “They sold the ice machinery out of there, and some old boy took it to South America,” Plug explains. “This South American went around buying up all the ice plants in the world and taking ’em home with him. Gets hot down around the equator, you know. Now, right there sat the old railroad depot….”
There are no rails, no traces of them remaining—the tracks were taken up and sold for scrap—but the roadbed for the Jonesboro, Lake City & Eastern railway line is still visible. Kim can imagine an early morning at the time of World War I and the considerable activity around the old depot as the first of several daily trains arrived from Jonesboro, bringing in drummers to sell their wares to the town’s shops, along with people returning home from a night on the town in Jonesboro and travelers to the east, to the bigger town, Blytheville. The train also brought the mail car, the baggage car, and a few empty flatcars to carry out the quickly dwindling timber from the sunk lands and sawmills to the east. The post-office wagon and an express wagon for the freight waited, along with a hack driver hoping to pick up a fare going to the hotel or a drummer going to a Main Street mercantile. In the shade of the depot there would be assembled the usual club of men loafing and watching the comings and goings of trains, the waking up of the town, and whatever river traffic remained, a short distance away.
All across America, hamlets grew into towns, and towns into cities, with the coming of the railroad; and with the going of the railroad, cities faded into towns, towns into hamlets, and hamlets into ruins. As if it were a vessel supplying blood to the brain, the shutting off of the railroad brings on stroke, paralysis, and death; Lake City is a stroke victim. The highways and roads all around are now paved, all-weather, all-season, and the trucks pound upon them, but it is not the sa
me as in the days when the long freight trains of the J.L.C.&E. came into town ten times a day.
The railroad was built out to Lake City in 1898, when the town was still remote, isolated, accessible only to the traffic of the river, an occasional steamboat or other watercraft. Like most shortline railroads, it was short-lived. If its mission in life was simply to open up Lake City and the eastern timberlands to the progress of lumbering and, after the woods were taken, agriculture, then it served its function well. But the men who chartered it for “ninety-nine years and a day” were as ambitious and as shortsighted as the men who anticipated that Lake City would become a city, and who incorporated it as such the same year the railroad steamed into town. Like the roots of a cypress tree spreading outward into the muck, the tracks of the J.L.C.&E. extended year by year eastward into Mississippi County and to branches reaching the Big River itself, then began to shrink backward until, fifty years after its beginning, it was dissolved and the last tracks were removed. In recent years the old Lake City depot served as an Assembly of God church, but today, says Plug Eaton, “it’s just sittin there empty and vacant.”
Also empty and vacant are the town’s pool hall and its drugstore. The letters of the sign above the former are vaguely visible—“CITY POOL HALL”—the “CITY” giving some dignity to a place that in many other towns is called “recreation parlor,” a hangout for men and boys exclusively. It once held a barbershop, too, like the ruin of a hotel in Buffalo City, and in its own vernacular way it appeals to our Ruinenlust as well as any abandoned building in Lake City. One corner of the brickwork is fallen and jagged, unintentionally like the intentional jagged corners of the Best & Co. store in Houston designed by postmodernist James Wine as one of his visual jokes, to crumble the dumb edges of box architecture and appeal to the public’s fascination with disaster and ruins. Archaeologists of the future centuries who might uncover this sign and investigate the ruins would be equally divided over whether CITY POOL HALL was a kind of natatorium or possibly one more of those shrines in which the priests and their acolytes took sharp sticks and poked at hard colored balls on a table of green felt, all symbolic of the many ball-into-hole rituals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century man.
Around the corner, on Main Street, is a better-preserved ruin, the drugstore, with its plate-glass windows still intact, its overhanging marquee still unfallen and level, and its abutting alley not yet overgrown with brush and weeds. Although the interior of this drugstore was once a busy place with an ornate soda fountain, whose marble surfaces and counter echoed the marbled wainscots of the entrance (the soda fountain was given a new life recently as a museum piece in Fayetteville, on the other side of the state), it was not so much the store itself as that alley alongside which was the impromptu social center of Lake City.
The druggist for fifty-five years was Ab Davis, whose death on the floor of the store in 1977 was to bring about the building’s abandonment, even by the fraternal organizations upstairs, Woodmen of the World and the Masons, for whom Plug Eaton was once secretary-treasurer (he is a 32nd Degree Mason). “Ab would get his ice cream in those huge cardboard cylinder-type things,” Plug recalls from his own boyhood, “and when they’d get about used up, he’d sit ’em up there in the alley. And there’s where we kids spent our afternoons, scraping the leftover ice cream out—” Plug interrupts himself with laughter at the pleasure of the memory.
“Did this place have a name?” Kim asks.
“Just ‘The Alley,’” Plug says. “Volumes could be written about the goings-on of The Alley…the fightings, the stabbings…that’s where everybody went to fight. That’s where all the winos went to drink. That was the main thoroughfare, right there!” Doctors had offices conveniently leading off The Alley; there was also a stairway leading up to the “Office Upstairs” of another doctor, Old Doc Roberts (about whom more later).
This Alley and this corner were the town’s social center, more than the pool hall, and when Ab Davis died, efforts were made to keep the place running as a secondhand store, as in secondhand stores in secondhand towns all over secondhand America in these times.
Now, here, where the new little official-modern United States Post Office sits behind its Zip Code, the corner of Main and Walnut, was a whole block of buildings, called “The White Elephant”: a store, a café, a movie theatre, another store. All gone. There, look, is the courthouse: that’s it.
Craighead County Courthouse (Eastern District). You wouldn’t know it as such; looks more like just somebody’s white two-story house, wooden. The only all-wood courthouse in the state of Arkansas, a tall frame building in a styleless design that might be called Georgian simply because of its simplicity and lack of ornamentation, it has nothing whatever fancy except a hipped roof instead of a gable, and a few tall, narrow windows. The whole thing is such a strong contrast to the Art Deco courthouse of the Western District, in Jonesboro, built in the middle of the Depression. Lake City’s courthouse, despite being of wood, is one of the oldest unburned courthouses in Arkansas; construction was started in 1883 and finished in our key year of 1886, the same year the town’s name was changed from Sunk Lands to Lake City. Inside, the staircase is all-wood, too, and leads up to the big courtroom, where all those murderers and thieves were tried and found guilty.
Plug Eaton shows Kim the spot where one of those murders occurred, up an alley. “You want crime? Right out the back there was where Bill Pace was shot. Five times with a .38 Special.”
“It must’ve set a record for shortness of distance to where the culprit was found guilty,” Kim observes. “So close to the courthouse…”
“Everything’s close to the courthouse here!” Plug says. “Did you ever know a town where the courthouse faced the whorehouse?” He looks sheepish and says, “Pardon me, but right over there was our resident bawdy house, back in the twenties and thirties. There was a saloon next door. Another one over there.”
And here, where there is just a one-chair barbershop, which before that was a sort of speakeasy, was once the office of Judge Craddock, where he could look out his windows and watch everything that was going on in town. “Let me tell you about Judge Craddock,” Plug invites.
He wasn’t a real judge. Horse trader, realtor, lumberman, banker, farmer, cotton ginner, mayor, and kangaroo jurist, William M. Craddock was the son of Welsh immigrants who foaled him in Pennsylvania a year before Fort Sumter was fired upon and took him to far-off Kansas and Oregon to pioneer the settling of both of those states by breeding, raising, and selling horses, indispensable to man’s mobility in the widening West. Raised on a horse ranch, young Craddock had his earliest job taking boxcar loads of horses back east to sell in the big cities. For some reason known only to himself, he brought a trainload of horses in 1898 not to New York or Boston but to the end of a new track just opened to Lake City, then an isolated quagmire that had more need of oxen than of horses but which eagerly accepted Craddock’s load and persuaded him to stay and start a horse-trading market and barn, just in time for the J.L.C.&E.’s expansion and opening up of the town to the outside world.
Bill Craddock quickly branched out into real estate, until he owned most of the Lake City business district; then into lumbering, until his sawmill processed the virginity of thousands of acres of prime timber around Lake City; into banking, until his Lake City Farmers’ and Merchants’ was the first and only financial institution in town; and into the planting of cotton upon the vast acres his sawmill had cleared of lumber, until his Independent Gin Company handled all the cotton harvest in the eastern part of the county. By this time Lake City was almost a city, and he was mayor of it as well as best friend of U.S. Senator Thaddeus Caraway, a local boy whose career in Washington had begun under Craddock’s tutelage and patronage years before, when Caraway established his first law office in Lake City.
Caraway never persuaded his friend Craddock to open a law book or take other than a business interest in the affairs of the courtroom, but Craddock held his own court, of sorts
, in his little office. A jovial lifelong bachelor (rendering him suspect of homosexuality among his few enemies), he liked a good joke as much as the next fellow (unless the joke was about his own proclivities) and would occasionally call into session a court where he would “try” his friends, or an unwary visitor, on some charge such as “flagrant misrepresentation of the observable truth” or “inclination to wear the wrong garment out of season” or “failure to observe the laws of nature.” With no more worlds of finance or commerce to conquer, “Judge” Craddock used these kangaroo courts to amuse himself and others. The defendant was always found guilty, and sentenced by the judge to stand a round of coffee or a box of cigars for the other attendants of the court.
When a city has finished growing, it turns to entertainment. An actual judge who tried a moonshiner in the Lake City courthouse and sent him to the state penitentiary was afterward hailed into Judge Craddock’s court and charged with “raising the price of whiskey,” found guilty, and ordered to buy coffee for all the spectators. Throughout the Roaring Twenties and Depressed Thirties, the annual event of Lake City was not July 4 but April 12, the birthday of Judge Craddock and two of his cronies, who gave themselves an annual birthday party and all-day public picnic, wingding, and blowout.
When Judge Craddock died, at age eighty, he owned most of the eastern part of the county, but, for a reason as strange as his reason for coming to Lake City in the first place, he requested that his remains be sent back to his boyhood home in Kansas for burial.
Or perhaps the reason isn’t hard to find. Plug Eaton drives Kim to the Lake City Cemetery, which is not on a hill like the Cave City Cemetery (there are no hills or even knolls here) but squeezed between the town’s eastern side and the river, right on the edge of the Sunk Lands, where it has been flooded by the “lake” on several occasions. Judge Craddock wouldn’t have wanted to be buried here. The few trees in this amphibious cemetery are, of course, cypress, the water-loving evergreen whose branches (appropriately or coincidentally, but probably unbeknown to those who lie beneath them) are ancient symbols of mourning. Cypresses standing in swamps with their knees above water suggest the forbidding gloom of death. Here some of the graves are entombed, New Orleans style, above the ground. Later in the afternoon Plug will take Kim all the way up and out to the Pine Log Cemetery, twenty miles northwest of Lake City, where there are knolls and rises that contain the burials of many of the town’s best people, including Allen Springer, who owned most of those knolls and rises as well as the best plots here in this cemetery.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 115