The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  It will not spoil her imagination of the story, or ours, to know this “outcome”: Stella married Uncle Henry. Henry Thane at the age of sixty-three gave her the first of three sons; the last one was conceived when he was a ripe old sixty-nine. Having built the St. Clement’s Episcopal Church (still standing, although its congregation is reduced to three) for his first wife, Miss Fanny, he now built for Miss Stella the large red brick Christian Church (now torn down after years of slow deterioration). For Miss Stella he also built the Tudor house on Front Avenue, which remained in her hands until her death on the Fourth of July in 1974, thirty-six years after his, at the age of eighty-eight. We must imagine that Stella tamed Henry during all those later years of his life, satisfied all his desires, and comforted him during—or, rather, for long after—the Great Flood of 1927, which destroyed his empire.

  In his short essay, “Floods,” of 1932, Henry Thane does not even mention the big one, of 1927, just as none of his writing contains mention of his bank. He mentions the formation of, but not his leading role in, the Desha Levee District in 1886, and the building of a vast system of drainage ditches. In 1917 he was the representative of Desha County in the stage legislature that voted to consolidate all the levee districts and to raise all the levees from six feet to their present height of twenty feet or more. He briefly discusses the 1922 flood, when a split in the levee, called locally a “crevasse,” brought out great numbers of convicts from the state penitentiary for repairs and rescue—bringing to mind Faulkner again and his story about the 1927 flood, “Old Man,” incorporated into the novel The Wild Palms.

  The epic voyage of the “tall convict” in Faulkner’s story begins when a deputy shouts, “Turn out of there! The levee went out at Mound’s Landing an hour ago. Get up out of it!”

  Mound Landing, Mississippi, is directly across the river from Arkansas City, Arkansas. The crevasse in the levee there was one of the worst, but it brought cheers to the anxious citizens of Arkansas City, because the breaking of a levee on one side of a river lessens the pressure against the levee on the other side. Kim remembers how Plug Eaton had explained the situation of floods on the St. Francis at Lake City: Plug’s father and other men would patrol the levee with shotguns on their side of the river to keep people living on the other side of the river from sneaking over and deliberately cutting the levee to reduce the threat of flooding on their side. But that was the relatively small St. Francis River. This was the much greater Grandfather.

  Ironically, the Grandfather himself did no harm to Arkansas City during the 1927 flood; the danger, and the damage, came from the Arkansas River, breaking through a large crevasse at Pendleton later in the same day when the crevasse opened at Mound Landing, and hitting Arkansas City from behind, unexpectedly. The realization that the town’s peril was coming from its namesake river hit with awful force.

  Water sweeping over the land from a crevasse, as it spreads for miles inland, does not, contrary to the imagination’s picture of it, rush and roar and engulf everything before it in a tidal wave; it creeps and rises slowly, almost imperceptibly, yet insidiously, until, as the simple aphorism has it, in “seeking its own level,” the water comes to rest against any ground higher than itself. This level, in the 1927 flood at Arkansas City, reached to the second floor of Henry Thane’s bank and inundated all the one-story buildings along Front Avenue; every building within the limits of the town was at least partly submerged. There was no escape except to the levee, which became a thin, fragile island in danger of breaking from the sheer weight of the hundreds of people and animals taking refuge atop it. During the days and nights that the water remained high, it is a wonder how anyone in the refuge camp managed to sleep, save from sheer exhaustion.

  Now that levee is tranquil again, and it is night. Now that levee is almost a useless anachronism, miles inland from the present peaceful snore of the Grandfather. The levee does nothing except delay the daily sunrise by a few moments, and tomorrow the sun won’t appear to Kim. She has driven in search of accommodation for the night to McGehee, the county’s larger town, still on arterial U.S. Highway 65. The one good motel there is filled with a group of casket salesmen en route to an undertaker’s convention; she has to take a poor room in a less mentionable motel nearly hidden alongside the busy highway. All the motels along this route seem to be managed by Pakistanis who speak imperfect English. Restless in her room, Kim grabs a quick bite at a local restaurant that does not even have the “atmosphere” of Grundy’s Blue Front, and she wishes she had dined there and perhaps slept in her car afterward; already “homesick” for whatever pleasure and happiness she had felt in Arkansas City, she drives back there, eleven miles, to look at it in the darkness. So few of these lost cities has she ever viewed in darkness; at night they are even more lost. But she finds this one. The expression used to describe the nocturnal evacuation of small downtowns, “They roll up the sidewalks at eight o’clock,” scarcely applies to a village where every single block is bordered on every side by an ancient sidewalk that remains perpetually unrolled and unused. Grundy’s Blue Front is closed; you don’t find supper at a plate-lunch joint. Only one other establishment is open—Robinson’s Café—and it doesn’t look like the sort of place where eating is the main activity. Kim observes that most if not all of the customers are black. She parks a block farther on, at the “main” intersection of Sprague Street and De Soto Avenue, beside the outdoor basketball court where Henry Thane’s bank had stood. There are no other cars parked anywhere in any direction except at Robinson’s Café. She sees headlights moving up and down the top of the levee, twenty feet above her level, and, rolling down her window, she hears coming from that direction voices and the sound of car radios playing hard rock music. It is the first “noise” she has heard in Arkansas City.

  Kids, she thinks, and remembers the nightly cruising of the Main Street in Beebe, Arkansas (and of what her correspondent in Brookings, South Dakota, has written about the Main Avenue there). Nowhere in any of these lost cities, not even the larger ones like Cave City or Lake City, has she seen a teenager, let alone watched to see how they amuse themselves at night. A lost city is an unlikely place to find the young.

  A car comes by. Moving slowly, it heads for the levee, turns, climbs the levee, is gone a while, comes back, and parks across the street from her. The noise on the levee has ceased. The occupant of the car is a lone male. He gets out. He is a black man, and not young, and he holds something in his hand into which he is speaking. A tape recorder? For a moment Kim imagines that a fellow reporter is joining her. She has heard that the editor and publisher of Ebony, the largest weekly magazine for blacks, is a native of Arkansas City. But this man is talking into the radio phone of his automobile, which is a patrol car, the town marshal’s official vehicle. Kim gets out of Zephyra, crosses the street, says hello to this man, tells him her name, tells him she’s “doing a story” on Arkansas City, and asks, “Do you work for the marshal’s office?”

  “I am the marshal, ma’am,” he says, with a kindly chuckle. “Nathaniel Hayes is the name.” He pronounces it “Nay-thaniel.” “Folks call me Nath.”

  “Do you mind if I get my tape recorder?”

  “No, ma’am,” he says. “You do that.”

  She fetches her tape recorder, parks it on the hood of his car, and asks, “How did you get this job?” Nath Hayes likes to talk, and he tells her the story. Same year Henry Thane died, 1938, Nath started as a part-time deputy for the sheriff’s office, and worked part-time until 1951, when he was appointed a full-time deputy by legendary Sheriff Robert Moore (for whom the town’s only nonsteamboat street is named). Nath worked for him for twenty-one years, until the day the sheriff died, then for Moore’s widow, who replaced him for the remainder of his term as sheriff. In 1979, at the age of seventy, Nath Hayes retired from the sheriffs office—“That is, I thought I retired,” he says, chuckling, “but after about three months of retirement, I tried a job as a security guard over at McGehee, until I heard tha
t the town of Arkansas City had done got put out of a marshal, and I started workin here.”

  “What exactly do you do as marshal?” Kim asks.

  “Patrol the streets, mostly,” he says. “I just try the best of my ability to protect the citizens of Arkansas City. Not too much trouble. Occasionally”—he draws out these five syllables, pronouncing each precisely—“we have something. Things do happen. But it’s not like what you’d expect in larger places. Because here everybody knows just about everybody by their first name, and we get along real good with both white and black.”

  Kim gestures toward the levee, where the high-school kids have quieted down. “Are they pretty well behaved?”

  Nath smiles, revealing a fine set of teeth. “Yes, the young folk up on the levee there were gittin a bit loud with their music and their voices. Did you hear ’em? I just drove up there and said, ‘OK, now, young folk, you’re gittin a little loud, too loud, and we’d really appreciate it if you’d cut your music down.’ They just said, ‘OK, Mr. Hayes.’ And those are the white kids, too, up on the levee. Sometimes the black kids shootin their basketballs there on the court beside your car, they’ll stay a bit late and I’ll get a complaint that they’re gittin noisy, or maybe somebody usin a little profanity. I warn ’em and they’ll say,’ ‘OK. Sorry. We won’t do it any more.’ And they don’t. And that’s it.”

  “Mr. Hayes, do you remember the flood?”

  “Call me Nath. Which flood? I remember a whole lot of floods, but you must be thinkin of the 1927 flood. OK. That one, I was workin for an engineer in charge of a section of the levee; we worked at this sackhouse over here, fillin sacks with dirt to sack the levee where the Mississippi was runnin over. We were takin a load of sacks down to a landing below here when we noticed the water had just started rollin in from that way, from the west, where they wasn’t any Mississippi out that way. It was the Arkansas River, and we turned around and came back to town and got a phone call that the levee had broke at Pendleton, on the Arkansas. I remember this was maybe about twelve-thirty on Sunday afternoon of the twenty-fourth of April, and everybody started gittin out of their homes whatever they could to carry to the levee, right there. By nightfall the water was all over town, over our heads right here where we’re standin, up over the top of that building there.”

  “Were a lot of houses destroyed, then?”

  “It was a lot of ’em destroyed, yeah. Some of ’em were moved from their foundations and carried to the south end of town.”

  Five million acres of land in Arkansas were submerged. A flood gauge at Arkansas City, which had recorded progressively higher floodwaters—forty-six feet in the 1859 flood, fifty-five feet in the floods of 1912-13, and fifty-eight feet in the 1922 flood—reached the unprecedented depth of sixty feet in the 1927 flood, with some areas of level ground nineteen feet beneath the crest.

  “We didn’t know how high this water was goin to come over on the land side. It was up to the housetops all over town.” Seventeen-year-old Nath Hayes took a truck and drove out to his mother’s house to rescue her and her belongings.

  “During normal times, in those days, was the Mississippi waterfront right out there against the levee?”

  “Sure was!” he says, and begins walking along Front Avenue; the “front” implied that it was the waterfront. Kim walks along beside him, thinking, I had a white cop, Plug, to show me Lake City. Now I’ve got a black cop, Nath, to show me Arkansas City. Nath Hayes’s memories of his little city extend much further into the past. “Arkansas City used to be right on the river. It was beautiful to see when the Kate Adams would come in with its freight, and those men that would unload it, they were called ‘rousters,’ and they had that rhythm in their walk, I mean, just like somebody square dance, they had that rhythm walkin up the gangplank. It was fun to just sit there and watch ’em. Oh, and we had these excursion boats, the Island Queen, the S.S. President, and the Capital, and people would come from all over southeast Arkansas and get on those boats and dance, and the boats would drift down the river in the moonlight for maybe two or three hours, and them dancin, and then finally about midnight it would come back here to the landing. And the showboats, yeah, the showboats, too! Vaudeville shows on those boats, and you could hear ’em a-comin up the river, hear them playin that…cally, whatever you call it, cally ump….”

  “Calliope,” Kim says.

  “Yes’m, that’s it, that’s right, that’s the name it was called, back there in those days, I remember the first time I ever heard a calliope.

  Blacks, of course, could only listen to the calliope; they could not attend the shows, or board the “floating palaces” except as porters and maids. The showboats did not have the elegant names of the excursion boats but were called things like the Golden Rod, the New Sunny South, the Spirit of Liberty, or simply the New Grand Floating Palace. The very best shows were presented by Captain French’s New Sensation as early as the year Henry Thane moved to Arkansas City, 1876, and continuing until the year Nath Hayes was born, 1909. These dates mark the golden age of the showboat, which was replaced in time by the nonfloating opera house, the circus with its “Wild West Show,” the carnival, and the minstrel show. Except for that sound of the calliope, which later he came to associate with the street carnival’s merry-go-round, Nath Hayes does not remember the showboats.

  The Kate Adams, for whom First Avenue was renamed Kate Adams Avenue and the old river lake where the steamboat landing had been was named Kate Adams Lake, was not one boat: at least three had her name over the years. She was not a showboat or even a passenger boat as such, but a freight boat and mail boat that sometimes took on passengers, and sometimes, toward the end of her life, in the 1920s, worked overtime on weekends as an excursion boat. The third and last Kate Adams, built in 1898 and burned at Memphis in 1927 (before the flood), was the one that Nath Hayes remembers; she is dear to the memory of others who refer to her as the Bonnie Kate or the Everlovin’ Kate.

  “Now, right there,” says Nath Hayes, pointing at the relic of a long, low building fronting on Front, “that shed? That was a freight house. We had a little train depot, closed down after the flood, used to sit on the side of the levee there. I worked as the station porter, cleanin it. The U.S. mail, it came by steamboat for years, then it came by train until the railroad was taken out, then it came by bus for years, now it comes by truck. The lumber mills used to ship out maybe ten or twelve carloads every day, so we had a train leave out from here every day.”

  Henry Thane’s Saw Mill and Lumber Company, which at the height of its operations had as many as seven million board feet of lumber stacked in its yards, covered eight blocks of the waterfront southwest of where Kim and Nath are walking. All of the lumber washed away in the flood. The railroad tracks have been taken up for years, and all that remains is the tiny depot of the railroad’s last years, with a fading “Railway Express Agency” sign beneath the letters “ARKANSAS CITY.” Where the tracks ran now runs the fence of a horse paddock, wherein a pair of the animals, descendants of those who lost their status to the powerful locomotive, reassert their mobility in the absence of the machines.

  “Here stood the confectionary,” Nath says, pointing to the vacant lot where part of a white marble floor remains, a mosaic of small hexagonal tesserae spelling out the words “PALACE CONFECTIONARY.” “Mr. E. L. Sponenbarger’s candy store. They had a soda fountain with old-time soda jerkers. Pool hall in the back. Men only. White men only. And here”—Nath gestures with a flourish—“still stands the hotel. Yes, ma’am, this was the hotel, upstairs. It was called the McCammon Inn. Downstairs was the funeral home.”

  Still stands: a large, two-story brick building, each of its floors fronted by a gallery or veranda, each supported by posts with decorative wooden-arched brackets in a kind of steamboat-Gothic style. McCammon, did he say? Yes, not Dr. Vernon, but his wife, Miss Mattie. Spending the last years of its life as a hotel, or simple inn, this place, built in our hospitable year of 1886, is not only one
of the few impressive original buildings of any of these lost cities still standing, but the only one built in that particular eventful and sometimes magical year, a hundred years ago, and therefore, by the dictionary standard of being a hundred years old, an antique—not the only antique building in Arkansas City (some of the blacks’ shanties are just as old, the opera house is nearly as old), but the only building here on the main, Front or De Soto Avenue still retaining a semblance of its former glory. Built originally as the Parker House by a Joshua Seamons, it changed hands and identities several times before Mattie McCammon took it over, or took over the upper floor for her inn, allowing the lower floor to become a funeral home. Did it bother the living patrons of the inn to sleep above the dead patrons of the funeral home?

  Now a single light bulb, naked, burns within the incongruously empty-but-cluttered interior of the former mortuary. Nath Hayes explains that a man is using it for a workshop, a farmer who uses the interior to work on his farm machinery. In the weeds on the other side of the hotel/undertaker’s were a group of storefronts: a furniture store, a dry-goods store, a Chinese grocery, another dry-goods store, another Chinese grocery.

  “Chinese grocery?” Kim asks. She is not sure she heard Nath correctly. Yes, Nath can remember when there were no fewer than four Chinese grocery stores and a Chinese laundry, but the last of the Chinese people moved some years ago to the village of Marked Tree, which is about halfway between Lake City and Mound City. During the 1870s some of the larger Arkansas plantations “imported” Chinese laborers from California to work in the cotton fields as an alternative to the “uppity nigger,” who had gained his freedom after the Civil War and would no longer work as a slave or for slave wages. The Chinese were induced to come to Arkansas by a monthly allowance of a half-pound of opium per worker, but when the cost of this narcotic rose to $18 a pound the planters abandoned their use of the Chinese. Most went back to California, but a few remained to establish stores and laundries in southern-Arkansas towns. (This temporary “captivity” of the Chinese would find a later parallel of a sort during World War II, when thousands of Californians of Japanese ancestry were “relocated” into concentration camps at Rohwer, a most un-Californian landscape near Arkansas City, to be held until the Japanese surrender. None of the Japanese stayed to open stores in southern Arkansas.)