The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Sure enough, on the other side of Thirty-sixth Street, in the shade of the thick post oaks, I found a mailbox, a long barrel-domed post-mounted one of the kind used for RFD, with the name on the side: N. Leon Howard. I also found near it the beginning of a driveway, a long, smoothly paved asphalt drive which wound its way among the husky oaks and between two rows of gas lanterns mounted on tall poles. This strange driveway led me on thus through the woods for another fifty yards before I saw the house. The house. House? I wondered, vertiginously summoning up Yale’s History of Art 166b: Stylistic Development in American Domestic Architecture, in which Professor Meeks implanted in me the ability to recognize the sources of style in any house in this country, from Colonial times to the present, but had not equipped me to deal with this one: Japanese-inspired, perhaps, in its lines, the angles of its roof and the proportions, on a kind of oriental Section d’Or, of its various parts; but in general a preponderance of features characteristic of that free contemporary class called “organic hillside”; yet its materials clearly seemed to be on loan from the more humble rural domestic architecture of the nineteenth-century South: wattle-and-daub, narrow clapboards and fieldstone, all used in elegant disavowal of their low-born origins. In short, it was a unique, thoroughly modern house of great size, one which tastefully echoed certain pleasing elements of the Old South era. What it was doing out here on the edge of Africa, I couldn’t understand, but I did at last comprehend an important fact about my friend: he was indeed only a chauffeur, hence the cap he wore, hence the fine automobile he periodically borrowed from his master for jaunts about town, hence this bold and wonderful mansion, behind which I would find the modest servants’ quarters where he had his domicile. A glorious but scoundrelly deceit.

  Wishing not to attract the attention of the owners, I stealthily stumbled off through the trees and around to the rear of the manse. But the only detached building back there was an open garage. The Lincoln was nowhere in sight. Maybe, I reflected, the servants’ quarters are incorporated in the house proper. I went to the back door and pushed the button, what the hell. A bell chimed and the maid appeared, a young Negro woman, bronzely handsome, wearing a stiffly starched apron. “We don’t want anything today,” she said through the screen door.

  “Snaps aroun?” I asked.

  She studied me closer. “Who?”

  “Naps Hod. Zee work here?”

  “Yes he does,” she said. “But he’s not here at the moment. Could I help you?”

  “Whenlee beback?”

  “It’s hard to say,” she said. “What did you wish to see him about?”

  “M’un olfrena his,” I said. “Olfren.”

  “I’m Mrs. Howard,” she said.

  “Zatright? Youn apswife?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well well.”

  “And what is your name?” she asked.

  “Clifferstone,” I said.

  “I don’t recall his mentioning you,” she said.

  “Ecallsme Nub.”

  “Nub?” Her face lighted up. “You’re Nub? Well, my goodness! Of course. Come on in.” She held the screen door wide open for me. “He should be back soon.” I walked into the kitchen, a chromium and copper and blue-tiled electronic servolab. She motioned me on, through the hall, and followed me. “Just make yourself at home. Could I fix you a cup of coffee?”

  “Don wanna benny trouble,” I said.

  “That’s all right. Just make yourself at home. I’ll be right with you.”

  “Don wanna botherin body.”

  She just smiled and went back to the kitchen, abandoning me in the hall. What was I supposed to do? Why didn’t I just sit in the kitchen and drink my coffee and wait for Naps? But maybe this hall led to their quarters, maybe they had their own sitting room or something. I shuffled on through it, conscious of being watched by the eyes of Audubon birds in several prints from the original elephant folio. The hall ended in a vast, multi-level living room, and one look at it told me I had come the wrong way. A huge free-standing fireplace of fieldstone rose up in the center of the room and rammed its end through hand-hewn beams and out through the ceiling. A plush crotcheted rug with a muted parquetry pattern in taupe covered the larger floor area and was anchored by antique ladder-back and arrow-back chairs with seats of woven, twisted cornhusks. Against one wall stood a foursquare milk safe with panels of black tin perforated in eagle designs; I had seen only one like it before, in the tavern room of the Arkansas Territorial Capitol Restoration. Elsewhere in the great room were unique chests and cabinets of cypress wood, flowing flame grain; trestle tables, slatted country Sheraton settees, primitive sculpture and other artifacts. My God, it was incredible, and I wouldn’t have known what to make of it had I not, just the other evening, seen all of these things in those books on Southern furniture and crafts. A veritable one-room museum of the best of old-time Dixie artisanry. So fascinated was I by this spectacle that I completely forgot to worry about being an intruder. My intoxication was replaced by a giddiness of a new kind: a breath-taking thrill at having stumbled upon this treasure-trove. Maybe I could get the master’s permission to make photographs of his collection for the Cabot Foundation. Wouldn’t Clara be entranced! By golly, I could just sit down right here in this room and do enough work to fill a whole filing cabinet at the Cabot.

  “Nub?”

  Just look at that pine statue over there! Lord, what sheer power of expression and

  “Mr. Stone?”

  And sense of proportion. Uncanny! And these draperies: primitive but variegated appliqué designs of war-painted Choctaws in combat with white settlers. Must be about 1810, at least, because the linen threads are

  “Mr. Stone, here’s your coffee.”

  Obviously unloomed handweave. What? “What? Oh, thank you!” I said, and then, as I took the offered cup, I realized my voice was too loud. Lowering it, I mentioned privately, “Fabyous room. Was jus mirin the furshure.”

  She smiled. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “Here?” I looked around me.

  “If you like. Or would you rather go out on the terrace? But it’s hot out there.”

  “Well—”

  “Let’s just sit in here,” she said, taking my arm and leading me down into the level of the living room. “I’ll turn up the air-conditioning.”

  Reluctantly I sat down in one of the rare cornhusk-seated pieces and she, after tinkering with the Honeywell, sat down in another one beside me. She had removed the starched apron, revealing a pair of tight blue jeans which did not strike me as properly menial. She had a good figure for a small woman, smaller even than Naps. I’m afraid that I can’t properly judge beauty among Negroes, but it seemed to me she was awfully attractive in contrast to her husband. Her wide-set eyes had a mischievous slant to them, and the irises had a greenish cast. Her mouth naturally was quite full, but not as thick as is often the case. Through the thin liquored haze over my eyes she even seemed enravishing, like the furniture.

  Apparently she had been alone here, except for a small child whose distant soliloquies I kept hearing off and on. Naps had probably driven the master down to Worthen’s Trust or Merrill Lynch, and the lady of the house was most likely off at a club luncheon somewhere. Thus we had the liberty of the living room. “Where’d they fine all this stuff?” I asked, indicating the furniture with a sweep of my hand.

  “Well,” she said, “the dealers picked it up at various places, mostly by just snooping around, you know. But a lot of it came from my granddaddy.”

  “Your granfather? How’dee get it?”

  “Well, his people had been slaves and, you know, the landowners gave their cast-off furniture to their slaves. You’d be surprised how many fine heirlooms are still in the hands of poor colored people.”

  “Tha sybird oar there,” I said, pointing at a big maple sideboard at one end of the room, “tha dint come from any slave. Thassa Loozanna Cajun sybird, eighteent censhry. Valble. Priceless.”

  “Yes, I kno
w. I found that at a small antique shop out on the old Hot Springs highway. How that dealer got it I can’t imagine, but he wasn’t aware of its provenance, so I picked it up cheap. But how did you recognize it as Louisiana Cajun?”

  “M’a speshlust,” I said, allowing myself a little braggartry. “N’expert. Connasewer ovold furshure’n all like that.”

  “Really? Naps told me you live in Boston now, but he didn’t say what you do.”

  “Assissant curetur of th’ Cabot Fundayshun.”

  “You don’t say! The Cabot. Why, I’ve got just dozens and dozens of their pamphlets!”

  “I wrote half avem.”

  “Well, I’ll be! And here you are, sitting in the flesh! What a surprise!” She shook her head back and forth at the wonder of it, and then eagerly she asked, “Would you…would you care to see some of my other things?”

  “Be delighted,” I said. So she took me for a tour of the house, into bedrooms where I inspected gracefully turned four-posters and fine old boudoir chairs and unusual blanket chests, into bathrooms and half-baths where I saw original cabinets constructed of persimmon wood and porcelain fixtures which she claimed were of the first type used in Arkansas bathrooms of the late nineteenth century, into the dining room where a whole new panoply of splendid fittings charmed my eye.

  Then she led me downstairs, into an enormous workroom, where countless other pieces of old furniture were stacked in various conditions of disrepair, waiting to be restored or re-finished. “And here is my lair,” she said, “my hive.”

  One glance at this pile of raw jewels turned my knees to glutenous pap, and I staggered to the wall for support. “M’ask you apersnal question?” I begged.

  “Certainly,” she said, all charm.

  “Zis your house?”

  She laughed. “Well, if it isn’t, I’ll be awfully surprised to find out whose it is.”

  “But…what’s your husband…Naps, whazzee do fr’lving?” I asked, as I began to wander among the fine plethora of tossed chairs and chests and all.

  “He sells books,” she said.

  “Thas wha he tells me,” I said skeptically.

  I glanced furtively away from the stock furniture at her long enough to see what her face was doing. She was just smiling, with her hands clasped behind her. Was she smiling because Naps did more than sell books, or was she simply beaming with pride as she watched me examine this hoard? An unreal and a mysterious and a perplexing situation. I roved on, bending to study a chair bottom here, pulling to look at a drawer mortise there. This is a peculiar cherry wood, which will look just great with a rubbed oil finish. That is sassafras wood, by George, but who would’ve thought you could make a taboret out of it? And this…a ball-footed gate-leg table, unlike any I had ever seen before, with a singular stippled grayish-white coloration, a peculiar nacreous surface. I ran my hand lovingly over it…. And discovered to my horror that its finish clung turbidly to my fingers.

  “Oops,” I said.

  Nap’s wife giggled, then said, “Oh, heavens! That’s a table that my granddaddy had out in his chicken coop, and the chickens…they…it’s just covered with—But you can wash your hand at the sink over there…”

  Christ Almighty, can I not escape? Am I to be haunted, plagued, with it? Reeling, I struck myself on my already-ripped trousers with the contaminated hand, wiping it off. Foul! My soul all sullied, soiled! All the world a vile midden!

  Chapter twenty-three

  When Naps came home he perceived at once that something was wrong with me, and he became solicitous and ministerial, taking away my coffee cup and replacing it with a full glass of iced straight whiskey, and it wasn’t rotgut, it wasn’t stump, but good Jack Daniels, smooth. His wife and I had still been in the workshop when he arrived, and he had yelled, Tatrice, what the devil you doin down here in the basement with a white man?” jokingly, kiddingly, jubilant at finding me in his house, but his sudden appearance and his mock outrage, coupled with the distressed frame I was already in, had set me to trembling helplessly, and I consumed considerable of his Jack Daniels before I could stop. To his questions I could only reply that I had been struck all of a heap with misery and sorrow, and that I was going back to Boston as soon as I could retrieve my lost suitcase, or without it if necessary, and I only wanted to drop in and say good-bye to him.

  But I didn’t leave. I woke up about noon the next day, in one of those four-posters upstairs with a fine view of the granite hills and the Fourche Creek Valley south of town. I stood at the window staring at that view for a long time, jittery, stale, dry-mouthed, my brains on fire, before I could remember where I was, what had happened. Then my first thought was simply: Goodness, I’ve not only sat down at the table with niggers, I’ve slept in their house as well. But I could recall very little of how the evening had passed. Talk, mostly, and drink. We had lounged in Naps’s study most of the afternoon, and I remembered being envious of the size of his book collection, which I had got up to examine from time to time; among other things, he seemed to have every book on the Negro that had ever been written, from Gunnar Myrdal to Margaret Just Butcher, and including every written word by Negroes themselves: Frederick Douglass, Saunders Redding, G. W. Carver, Booker T. Washington, Dunbar’s poems, W. E. B. DuBois, and the moderns, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, John Williams, even LeRoi Jones, as well as, of all things, the complete Frank Yerby, which I thought might have been overdoing it a bit. I had accused him of chauvinism and we had argued, but I could not remember his words. The children had come home from school and I had been introduced to them: Lucy, a tall skinny girl of seven; Mart, a six-year-old spitting image of his father; and the baby too, little Jimmy, whose babble I had heard earlier in the day. Lucy had looked shyly at me and had asked, “You from the school board?” and Naps had winked at me and then explained to his children who I was. A beautiful family he had, a beautiful house, a beautiful car; how did it happen, I had asked him, that he was still the same ugly runt I used to tote bags with at Riverdale Country Club? We had joked a lot and had exchanged many friendly insults, and it seemed to me that he had become almost as tipsy as I was.

  The rest of the evening after dinner had been an archipelago of small islands of consciousness, short broken moments which lay suspended and isolated in my mind’s drunken eye. There had been a lot of words spoken, but I didn’t know whether they were mine or theirs. We had listened to music; a great many Negro spirituals had been played on the elaborate stereo hi-fi, but I remembered only two: “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Chile,” and one that Naps himself surprisingly had sung in a deep, repercussive baritone full of cadent surge: “There’s No Hiding Place Down Here.” Later some jazz had been played, and I recalled learning, with Tatrice, how to twist. They had tried to teach me another dance too, a weird thing called limbo, which consisted of me falling on my back several times while a broomstick was passed over me like a voodoo wand. It had all been great fun, Tatrice the soul of charm, Naps the convivial host, but at some time or another it had died, faded, gone to nothing…

  Nothing all night except a vague notion that somehow before or maybe after I was put to bed I learned the answer to an old riddle. Perhaps I only imagined it or at last solved it myself through some kind of drink-stimulated cleverness, but it seemed I had learned it from him. It was his name, his real name, and it was Napoleon. Napoleon Desha County Howard. If I dreamed anything that night, my dreams were of Arcole, Rivoli, Eylau, of Waterloo and Saint Helena.

  Despite my crapulous chemistry the day after, I felt in good spirits, almost cheerful, having shoved out of my mind whatever it was that had been bothering me. Naps called me down for a brunch which he had spread out for us himself: poached eggs on toast, smoked turkey, Benzedrine, and a beverage he called bull-shot—hot beef bouillion laced with bitters and vodka. Tatrice was in her workshop, he said, removing hen droppings from a table. I shuddered and looked askance, and, in looking askance, saw beside my plate a cardboard box.

 
“What’s this?” I asked.

  “Your order,” he said.

  “My what?”

  “Your order. Open it.”

  I did. The box contained six identical copies of Fanny Hill. “Oh my gosh!” I said.

  “I just got it,” he said, beaming proudly.

  “Well, golly, Naps, I…I thought you were just kidding. I didn’t really mean to order all of these.”

  “Well, you did, and there they are.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Seven dollars.”

  “For all of them?”

  “Apiece.”

  “Hell, Naps, I don’t have that kind of money. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to do with six copies.”

  “You said half a dozen. That’s six.”

  “Yes, but I was just joking, and—”

  He slapped me on the shoulder and laughed. “Sho,” he said. He took five of the copies away. “I can sell these mighty easy. You keep that one. My compliments.”

  “Well, say, thanks a lot.” I picked it up and thumbed admiringly through it.

  “But don’t read it now. You doan wanta get goona-goona this time of day.”

  I chortled self-consciously and put the book aside. We plunged into the brunch. The dog hair in the bullshot did wonders for my disposition. “Naps,” I asked, “did you or did you not tell me what your full name is last night? I don’t remember.”