The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Marshal Hayes’s short tour of Front Avenue takes Kim back to their cars, at the main intersection, now flanked by the fire station and basketball court on one side, and on the other side by a large vacant lot containing a magnificent sycamore tree and a few brickbats suggestive of a former edifice, which was indeed there: on the second floor of the block-deep brick building was Sophia Furlong’s Commercial Hotel, rival to the McCammon Inn, above another undertaker’s parlor (those progressively missing from the decennial census did not all emigrate to California’s greener pastures), a drugstore, a variety store, and, as Nath pronounces it, a the-ay-ter—yes, a moving-picture establishment dating back to the first showing of The Great Train Robbery.

  Next door to the vacant corner lot, and still surviving as a grocery store called Red Star, is the Reitzammer building, besides the old hotel the only two-story building remaining on Front Avenue; for many years it housed the Reitzammer Bakery. “I used to work at that baker shop when I was goin to school,” Nath says. “I delivered groceries with a one-horse wagon. Mr. Reitzammer would bake bread and doughnuts and cinnamon rolls. I guess they quit bakin about the time of the flood.”

  Leonard “Rocky” Reitzammer, whose father, John, had immigrated from Nuremberg, Germany, in 1882 to establish (and build with handmade bricks) the Red Star Grocery and Bakery (and whose brother William was the newsdealer), ran the business throughout this century until he retired at the age of eighty-nine; he died a year later, in 1979. He and his wife, Verna, the one who was the postmaster for forty-two years, lived in an apartment upstairs over the grocery/bakery. Rocky Reitzammer was, in addition to being a baker and grocer, the town’s fire chief, the town’s justice of the peace (who performed most of the marriages in Arkansas City in this century), and the manager of the Kate Adams baseball team which played in a league with teams from Natchez, Vicksburg, and New Orleans on the Arkansas City diamond.

  “You should talk to Miss Verna,” Nath Hayes suggests.

  “I’ve got an appointment with her in the morning,” Kim says, and prepares to take her leave, but asks Nath one more question: “Is there anything you miss from Arkansas City’s past?”

  Nath Hayes thinks about this. Glancing at the Red Star, he says, “Yes, ma’am. If it was possible we could have one good supermarket where we could get fresh meat and fresh vegetables, that would be a great help to us. We need a good dry-goods store, too. Say my wife needs a pair of shoes, we have to go to McGehee.” Nath ponders the question some more. “But most of all,” he says, “what we need is a first-class restaurant.”

  “Have you eaten at Robinson’s or the Blue Front?”

  “They’re OK,” Nath says. “They’re OK.”

  The next morning, bright and early, Kim decides to have breakfast at Robinson’s Café. Feeling that her long talk with Nath Hayes has broken the racial barrier, she does not realize she is the first white woman ever to eat alone at Robinson’s. “Alone” is the word: there are no other customers at all, no one there except a young black man who is the cook, and who is mildly surprised when she sits down at a table and asks for the breakfast menu. He points at a simple sign, chalked figures: “Dinner 3.59, Breakfast 3.09.” Kim studies it for a moment, then decides, “Well, I’ll have breakfast.” The young black disappears to his kitchen, is gone a very long time. She wonders what sort of breakfast he is preparing. Waffles? She studies the interior of the large room, takes an inventory of it. The metal folding chairs and odd tables have not been straightened from the night before, when black men sat around drinking beer, playing cards, talking, or whatever. There are two gumball machines with giant gumballs in their glass globes, a cigarette machine, a pinball machine, a juke box; one corner is occupied by a riding lawn mower. Empty egg cartons are stacked beside boxes of salt and boxes of grits: these provide some clue as to what might be served for breakfast. Sure enough, in time, the waiter/cook comes back to her table and asks, “How do you like your eggs fixed?”

  She does not drink coffee, usually drinks diet cola even at breakfast, but apparently the only other beverage available besides coffee is beer, which she likes even less than coffee. The man takes a very long time doing the eggs or whatever. She says to herself, I can hardly believe I’m going to eat in this place. What if I get poisoned? She wonders if the café has passed the health standards. She would feel more comfortable if another customer came in, but she is there alone with the cook, who has taken enough time to have raised the chick into a chicken and forced it to lay eggs. Finally he brings a plate. It is as good a plate of eggs, bacon, biscuits, grits, and gravy as she has ever tasted, but somehow the atmosphere of Robinson’s prevents her from enjoying it.

  Afterward, at the Bixlers’, she finds that Judy has been busy setting up a whole day’s schedule of interviews for her with several people who are eager to talk about Arkansas City and who seem to have time on their hands. First, and most important, is Verna Reitzammer. She no longer lives in the apartment above the Red Star Grocery hand-built by her father-in-law, but has built her own, very contemporary, spacious brick ranch-style on the site of her family’s home, in the neighborhood of the courthouse. In a vast living room filled with mementos and collectibles, few of them compote, she receives Kim with warmth, garrulity, and the gentility befitting an officer of the Desha County Historical Society, St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, and the United States Post Office, which used to be located so conveniently right next to the Red Star. A black maid brings coffee.

  Kim is thinking, I wonder what she would think if I told her I just had breakfast at Robinson’s. Kim decides not to tell her. Instead she begins by asking about those forty-two years Mrs. Reitzammer worked at the post office, in one of which she was named national Postmaster of the Year. “Did you prefer being called ‘postmistress’? ‘Postmaster’? ‘Postal manager,’ or what?”

  “I don’t like to be called ‘postmistress’!” Mrs. Reitzammer emphasizes. “I’ve had that argument at the postal conventions. I was a postmaster. Master of the post!” Then she asks a question: “What have you seen so far in Arkansas City?”

  “Well, I started with the cemetery…” Kim begins.

  “Cemetery?” Verna laughs. “Have you ever had any dealings with a dead cemetery?” She laughs again, explaining how the cemetery has been neglected, taken over entirely by the black people (her maid, Miss Pearl Seals, is more or less in charge of it), what is left of it, the flood-obscured graves, washed-away headstones…. But Verna Reitzammer can remember seeing it when she was only five years old and it was being fixed up, an iron fence put around it.

  “Do you remember a lot from the age of five?” Kim asks.

  “You know, it’s hard to say whether you remember something or whether you heard it said so that you think you do,” Mrs. Reitzammer says. But she mentions her earliest memory: of pushing her baby brother in his little buggy down the wooden sidewalks and trying to keep the wheels from going through the slats. The trees were so big and beautiful—of course, when you’re small, everything looks bigger—the houses were larger then than they seem now, and people kept their yards so pretty. But the streets were so dusty and there was no stock law, so the animals roamed the streets.

  “Here would come a cow down the street, and I would just be frightened to death!” she laughs. “I remember Momma sending me down to a neighbor to borrow a cup of buttermilk, and all the way home there was this cow, and I just knew it was after me. So I sat on a bench and cried, holding the cup of buttermilk so it wouldn’t spill, and I hollered for someone to come and get me, save me from the cow!”

  What does Kim think of the town so far? “I can’t get over all those sidewalks,” Kim says, and only after Verna laughs uproariously does Kim realize her unintentional pun.

  “I can’t get over them, either,” Verna says. The big wide beautiful sidewalks, so much an example of good city planning along with the wide avenues, were ruined by the ’27 flood, or the subsequent moving of the houses broke up the concrete. On those sid
ewalks—unlike those of a true city, where you may walk a sidewalk and never speak to anyone—you always speak to anyone you meet. “Even if you can’t call them by name, you can find out in two minutes who they are,” Verna says. “We’re all one big family.” Her biggest regret about retiring from the post office is that new people have moved into town whom she does not know. “I miss that more than anything: not knowing everybody.” Since she doesn’t drive—her eyesight isn’t good enough for driving—she can’t get “downtown” to the post office, which used to be such a social center when it was her domain. The mail used to come four times a day! Verna would have to be up before daylight and at the post office for the first mail, which came at six in the morning, then again at ten, at three in the afternoon, and finally, the “late-evening” mail, which came at eight. Verna closed the post office at five o’clock, but everyone would go home for supper and then return to gather and wait for the eight o’clock train, which brought the last mail. “To think that people in a small town would have to have their mail four times a day!” Verna says, shaking her head, but clearly missing those times. Customers of the post office had been known to arrive by every possible means: on foot, horse, bicycle, boat, car, horse and wagon, and once even by airplane. Verna tells a story of an airplane that deliberately landed on the levee just so its pilot could come to the post office to buy a special migratory-bird stamp.

  But such excitements were rare, almost as rare as the stranger who would remark upon the presumptuousness of the place in calling itself “City.” Verna quotes to Kim the song:

  It aint a town and it aint a city,

  Just a little place called Ditty Wah Ditty.

  This old wheeze, popularized in a song by Phil Harris, can be traced to folklore, wherein the last stop on a mythical railroad to hell was named, as it is alternatively spelled, Didy Waw Didy. Unlike others of these lost cities, some of which are commonly called by their names with the omission of “City” (e.g., Buffalo City is called simply Buffalo), Arkansas City is always called by its full name. To call it simply “Arkansas” would be both confusing and grandiloquent.

  Look magazine, the once-popular weekly now as defunct as any of these lost cities, had a regular contest for “All-Americn City,” and Verna Reitzammer entered her town in the contest. “Look was impressed,” Verna relates, “and we came home with honors, but I understand the reason we didn’t get first place was simply because back then our school was not integrated.” The school now, like all those in Arkansas, is integrated, and Kim has appointments to talk to both the former principal, black, and the present one, white. She does not wear a watch, and wonders if they are waiting for her.

  Verna Reitzammer is one of the few living residents of these lost cities who have already been mentioned in a book: Pete Daniel’s Deep’n As It Come, a study of the 1927 flood (Oxford University Press, 1977), a mostly oral history, quotes at length Verna Reitzammer’s account of being trapped in her father’s store as the floodwaters rose, of climbing on a meat block and being rescued by a boatman. She is quoted as saying, “I remember sitting up on the upstairs steps and watching my piano floating out the front door, piece by piece, one key after the other. That’s the only thing I cried about in the flood.” Verna admits to Kim that she (like Henry Thane) had never learned to swim until after the flood. She laments the damage caused to the two-hundred-year-old trees, cottonwood and sycamore, whose limbs were hanging down into the water. “I just imagined I was in Venice! I said to myself, ‘I’ll never get to Venice, so this must be the way it is!’ But I’ll tell you, when I did go to Venice eventually, I was disappointed—I’d have rather lived in Arkansas City!” Verna laughs. “They didn’t have any pretty trees hanging in the water in Venice! Old dirty buildings and old dirty canals! All the garbage running down the streets!”

  No, she would take the peace and quiet of Arkansas City over Venice any old day. A dear friend of hers once told her that there were only four sounds heard here, but four sounds that always reminded her of Arkansas City, wherever she heard them:

  Cows mooing

  The boats on the river blowing their whistles

  Roosters crowing

  The courthouse clock striking

  The striking of that courthouse clock reminds Kim that she has other appointments to keep. And of the four sounds, it is the most faithful, an aural reminder, in a way, of Henry Thane, who spent $10,000 in 1899 to commission the building’s design by Rome Harding. This obscure Little Rock architect was working in the Romanesque Revival popularized by Louisiana-born Henry Hobson Richardson, a genius who died young in our solemn year of 1886; by the end of the century most Richardsonian principles had become retardataire, although courthouses throughout the American hinterland continued to employ them. The Romanesque features of the Arkansas City courthouse have become so diluted and secondhand—the rounded arches, the square tower, the Richardsonian dormers in a steep roof—that some journalists have referred to it as “Spanish,” and one book on Arkansas courthouses wrongly identifies the style as “Pseudo-French Renaissance Revival”(!). But there are still echoes of the bold Richardsonian Romanesque, forerunner of modern Brutalism, which makes a courthouse seem more a place of punishment than an institution of justice. Made of delta-clay brick whitewashed in more recent times, it and the wooden Lake City courthouse are among the few white courthouses in the state; it rises more massively than any grain elevator or cotton gin as a landmark in southeastern Arkansas, and the clock tower, with four gilded Roman-numeraled faces, is the nearest thing to a skyscraper to be found in the Arkansas delta.

  Covetous of the court, larger McGehee has tried for years to steal away the seat of county justice. As Nath Hayes told Kim, “That effort to move the courthouse to McGehee has been goin on a long, long time. Started back in the early thirties. Each time they tried, we defeated ’em, but they got all the county offices, and the only thing we got left is the courthouse. They take that away from us, it would just leave us blank” All of the county officials have to commute to Arkansas City from McGehee. But every effort to relocate the courthouse, the last a referendum in 1978, has failed. Since the courthouse building could not literally be moved to McGehee, it was symbolically moved in the form of a new red brick fire-station-type eyesore called Desha Court Building, which most McGeheeans think of as the real courthouse.

  The courtroom, with a pressed-tin ceiling twenty-three feet above the floor and old ceiling fans hanging over the bench, the bar, and the jury seats, is not the only auditorium remaining in Arkansas City. There is also the lodge hall of the Masons, in a white wooden building strongly suggestive of a New England town hall, except that the Masons, in their unending quest for secrecy, have in modern times boarded over with clapboards all of the windows on the ground floor. When Kim, driving around, first saw this building, she thought it might be some kind of monastery, eyeless and veiled, until she saw the sign over the door, “Riverton Lodge 296 F&AM,” and the symbol of the Free & Accepted Masons. Asking Verna Reitzammer, she has learned that this was formerly the opera house, a building dating back to theatrical 1886. The floating opera on the riverfront was seasonal, docking in the autumn; this opera house could be used year-round for minstrels and for plays, road shows on their way to Little Rock or Memphis, and opera companies from New York staying at Sophia Furlong’s hotel and doing Verdi’s Il Trovatore. The opera house doubled as a social gathering place, with ice-cream suppers, oyster suppers, dances, and masked balls, as well as the year’s main event: the annual Christmas Eve Tree, a giant holly set up on the stage and decorated with candles and strung with popcorn and cranberries in a public ceremony and gift exchange.

  The second floor was also a temporary ark of refuge during the floods of 1912, 1916, and 1927. Perhaps the Masons have preserved a couple of the second-floor windows for easy access in any future flood. On the totally cloistered ground floor, a lone air conditioner sticks out from the blank wall, as if to save the claustrophobic Masons from asphyxiation. To Ki
m, this building, with its few windows as sparsely placed as the few buildings in town, seems to represent the present town of Arkansas City itself: shut off, bare, withdrawn.

  But there is still one more auditorium in town. The opera house never held more than 250; twice that many could, but don’t, sit in comfort in the new and cavernous auditorium of the Arkansas City Schools building, constructed in 1970 from designs by a Little Rock architectural firm more experienced with the metropolitan and cosmopolitan edificing of that city, and financed by the taxes paid by the Potlatch Corporation, who convert the delta timber into pulp and paperboard in a giant mill at nearby Cypress Bend. (“Potlatch,” from the Chinook Indian word patshatl, “giving” or “gift,” was a Northwest Pacific Coast custom whereby the host gave valuable goods to his guests or destroyed property to show that he could afford to do so; it is a highly symbolic and appropriate name for this huge industry and the lifeblood it is pouring into the community.) The school district has an average daily attendance of only 170 but, thanks to Potlatch’s taxes, can afford to spend $4,000 a year per pupil, versus a statewide average of only $1,500.