Yes, he knew Bill Clements, very well, used to work on the river with him day in and day out, hunting and trapping with him.
And, yes, he knew Pearl Harrison and can recall the details of her supposed crime and her suicide.
Yes, he remembers Sheriff Nash and can see him walking tall as if it were just yesterday. Best of all, he remembers Sheriff George Spencer, who was “a very close friend of mine. We grew up together. I know exactly what happened when he was shot down by that Alf Wood.”
Cotton Williams will be glad to take Kim (in his own car, which he still drives without any problem) to the river to meet Cotton Taft, but first he has to feed lunch to the senior citizens and then close up the office for the afternoon. While Kim waits, she prepares the questions she’ll ask.
The two Cottons, who haven’t seen each other recently, greet each other like the old friends they are, old rivermen, and Cotton Taft scarcely notices the young lady who’s with Cotton Williams and holding a tape recorder in her lap as they sit on the bank of the levee, steps away from Taft’s houseboat, beneath cottonwoods and cotton clouds. The two men begin talking about some subject as if they had just left it, a subject not too familiar to Kim, who keeps her mouth shut and her recorder silently running.
“…never took a drink from that still on the donnick,” Cotton Williams says.
“…know you didn’t, Cotton, nor me, neither,” Cotton Taft says. He seems only vaguely aware of Kim; when he gives her one glance, his eyes stun her with their blueness, as if a whole life spent out under the open sky had absorbed the bright color of the air and sky. “Who’s this?” he says finally to Cotton Williams.
“Just a little ole girl,” Cotton Williams says. “Might want to ask you a simple question or two.”
“You aint a reporter?” Cotton Taft says to her.
“No,” she says, timidly but truthfully, “I’m not.”
“There was a lady reporter here just this mornin,” he says. “Or maybe it was yesterday mornin; I get so many of ’em, I caint tell ’em apart.”
“Why are you so popular with reporters?” she asks.
Cotton Taft laughs. “I guess I’m an old goat! I’m a real character, caint you tell?”
“In other words,” puts in Cotton Williams, “it’s because you and me saw Lake City develop from when it wasn’t nothin.”
“And back to nothin,” Cotton Taft says. He stares around him defiantly, as if challenging the dead town to rise up again.
The two men talk of the old days, their memories of the coming of the first Model T Ford, the days when cows and goats roamed the dirt streets, which were edged with wooden sidewalks. They talk of their first boyhood jobs for “real money”: killing frogs at night for a dollar a dozen. They talk of the war—not Number I but Number II, when meat was rationed and people had to have stamps to buy it, so they ate fish instead, and Cotton Taft had a fish market that was running night and day. That river right now, Cotton Taft observes, wouldn’t hold all the fish he had taken out of it during his life. He used to catch three or four hundred pounds a day.
“How’s your fish business these days?” Kim asks. Immediately she wonders if it’s a bad question; there seems to be no business of any sort along the riverbank. But Cotton Taft answers quickly:
“It’s good! If I could only catch ’em. Right now I’m havin the biggest trouble catchin fish as I’ve ever had!” Both Cottons grumble about the condition of the river: several drought years have hurt and lowered it, and those folks up in Missouri who control the Mappapello Dam won’t open the gates and let old St. Francis come the many miles down into Arkansas. There is also suspicion that the state never restocks the St. Francis, since the river is used for commercial fishing more than sport fishing. Worst of all, the fish have been poisoned by insecticides running off from the cropland.
Both Cottons look at the sky. “We need a rain right now,” Taft says. “Just an eench. Not one of them floods, but about an eench, for the gardens and flowers….”
The two men talk of drought years past, of flood years past, of storms, tornadoes, of the best ways to predict the weather. Kim enjoys just listening to them. She realizes something: of the lost cities she has been to (or will go to), this is the only one in which she has not sat indoors, in somebody’s compote living room. She likes being out here on the riverbank.
After a lull in the conversation, Kim asks Cotton Taft, “Did you know Constable Bill Clements?” The two Cottons exchange glances, and Taft does not reply. “Was he a friend?” Kim asks.
“Yeah, yeah,” Cotton Taft says impatiently, “but he’d kick you right in the butt. Pardon me, lady.” He ruminates and grinds his teeth. “I didn’t trust ole Bill. See, we used tackle to catch fish and traps to catch coons, but Bill, he’d take any of it! He was a booger-cat.” Taft points upstream. “Lived on the donnick over there, last years of his life. Because of the things he done, you know, and other people, I’d think he was pretty lonely them last years.” As if to divert his friend from thoughts of that tragedy, Cotton Williams begins reminiscing about worse things that happened: a friend of theirs who got literally scalped, and other killings they knew in the rough days of the town, including a liquor-syndicate war in which nine moonshiners were killed.
“Why was there so much violence in Lake City?” Kim asks.
“Well,” says Cotton Williams, “this used to be a timber town. Come payday, they’d all get drunk, and cut up, and—”
“—and whore around!” Taft adds. “Pardon me, lady, but there was two whorehouses up there, one of ’em over the hamburger joint. You’d get you a hot dog or a hamburger and pay the man fifty cents and then you could go upstairs, where all the girls were. I don’t know where all the girls come from. I never went to none of them places.”
“Were you married?” Kim asks.
“Yeah,” Cotton Taft says, and begins to tell the story as if he’s rehearsed it through frequent repetition. Like Bill Clements, he had a wife and two kids, whom he raised right there in a houseboat on the river. Not that he ever felt like shooting them, but, like Bill’s Nellie (the third one), Cotton’s May up and left him, “flew the coop.” “We was makin so much money here in the fish business we didn’t know what to do with it, so one day she just grabbed her an armload of money and left. By herself. Me with the two kids. I raised ’em. She was on her way out to Californy, stopped in Las Vegas, lost all her money, got beat up, but stayed twenty-five or thirty years, then she come back home…. She didn’t come home for me, she just wanted a place to stay, and I was dumb enough to give it to her. I hardly knew her. She’d weighed about a hundred forty when she left, a real pretty gal, and come back weighin about ninety and looked awful, looked like she was ninety years old and had been in the dope.” Taft shakes his head sadly. “Oh, I paid her hospital bill for a while, but I wanted out, so I got me this lawyer and he told me what to do. I went down and talked to my wife and she said she’d give me a divorce for a thousand dollars. ‘You got it, kid,’ I said to her.” Taft pauses, squints at the river, spits, and adds, “But I tell ye right now, you don’t know how sick you can get lookin at someone you thought so much of, and was so pretty, and then see her when she’s been thrown down the hole. All I could do, lady, was put her on the plane and send her back.”
Suddenly Kim realizes that the desertion of a town is like the desertion of a spouse: you never know what will happen while you’re gone. “Do you ever go down to where the old abandoned buildings are, where there used to be a drugstore beside an alley and—”
He shakes his head. “It’s lonesome down there, lady.”
“Why does it bother you?” she asks, wondering if it isn’t much lonesomer here on the riverbank, except when the reporters come.
“Well, I used to go down there and everybody in the world was there. Why, I remember when you could hardly walk, there were so many people, and there were five cafés and you’d have to git you a plate of grub and eat standin up because there were so many people.
Now…” He shakes his head. “You go down there now, you can holler and there aint nobody to hear ye.”
“Do you ever see your children?”
“My boy was just here yesterday. Drives a truck. Fifty years old, bald-headed and fat. I understand my girl’s in California; aint seen her in ten or fifteen years, but I understand she’s big and fat, too. She married off and just got to eatin! I like to remember her the way she was: just a little blond-headed girl, like you.”
And these two old men like to remember the town the way it was, and go on talking about it, recalling the glories of its past and the good times they used to have.
Cotton Williams cracks, “But the next fifty years will be easier for both of us!” Both men chuckle over that.
“I hope so!” Cotton Taft says. “But, Cotton, we’ve had it. We’ve had fun. Doggone it, I tell you right now…”
“We’ve had a rich life.”
“Yes, we have. Cotton, right there when we run that river together, we had fun….”
“Oh, yeah, we had fun.”
Lake City was incorporated as a city in 1898. Elvis “Cotton” Taft may (or may not) have been born the same year, or the next, or, as he has told Kim, with this century. Perhaps he himself doesn’t really know. “No, he doesn’t really know,” Cotton Williams tells Kim, driving her back to her car. “He thinks he’s three or four years older than me, but the truth is, I’m three or four years older than him.”
“I wonder how a person loses track of how old he is,” Kim remarks, just making conversation.
“Oh, there’s a million and a million that don’t know their age.”
“He’s got the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen,” she says.
“Yeah, he has. Cotton was a real nice-lookin young man, too.”
“Do you remember when his wife left?”
“Oh, sure. I knew him before they was married, even.”
“Seems he had some good memories of her.”
“That’s right,” says Cotton Williams, who still has his wife of fifty-six years. “We still have some good memories of her.”
Mound City, Arkansas
Mound City is nothing more than the barest resemblance of what it used to be.
—Goodspeed, Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Eastern Arkansas, 1890
No one knows where de Soto crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas. Five different landings have been conjectured as his entrada, the northernmost being the future site of Mound City, which was already a village with mounds even then, even then deserted, or temporarily abandoned in fear of the armored Spaniards and their sophisticated weaponry. Perhaps the name in the language of those inhabitants (“Aquixo,” as spelled by the Spanish) meant “mound-wanting-to-be-city.”
It would have been the only eminence and clearing in all that marshy woodland, and if de Soto espied it rising across the great awesome roil of muddy water, he would have deliberately chosen the mound as security against a possible flood, in that late springtime of 1541.
Those same sunbrowned natives who called their city Aquixo called their stream a name derived from Algonquin that sounded like “Mizzissibizzibbippi,” the very utterance of which was meant to convey its feeling: Old Big Deep Strong Turbulent Muddy Winding Grandfather of Waters. Not simply Father of Waters, as it is so often mistranslated, but grandfather, ancient and venerable. These “Indians,” like so many others, worshipped the sun when it was rising in the east, and all they could see to the east of themselves, besides the morning sun, was the Big Muddy Grandfather. Their own grandfathers had first heaped up a pile of dirt on the bank of the river to protect the interred bodies of their grandfathers from being washed away in the floods, just as their dark-skinned counterparts were doing alongside another flooding river, the Nile, with a more durable sort of mound-building, brick mastabas and blocks of stone pyramided into great mounds. The original Mound City is the necropolis at Saqqara—the cemetery for, coincidentally, the archaic Egyptian capital of Memphis. Just across the river from Mound City, Arkansas, is another Memphis, named after the first.
A digression on language ties it all together; Memphis, in Egypt, was named after its founder, Men, the Greek “Menes,” related in the dark mother-mewlings of etymology to the Latin manus, for “hand,” which gives us not only the multitude of “handiwork” words—“manipulate,” “manage,” “manufacture,” “maneuver,” “manure,” “manuscript,” “legerdemain,” etc.—but also any concept involving extension of the hand—“command,” “demand,” “mandate”—or a failure of the hand—manque, as in cities frustrated or unfulfilled (not to speak of Peter Mankins again)—and finally the Old English (as well as Dutch and Old Norse) word for both “hand” and the protecting hand, or protection, as from floods: mund, which is the origin of our word “mound,” as in Mound City.
“Mound” and “mountain” are not to be confused: the latter comes from a related root meaning “projection.” A mountain projects; a mound protects. It is nearly as simple as that. The mounds at Mound City were piled up to protect man primarily from the river and secondarily from fellow men, from the coming of bellicose de Soto and his starving, once-proud knights, who had sold all their possessions in Spain to finance this expedition, and whose numbers had been decimated from the six hundred who had landed in Florida two years before. The mound protects both the living man and the dead man: somewhere deep beneath the dirt lies entirely decomposed the grandfather who established the city and decreed the heaping up of the dirt above him. Somewhere on top of the pile once stood a temple of sorts, and more recently stood animal and human refugees from the flooding of the Grandfather of Waters. We can only conjecture the flexed position of the corpse and the log-and-mud architecture of the temple; we have photographs of the men and chickens and cows and squirrels held suspended barely above the deluge.
That torrent and tide, commencing two thousand miles away in the lake country of Minnesota, in a river named after the same Schoolcraft who explored early Arkansas, has been captured in the art of the people who were creating it long before de Soto came. Etched or stamped or painted onto the sides of their ceramic ware are abstract representations of the behavior of the Grandfather, his endless, fickle meandering, his sudden dance into whirlpools, his spinning around within the vortex, his bending and doubling and occasional rising into the hallucination of a familiar creature—bear, opossum, frog, squirrel, duck, rabbit, raccoon—around and about the contours of a vessel shaped by protecting hands from a mound of river clay into a bubble magically endowed with permanency, unless it be shattered into shards. The hands that mound the clay caress it with ritual motions symbolic of the Grandfather’s slow, inexorable cruising, which turns and counterturns down and down the center of the continent. The result of this artisanry, dismissed as a bunch of pots by schoolchildren taken to the museums, is a more durable tribute to the Mississippi than anything from the hand of Sam Clemens. In a universal language of spirals and swastikate symbols used in Austria four thousand years before Christ, in neolithic China three thousand years before Christ, and in Ireland two thousand years before Christ, to mention only three examples of the widespread diffusion, artists have tried to convey these same feelings about water, its elusive illusion—the theme and function of art: to seize the fickle.
The fickle Grandfather two thousand years after Christ has writhed eastward yet again, to leave Mound City no longer on its very banks but stranded miles to the west of its course. The Mississippi’s continuing hilarious mockery, a running joke, is to change the whole eastern boundary of Arkansas constantly: thousands of acres of Arkansas soil lie on the eastern shores of the river in what ought to be Tennessee and Mississippi, while thousands of acres of Tennessee and Mississippi lie on the western shore in what ought to be Arkansas. (All those fluid, sibilant s’s are in the names of all three states. Walt Whitman said of the Mississippi that “the word winds with chutes,” but he might not have noticed that “Arkansas” and “Tennessee” each have at least two o
f those chutes, too; in fact, of the ten states along the river’s route, all but Iowa and Kentucky have an s in their name.)
Would Mound City have become a city if the Grandfather had not abandoned it? From its earliest aspirations to cityhood, it was in competition with the place across the river called Memphis, which had the rock masses of the Chickasaw Bluffs to protect it against the fickle shiftings of the course of the current of the stream. Mound and Memphis were sister belles primping up for the steamboat’s attention in the 1830s. If Hernando de Soto first saw the river from the heights that are now a park named after him in Memphis, he stood then in wilderness and beheld a “civilized” destination on the other side. If the fort built by the French on the eastern bank (and taken subsequently by Spain and then by Great Britain) passed into the possession of the United States in 1797, that same year the Spanish built a new fort on the Arkansas side of the river and called it Esperanza, for aspiration or hope or ambition or whatever you call the swelling in the heart created by any new enterprise. If “the Gentleman of Elvas” who accompanied de Soto became his bard and persuaded him to cross over the river, and then recorded his destiny and doom in Arkansas, another Gentleman named Elvis would make Memphis famous in our own time.
With wry hyperbole William Faulkner wrote of his native state, “Mississippi begins in the lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.” With less exaggeration we might say: Arkansas begins at a mound in the mud in the shadow of Memphis and extends west to the Great Plains. The Arkansawyer would never have tracked that mud into the lobby of the Peabody; he would have tracked it west into the lobbies of Little Rock. The building of a major road through the swamp and wilderness, from Memphis to Little Rock but starting at Mound City, was the state’s first highway project, in 1832, and the cutting and laying of that road, called “the Old Military Road” because soldiers helped build it and soldiers used it to conduct Indians on their “removal” to concentration lands in the territories of Arkansas and what would become Oklahoma, was largely responsible for opening up Arkansas to statehood four years later, besides making possible the whole nation’s movement to and settlement of Texas and the Wide West.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 118