Chapter fifty-three
Out of the darkness of the southwest the train came thundering into the station. My father and grandmother came out of the waiting room and, with Naps, they walked me down the steps to the platform. I had given the whole Sunday to my folks, and thereby reclaimed some of their lost love. After sleeping Saturday night in the same house with them I had risen and eaten breakfast with them and talked with them and read the Sunday papers with them, and then my father and I had taken my grandmother to church and we had sat and listened to the Baptist preacher talk about the coming doom of mankind and both my father and I had taken communion with my grandmother, and she had been well pleased. He had bought her a new hat for a Mother’s Day present, and I had given her a corsage of white carnations. After church we had gone home to a big Sunday dinner of fried chicken and it was like a thousand Sunday dinners I had had before in Little Rock, and like a thousand Sundays, with Sunday’s long listless lethargy, that encompassing feeling of having eaten more than enough and having read too much of the newspaper and having nothing whatever to do. We had been genial to each other. A kind of old Southern gentility had suffused the whole day with comfort and warmth and peace. Although it had been a very dull day, even a very boring day, I had reflected that it was much more like a typical Little Rock day of my youth than had been any of the other days in these two weeks; I had remembered all my other visits, all my other homecomings, and had recalled how monotonously uneventful all of them had been: and there in a long moment of that Sunday ennui I had permitted myself a last consoling but hopeless fantasy: none of this had really happened, all of my days during these past two weeks were just like this day, dull and uneventful, just like all the other times I came home, I had gone fishing with Dall a few times and that was about the extent of the excitement, I had never even met Margaret, I had forgotten she existed, and the same for Naps too, and as for Slater he was but a figment of my lazy thrill-seeking mind. There I had lounged indolently in the living room with my father and grandmother, and there I had tried to believe that nothing much of anything had really ever happened, but in the end I had not been able to hold to that idle and innocent pretense. I had endured the day, the passing of the hot and silent afternoon with an occasional sluggish drone of some airplane drifting off through the sunny skies, and then I had eaten supper with them, my grandmother had served flapjacks and sausage with coffee, and then my father, sensing that if he were going to say anything worthwhile he had better say it soon, had looked at me and asked, “When you plan on having some kids?” He had reminded me that my sister Lucinda was incapable of bearing a child, and he had said, “I wouldn’t sorta mind being a grampaw one of these days. It’s up to you.” And I had told him I would think about it. After supper we had watched television for a while, Travels of Jaimie McPheeters and Ed Sullivan and Grindl, and then I had seen Hy Norden come on with his tumid news program: “Hi, out there, folks, here’s Hy!” I had been relieved that Hy had had nothing more to say about Slater except that he was still dead, and then Hy had gone on to talk of other things, politics, plane crashes, and a Little Rock lady who had won a deep-freeze in a Safeway jingle contest. My father had watched Hy in disgust and then, snapping off the television, he had said to me, “Son, I reckon if I had your brains I’d get out of this town myself.” And we had smiled broadly at each other and he had clapped me on the back and we had come on down to the train station.
Now in haste we said our good-byes. My grandmother bent down and hugged me and told me to be sure and plan on visiting her up in the hills the next time I came home. My father shook my hand and slipped two twenty-dollar bills into it and told me to be sure and write more often. Naps shook my hand and grinned his Cheshire grin at me once more and told me he’d try to come up and see me sometime, then he said, “But, man, when I hear that whistle, I’m gonna wish I was on there with you.” I thanked them all and got on the train and found a seat.
As the train gathered gradual speed on the Baring Cross bridge, I looked out the window at the river, and at the town again: the new skyline of Margaret’s futurity, all the lights like the night before, the river she would not need again. Out of the trees alongside the river a great flock of birds rose and clambered in silhouette against the penumbraic sky in a diminishing pattern of rise and drift. Cars coasted over the bridges, people going home from the late movies. The river itself seemed limpid and gentle; none of its miasmic nastiness could penetrate my sealed train car. It wound off and disappeared in the flatland darkness, a dawdling old terrapin stealing through the slumbrous city. The place in that moment seemed to have some of the mellow flavor that it was supposed to have, that it used to have, it seemed to shadow forth the serenity that I had never found there, and for the length of that moment I had the feeling that the town itself, the town itself was the mother I was looking for. And even if she had been a bad mother to me I still loved her with a son’s innate and blind devotion. For the length of that moment I felt a great desire to stay in her arms, with all my might I wanted her to keep me, but I was on the train, and that moment, like all moments, passed away.
About the Author
Donald Harington
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers.
His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for twenty-one years.
His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published fourteen other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. In 2006, he was awarded the inaugural Oxford American award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).
Table of Contents
By the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
The Joyful Noise of Donald Harington
Donald Harington’s Grand Jamboree
The Pitcher Shower
Dedication
Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Farther Along
Dedication
Movements
Solo for Hair-Comb-and-Tissue
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Duet for Harmonica and French Horn
Chapter fourteen<
br />
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Trio for Harmonica, Hair-Comb-and-Tissue, and Hammered Dulcimer
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Enduring
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
Chapter thirty-nine
Chapter forty
Chapter forty-one
Chapter forty-two
Chapter forty-three
Chapter forty-four
Chapter forty-five
Chapter forty-six
Chapter forty-seven
Chapter forty-eight
Chapter forty-nine
Chapter fifty
Let Us Build Us a City
Contents
Prologue: Let Us Build Us a Book
Sulphur City
Cherokee City
Marble City
Buffalo City
Cave City
Lake City
Mound City
Arkansas City
Garland City
Bear City
Y City
Epilogue and Acknowledgments
Afterword
Appendix: The Cities, Found and Lost, of America
The Cherry Pit
Contents
Part one: Why have we come here to this water?
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Part two: How to get down out of trees
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
Chapter thirty-nine
Chapter forty
Chapter forty-one
Chapter forty-two
Part three: Bridge Burning
Chapter forty-three
Chapter forty-four
Chapter forty-five
Chapter forty-six
Chapter forty-seven
Chapter forty-eight
Chapter forty-nine
Chapter fifty
Chapter fifty-one
Chapter fifty-two
Chapter fifty-three
About the Author
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 186