The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “And she just carried on like that somethin awful, so finally I told her Margaret had gone to a party, and she kept after me about it, so finally I told her whose party it was, but I didn’t mention you. Then she left, and I called Norden’s place trying to reach you and warn you, but some drunk answered the phone and I had the awfulest time gettin him to understand what I was sayin, and when I did, he went away and come back in a little bit and said that you was nowhere around, so I thought maybe you’d done already taken Margaret off somewheres else.

  “So I sat down and played some more cards with Slater for a while, and then the phone rang, and one of the boys at the station house was callin to tell me that they had this nigger that they caught prowlin around inside of Margaret’s house after gettin a complaint from her mother, so I borrowed Slater’s car to come and try to find you. And so here we are.”

  There we were, at the police headquarters. Dall told me to wait for him outside while he went in. He was gone for about twenty minutes, and when he returned he had Naps with him. Dall lectured him: “Naps, if you have to go into white folks’s houses, don’t rattle the damn doors so much.”

  “Men, we got to get a rope,” Naps said to us. “Aint no other way. Miss Margaret’s mother put a padlock on the door of that room, on the outside, yeah, and that’s how I got caught, rattling that padlock. We got to get a rope and throw it up to her window.”

  So we got a rope. Dall parked Slater’s jeep in the headquarters parking lot, and then he went inside and came back with a fifty-foot coil of rope. Then we got into Naps’s Lincoln and drove over to Margaret’s house.

  There were no lights at all anywhere in the house; Margaret’s room was dark too, we noticed as we crept up the back alley. It was two o’clock in the morning now, and we hoped everybody but Margaret would be in deep slumber. We stood beneath her open window—thirty feet beneath it. First Dall picked up some gravel and threw it up against her window screen, but there was no response. “Rapunzel,” I called softly upward, “Rapunzel, let down your hair.” This aint no time for jokes, Dall said.

  Then I saw something, dangling from her window all the way to the ground. “Gone,” I said to Dall and Naps, and pointed to the sheets and bedspread that she had knotted together to make a rope to get out of her room and down.

  Chapter thirty-two

  In my dream of that night I am again John Linton, the Latin-spouting ex-lawyer in the frontier settlement of Lewisburgh, and I have left my cabin and, fortified with a jug of sour mash, floated my raft twenty miles downstream to La Petite Roche, to hunt for Sam Houston, who had deserted me in the previous episode of this continuing nocturnal serial. Or is it Sam Houston I am seeking? No, old Sam had become old Wes Stone, my father. Daddy is it, then, that I am hunting in the dirt streets of this territorial capital? No, my name is John Linton, and my father’s name would be Linton too. In my drunkenness I careen down rows of brick dwellings and the new jerry-built clapboards—Tristis eris si solus eris! I yell, and the people stare questioningly at me, and I yell a translation for them: You will be sad if you keep company only with yourself! A constable accosts me and asks, Who are you trying to find? I cannot answer. Your brother? he asks. Your sister? Your mother? Maybe you’re lookin for your wife? he says. I cannot answer. Hours and days I spend in that town, and can never learn what I am doing there. I only know that I am not well, and I cry: Ubi bene, ibi patria: Where it is well with me, there is my country. And the people stare at me.

  I awoke looking into the dark pretty face of Tatrice. She was sitting on the side of the bed, with a tall glass of orange juice in one hand and the Sunday morning papers in the other. I fought down an urge (morning madness?) to grab her and pull her to me. She told me I had been talking in my sleep. What had I been saying? I asked her. She said I had been saying, over and over again, O rus, quando ego te aspiciam, and she asked me to tell her what it meant. I told her: O country of my boyhood, when shall I behold thee?

  “You just lie here and be comfy,” she said, handing me the orange juice and the newspapers. “I’ll get you some coffee and doughnuts. Probably Naps won’t get up for another hour or two.” Then she left me, and I drank the juice and opened the papers. The news was dull and uneventful. I read the comics and then I hunted through all three of the papers for reviews of Slater’s play. The Democrat in search of a reviewer had scratched the body politic of Arkansas literati and had come up with another playwright, one Shirley Watford LaPlante, whose This Is the Way We Wash Our Feet has been playing to sixth-grade audiences for twenty years. Miss LaPlante gave her solemn attention to the premiere of Slater’s play, and grudgingly acknowledged to Democrat readers that it was “clever.” But her general reaction to it was summed up in the hyperbole of her concluding sentence: “Last night the legitimate theater wantonly ravished the illegitimate theater.” The Gazette’s critic wrote: “Miss Austin performed admirably in her debut, and in her red wig bore an uncanny resemblance to the heroine of the movie, Miss Shearer, but as a whole the evening’s entertainment struck this viewer as simply a case of cinema at its best being defiled by drama at its worst.”

  Early in the afternoon the delectably crisp smell of fried chicken was filling the house as Tatrice prepared Sunday dinner, when Dall called me. He had found Margaret. Or, rather, one of his patrolmen had found her, eating pancakes in a café at Markham and Main, and the patrolman had contacted Dall and Dall had gone down to get her and now they were at Dall’s house. “Bring her on over here and have Sunday dinner with us,” I suggested. Well, naw, now, Dall hawed, he reckoned he’d just fix some spaghetti for him and Margaret and come on over afterward. “You’ve been fixing too much spaghetti lately,” I said, “and it’s fattening. Come on over.” Now look here, Nub, he said, runnin around with niggers is one thing, but eatin with em is a horse of a different feather. “We’re having fried chicken,” I said. “Don’t you like fried chicken?” Why hell yes, he said, but—“Suit yourself,” I said and hung up.

  We delayed dinner pending his arrival, but he wasn’t very late. There was a timid sound of a car rolling down the driveway and we went to the window and looked out. His dusty, rust-eaten Pontiac croaked to a halt at the front steps, and Dall got out, dressed again in that suit and porkpie straw hat which made him look so much already like the chief of police. He opened Margaret’s door and she got out and the two of them timidly approached the front door of this strange mansion, both of them looking from side to side wonderingly, as if they had the wrong address. Margaret was wearing a full madras skirt and matching blouse, deep blue and green.

  Tatrice answered the bell and said, “Won’t you come in?” and I said, “Hiya, Dall and Margaret, come on in. Dinner’s getting cold.”

  But he said in an undertone, “We done ate, Nub. Honest.”

  Margaret nudged him. “No we haven’t,” she said, and before he could protest further I grabbed his arm and pulled him into the foyer and slammed the door behind him. I introduced them to Tatrice. “Pleased t’meetcha,” Dall mumbled at her, then he added, “Don’t want to put you folks to no trouble.”

  “Not at all, sir,” Naps said and beckoned, and we led Dall down into the living room. Naps offered, “How bout a little Jack Daniels, Sergeant?” Dall started to decline, but too late: Naps had already sloshed a couple of jiggers into an ice-filled glass and thrust it into his hand. Dall looked down at the glass, mumbled something about how he didn’t guess a little bit would hurt him, grinned blushingly, and took a sip. “Good stuff,” he commented.

  There followed a brief interlude of silence, during which we all struggled to think of an ice-breaking word. Dall spoke first: “Sure is a swell-lookin place you got here.”

  “Thank you,” Tatrice said nicely.

  “You—” Dall bluntly addressed Naps, then he softened his tone. “Naps, what sorta work is it you do?”

  “I’m a book salesman,” Naps said.

  “You mean a bookie?” Dall asked.

  “Naw, I don’t make bo
ok. I sell books.”

  Dall did not pursue the matter. We sat in the living room and drank our drinks and exchanged pleasantries. Margaret looked very…very, well, tired in a way, and more than that: confused, as if she were not at all certain where she was, who she was with. There were many things I wanted to talk with her about, but I would have to wait until we were alone.

  Soon Tatrice led us into the dining room to a groaning board (Duncan Phyfe-type mahogany) laden with three big chickens cut up into golden flaky pieces, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, stuffed celery, roasted pecans, artichokes, the works. Dall was to be seated on Tatrice’s right, Margaret on Naps’s right, I beside Margaret, little Lucy and Mart beside Dall. Dall eyed Margaret and me skeptically and waited until he had watched with his own eyes as we sat down at that table before finally sitting down himself. But sit he did, and I was thrilled. A whole era had come to an end. “You the law?” little Lucy asked of him, and Dall gruntingly granted that he was. “You don’t look like the law,” Lucy said doubtfully, and her father explained to her that it was only because Sergeant Hawkins didn’t have on his uniform, but that if she would be a very good little girl he might come back sometime with his uniform on. Mart said, “I gonna be the law when I git growed,” and Dall said that if he were chief of police by that time he would give Mart a job on the force, and Naps choked on a bite of celery or something. Dall’s deportment in general surprised and pleased me, and I was especially gratified to note that his table manners, if not irreproachable, were at least graciously inconspicuous, even genteel.

  For table conversation, Naps and Tatrice tried to draw Dall out on the nature of several of his more recent and daring exploits in the performance of his duties as a policeman, those for which he had been cited by the department, but Dall was reluctant to say anything which could be construed as a self-laudatory remark. The talk turned to the reviews of Slater’s play, which Dall and Margaret had read in the papers that morning. They agreed that the reviews had been about what they had expected.

  Toward the end of dessert and coffee I noticed that Margaret’s head was beginning to nod forward at intervals, and I sensed that she was having a struggle to remain awake. Tatrice noticed this too, and offered her the use of one of the upstairs bedrooms for a nap. At first Margaret declined, but eventually she had to do it. She excused herself and went upstairs.

  “Poor kid,” Dall said after she had gone, “I don’t imagine she slept atall last night. Told me she’d just been walkin around town, tryin to make up her mind what to do.”

  “Make up her mind?” I said. “About what?”

  “All kinds of things,” Dall said, rather evasively. “Mainly she was wonderin whether it might not be best for her to quit that Slater play right now, cause she don’t approve of it.”

  “I know that,” I said, “but I wonder why she had to spend the whole night wandering around town trying to make up her mind.”

  “Needed to be by herself, I guess,” he said. “Caint say I blame her, though I gave her a real talkin-to for it. Them reviews in the papers this mornin kind of upset her, and I think she don’t aim to be in any more performances.”

  Dall could not stay long, he had to go back on duty that afternoon. He got his hat and went up to Tatrice and said to her, “Miz Howard, that sure was a mighty fine dinner, and I’m much obliged to you.” She said she hoped he would come again sometime, that it had been good having him.

  I walked with him out to his car, and he got into it and I leaned up against the side of it and looked in at him. “Well,” he said. “You and Margaret have yourselves a good time now, hear? And thanks for invitin me over for dinner, anyway. I guess if you can pal around with niggers, I can too. You aint a goddamn bit better than me.” He let out the clutch and was gone.

  When she woke up from her afternoon nap we went out for a walk, through the copse of oaks behind Naps’s house and down across the Fourche Creek valley and part way up Granite Mountain on the other side of that plain valley, keeping to no paths or trails but just wandering through woods and bottoms and barrens, a fine afternoon full of wildflowers and clouds. This is the way to take a walk with one’s girl, I said to myself, and what we talked about didn’t much matter: frivolities, persiflage, waggery, air, nothing. We held hands. She seemed to be feeling much better: rested, less confused, happy even. Starting back, on the way down Granite Mountain, I grew tired of vacant gab and began to ask her little questions. “Who was that Dr. Ashley that your mother took you off to see the other morning?”

  He was, she said, the minister of her mother’s church, the Reverend Doctor Malone C. Ashley. Her mother had said to her that morning, “I’ve told you time and time again you should have talked to him. That’s his job, it’s what he gets paid for. If you won’t tell me your troubles, at least tell them to him, for heaven’s sake.”

  But the man’s manner, his fat beatific face, his rectory—all had overwhelmed, intimidated her. She had not been able to tell him a thing, although he had persisted: “Unburden yourself, my child. Share your problem with me.” And he had told her, “I think I might safely boast that I have never yet encountered a problem of the soul, of the spirit, which I have not been able to deal with. So…if you feel that we might be able to bring this thing out into the open, so to speak, if there is any possibility that we might call upon Christ Our Redeemer for some measure of understanding or reassurance in this time of our affliction and our errant but venial iniquity, then by all means let us stand shoulder to shoulder and put our heads together, let us play ball.”

  She had not been able to think of a blessed thing to say to him.

  His Immense, she referred to him—he was not really a fat man, no, not fat like her mother, but he ate well and his ectomorphic build was incongruously draped with flab; his under-chin jiggled when he spoke, his lips had drawn a surplus of sebaceous cell tissue and were thickly pursed, distinctly carnal; in Sunday School class years ago when the teacher was out of the room Margaret and the other girls had often speculated about this minister’s private pleasures, he being a bachelor and all. “Naturally now I’m aware,” he had prattled onward to her, “that you have not been entirely…entirely”—he had been rotating his open hand palm upward in front of his belly as if to signal that he was about to heave up his breakfast—“entirely, well, dutiful, shall we say? in the manner of your outlook toward the Faith, that is, you seem, to all intents and purposes, to have manifested a rather skeptical approach to matters of theology, all in all, yet at the same time I am given reason to hope that you are not beyond the pale, figuratively speaking, in so far as your basic moral structure is concerned.” But she had not been able to talk to him. Alternately jabbing his palm with an anodized letter opener or forming a church roof with his fingertips pressed together, he had leaned forward abruptly across his desk and gripped the front edge of it so hard his pink pudgy knuckles had turned white, and he had tilted his head to one side and his face had become filled with gummy and affected compassion as he whined, “Margaret, why did you not come to me before? Why have you waited so long to seek counsel and comfort? Have you not known, all these years, that Our Lord has a place for you in His heart? Have you been afraid of Him?”

  No, she had confessed at last, she was not at all afraid of Him.

  Finally he had said to her, “Margaret, in my own way I’m a pretty nice and level-headed sort of fellow, and I think we ought to do business with each other, and if we just work together on this problem, we’ll have it licked one of these days.” And he had suggested to her mother that she dip into her savings and send Margaret away for a while, out of town, for a rest. He suggested Hot Springs because, by coincidence, he himself was due over there for a few hydrothermal treatments in another week, and they might get together for a little talk or two, no?

  No, she had said, but the mother had been persuaded, and had taken—not sent but taken—her to Hot Springs. Before they left she had said to her mother, “You don’t have any savings, so tell me
, if we’re so poor, how can we afford to go to Hot Springs?”

  “That’s my business,” the mother had said, “I’ll worry about that. You run on up and pack your bag,” and then, as Margaret had started for the stairs, she had stopped her and given her an aerosol can of Glade spring-flower air freshener, and had said, “Spray this around up here!”

  “Mother,” Margaret had moaned in exasperation, “I told you. It isn’t—”

  “Do you think you can fool me?” the mother had said. “Do you think I believe all your lies?”

  We were sitting now in the late afternoon sun on the terrace behind Naps’s house, returned from our walk and resting now, drinking lemonade with a little gin in it. More than it had yet, the day began to take on that quality of laziness, of idle lethargy, which Sunday afternoons always have, and there was nothing we felt like doing so much as sitting gently in the sun and holding hands and talking. But although I was managing to get a lot of her story out of her, still she was reluctant to talk about Slater, beyond saying that she thought she might at one time have been infatuated with him or she might not have been, but one way or the other, after meeting me again as she had, her feeling toward him, whatever it was, had turned abruptly into revulsion; and now she wished for nothing better than to be permitted to forget him entirely.

  “But just tell me one thing,” I persisted. “Did you ever sleep with him?”