Lightning Bug
Page 24
The searching will have consisted mostly of small parties of two, three or half a dozen, who will have wandered more or less aimlessly around the Stay More countryside, beating the brush and calling out periodically “Dawny!” and “Oh, Dawny!” If the aggregate of these individual parties will have totaled over a hundred people, or the entire able-to-walk population of the town, then it will have been likely that every inch of the terrain will have been checked during the course of the day.
But still, because I shall have stumbled off into the remote reaches of Ledbetter Mountain, I shall have unwittingly managed to avoid being found.
If I should have known that so much fuss and bother will have been taken over me, I shall probably have been tickled in a way, secretly pleased, but more likely I will have been scared, knowing that when I will have been found at last I will have really gotten a thrashing from Aunt Rosie and Uncle Frank both for having put all those folks to such trouble. So I reckon it will have been just as well that I will never have been found.
Except that, if I will never have been found, what will have become of me? Will I have perished in the woods? If that is so, then how will I have come to have written this? Or will this ever come to have been written? Or shall I, will I, ever have been?
But the point is, my beloved Bug, that you shall have been searching for me, still, still searching, you and Every, who will have been the most likely to have found me.
Maybe, late in the afternoon, almost near on to lightning-bug time, it will have been Every who will have remembered that on the few times he had seen me I had been followed by a dog, and he will have inquired the name of this dog from Latha, and then he will have followed his “hunch” and will have climbed Ledbetter Mountain and probed deep into the woods, not calling out “Dawny” as the others will have been doing, but instead he will have begun to call out the name of the dog, Gumper, and maybe, just maybe, the dog will have come to him and he will have said, “Gumper, lead me to Dawny,” and maybe, just maybe, the dog will have led him to me. And I will have been found. And Latha will have hugged me to her warm breasts.
But then, when all of the people will have congratulated Every and then will have all gone back home, and I will have been alone again with Aunt Rosie and Uncle Frank, Aunt Rosie will have said, “Jest whut do you mean, anyhow, you rapscallion, puttin all them folks to such bother? I never been so mortified in all my born days!” And then she will have clobbered me all over again. And Frank too, with his razor strop.
So yes, it will have been just as well, it will have been nearly perfectly all right, that I shall never have been found. After a year or so, I will have been forgotten. Latha will have remembered me sometimes, with a sigh, or maybe even a tear, and she will have reflected, perhaps, that all of this would not have happened if she had not allowed me to have slept with her that night.
She will not ever have been able to forget me, completely.
There will be no honeymoon, nor even the traditional “shivaree”; in fact, it will be the first wedding anybody can remember that was not followed by that traditional ritual whose name comes from the French charivari and which consists of a riotous teasing and harassment of the couple on their wedding night. It will be felt that both the honeymoon and the shivaree are unbecoming in a time of bereavement. So Latha and Every will enter into married life without any fanfare, almost as if they had already been married since childhood, and in a way they had. And in a way this will console her, that she can remember that Every at the age of five-going-on-six was just exactly like lost Donny, and she will even be able to pretend that Every is Donny, grown-up. But still the early days of their marriage will be sad.
Sitting on the porch together one waning day in the waning of summer, Every will remark, “Maybe the poor kid just sort of gave up and walked clean on out of the country. Maybe he’s trying to find his way on back home to his real folks.”
“Maybe,” Latha will say, without much conviction, knowing he would not willingly desert her like that.
“Maybe his folks’ll send a letter saying he showed up there, all right. Or maybe somebody else will spot him and wonder what a six-year-old kid is doing on the loose. Or maybe—”
“Hush, Every,” she will say.
But she, later, will bend down a mullein stalk up in the orchard meadow, and wait to see if it straightens up, grows back up again. If it straightens, the boy is not gone for good. She will visit that meadow several times and look at that mullein stalk. She will even talk to that bent-down mullein stalk, plead with it.
Every will never cure her of her superstitions; rather he will absorb them himself. But it will be like a kind of trade: she will make him superstitious, he will make her religious, [for although he will give up being a preacher, he will never give up believing in the Lord].
The very last thing that Lola Ingledew will sell out of the big old Ingledew general store before closing it for good will be Latha’s wedding band, to Every, but Latha, being superstitious, will protest that they ought to just wait and order one from Sears Roebuck, because a store-boughten wedding ring might have been tried on by somebody else and have absorbed bad luck from her—but Every will poo-poo this, not knowing that the ring had in fact been tried on before, by Lola herself, who never married, who lost in the sawmill the arm of the hand of the finger on which she put the ring.
But Latha will never lose an arm. Superstitions don’t always work.
The mullein stalk will grow up again.
IT WILL END WITH THIS MOOD:
[Hell, what is the mood of an end, of an ending? Are all endings sad, because they are endings? Can there truly be a happy ending? If not, then better no ending at all, for your story is a happy one, Bug, and I would not for anything spoil it by my loss. So then it does not end. But anyway:] the porch again, and cowbells clapping faintly in the distance. They will have to sound like French horns, though, echoing up and down the valley. They will have to sound like French horns because only the French horn is capable of that particular poignant, mournful, wistful sound.
But the other instruments, the katydids and crickets and tree frogs and bull frogs, will have to play in adagio un poco mosso too, with an almost holy slowness. They cant do this, but they will have to. It will be necessary, to match the intervals of flashings by the lightning bugs.
The air will have to be thick enough, dew-laden enough, to hold aloft the drifting lightning bugs. The air will have to be all blue. All the air will have to be blue. And the blue air will have to be full of green things, strange wildflowers and magic weeds, creek-water, a trace of distant cow manure, a trace even of Gumper sleeping on the porch floor, a trace of the boy’s milk-and-honey-and-grasshoppers-and-skinny-skin-skin, and of the woman’s spicy creek-water-with-fish-in-it, and of the man’s musky sweat, and of the dew, especially of the dew, which is all the green and wild things essenced together.
The air will have to yield its fragrances in slow time, in pace with the music and the flashes.
Gumper, sleeping, will have to strike the porch floor with his tail in adagio un poco mosso. This sound will not lead to his eviction; it will blend with the other sounds; he will be left to lie.
The cats will not mind him; they will festoon the porch rail and the porch and the shrubbery, and will move, stretch, writhe, in tune to the music and the flashes and the air.
The man and the woman will be talking; they will have to keep their voices from being understood; their voices will have to be heard but not understood; their voices will have to be pure sounds playing also in adagio un poco mosso. If the boy will actually be sitting in the swing near them, they will not want him to hear what they are saying. If the boy will only be thinking that he is sitting in the swing near them, he will not want to hear what they are saying. He will want instead to listen to the theme of the music and the flashes and the air.
The theme will be of loss. Of loss and search, of losing and finding, of wanting. The cow wears the cowbell so she can be found; the
distant dull thing-thang of the cowbell must now sound like a French horn, which sounds of loss and yearning and the always possible finding. The cow can be found. The cricket chirps, the tree frog peeps, the bullfrog croaks, to find, to search, to be found. In the finding-time, which is evening, night.
The lightning bug flashes to find, and finds by flashes and is found by flashes. But is lost until found. The flashing is of loss, and yearning.
The smells of the things in the air of the night are the calls of the lives wanting to be found. Why else are fragrances fragrant?
We see to find, we hear to find, we smell to find and be found. Until we find or be found, we are lost, and wanting.
The theme of the mood of an ending is of a loss or finding.
IT WILL END WITH THESE PEOPLE:
the man sitting on the porch, in the straight-backed chair, sweating because the night is hot and because he will have been spending the whole day tramping the hills, searching. It will have been his last search, he who has searched so, and lost, and found, and lost again. He will be thinking that he will not have to be a searcher any more, he will be saying to himself, “It’s over. I’ve done come home to roost. I reckon I’ve got what I want,” and he will be thinking Now if only I can figure out some way to get married to her proper without sinning beforehand. Which will be his biggest problem, bigger even than the problem of how he is going to pay back all the money he stole a long time ago. But this problem, this problem of marrying her before making love to her, he will solve, ingeniously, in just a few more minutes. His name will be Every. The way these folks will say it, it could be “Avery,” but it will happen to be Every. If this story will have a hero, it will be him. He will be the one male whose name will endure longest in the mind of the creator of this story. He will be the one male whom the creator of the story will identify with, will even confuse himself with, and will remember the longest, will even be so unable to forget that whenever he, the creator, happens to verge upon mindlessness, or helplessness, or intolerable loss or wanting, the very thought of those two words, “Every Dill,” like a magic incantation, will bring him back from the brink, will find him, will find him.
the woman sitting on the porch in the rocker, rocking some, who in just a couple of minutes will join her life forever with that man’s. She will have been the Bug who gave her name to the story, who gave her life to the man, and who gave her love to the boy who will become her lover and creator. Her name will be Latha, and she will come to look, in the eye of his mind, like Vanessa Redgrave, and she will come to be, in the heart of his soul, all womankind, and in the pit of his gut, all desire. She will converge all his wanting, all his searching, but she will never be found, not by him; his loss of her will keep him going. But for all these lofty sentiments, for all this love and lust and longing, the only thing that will be on her mind at this moment is how she can get that man into bed before marrying him. But she too will solve this problem in just about the same instant that the solution will hit him, in just another minute. She will think, “If there’s any of the preacher still left in him, he can use it to marry us at the same instant we marry ourselves with ourselves.” She will smile at this thought, and think, “And when he says, ‘I now pronounce us man and wife.’ I will faint,” and possibly she will even laugh, lightly, aloud, and he will look at her, and she will look at him and know that he knows what she is thinking. Then she will glance at the door which leads off the porch into her room.
the boy who will think that he is sitting in the porch swing, watching the man and woman yet listening not to them but to the theme of loss and search and finding being played in the grass and the air and the night, who will be lost. He will be called “Dawny,” but then he will not be called that, any more. He will think that he is sitting in that porch swing and brooding because the man will be going to take her away from him. He will think that he is listening to all of that adagio un poco mosso out there, and reflecting, Maybe they don’t want me around. Maybe I ought to whistle up old Gumper and head for home. She loves him now. She don’t even know I’m here. She and him are going to get up and go inside and do what she and that other feller were doing yesterday afternoon, that makes her smell like creekwater afterwards. She won’t wait till I grow up and do it with me. But that’s okay, I guess. When I get growed up, I’ll just marry somebody that looks just exactly like her. But it won’t be the same thing. Darn it, it won’t never be the same thing. He will think he is sitting there thinking these little-boy thoughts, but he will not be, for he will not be there, ever again.
IT WILL END WITH THIS SOUND:
the screen door pulled outward in a slow swing, the spring on the screen door stretching vibrantly, one sprung tone and fading overtone high-pitched even against the bug-noises and frog-noises, a plangent twang, WRIRRAAANG, which, more than any other sound, more than those other sounds, evokes the heart of summer, of summer evenings, of summer evenings there in that place, and ends the music, ends the song, on a last quavering tone of loss and search and finding, of an opened door about to close. WRENCH. WRUNG. WRINGING.
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 fifteen years. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim, although his in-habit resides forever at Stay More.
His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published eleven 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. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).
Table of Contents
Beginning
MIDDLING
ONE: Morning
SUB ONE : Recently
TWO: Noon
SUB TWO : Twenty and Eighteen Years Ago
THREE: Afternoon
SUB THREE : Seventeen Years Ago
FOUR: Evening
SUB FOUR : Fourteen Years Ago
FIVE: Night
SUB FIVE : Now
Ending
About the Author